by Paul Doiron
“I’m fine! Just let me go.”
I stepped between Kurt Eklund and the door and prepared to tackle him onto the bed if necessary.
“I can’t do that, Kurt,” I said.
He raised his head, and I saw tears streaming down his discolored cheeks, one from his open eye, the other leaking out from under the concave patch. “Where’s Pluto?”
“He was shot, too,” I said.
He tried to sniff up the liquid that was running from his nose. “Can I see him?”
As always, Deb Davies was more compassionate than I was. “The state police are investigating the shooting. They’ve taken Pluto’s body to help find evidence to catch the person who did this. When they’re done, you will have a chance to say good-bye to him.”
Eklund reached his rough hand out and set it on my shoulder. The sudden weight caught me by surprise. There was no aggression in the motion, only a physical need for support. I took hold of his arm to lighten the load. His biceps and triceps reminded me of a twisted ship’s rope.
“I’m sorry I’m such a mess,” he said.
How many times has he said those words to his sister? I wondered.
“I’m so, so, so sorry.” The tears were coming quickly now, and his lips were trembling.
“Let’s get you into bed,” Deb Davies said.
I wouldn’t have known what to do without the chaplain.
20
After Kurt had fallen back to sleep, Deb Davies and I went downstairs to confer. Over the years, Kathy had transformed the formal sitting room into what she called her “woman cave.” She had removed the rocking chairs and love seats and replaced them with a leather recliner, sectional couch, and wide-screen TV, on which she watched nothing but sports. She’d had me over for a Patriots game once, but she’d gotten so apoplectic, screaming at the television after every dropped pass and missed route, that I’d never dared return.
“You don’t have to stay,” I told Deb Davies.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’ll grab my sleeping bag from the Bronco and camp out on the couch until he wakes up.” There wasn’t much else I could do for Kathy at the moment.
“You know,” she said, “there’s a good chance he won’t remember anything that happened tonight. His blood-alcohol level is over the moon. You might have to break the news to him all over again,” she said.
“Yippee.”
“What if he wakes up with withdrawal symptoms?” she asked.
“You mean like the DT’s?”
“If he’s been on a bender, he could have a seizure while he’s detoxing.”
“I’ll just have to watch over him.”
Davies removed her trendy blue glasses, massaged her eyes, and then rearranged herself. “I wonder where he was all this time.”
“I doubt he even knows.” I shifted positions and felt the revolver in the jacket pocket pressing against the arm of the sofa. “The state police will want to interview him.”
“That’s assuming he remembers anything.”
“You sure you don’t want your gun back?”
“Give it to me the next time you see me.”
“If he sobers up, I was thinking of driving him to Maine Med,” I said. “Unless you think that’s a bad idea.”
“I guess it depends on what he looks like in the morning. Watch him closely. He could have a seizure if he goes through alcohol withdrawal. The DT’s can be fatal.”
I showed Deb Davies to the door and then closed and locked it behind her. My recent experience as a caretaker prompted me to do a circuit of the house to check that all the windows and doors were securely fastened. I wondered what was happening back at Moosehorn Lodge now that it was essentially unguarded. The video cameras would have already recorded my extended, unexplained absence. My gig watching over Betty Morse’s estate was the least of my concerns at the moment.
On my way through the kitchen, I passed the open pantry and noticed Kathy’s shelf of liquor bottles. Her taste in booze always struck me as surprisingly girlie. She liked chocolate liqueurs, honey-sweet bourbons, cordials infused with melon and other artificial fruit flavors. I grabbed a bottle of rum and poured a splash into a coffee mug. It tasted like suntan lotion.
It said something about the frazzled state of my nerves that I took both the mug and the bottle back with me to the living room. I’d visited Kathy on a number of occasions, but I’d never gotten the full tour of the house.
She’d thrown exactly one get-together for her district wardens during my time under her command. We’d lighted a bonfire and dragged up lawn chairs and sawn-off stumps to sit on, and everyone passed around a gallon of Absolut in honor of the Swedish Midsommar. Kathy had always impressed me as a walking contradiction: a sociable hermit. She seemed extroverted and was capable of making small talk easily enough. But she seemed to consider no one in the Warden Service to be a close confidant, not even me. The Midsommar party was the only she’d ever held here.
I tried to respect her privacy now. I didn’t open any drawers or cabinets. My prurient curiosity had certain limits.
I half hoped to come across a picture of her first and only husband, Darren Frost, about whom I knew next to nothing, other than they’d split up ages ago. I didn’t know why they’d divorced or where he lived now or what he did for work. Kathy’s mysterious ex-husband had come to stand for everything I didn’t know about my friend. There were no photographs of him on any of the walls or shelves, of course. Who keeps pictures of their exes?
I found other photos, though: Kathy playing high school and college basketball; Kathy graduating from the University of Maine, with her hale-looking blond parents in attendance; Kathy in her warden’s uniform, receiving an award; many pictures of Pluto. But none of Darren Frost.
The alcohol began dissolving the adrenaline in my bloodstream, and I found myself growing tired. Rather than waiting for the local news to come on television, I sat down at the desk in Kathy’s study, planning to turn on her computer. The machine was gone, of course. Lieutenant Soctomah had taken the computer after I’d told him she’d received death threats. The computer forensics team would need to trace every e-mail she’d received. All that remained were dusty rectangles on the desk.
Her office was a mess. There were not one but three mugs of unfinished coffee, one with a grayish scrim floating on the surface. A leaning tower of hunting and fishing magazines was one good nudge from sliding onto the floor. Soctomah had left piles of paperwork untouched, concluding that Kathy’s various personnel reports and duty logs were not the best starting points for his investigation. The vengeful veteran theory still seemed to offer the most promise.
I wondered, though. The short interval between the Gammon shooting and the sniper attack suggested the two incidents were linked, but every warden I knew had enemies, and what better time to settle an old grudge then when the detectives might be misdirected? Had anyone interviewed Danielle Tate about whether Kathy had had a dustup with one of the local dirtbags recently?
I leaned back in the squeaky desk chair and extended my feet under the desk. My toe caught a wastepaper basket that was hidden under there, overturning its contents onto the hardwood floor. I bumped my head on the sliding drawer while picking up the wadded pieces of paper.
Most of it was junk mail, opened envelopes that had contained bills, magazine-renewal cards, catalog—the usual sorts of things. But there was a crumbled sheet of legal paper that caught my eye. It was a crudely drawn sketch of a rectangle. There were no words on the page, just three X’s, each with a dotted line extending outward from it. The drawing had been done in pencil and I saw that one of the lines had been erased and redone at a slightly different angle. It looked like a schematic rendering done by a child.
There was also a neatly folded piece of paper that I couldn’t keep from opening. It was a news story that Kathy had printed out from the computer. It was dated four days earlier:
POLICE BELIEVE LYNDON, ME, WOMAN
&
nbsp; DIED FROM FALL DOWN STAIRS
HOULTON, ME—Police say they believe a woman found dead in her Lyndon, ME, home Saturday died from a fall down her stairs.
The Major Crimes Unit suspended its investigation Sunday night after finding no evidence of a crime in the death of 67-year-old Marta Jepson.
A concerned neighbor found Jepson dead around 11:00 A.M. Sunday at the bottom of a staircase in her home on Svensson Road. Police became suspicious because of trauma to her body, a broken lamp in the living room, and items possibly missing from the home, said Aroostook County sheriff Alvin Cyr. The Sheriff’s Department called the state police Major Crimes Unit to investigate.
Authorities said Jepson died of head injuries consistent with a fall. Cyr said Jepson’s house was locked when police were called to check on her.
Jepson had last spoken to a friend by phone about 5:00 P.M. Friday, Cyr said. She apparently lived alone in her house and was home when she spoke to her friend by phone.
Cyr said investigators have found no evidence of a crime or that anyone was in her home at the time of her death. If police get additional information about her death or autopsy results indicate she did not die of an accident, police will resume an investigation at that point, Cyr said.
I wasn’t sure what to make of the story. The town of New Sweden, where Kathy had grown up, was just down the road from Lyndon. It was possible that the dead woman was someone she had known, perhaps the mother of a friend. Jepson sounded like a Scandinavian name.
The woman had died on Saturday, the day after the Gammon shooting. Was there any significance in the timing? Probably not. She was an older woman who had lived alone. She had fallen down and died.
I took the article back to Kathy’s woman cave and reread it, hoping it would open a door in my mind. I set the piece of paper on the coffee table to look at again later.
The rum might have been oily to the taste, but there was nothing wrong with its sedative properties. The nerve endings throughout my body seemed to be going numb, and my breathing was becoming shallow and more regular. My injured face and scalp stung a little less.
My mind had been lurching from crisis to crisis for more than twenty-four hours. That sort of intense focus takes a toll. I couldn’t imagine how men and women in combat managed to stay sane. I’d heard that soldiers were prescribed amphetamines. When you are under extreme stress, the first thing to go is your ability to regain perspective after traumatic events. Our brains are the tools we rely on to make sense of the world, but what happens when your brain is broken?
If you’re Jimmy Gammon, you decide to die. The first emotion I had experienced when I heard the news of his death was anger at what he had forced the wardens to do. Perhaps if I’d visited him after he came back from Bagram and seen for myself the extent of his injuries, it would have been easier to reconcile myself to his suicide. People had described Jimmy’s wounds as disfiguring; they’d said his pain was constant and unbearable. I was fairly certain that the grinning guy with whom I’d gone pheasant hunting hadn’t existed for a long time. He had died years before his body bled to death in that barn.
* * *
I was half-drunk myself when I finally stretched out on the sectional sofa in Kathy’s woman cave. I’d fetched the sleeping bag from my Bronco and rested my head on a throw pillow. Kurt was snoring so loudly, I could hear him downstairs.
I gave a thought to what Deb Davies had said: that Kurt might awaken with no memory of the previous night and might regard me as an unknown intruder. I removed her pink revolver from my jacket and tucked it under the pillow.
Over the years, the sofa fabric had become impregnated with the smell of Kathy’s dog. I found myself blinking back tears. The horror that Kathy must have experienced in those few seconds between the time Pluto was gunned down and she was shot herself must have seemed like a nightmare come true.
When I closed my eyes, I saw a mutt lying at the bottom of a brackish swimming pool. The grotesque image grew more and more vivid as I tried to fall asleep, and I felt my wakeful mind returning to a time and place I’d almost forgotten. It was a memory that had the blurred edges of a dream.
21
On my first day as a game warden, I was called upon to shoot a rabid dog. The animal had just bitten a little girl in the face. Her name was Kaylee. The dog’s name was Goofus.
I was twenty-four years old, a recent graduate of Colby College and the Maine Criminal Justice Academy. I’d just spent the previous eight weeks being taught the arcane tradecraft of my new career. I’d learned how to vanish into alder swamps to catch deer poachers, follow clues left by panicked people lost in the snow, disarm the trip wires used by marijuana growers to guard backwoods plantations. By most standards, I’d become an accomplished woodsman. In those early days of my occupation, I believed these specialized skills would automatically admit me to an ancient order of wardens—a brotherhood of trackers, detectives, and scouts. This arrogant assumption was the first of many misconceptions I would have about my job.
My reeducation began with Goofus.
It was true that being a game warden was an odd job relative to other law-enforcement specialties—we dealt with moose poachers and pirate rafters and other strange specimens of humanity. But in Maine, you never knew when you might wander into a firefight between two rival gangs of backwoods heroin dealers. That was the reason we wore bulletproof vests.
Sarah had arisen early that first day to mark the occasion. She was a gorgeous short-haired blond who was getting a master’s in education while teaching at a private school to supplement our meager incomes. She had misgivings about my new profession—secretly she hoped it was just a phase I would pass through—but she was being a good sport about it. She photographed me as I buckled on my gun belt and laced-up my L.L.Bean boots. I’d dreamed of being a Maine game warden for years. This was supposed to be the most exciting day of my life.
Kathy arrived to pick me up at dawn. She’d brought us both tall cups of coffee from the store at the base of Appleton Ridge. Sarah made us pose in front of Kathy’s green patrol truck.
“Say ‘yoga,’” Sarah said.
“Why not ‘cheese’?” Kathy asked.
“‘Yoga’ makes your mouth smile more naturally.”
Kathy and I set off on patrol. It was supposed to be a day of checking fishing licenses and boating registrations—nothing too serious.
Around ten o’clock, the radio crackled and Kathy’s call numbers were recited. The dispatcher reported a 10-42. A possibly rabid dog had attacked a young girl playing in a trailer park nearby. The EMTs were on the scene. In my mind, the call properly belonged with an animal control officer, but we were the nearest unit. I was depressed to begin my new career as a glorified dogcatcher.
Kathy turned the wheel in the direction of the hamlet of double-wides. Some of the mobile homes were neat little residences with welcome mats and window boxes of chrysanthemums. Others looked liked derelict boxcars with plywood doors and barrels out front filled with empty beer bottles. The older people tended to live in the nice trailers; their sons and daughters inhabited the others, along with their chosen fuck buddies and assorted offspring.
As we entered the park, a skinny shirtless guy with a billy-goat beard waved us down. “It’s at the pool, man! Cujo!”
The ambulance was parked near a chained-in rectangle of ragweed, under a bright and cloudless summer sky. Along the horizon stood the serrated treetops. It was the municipal center of the trailer park. There was a crowded cluster of bodies, young and old, but mostly young, inside a mesh fence that the local boys had nearly succeeded at kicking in. The mob had brought with it stones and bottles to throw.
I hopped out of the truck and nearly collided with a shiny-faced paramedic emerging from the rear of the ambulance.
“How is she?” I asked the EMT.
His expression was grim. “Depends on the plastic surgeon. We’re gonna haul ass getting her to the hospital if it’s all right by you.”
“Go for it.”
“By the way, some guy shot it for you with a crossbow.”
“Is it dead?”
“No,” he said. “Unfortunately.”
Kathy appeared beside me. She had brought her shotgun from the truck. It was the old Mossberg 500—subsequently replaced by the combat-tested Mossberg 590A1 as the Warden Service has become more heavily militarized. She handed me the heavy weapon.
We shouldered through the mob. “Game wardens!” Kathy shouted.
When she wanted, she could make her voice as deep as man’s, although it wasn’t naturally that way.
The Red Sea parted. I angled my way through the pool gate and across the cracked tile of the patio, feeling the surging kids around my thighs. A heavy, sweaty man in cutoff cargo pants and an odiferous wifebeater T-shirt was trying to aim a crossbow into the pool bottom.
“Hey, Robin Hood,” said Kathy. “Drop the bow.”
He let fly another arrow.
“I said knock it off!”
I found myself staring into a concrete hole in the ground. A shallow green pond had formed at the bottom. Beer bottles and cans floated in the water, along with grass clippings and a yellow dusting of pine pollen. You could practically hear the sound of hatching mosquitoes rising in swarms from the stagnant reservoir.
As the crowd grew quiet, the dog’s whining seemed to grow louder. Occasionally, it let out a yap and snarled up at us before turning in circles, trying to snap at the crossbow quarrel buried in its bloody haunches. Its brownish fur was coated with some sort of lather, maybe from having licked its ribs with its foaming mouth. The animal was starving, fleck-mouthed. No question it was rabid. I guessed it to be a rottweiler-Lab mix, although it no longer resembled anyone’s pet.
The people of the park had been hurling stones and bottles down on its head before the flabby-armed joker thought to bring out the crossbow.
“Shoot it!” one of the adult women said.
“Would everyone back away!” I said. “It’s for your own safety!”
Kathy leaned close to me and I smelled the Avon Skin So Soft that she used as her own personal bug repellent. “Do you want me to do this?”