by Paul Doiron
The interruption had made us lose our rhythm.
Sarah returned to work on me, and I reached both hands down to hold her head, but something had been lost. My mind had started working again. The ringtone had sounded customized, signifying that the call was coming from a specific person.
After a few awkward silent seconds, the phone rang again. It was the same bubbly little song.
Sarah looked up at me. “Sorry. I should get that.”
She rose from her knees, reached for her robe, and knotted the belt around her waist.
I stood awkwardly in place. My pants were down around my knees.
“Hi, Abbie,” Sarah said. “What’s going on? Is everything OK?”
I could perceive a high-pitched female voice coming through the receiver but couldn’t make out the words.
Sarah saw me watching and turned away.
“Why were you using the washing machine?” she asked.
She waited for an answer. I bent over and pulled up my pants.
A guilty feeling had come over me that I was being unfaithful to Stacey. It was a ridiculous notion, because we had never been romantic. But emotions are not reasonable. They simply are what they are.
“It’s probably just the circuit breaker,” Sarah said in a motherly tone of voice. “The circuit breaker goes off when you have too many appliances running at the same time. All you need to do is reset the switch. There’s a panel in the basement near the furnace—”
She was speaking with Jon Hogarth’s daughter, I realized. Sarah hadn’t mentioned anything about where she was living or with whom, but I saw the situation clearly in my head.
“No, you didn’t actually break anything,” Sarah told the girl. “It’s just a name for the electrical box.”
In the bar, I had intuited her lack of fulfillment. Whatever her relationship was with Hogarth, it wasn’t a romance. I had formed a negative image of the man as a late middle-aged Svengali, and the stereotype had allowed me to shove my conscience aside for a few minutes.
Sarah walked toward the opposite end of the room, trying to explain to Abbie Hogarth how to reset the switch on the circuit breaker. There was a faint chill in the hotel room, as if the heat hadn’t been on before she rented it. I retrieved my T-shirt and sweater from the floor.
I knew nothing about Sarah’s relationship with Jon Hogarth. I only knew that I didn’t want to be complicit in someone else’s betrayal. As the son of a man who had wrecked more than a few marriages, I could say that much about myself.
Sarah kept her back to me until she was finished with the call. She seemed surprised to find me fully dressed again. “That was awkward,” she said.
“Was it his daughter?”
“How did you—” She clutched her robe around her throat. “Her name is Abigail. She’s twelve.”
I dug my hands into my pockets. “I can’t do this.”
“Because of Abbie?”
“I heard the way you talked to her,” I said. “It’s like you’re her big sister. You’re part of her life.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with the way I feel about you. I wish you wouldn’t judge me without hearing my side of things.”
“I’m not judging you.”
“If you leave like this, it’s the same thing as judging me.”
I removed my wallet from my pocket. “I’ll pay for the room.”
“That just makes it worse! It makes me feel like a prostitute.” She plopped down on the bed and leaned her head forward, so her hair was covering her face. “Are you seriously going to run off?”
“Do you want to talk about what’s going on between you and Jon?”
She shook her head. “No. Fine. Leave.”
“I’ll stay if you do.”
“How chivalrous of you.” When she glanced up, her eyes flashed with anger. “You’re right. This was a mistake. I had too much to drink. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“You weren’t thinking,” I said. “Neither of us was.”
“Don’t be so sure about that.”
She gathered up her clothes and went into the bathroom. I hung around to say good-bye, until it became obvious that she wasn’t coming out until I left, so that is what I did.
* * *
It hadn’t been my intention to make Sarah feel ashamed of herself. I only knew that I had needed to stop myself before I had a reason to regret my actions. I had so much practice in my life doing the wrong things; I hadn’t realized I could feel just as lousy when I did something right for a change.
The traffic was heavy leaving Portland, and there was night construction along Route 1 that forced me to stop periodically.
I had given in to temptation with Sarah because I was lonely and because things had ended badly with us the first time. Like everyone, I fantasized about rewriting my past. To have had sex with her one more time—after she’d been the one to reject me and the family I’d hoped to have with her—would have recast our relationship in terms that made me feel less self-pitying. But mostly I had been acting out of a pent-up frustration with the wayward man I’d become.
“I can do whatever I want now,” I had told Sarah. “I’m a civilian.” In fact, I had never felt more powerless.
The moon had climbed above the Camden Hills and was lighting up the eastern slopes of the blueberry barrens when I turned off the Ridge Road and began my cautious approach to Kathy’s house. The windows were all dark, and I didn’t see the Xterra parked among the assorted boats and motorized vehicles. I could call the VFW Hall in Sennebec and ask if Kurt Eklund had showed up, but my gut told me that he hadn’t raced off in such a hurry just to play Texas Hold ’Em.
I searched under the seat until I found Deb Davies’s pink LadySmith revolver, then tucked the gun into my pants at the small of my back.
When I stepped out of the car and closed the door, I heard a toad trilling nearby. The air was crisp but dry and the aroma of a blooming shadbush was drifting down the hill. I hadn’t remembered seeing one of the shrubs, but the sweet smell of serviceberry was unmistakable. There were still shreds of police tape hanging from bushes around the property, and in the light of the moon, they looked like festive decorations from a recent party.
As I approached the front door, I noticed a piece of paper that had been affixed with a heavy-duty staple gun at eye level. I tore the paper loose and held it up in the moonlight to read it. NOTICE OF PROPERTY LIEN, it said. For an instant, I thought it might be a legitimate legal document. The fine print was so small as to be almost unreadable. Then I remembered Kurt’s comments about the crackpot neighbor. When I peered closely, I located LITTLEFIELD in block letters hallway down the page, listed as the lien holder. His first name, evidently, was Lawrence.
He must have downloaded the bogus form off of the Web and trudged across the barrens to post it in the event Kathy expired without a will. He wanted dibs on his damn right-of-way, and so, like a modern-day Martin Luther, he had decided to nail his grievances to her door. I fought against the impulse to pay the man a surprise visit. I wondered how much he might enjoy eating this piece of paper.
I entered the unlocked house and made my way from room to room, turning on lights as I went, searching for signs that Littlefield or someone else had been inside, but everything seemed to be in the same shape as when I’d rushed off that morning. The newspapers were spread across the kitchen table and, upstairs in the bathroom, my still-damp towel was wadded in a ball where I’d dropped it on the floor.
I returned to the living room and sat down on the sectional sofa, stretching my legs across the coffee table. In the process, I nearly dislodged the mug I’d filled with rum after I’d tucked Kurt into bed. I played with the idea of pouring myself a nightcap, but the two double bourbons I’d consumed at the Top of the East—followed by the sexual fiasco that had followed—had soured my stomach.
A fleeting impression came to me that something about the room was different, but I couldn’t identify a single item that had been moved. I let my ga
ze wander up the wall to the big-screen TV hanging there and saw my silhouette reflected in the obsidian-dark glass. It felt as if I was looking not at myself but at the featureless shadow of the man I was searching for. The synapses in my brain were as tangled as a ball of rubber bands. After a while, I gave up trying to unravel them.
31
Stacey’s father, Charley, had once told me, “Don’t mistake action for progress,” but I had reached the emotional state where the distinction no longer mattered. I needed to take action even if it led me nowhere.
The next morning, I took a quick look around the house, but Kurt had not returned during the night. I took a hot shower and dug out the last clean underwear and socks I had from my duffel. When I left the bathroom, I found a voice mail on my phone from Jeff Jordan at Weatherby’s, telling me he had a fishing party arriving the next day and to call him back if I wanted the guiding job. I deleted the message. Instead, I sat down at Kathy’s desk and opened the binder that listed the names, home addresses, and phone and pager numbers of every game warden in the state. I flipped through until I found Danielle Tate’s information. She lived twenty minutes south of Appleton, in the old German township of Waldoboro. I tucked Deb Davies’s revolver into the back of my pants and set off.
The weather seemed to have taken a decided turn for the better. The sun was bright and the sky was the cornflower blue you expect to see in Maine during the last weeks of May. I drove with the back windows of the Cutlass rolled down, letting the breeze dry my wet hair. I passed an old man on a John Deere tractor. He was mowing an overgrown lawn he’d been unable to tend during the many days of rain. He waved at me as if we were old friends. The pleasant smell of freshly cut grass drifted to my nose as I rounded the curve.
Dani Tate lived in a smallish modular home in a clearing in the trees along the Friendship Road. The property looked as if a team of professional landscapers had recently visited; there wasn’t a single weed sprouting from the tulip beds. The black patrol truck and the silver Toyota Tacoma parked side by side in the drive had both recently been washed and waxed. The woman was a neat freak.
I parked Eklund’s beater on the side of the road. I made a bet with myself how quickly Tate would slam the door in my face. Thirty seconds, I decided.
The doorbell glowed orange. I heard electronic chimes, followed by quick footsteps descending a staircase. I waited with my hands plunged deep into my pockets and a dopey smile on my face. I wanted to appear clueless enough that she would at least open the door when she saw me through the spy hole.
The door opened, but she held her sturdy arm across the opening to bar me from entering. She had been exercising when I had arrived. Her compression T-shirt was drenched with sweat, and her forehead and cheeks were pink and glistening. She was barefoot and her feet were raw-looking. She had been practicing her martial arts, I concluded.
Her expression was openly hostile. “How did you know where I live?”
“Warden Service roster.”
“So what do you want?”
“I thought I might buy you breakfast,” I said, never once dropping the grin I’d put on for her benefit.
“You’ve got to be joking.”
“Come on. It’s healthier than smoking a peace pipe.”
She started to close the door. “Thanks, but no thanks.”
I stuck my Bean boot into the crack and nearly got my metatarsals crushed. She yanked the door wide.
“What the fuck, Bowditch?”
“Kathy would want us to be friends.”
“Not gonna happen.”
“She wouldn’t want us to hate each other, at least.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You’re serious about this? You drove all the way out here to buy me an Egg McMuffin?”
“I was thinking more like a bowl of oatmeal at the Square Deal. You strike me as an oatmeal person.”
She hung in the doorway, studying me with the same open suspicion with which she probably approached every hunter or fishermen she met in the field. Her facial features weren’t unattractive. It was her attitude that made her appear so mean and unapproachable.
“If this is some lame ploy to get information out of me, I swear to God I’m going to punch you in the heart.”
“Duly noted,” I said.
Without another word, she closed the door, leaving me standing on a welcome mat that was the dictionary definition of false advertising. I wandered back across the road, leaned against the side of the Cutlass, and raised my face to the sun. A wave of excited magnolia warblers had descended into the crab apple tree behind me. A soft hum at my feet made me look down. A low-flying bumblebee was scouting for a mouse hole in which to nest.
I wasn’t sure if Tate would accept my invitation or not. But after five minutes, she emerged from the house, having taken the world’s fastest shower. She was wearing a denim jacket over a baggy sweatshirt with the Unity College insignia on the front, Carhartt carpenter pants, and scuffed work boots that looked like she’d done real work in them.
She waved me across the road, heading toward her silver Toyota.
“Are you afraid of being seen in the Cutlass?” I asked.
“I don’t trust your driving,” she said, putting on a pair of aviator sunglasses. “Besides, this way I can kick you out anytime you start pissing me off.”
The humorless tone of her voice let me know I should take it as a very real threat.
The inside of the vehicle made it appear as if she’d just driven it straight from the dealer’s showroom. There were no stains on the graphite fabric, no trace of dust on any plastic surface. I secured my shoulder belt while she switched on the Bearcat police scanner she’d installed on the dash.
“I thought you were suspended,” I said.
She fired me a look. “I still want to know what’s going on.”
She backed out of the driveway quickly but with the expertise of a professional race car driver. She kept her hands at nine and three o’clock on the wheel—the way we’d been taught on the Criminal Justice Academy’s practice course—and never crossed them when making turns. She was a better driver than I was.
She didn’t say a word to me for the first few minutes. Instead, we listened to the almost incomprehensible burbling of the police radio. Kathy had compared driving with her taciturn rookie to being alone in the truck with her dog. I was coming to appreciate the comparison.
“So, where did you grow up?” I asked finally.
“Pennacook.”
It was a papermaking town in the western Maine foothills. “Did your dad work at the mill?”
Her gaze never veered from the road. “What’s this? Twenty Questions?”
“Just pretend I’m someone you don’t despise.”
“He’s a shift supervisor. At least for now. The mill’s been laying off people right and left.”
It was the familiar story of the Maine North Woods. The state had been the logging capital of the world in the late 1800s, but by the twenty-first century, most of the paper mills had been shuttered and the jobs shipped off to countries like China, Indonesia, and Brazil. There were too many communities in northern Maine that were just another economic downturn from becoming ghost towns.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re the only girl in the family.”
“Why? Because I’m a tomboy?”
“Am I right?”
“Yeah, you’re right.” We crossed the town line into Sennebec, where I had lived when I had patrolled this coastal district. “But it would be more polite to ask me direct questions rather than pretend you’re Sherlock Holmes.”
“What made you decide to become a warden?”
“I grew up hunting and fishing. My grandfather was a warden in New Hampshire. He took me on ride-alongs before he retired. I liked the idea of catching bad guys. The usual stuff.”
“You ever consider becoming a regular cop?”
“Nah. I like the woods too much. And I prefer to work alone.”
Dani Tat
e’s motivations for joining the Warden Service weren’t so different from my own. The difference was that she believed in following the policy manual as if it were holy Scripture. I had always been a heretic.
“Rumor is you have a black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu,” I said.
“Jesus, you are nosy.”
“True or false?”
“I wanted to be an Ultimate Fighter for a while when I was in high school. Then I decided it was too much about performing for the cameras. I never gave a shit about being famous like Gina Carano. If I could live my whole life without anyone knowing my name, I’d be happy.”
Her involvement in the Gammon shooting had quashed those hopes.
I was desperately curious to hear her account of what had happened that night at the Gammons’ farm, but the attorney general had sworn her to secrecy during the investigation, and I already knew enough about Danielle Tate to realize I had zero chance of persuading her to break a vow of silence.
The Maine woods in springtime are as pretty as pastel paintings. The formerly dull hillsides were now vibrant with colors I hadn’t seen since fall. The road dipped and passed through a cluster of old houses along a slow-flowing brown river. Locals still referred to the area as Sennebec Village, even though the only commercial enterprise left was the old Sennebec Grocery. The market had gone from offering butchered meat and fresh vegetables in its heyday to selling cartons of cigarettes, cases of cheap beer, and spools of scratch lottery tickets. I doubted that when its current owner, Hank Varnum, decided to retire he would find a buyer for the business.
Seeing my former district from the passenger seat of Tate’s truck put me in a nostalgic mood. I’d endured some of the most dangerous and difficult experiences in my life here, and yet I found myself feeling an abiding affection for the salt marshes and spruce-fir forests of the Midcoast. The passage of time erases the rough edges of memories.
We climbed the steep hill that led up to the main road and the Square Deal Diner and Motel.
“I’ve been asking you a lot of questions,” I said.
“No shit.”
“I figured you might have some for me. You don’t want to know about my mysterious past?”