Cover Story

by Brenda Buchanan

  “So the odd part wasn’t that someone from Ellsworth was calling. It was that you had no track record working for the state.”

  “Right. I’m still in the process of introducing myself around the local mental health community and haven’t quite figured out how things work here. Maybe it’s not unusual for DHHS to reach out to new professionals. But at the time I thought ‘Why me?’ And to tell you the truth, I’m still wondering.”

  I sat back in my wing chair. I’ve found the best way to encourage someone to keep talking is to say as little as possible myself.

  “There are a number of psychologists in eastern Maine who work with traumatized children, and several of them are established consultants to DHHS,” Emma said. “I’m not some hotshot who brings extra special insight to the case. Don’t get me wrong—I’m good at what I do and not shy about saying so—but it’s not like they had to look outside the system to find someone competent to work with Corrine.”

  “Have you figured out who got you the gig?”

  “The closest I can figure is that the DHHS supervisor in Ellsworth—her name is Dorcas Simonton—went to Oberlin College, same as I did. She’s about a dozen years older than I am, so I didn’t know her when I was there. She told me she’d seen a little squib in the alumni notes about an Obie having moved to Maine and opened a practice in Bangor. So I guess it was the college connection, but who knows?”

  “She didn’t say anything like ‘all our usual therapists are too busy,’ or anything like that, huh?”

  “Nope. She just called and asked and I said I’d meet with Corrine. Once I did that, I was sucked right in.” She cocked her head and grinned across the table, sending a clear signal that we were winding up our discussion of her role in the case. “So now I’m here in Machias for a week, whiling my evenings away talking with you. I’m meeting with Dorcas tomorrow, though. Maybe she’ll tell me more about how I came to be so blessed.”

  “Are you seeing Corrine tonight?”

  “She called me early this morning, asked if I’d come for dinner. I told her sure, of course. It’s the first time she’s ever called me, even though she’s had my cell number since the day we met.”

  “Did she say why she wanted to see you?”

  “She was pretty sparing with her words, but that’s typical.”

  “It sounded from Day’s testimony like she was a mess on the day O’Rourke was killed. I’m betting she saw the whole thing. Can you imagine watching your dad—the person you count on most in the world—stabbing someone to death?”

  “I can’t. But then, we don’t know if that’s what happened, do we?”

  “Absolutely true.” Was Emma referring to the implication Cohen had made, that an unknown person stabbed O’Rourke then fled north on Route One? Or was she wondering if Corrine was the killer? While it seemed implausible, it was not out of the realm of possibility that the girl had stabbed O’Rourke, and her father was taking the rap for her. If that was the case, the kid would need a therapist, all right. Even if Emma was speculating about the culpability of her patient, my gut told me approaching that topic would destroy whatever trust I’d managed to build.

  “I guess I’ll have to find some dinner on my own tonight.”

  “I’m sure you’ll survive. And with that new ’do, you’ll likely have your pick of the local women to keep you company.”

  I raised my eyebrows in a way I hoped suggested rakishness then filled her in on my barbershop conversation. I described the emotional yo-yo that was Claude LeClair. “One minute he was seething—furious at Boothby. The next minute, he seemed kind of jealous of him. Or maybe not jealous, more like he was competing with Boothby for the trust and affection of Corrine. When he talked about Corrine, he became a big mushball, almost weeping.”

  “There’s a lot going on in that family.” Emma stood and started gathering up her stuff—scarf, hat, gloves—but I wasn’t ready for our conversation to end yet.

  “Claude said Dolores and Corrine have been like mother and daughter since Karen Boothby died. Tomorrow I hope to interview Dolores one-on-one. I had a tip today from someone with harsh things to say about Frank O’Rourke. I’m not sure if she was telling the truth, but Dolores might have some insight on it. As Corrine’s therapist, you should know about it, too.”

  “What’d the tipster say?”

  “She claimed O’Rourke molested a member of her family, a thirteen-year-old girl who was on his caseload.”

  Eyes wide, she moved closer to me, her voice a whisper. “A girl from Machias?”

  “Biddeford, where he used to work.”

  “How are you going to find out if it’s true?”

  “Work it inside and outside. We need to track my source down and talk to her in person and lean on everyone we know inside DHHS who might know anything about it.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Everybody who cares about the truth.”

  * * *

  I headed back toward the courthouse with the intention of finding a sheriff’s department clerk to dig the police report about the May 22 bait truck accident out of the files, but was intercepted by the Peabody sisters, who had tea on their mind. Tea with me.

  “We understand you need to meet a deadline, but our house is right around the corner, and the judge did adjourn early today,” Trulette said.

  “It will be a little civilized break,” Arlette added. “And I make a potent cup of Darjeeling.”

  I was caffed out, but court had adjourned at three twenty, leaving plenty of time before my deadline, so we proceeded to the Peabody ancestral home. From the outside it murmured old New England. Center chimney. White clapboards. Black shutters flanking six-over-six windows. As was local custom, we entered through the side door. After shucking our shoes onto a plastic boot tray, we shuffled in stocking feet into a large square kitchen with an antique stove radiating steady heat in the corner. While Trulette put the kettle on to boil, Arlette shoveled two scoops of pea coal into the stove’s top hatch, then bent and shook the accumulated ash into the bottom pan, moving with the easy rhythm of someone who’d fed a coal stove her whole life.

  There was a little skirmish once we settled at the maple kitchen table graced with a plate of homemade oatmeal cranberry cookies. They wanted me to talk about myself, my work, my family. I wanted them to talk to me about life in Machias, Danny Boothby and his extended family. Being a professional, I won.

  “To do this story justice, I need to know as much about Danny as possible. I really need your help.” The direct approach won over Arlette.

  “Poor Danny had a tough childhood,” she said. “His father was an unhappy person. Drank himself to death by the time Danny was ten or twelve, leaving his mother to raise five kids by herself. But Danny grew up to be a kind and helpful man, and plenty smart. When he and Karen LeClair fell in love, it was seen as a good match.”

  “That’s not what Claude says.”

  Trulette sniffed. “In Claude’s mind, no fellow would have been good enough for his daughter.”

  “How about Dolores? Did she think Danny was good enough for Karen?”

  “Dolores and Danny get along fine. They shared the same sense of humor,” Trulette said. “Always pulling practical jokes on each other, clever things.”

  “You said ‘shared’ the same sense of humor. Does that mean they stopped laughing when Karen died?”

  “Dolores took it hard, of course. But she’s the rock in that family, boosts everyone up,” Arlette said.

  “I don’t know how well Danny managed his grief,” her sister said. “I focused on Dolores because she’s our friend.”

  I obliged her when she pushed the plate of cookies at me a third time.

  “We’ve known Dolores all her life,” Trulette said. “Even as a girl she was like she is now. Level-headed and strong. Bright a
s all get-out, too.”

  “Karen’s death took the light out of her smile,” Arlette said. “But she’s worked hard to keep herself together, for Corrine’s sake. She’s been a constant source of support for that girl since her mom died.”

  “Over the past year, Dolores’s grief has bubbled to the surface a few times,” Trulette said. “She was real emotional last summer. Had a crying jag in church one Sunday. Claude got all shook up about it, and the next thing you know he got her on some kind of medication that numbed her out so much she had to stop driving.”

  “What about Corrine? Why is she in a foster home instead of living with her grandparents, especially because her grandmother is so devoted to her?”

  “Dolores fought that battle back in May,” Trulette said. “The DHHS people said Corrine was in a fragile emotional state and needed to be in a therapeutic setting. Dolores kept saying love is the best therapy, but they wouldn’t budge.”

  “Can you help set up a meeting between me and Dolores? Maybe tomorrow at a break in the testimony?”

  Arlette looked at her twin. “I don’t see why not.”

  The Peabodys’ grandfather clock struck the hour, a reminder that I had a story to write. Thanking them for the cookies and chat, I headed back to the inn. On the way I bumped into Cohen, who was lugging his big square lawyer bag down the sidewalk outside the courthouse.

  “You’re late going home.”

  “I’ve been meeting with Danny. The work never ends during a trial.”

  “Interesting testimony today.”

  “Interesting. That’s a good way to describe it.” He stopped but didn’t put his bag down. “This is one of those cases that keeps offering up new insights as we move along. It’s keeping me on my toes.”

  “Some of the testimony has surprised you?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He took a step or two toward his house. “Today was full of revelations.”

  “I thought you were going to make a case for self-defense. But now it seems you’re trying to cast doubt on whether Danny Boothby did the stabbing.”

  Cohen stopped walking, a bemused smile on his face.

  “I’m not giving you the defense attorney’s line when I say the facts don’t show my client did the stabbing,” he said. “I can’t get into detail right now. But off the record, or perhaps I should say, not for attribution, if you’d been sitting in a spot where Danny’s face was visible to you, you’d know that he hasn’t been pleased with some of the questions I’ve been asking the state’s witnesses.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I’m not sure. But I’ve got a theory, and if it has legs, things will get even more interesting.”

  Cohen was speed-walking down the street before I could think of a way to convince him to tell me more.

  * * *

  I doubled back to the courthouse where a taciturn deputy at the front desk collected four bucks—one per page—before printing out the fish truck accident report for me. Back in the warmth of the inn, I fired up the laptop and banged out a rough lead.

  MACHIAS—With the threat of a nor’easter hanging over the courtroom, jurors sitting in judgment of Daniel Boothby, the East Machias man charged with murdering state social worker Frank O’Rourke, heard and saw evidence today that was intended to put them at the crime scene immediately after the killing occurred. O’Rourke, brother of Maine Speaker of the House Edmond O’Rourke, was stabbed to death last May 22. Jurors today heard in dramatic detail how the victim was found sprawled on Boothby’s front porch, a fixed-blade filleting knife embedded in his chest.

  Pump primed, I stood and shook my shoulders loose as though I were a competitive swimmer approaching the starting block. After taking several deep breaths I sat down at the desk in front of the window and resumed typing. Thirty minutes later, I had a tight story that incorporated key aspects of the testimony by Troost, Francis and Trooper Day. Focusing on the tension at the scene of the crime, I recounted Day’s tale of arriving at the Boothby dooryard with no backup to find the potential perpetrator—possibly armed—and a dead body on the front porch. Layered throughout the piece was the doubt Cohen was sowing about Boothby’s culpability and O’Rourke’s own actions.

  Defense attorney Cohen declined to comment on his trial strategy, though today’s questioning left little doubt that the anticipated self-defense claim from Boothby will not materialize. Cohen’s cross-examination of the state’s witnesses implied he’ll seek to exonerate his client by pointing the finger elsewhere, perhaps by raising questions about Frank O’Rourke’s own actions on the day he died.

  Leah called my cell while I was proofing the story.

  “Hey, Joe, my Front Page man. How’s tomorrow’s piece coming along?”

  “It’s heating up here in the back of beyond. Instead of a staid, self-defense kind of a case, it’s turning into a whodunit free-for-all.”

  “You said at lunchtime Cohen was raising questions about fingerprints on the knife.”

  “This afternoon he got the first cop on the scene to say no one was minding the intersection of Boothby’s road and Route One for close to an hour after the call came in to dispatch, hinting that the killer could have gotten away.”

  “Suggesting someone other than Boothby did the deed, eh? Is he afraid the self-defense story will melt under the bright lights of cross-examination?”

  “Apparently Boothby’s not pleased that his lawyer’s asking some of the questions he’s asking, so who the hell knows?”

  “Did the competition sit through all the testimony today?”

  “The AP reporter and that woman from the Bangor paper were in and out of the courtroom. Mostly out. Make sure you tell Jack Salisbury his brilliant idea to use the wire services for the day-to-day coverage would have been an epic fail.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be delighted to hear that. Nobody else is staffing it, eh?”

  “Not even the woman from the local weekly. And as far as I can tell, the regional papers aren’t here, not even with stringers. It’s the strangest damn thing. If in the brave new world the media stops covering trials just because it’s time-consuming and inconvenient, there will be no end of trouble.”

  “You know who you sound like?”

  “I absolutely do, and Paulie was right. The press is a bulwark against tyranny and corruption, and don’t you forget it.”

  “I’ll tell Jack Salisbury when I see him next.”

  “I’m not kidding.”

  “I know. And you’re right, Joe. You’re absolutely right.”

  “There’s another thing going on that’s probably a dead end, but I’m running it down. I got an email two days ago from someone who said she had some dirt on Frank O’Rourke. She gave me a phone number and I called her this afternoon. It’s probably bullshit, but she said Frank had molested someone in her family, and that someone was a kid on his caseload.”

  “No shit.”

  “That’s what the lady said.”

  “She give you any details we can check out?”

  “The phone was a Biddeford exchange. She hung up after dropping that story on me, and didn’t answer when I called back.”

  “Give me the number and I’ll run it through the reverse directory,” Leah said. “Do you have even a first name?”

  “Nope. Just an email address. Scrapper64@hotmail.com. She claimed to work a split shift, specified that I could only call her around two in the afternoon. I’m going to email her again as soon as I finish writing to see if I can make another phone date. My gut is telling me to be skeptical.”

  “But if what she says is true, it sure as hell could explain the murder.”

  “If Danny Boothby found out O’Rourke was messing with his daughter, it might very well explain why he ended up dead on the front porch. But we have no proof, just a woman in the Biddeford area,
sharpening her axe.”

  “You think this could be the ace in Cohen’s hand?”

  “I doubt it. It’s obvious he thought O’Rourke was an asshole, and today in court he started laying the foundation for testimony that Frank was up to something devious the day he died. But there’s not the slightest whiff about anything like what this scrapper lady is saying.”

  “I’ll crosscheck the Biddeford woman’s phone number. You try to raise her by email. In the meantime, get writing. What’s tomorrow’s package look like?”

  “I’ve finished the main story already. If I can have another fifteen minutes I’ll also get you a couple of short sidebars. I pulled together enough information today to flesh the Boothby family out a bit. The other will recap the bait truck accident that delayed the cops’ arrival at the scene.”

  “Keep those sidebars short, and I want it all no later than six forty-five.”

  “You’ll have it with seconds to spare.” I glanced at the clock as I hung up. Ten past six. Plenty of time.

  I jumped into the Boothby profile first. If Corrine was as traumatized as Emma implied, the state’s insistence on a therapeutic foster home was plausible. But on May 22 O’Rourke had been on his way to cart Corrine off to foster care, ignoring the obvious option of an extended family placement.

  Unexplained so far is why O’Rourke went to the Boothby home on May 22 with the intention of placing 12-year-old Corrine in foster care. Even if her father’s parenting skills were found wanting, the defendant’s in-laws, Claude and Dolores LeClair, are respected members of the community who, townspeople say, were eager to jump in and help.

  Next up, the tale of the jackknifed fish truck. The police report provided helpful technical details, but was thin on color. I turned to Google and found plenty of that, including several photos and a Bangor Free Press piece rich with personal observation, including that it took two hours for someone to get the bright idea of using a snowplow to clear the bait from the road. As my deadline raced near I put my head down and pounded out the tale of lawmen blocked from the crime scene by a river of rotting fish. At 6:44 p.m. I sent both sidebars to Leah, telling her I wouldn’t take off for dinner until she texted me that she was all set.