by Paul Doiron
“How long did it take you to decide to write about the neo-Nazis?”
“About five seconds.”
We laughed together.
“Are you married, Mike?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. You’re not wearing a ring, but not all married men do. I pride myself on my ability to intuit a person’s relationship status without having to ask.”
“What about you?”
“Me?” She laughed again. “Never. I am the kind of girl who likes having a boy in every port.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of that.
“Can I borrow your phone? I need to call my captain and tell him what’s been happening. My partner from the state police might be coming out here by boat tonight.”
“In this fog?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him.”
She removed her iPhone from her pocket, tapped the passcode, and handed it to me. The illuminated screen cast a freaky glow on my wrist. “Knock yourself out. I’ll meet you back at the cottage.”
I watched Ariel pedal off into the fog wondering if she’d been flirting with me. Not that it mattered. When it came to involving myself with women I met through my job, I had learned my lesson through bitter experience. And my romantic life was already a mare’s nest.
The thought made me open my sodden wallet to the plastic holder that contained Stacey’s photograph. She’d mocked me for carrying around the snapshot: “People use phones for that purpose these days, Bowditch.” But I’d lost my cell in the Gut, and her picture was only a little water stained.
I held the screen of Ariel’s iPhone over the wet photograph and felt a familiar pang as I stared into those almond-shaped jade-green eyes. Ariel Evans was more conventionally good-looking than this skinny, brown-haired woman whom I still thought of as my soul mate despite all that separated us now. It was a lot more than distance.
Ariel hadn’t bothered to check her cell before she gave it to me. But I saw from her notifications that she had 130 voice messages, 285 emails, and 829 texts. How were those numbers possible?
There could only be one reason: the story was out.
The world wanted to talk to the famous and controversial author who had returned from the dead.
While I’d been off the grid on Maquoit, thinking the investigation consisted only of my actions, the story had blown up back in the real world. I could only imagine the chatter at Warden Service headquarters in Augusta.
DeFord let my call go to voice mail because he didn’t recognize the number but phoned back the instant he heard my message. In a tone that seemed uncharacteristically stern he asked me to summarize my activities for the day. I gave him the play-by-play while he listened in silence.
Finally he said, “What progress have you made identifying our shooter?”
The question, which I should have anticipated, put a knot in my tongue.
“Are you there, Mike?”
“I can’t say I’ve made significant progress. I understand the island dynamics better than I did and how Miranda Evans disrupted them. But I’m no closer to ID’ing the person who fired the gun.”
Now it was my turn to listen to a seemingly dead line.
“Should I send Norm Bilodeau out there to help you?” DeFord’s voice had grown cold.
It was as strong a statement of disapproval as I’d ever heard from him. Bilodeau was an experienced but ethically suspect warden investigator. I’d gotten too comfortable speaking candidly with DeFord. I had forgotten that the captain had superiors of his own holding him to account.
“No, sir. That won’t be necessary.”
“Public safety issued a statement today about the shooting and the misidentification of the victim. You’re lucky the weather forecast is as bad as it is. The media is going to start invading that island as soon as the fog lifts.”
“What about Steve Klesko?”
“Detective Klesko’s testimony was interrupted by a juror having a heart attack that turned out to be a panic attack. As a result, he has to return to take the stand tomorrow for cross-examination. Another stroke of good fortune for you.”
“I don’t see it that way.”
“He’ll be out tomorrow afternoon, whatever the weather. Expect a boatload of wardens and troopers. In the meantime you’re the only law enforcement officer on Maquoit for the next eighteen to twenty-four hours, which means this whole thing is on you and you alone. Do you know the origin of the term scapegoat? It’s from the Bible. The scapegoat was a goat sent off to die in the desert after the high priest ritually cursed it with the sins of the people. You can either be the hero or you can be the goat, Mike. The choice is up to you.”
“Understood.”
“I hope so.”
The foghorn sounded again in the distance. Behind me, unseen waves broke along ledges.
I switched off the phone and set it on the hood of the truck. Then I put on my still-dry peacoat, gloves, and watch cap. The engine took thirty long seconds to turn over. The inside of the windshield began to cloud over from the dampness of my clothes. Fog within, fog without—I drove cautiously back to the cottage.
Ariel had not only started a fire in the stove but had gotten it roaring. On what assignments had she learned so many skills, so much bushcraft? How many people, meeting this woman for the first time, underestimated the size of the heart beating inside that chest?
She stood over the woodstove sipping from a glass filled with amber-colored liquid and ice.
I handed her the phone. “I didn’t mean to pry but I couldn’t help but see you have a lot of messages. The story seems to be out.”
“Of course, it’s out. I called my editor at the Times this morning.”
No wonder it had become such a shitstorm for DeFord.
“You might have told me,” I said bitterly.
“I’m a journalist. What do you think we do?”
“But Miranda was your sister.”
“Listen, I’m sorry if I’ve unwittingly gotten in your way. No one wants Miranda’s murder solved more than I do. But I don’t know you, Mike. You seem like a nice guy, but you haven’t provided me with a lot of reasons why I should trust you.”
Heat rose along the back of my neck. “If you want to know who I am, you can Google my name. I’ve been in the news enough. The only reason I attempted crossing the Gut in the first place was because I was concerned about your safety.”
“My safety?”
“Blake Markman was—still is—a potential suspect. The man’s a cipher. He was obviously close to Miranda, maybe even as obsessed with her as she was with him, and there are still plenty of reasons to doubt his stability. You yourself believe he’s a murderer. You didn’t give me a chance to interview him and make an assessment before you rowed over there alone.”
She rattled the cubes around the glass. “Do I really have to give you the ‘I can take care of myself’ speech?”
“You’re interfering with a criminal investigation, Ariel.”
“That’s not the first time I’ve had some clueless cop tell me that.”
“Clueless?” The heat had spread from my neck over my scalp.
Ariel spun on her heel and disappeared into the kitchen. After a moment, I gave chase. She spilled some of her Dewar’s when she saw me enter the room. Her shoulders tightened as if she expected me to either smack her or kiss her.
Instead I squatted on my heels before the kitchen sink and began rummaging through the cleaning products in the cupboard until I found what I was looking for: a small can of household lubricating oil. I removed a dish towel from a drawer, laid it flat atop the counter, and fieldstripped my handgun atop the cotton square.
Ariel watched me clean my gun and magazines. “How am I supposed to interpret this?”
“As me cleaning my service weapon before it rusts. Salt water is the enemy of every man-made thing.”
When I was done, I reholstered my SIG, washed my hands with dish soap, and departed the kitchen
.
She called after me, “You’re not clueless, Mike. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”
I paused in the front room to answer her. “Has it occurred to you that whoever shot your sister might have been gunning for the person who wrote Ghost Skins? If so, he didn’t finish the job. If I were you, I’d stay in for the rest of the night. I’d keep away from the windows, too.”
I locked the door and pulled it hard after me.
Down at Beacon Head, the foghorn continued to send out its warnings.
31
I passed no vehicles on my way back into the village but paused briefly to let a doe and fawn cross from the orchard to the marsh. The mother and child took their sweet time, like certain pedestrians in crosswalks. The blurry headlights picked out the fading spots on the tawny coat of the fawn. Those white markings had helped camouflage the young deer from nonexistent predators through the short island summer, but they were being replaced by the hollow gray bristles that would keep the fawn warm in the winter.
DeFord was right about one thing. Probably more than one thing. Instead of taking full control of my interviews, I had let the Maquoiters evade my questions and obfuscate their answers. My strategy of hanging back and letting people say more than they’d intended might have worked in the long run. But it didn’t admit to the urgency of the situation.
Case in point, I had let Beryl McCloud play hide-and-seek from me all day. The schoolteacher was too smart not to understand that an interview was nonnegotiable. That she’d made herself scarce told me the information she possessed was important.
It didn’t surprise me in the least that the teacher didn’t answer the door when I arrived at her house. Usually, people hiding in their own homes will behave predictably. They will pull the blinds and turn off lights. They will be careful to conceal the glow of their television or computer screen. There were none of those telltale attempts at concealment here.
Beryl had gone out, but where had she gone?
The obvious place for me to start looking was the school. The windows were dark, but the blinds were open. If I stood on my tiptoes and pressed my forehead to the cold glass, I could see from one interior wall to the next. No one inside.
What about the library?
As I approached the building, I saw a brief sliver of light as a heavy curtain dropped shut. I climbed the wooden steps and used the meaty part of my fist to pound on the door. The glass panes rattled so hard they seemed likely to fall out.
“Beryl? It’s Warden Bowditch.”
I waited a long time for the porch light to come on and the door to open. She managed to summon a smile, but the wariness in her expression was unmistakable. She was wearing a green cashmere hoodie over a white T. The sour odor of cigarettes hung about her like an invisible cloud.
“You caught me shopping,” she said, affecting a cough to convince me that she was still incapacitated from her illness. “I don’t have an internet connection at the house so sometimes I sneak in here to buy things. Thank heavens for eBay, Amazon, and Netflix. I don’t know how people survived on this miserable island before the web.”
I noted the elaborate answer to a question I hadn’t asked. “Joy told me you were sick in bed.”
“It was a bad morning. I have a lot of them.”
“And yet you went for a hike?”
She brought out the fake cough for another spin. “I thought the sea air might do me some good.”
“Where did you go?”
“I like to take the trail out to Spruce Point on the east side of the island.”
“You weren’t concerned about deer hunters?”
Her lip curled into an ironic smile. “No one will be hunting as long as you’re on the island. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Have you been over to the east side? The trees are so tall and dense, and the needles are so thick you kind of bounce as you walk. The kids build fairy houses along the path with bark and twigs and moss. I heard a winter wren singing. Do you know they have the longest songs of any native birds, winter wrens? They go on and on.”
I knew all about winter wrens. But I said nothing.
She couldn’t stand the silence. “I guess I like that trail because it reminds me of when I first came to Maquoit and everything seemed so otherworldly and enchanted.”
“Unlike now?”
She shrugged and gestured to the library’s dimly lit interior. “Would you like a tour of the island museum? It’s only a few rooms, but there’s some really interesting stuff. We have a Native American harpoon used to kill minke whales, and lots of antique furniture and clothing from the nineteenth century. There are vintage photos of Maquoit when it was all clear-cut for grazing sheep and cows. There were barely any trees back then. You’d probably be interested in the taxidermy. We have scoters and harlequin ducks and even a stuffed harbor seal.”
I pulled a seat out from the nearest reading table. A banker’s lamp cast a pool of greenish light on the polished wood. “First I need to ask you some questions about your relationship with Miranda Evans.”
She stared at the chair as if she’d never seen such a thing before and didn’t understand its purpose. “We didn’t have a relationship. We were friendly is all it was. Two single women on an island of macho fishermen.”
I circled around the varnished table, pulled out a chair, and settled down across from where I wanted her to sit.
She sat.
In the bright sunlight outside Gull Cottage, Beryl McCloud had had a kind of burnished glow. It wasn’t just her bronzed skin. She’d looked like the kind of adventurous soul who would give up big-city life to take a teaching job on a fogbound Maine island. But her tan had seemingly faded overnight. Her eyes had developed hoods that suggested insomnia. And her fingertips were noticeably jaundiced from nicotine.
“What’s her sister like? The real Ariel? I’ve heard there’s a strong resemblance. I’d like to meet her, but, well, I guess I’m afraid to.”
“Why’s that?”
“It seems macabre somehow.”
Without a phone, I was forced to take handwritten notes. I started with my usual back-and-forth establishing where I was and whom I was interviewing. She acquiesced.
“Where were you between nine and eleven a.m. yesterday morning?”
“Teaching school.”
I didn’t suspect the former barista of having fired the fatal shot, but I continued down my list to get her answers on the record. No, she hadn’t killed Miranda Evans. No, she had no idea who might have committed the crime.
Finally I reached the questions I most wanted her to answer. “At any time did Miranda say anything to suggest she was using her sister’s stolen identity?”
“No. Never. I didn’t have a clue.”
“At any time did Miranda ever use injectable drugs in front of you?”
“No, but…”
I paused in my writing. “Since she’s dead, you won’t be violating a confidence, Beryl.”
“I saw the needle marks one day when she had her shoes off. She caught me looking and went into another room to put on socks.”
“So you don’t know where she got the drugs? Whether she brought them with her or obtained them on Maquoit?”
Her eyes drifted toward the ceiling beams. “I have absolutely no idea.”
I was sure she was lying now. “Really?”
“You must have heard about what happened to Hiram’s brother, Heath, and how Harmon decreed that no one is allowed to do drugs out here. Pot, obviously, is an exception. But hard drugs? Not permitted.”
The banker’s light began to flicker. I tapped the bulb with my pen, and it stopped. “I want to return to something you said yesterday. You said that it shouldn’t be hard finding the person who shot Miranda. What did you mean by that?”
Her hand rose to her mouth. She spoke from behind her yellow-tipped fingers. “I don’t remember saying that! I’m not sure why I would have.”
I rested my forearms on the table. “Are you
frightened of someone, Beryl?”
“At the moment you’re freaking me out pretty good.”
“When was the last time you saw Miranda alive?”
“The day before she was killed.”
“Where?”
“Her cottage. She’d returned from Stormalong, and she wanted to show me the drawings. We had a glass of wine and talked about Blake. That’s the hermit’s first name.”
“I’ve met him.”
Her eyes widened. “Really? I’ve been on this island for a year and a half and never seen him once. But you needed to interrogate him, of course.”
“That’s an interesting word choice.”
“Aren’t you interrogating me? It feels like you are.” She reached into the pocket of her flannel shirt and brought out a pack of American Spirits. She set the cigarettes on the tabletop but made no attempt to light one.
“What did Miranda tell you about Blake Markman?”
“That he was intelligent, sensitive, and kind of haunted. And not grubby at all. She said his house was very clean and architecturally interesting. The whole crazy-island-hermit thing was a pretense so that people would leave him alone, she said. She was fascinated by him. I think all the drawings she did make that pretty obvious. I cautioned her about falling under his spell.”
“Why did you feel the need to warn her against him?”
Beryl stiffened with something like indignation. “I used to date an older guy who seemed like the perfect man—handsome, funny, this incredible musician—and then one night we had what I thought was a regular argument and he punched me in the teeth. I told Ariel—Miranda, I mean—that it was like he’d pulled off a mask and behind it was the devil.”
I underlined the word in my notebook. “She didn’t say anything that suggested Markman was violent?”
“No, but everyone’s heard the stories about how his wife died. If he didn’t murder her, why’s he hiding here?”
“Maybe he wants to be alone with his grief. Or he feels guilt for not having been able to save her.”
Beryl’s tone turned acid. “Now you sound like Miranda. Making excuses for bad men.”
“Speaking of bad men, tell me about her relationship with Nat Pillsbury.”