Before logging off I tapped out another email to scrapper64.
Thanks for talking with me today. What you told me Frank O’Rourke did to your family member was wrong. I’ll protect your privacy, but need more details. When can I call you again? Thanks for your help.—Joe Gale
Next I called Christie.
“Hello, Mr. Gale.”
“How’d you know it was me?”
“My caller-ID said Easterly Inn and Day Spa. I figured your hot stone massage finished up at six and you were calling me before you head downstairs to a four-course meal.”
“Not quite. I might try the pizza place tonight, even though my pal in the DA’s office tells me there’s enough garlic in the sauce to protect me from a hundred vampires.”
“Pal in the DA’s office?” she said. “I thought she was a psychologist?”
“Not Emma,” I said, “Shirley.”
“Does Emma know about Shirley?”
“I doubt it. Emma wouldn’t have any reason to go into the DA’s office. But if she did, she’d meet Shirley, because Shirl rules the roost.”
“Let me guess. Sixty. Gray hair teased into a slight bubble-do. Keeps track of her glasses with a gold chain around her neck,” Christie said.
“Exactly. Just my type. Speaking of hairdos, I have a new one.”
“What do you mean, you have a new hairdo? You didn’t have an old hairdo. You have a shaggy head of wavy hair, and since Megan left you’ve been wearing it too long, like a washed-up rock star.”
“I never knew you had an opinion about my hair, much less a poor opinion of it,” I said. “The good news is that I no longer have shaggy old rock star hair.”
“Do tell.”
“I was interviewing the barber—he’s Danny Boothby’s father-in-law—while he was cutting my hair. Long story short, he got to talking, and it kind of led to a whole new look for me.”
“Can’t wait to see it. When are you coming home?”
“Depends on the weather. Is it snowing there yet?”
“Not yet, but the sky has that look.”
“The judge is predicting it’ll be a big nothing, but that may be wishful thinking on her part. The state got through two and a half technical witnesses today. I’m sure Justice Herrick thinks that if we have full days tomorrow and Friday, the state might rest by the weekend.”
“I’d listen to the weather report, not a judge,” Christie said. “If you want to stay in Machias for the weekend, that’s your business. But it sure sounds as if the whole state’s in for a nor’easter and you’re right where the wind’s going to play crack the whip.”
“Machias is the last damn place I want to spend the weekend. I’m coming home to see my dog and hang out with you and Theo. All three of us can go out to that Thai place he likes.”
“I’ll ask him. Maybe he’ll be willing to be seen with me in public as long as you’re at the table, too.”
“Here’s the mantra I want you to recite until I come through your door,” I said. “It’s not about me. It’s about testosterone.”
Chapter Eleven
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
The pizza place was less than three blocks away, but I hadn’t driven my Subaru for more than twenty-four hours, and her balky battery would benefit from a workout. So I charged the old girl up by driving up Route One a few miles—to the intersection with the road that led to Danny Boothby’s house, to be precise.
As I approached the village of East Machias, I pulled to the shoulder at a sharp bend in the road and got out of the car, leaving the engine running. The stench of spilled bait was long gone, but I was pretty sure I was standing at or near the spot where the tractor-trailer had jackknifed last May 22. Like Trooper Day said, deep ditches bracketed the highway. Even though it was Route One—the old Post Road that runs along the coast—in that spot the paved portion looked to be no more than sixty feet wide. I hopped back in the car and continued north. If one of the deputies had been willing to wade through the mess, it wouldn’t have taken more than three minutes to hike to the intersection with Boothby’s road, where the cars turning north on Route One could have been monitored.
I pulled into a plowed apron in front of a low-slung garage, flipped open my notebook and used the reading light above the rearview mirror to verify the details and sketch out a flow chart, assuming for the sake of the exercise that Danny Boothby wasn’t the stabber. The first call about the bait spill came in to the sheriff’s office at 3:01 p.m., fifty-two minutes before Boothby called the cops to report a killing in his dooryard. So there would have been a bunch of deputies at the accident scene when Danny’s call came in. The murder could have occurred before or after the bait spill, meaning the killer might have been long gone before a deputy slipped and slid his way to the corner of Boothby’s road. But maybe not. It was possible drivers in some of the southbound cars stuck in the traffic jam might have seen someone hightailing it north.
The first deputies to make it through the mess went right to Danny’s house, arriving there at four thirty-three. If southbound traffic had begun moving by then—even at a crawl—potential witnesses drove off before anyone could ask if they’d seen anything suspicious while they’d sat through the delay.
I headed back south. When I reached the sharp bend, I pulled over and got out of the car again, intending to pace off the width of the road. Before I took my first step, a battered pickup pulled in behind me. I shoved my hands in my pockets and walked back to meet the lanky, long-haired man who’d stepped out onto the pavement.
“You broke down?”
“No, just checking something about the road.”
He squinted at me. “You drunk?”
I laughed. “No, I’m a newspaper reporter. Covering the Boothby trial, you know, the guy accused of killing that social worker last spring.”
“How’s that connected with you walking around out here in the dark of a January night, tempting some idiot who is drunk to run you over?”
“There was testimony about a truck accident right along this stretch of road the day of the murder. Made me want to see the road.”
He tucked his long hair behind his ears. “I remember that day. Not the truck accident particularly, but hearing Social Worker O’Rourke had been stabbed to death.” He cleared his throat and spat a loogie on the pavement between us. “That news moved through this county like a wildfire.”
The edge of a dark two-lane highway at a sharp curve isn’t the best place to conduct an interview, but I managed to find out the tall man’s name was Trix Reardon and that he was a self-employed carpenter who lived with his girlfriend Angel Marie and three kids under six. Trix implied it was through Angel Marie that he came to meet Frank O’Rourke. Wanting to hear more about that, I offered to buy takeout pizza for the whole family if he’d let me join them for supper. He was game, so we went together to the pizza shop on Machias’s Main Street, where the air inside the steamed-up glass door was redolent of garlic and frying meat. After making small talk while waiting for our pies, I followed his truck a few miles south onto a side road and down an ice-rutted driveway to a single-wide trailer.
Trix had called ahead to let Angel Marie know he was bringing company and pizza. She hadn’t used the notice to neaten up the place. Dirty dishes were stacked in the sink and the kitchen table was littered with paper, crayons, two half-eaten bowls of cereal and a huge pile of laundry.
Angel Marie was barely taller than five feet, with a braid of dark hair hanging down the middle of her back. She was rubbing lotion into her chapped hands when we came through the door, so declined to shake when Trix introduced me as “a guy from Portland he met on the road.”
He pointed out the kids in turn. Jolene and Carlos were Angel Marie’s from a previous relationship. The chubby toddler, Otis, had Trix’s ice-blue eyes. We moved as a
pack into the slightly less chaotic living room where I set the pizza boxes on a low table and everyone dug in. Trix and Angel Marie reminded the kids about their manners once or twice, but the mood was relaxed. When everyone was done eating Carlos sang us a song he’d made up that afternoon about an ice-skating dog.
A short while later Trix marched the kids down the hall to brush their teeth and get ready for bed, leaving me to ask about Angel Marie’s experience with DHHS in relative peace. Though she’d been lively while we were eating, she was a difficult interview, eyes focused on her lap, mumbling vague answers to my questions about Frank O’Rourke. When Trix rejoined us, she excused herself long enough to deliver goodnight kisses to the kids, then tucked herself under his arm on the nubby plaid couch.
“Did you tell him about O’Rourke giving you a hard time about me?” Trix spoke with a strong Downeast cadence.
“He was suspicious about you, no doubt about that.”
“Suspicious why?” When I slid my phone out of my pocket and tapped the record button, Angel Marie gave Trix a look. He nodded that it was okay.
“It seems when a single mom meets a new man, DHHS starts from the assumption he’s a child molester. When Frank O’Rourke heard I was seeing Trix, he came by and gave me a big lecture, quoting statistics about how often Mom’s new boyfriend turns out to be a pervert.” Her eyes locked mine, and the color rose in her face.
“I think Frank expected me to argue with him about it, but I knew that would be stupid. So I told him he could background check Trix all he wanted, come by the house and observe him with the kids, the works. He did all that, and nothing really bad turned up.”
“I had a couple of drug arrests when I was a kid,” Trix said. “Dope and pills. But I don’t use anymore, don’t run with a crowd that does.” He barked a laugh. “Don’t run with any crowd anymore ’cept the rugrats down the hall.”
Angel Marie’s eyes flicked from him to me and back again. “Our life’s a good life.”
“Frank had to be convinced of that,” Trix said. “He made me go to his office and piss in a cup once a week. I showed up on time every single Thursday, did what I was told, results were always clean. But he kept at it for months. Stopped in unannounced. Asked a lot of questions about us all over town.”
“My counselor told me not to let it bug me, but it did,” Angel Marie said. “It’s a free country, you know? I should get to start a new relationship without Frank O’Rourke looking over my shoulder like a damn chaperone.”
“Why were you on DHHS’s radar in the first place?”
She leaned out of her boyfriend’s embrace, put her hands on either side of her face. Trix reached out a long arm and rubbed her back. “You can talk about it,” he said in a quiet voice. “It’s over.”
Angel Marie took a deep breath and exhaled loudly. “When Jolene was two and Carlos just a baby, I spent a couple of months at the battered women’s shelter. The guy I married when I was twenty turned into a mean drunk when there were kids who needed my full attention. I got out before he hurt me bad. In order to leave the shelter I needed money from the state to help feed the kids and pay rent, and the price for that was I had to welcome DHHS into my life. They made me take a parenting class and go to a support group, which I did. They helped me find this place. I was taking good care of my kids, no worries there, but like I said, as soon as Trix and I got together, Frank was on the doorstep.”
“I’m sure they wanted to make sure Trix wasn’t another abuser.”
“Right. I know some women can’t get away from the craziness, but I was determined.” A sudden sob strangled her next words.
“Jolene remembers my husband hitting me. She still talks about it sometimes.” She pulled a tissue out of her sweater pocket, dabbed at her eyes. “I think watching him belt me hurt her more than if she’d been hit herself. Which she wasn’t. I protected her from that, at least.”
“If O’Rourke’s job was to make sure you got your feet under you, so you’d pick a better guy next time around, wasn’t that a good thing?”
“It could have been. Some of the other women in my support group said their caseworkers helped them do the stuff you need to do to—” she held up her fingers in air quotes “—break the cycle. You know, sign up for classes at the voc-tech, find day care so you can have a little time to yourself every now and then. Frank didn’t do stuff like that. He just slunk around, watching me but pretty much ignoring my kids. He called my daughter by the wrong name—Janine instead of Jolene. Talked loud when they were napping, even though I told him like five times to hush. I don’t think he had a friggin’ clue about what it’s like to be a parent, so he didn’t have a clue about how to help parents.”
Trix said he thought O’Rourke acted more like a cop than a social worker. “He’d drop these snide hints every time he saw me, like ‘Are you really keepin’ your nose clean or just putting on an act?’ It was all I could do not to tell him to go fuck himself. I’d pulled my life together and was working hard—seven days a week—so we’d be able to get off the state. I’m good with kids, he could see that. You’d think he’d give me a little bit of credit. But all he ever did was bust my balls.”
“The other mothers in my support group who had him as a caseworker thought he was weird, too,” Angel Marie said.
Scrapper64’s email flashed through my mind. I weighed my words. “Weird in what way?”
“Like he knew your secrets. Like he’d been spying in your windows at night, or following you around town.”
“Like he was a stalker, or something like that?”
“Maybe,” she said. “But he’s dead now, so it doesn’t matter anymore.”
Chapter Twelve
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
I convinced Angel Marie and Trix to let me take their picture before I left, in case I ended up using part of the interview in a story. Both of them flashed tentative smiles when I held up my phone for the shot.
Our life’s a good life.
With our conversation percolating inside my head, I headed back to Machias. Halfway there I decided to check out the bar I’d noticed on my noontime walk to Claude’s barbershop. I’d already filed two stories and didn’t plan to write about my conversation with Angel Marie immediately. Christie was home in Riverside, Emma was dining in Cherryfield, and it was early yet.
I nosed the Subaru down the alley that ran perpendicular to Main Street and found a parking spot between two pickup trucks. An illuminated sign announced the bar was called The Mudflat. As soon as I stepped out of my car I could hear Garth Brooks singing about having friends in low places.
Two guys stood outside the door, pulling on cigarettes. They nodded as I walked past. I caught a provocative piece of their conversation. “I told her over and over, you can have me, or you can have him. But I ain’t sharin’ the bed,” the taller of the two guys said. I wondered if his woman had another boyfriend or a dog who liked the comfort of a pillowtop mattress.
I’d found the place where the people unimpressed by microbrews drank. It was an L-shaped space, narrow in the front, broadening beyond the bar. The bar itself—which ran along the right side of the room—was a slab of maple someone had milled but didn’t have the patience to finish. There were about a dozen tables opposite the bar, and in the back, a few booths. The place reeked of stale beer and nicotine. It had been a decade since smokers could light up in Maine bars, but it smelled like hundreds of thousands of butts had been smoked in The Mudflat over the years and no one had thought to wash the walls when the practice was outlawed.
The place was two-thirds full. The men wore work clothes—insulated Carhartt pants, bulky wool shirts, steel-toed leather boots or the tall rubber ones that marked them as clam—or worm-diggers. A couple of women were sitting at the bar.
I spotted an unoccupied stool at the far end, on the corner. “Anyone sit
ting here?”
“All yours.” The old guy sitting next to me had a mouthful of teeth so big and straight they had to be dentures.
My draft beer options were Bud, Miller or Coors. A quick glance around showed bottles bearing those same labels, and a couple Pabst. I asked for a bottle of Bud when the bartender looked my way. A fellow with a head shaped like a Mr. Potato Head and a comb-over leaned against the stool on my right, listening to a beefy guy with a heavy Québecois accent extol the intelligence and obedient nature of his German Shepherds. A beer and a half later my neighbor with the dentures moved to one of the tables to sit with a pal. This left me the nearest neighbor of a guy sitting two stools over who mistook me for someone who cared about the fact his plow was in the shop when the biggest storm of the season might be roaring up the coast.
Before his tale of woe turned into a full diatribe, a guy wearing a filthy barn jacket slid onto the stool that separated me from the pissed-off plow man. It turned out to be Jackson Harrison, the next-door neighbor of none other than Danny Boothby. He didn’t say hello, asked how I liked the townie watering hole instead.
“It’s a friendly place.”
“People talking to you?”
I shrugged and motioned for the bartender to bring us each a Bud.
“You finding a lot of sympathy for Danny?”
“Most people I’ve spoken with like him well enough.”
We drank in silence for a while, half watching the Celtics beating the Nets on the TV over the bar.
“He’s not a guy who gets on your nerves.” The creases in Harrison’s forehead deepened rather than smoothed out. “Frank O’Rourke, he was a guy who got on your nerves.”
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