by Paul Doiron
She was unconscious when I grabbed her by the shoulders. I braced my knees against the door and pulled. Nothing happened. Her shoulder belt was still fastened. I was running out of air and could feel a panicking sensation rising in my lungs. I fumbled inside the car for the seat belt and located the clasp. I pushed the button with my thumb. To my utter amazement, it sprang free. There was nothing wrong with the belt. She had just been too terrified to remember how to unlatch it.
I grabbed the girl by the shoulders again and pulled. This time she came through the window. I hugged her with one arm and used the car for leverage, bracing my foot against it and kicking hard for the surface.
I hadn’t realized how close I’d come to blacking out until I tasted air. I turned the girl so her face was pointed at the sky and gripped her around the chest. I began doing the backstroke toward the cliff face. My eyes and nose were burning from whatever filth was in that deceptively blue water, and the taste in my mouth was like I’d been sucking on a rotten egg.
The shore was closer than I’d expected. I whacked my outstretched arm on a rock as I tried to take one more stroke. I felt two hands close around my wrist. I looked up into Dani Tate’s gray eyes and found myself being pulled to the rock where the injured girl was crouched, crying and shivering.
“Is she dead?” the girl shrieked. “Oh my God, she’s dead!”
I didn’t have the strength to push the unconscious girl onto the ledge, but Tate was able to get her by the armpits. I held on to the lip of the rock with my bleeding hands while Dani used her back to hoist the teenager onto dry land.
The other girl tried to reach for her friend, but Tate shoved her out of the way. She placed the driver on the ledge and began giving her chest compressions. Frothy water gushed from the senseless girl’s mouth every time Dani leaned on her chest.
I made another effort to push myself onto the ledge, and this time I had the strength. I couldn’t have spoken if I’d tried. It was all I could do to catch my breath.
“She wasn’t texting!” the other girl kept saying.
Bright mountain-climbing ropes fell down around us. I saw men’s boots, legs, and rear ends overhead. Rockland firemen were rappelling toward us.
I heard coughing. Dani Tate leaned back on her heels as the driver vomited water from her lungs. I had no idea how Tate had managed to get herself down that cliff, but the front of her sweatshirt and pants were gray with limestone dust.
My hands were a bloody mess. When I glanced up again, I found Dani Tate staring at me over the prone body of the coughing girl. “Has anyone ever told you you’re fucking insane?”
It was the first time I’d ever seen her smile. She actually had very pretty teeth.
33
An EMT bandaged my hands. Then Tate and I both gave statements to the Rockland police. We watched firemen help both girls into an ambulance that had arrived belatedly at the scene. And then we were free to go.
I turned to Tate as she started the engine. “I swallowed about a gallon of that toxic water. I feel like I should have my stomach pumped.”
“You’ll live,” she said.
“Good job with the rescue breathing.”
“You saved her as much as I did.”
She should have smiled more often. It made you feel like there was a real person under all that hardness, one who might be worth getting to know.
I had poured the water out of my boots and wrung out my socks, and one of the fireman had given me a towel, but I was still soaked to the skin. I turned up the heater, and the dampness my hair gave off caused the passenger window to mist over.
“When you jumped in, how did you know you wouldn’t land on a rock?” she asked.
“I didn’t think about it. I just acted. People say I have a reckless streak.”
“You could have killed yourself.”
“There are worse ways to go than trying to rescue someone.”
She fell silent until we reached her house. She idled the truck in the driveway. I reached for the door handle, but she grabbed my wrist. For a small woman with little hands, she had a surprisingly firm grip.
“Kathy told me you were involved in two use-of-force investigations,” she said.
“That’s right.”
She let go of my wrist. “Cleared both times?”
“Yes.”
“Did the inquiry panel treat you like you were guilty of negligence when they brought you in for questioning?”
“That’s just their standard approach,” I said. “The process seems more prosecutorial than it is. Jimmy Gammon didn’t give you and Kathy any choice when he raised his shotgun. The AG’s panel will decide you acted in self-defense.”
“How can you say we did the right thing? You weren’t even there.”
“I know Kathy. If she says she acted in self-defense, then she did.”
She brought her fingers to her mouth, and I noticed for the first time that Dani Tate was a nail chewer.
“Did she ever talk with you about the first guy she shot?” she asked.
“Decoster?” I settled back against the seat. “Kathy said it was a domestic violence call. I guess the guy had been beating his wife with the buckle end of his belt. When Kathy arrived, he grabbed a butcher’s knife from the kitchen and came after her with it.”
“Nothing else?”
“Only that he weighed three hundred pounds.”
“She told me that, too.”
Kathy had always been closemouthed about that particular incident. In general, she didn’t tend to spend much time talking about the past—hers or anyone else’s—and seemed to grow annoyed whenever I waxed nostalgic in her presence. “What’s past is past,” she used to say. “Why worry about what you can’t change?”
To which I’d respond with a maxim of my own: “Just because you’re done with the past doesn’t mean it’s done with you.”
Dani Tate stopped her nibbling. “She was my age when it happened. Right out of warden school.”
“She probably wanted to reassure you.”
“I guess so.”
She turned off the ignition, and I took it as a signal that she considered the conversation to be over. I opened the door and slid out, leaving a wet stain on the newly vacuumed fabric.
“Don’t be intimidated by the Gammons’ money and political connections,” I said.
Her face hardened again into its less appealing aspect. “That’s easy for you to say.”
She didn’t say good-bye, just clicked the automatic garage opener and drove inside. I found myself staring at a closed door and thinking that she might well be right. The review board was unlikely to hang Kathy out to dry, given that she’d just been wounded in the line of duty. But you couldn’t have asked for a better scapegoat than Danielle Tate.
My boots made a squishing sound as I crossed the road to Eklund’s car. I needed to change clothes yet again, which meant heading back to Kathy’s house and doing some laundry. I should also craft an apology to the Reverend Davies for losing her revolver. All things considered, I doubted she would mind my carelessness.
* * *
My phone buzzed on the drive back to Appleton. The text befit the person who had sent it to me: blunt and to the point.
Seacoast Security informs me that you have not been in residence at Moosehorn for the past four days, putting you in breach of our contracted agreement. Please remove your possessions from my buildings by end of business Friday. Combination locks will be changed on that date and you will not be permitted on the grounds w/o escort.
Billy had been right about my foolishness in accepting Elizabeth Morse’s job offer. I had never been more to her than a replaceable drone in a hive that was already buzzing with impotent worker bees.
I was officially homeless, I realized.
Maybe I could share the guest room with Kurt Eklund—if he ever reappeared.
* * *
Ten minutes later, I found myself passing the VFW Hall in Sennebec and noticed a single ca
r in the lot: a Ford Taurus with two American flags, one protruding from the top of each front window. Kurt said he’d been playing poker at the hall the night his sister was attacked. I’d never thought to follow up on the story.
The front door was locked, but inside I heard what sounded like a vacuum cleaner. It hurt my knuckles to knock, so I resorted to kicking with my still-wet boot.
After a minute, I heard the vacuum stop. The door opened, and a short man peered out. He was dressed in chinos, a button-down shirt, and sneakers, and he was wearing bifocals and one of those U. S. Navy baseball hats that displays the name of the veteran’s signature ship. Evidently, this old gent had served aboard the USS Philippine Sea (CV-47).
With my longish hair and beard, scabbed face, and bandaged hands, I must have appeared to him as a wandering beggar who had just fallen into a lake. “Are you trying to kick down the door, young man?” he asked.
“You’ll have to excuse me, sir,” I said, showing him my bloodstained knuckles. “I have trouble knocking.”
“You been in a fight?”
“Not exactly.”
My answers weren’t doing much to reassure him of my character or intentions. “We don’t do handouts here, if you’re looking for money,” he said, glancing at the puddle of water forming around my feet.
“Actually, I’m looking for a man. His name is Kurt Eklund.”
His wrinkles deepened when he frowned. “Does he owe you money, too?”
“You haven’t seen him recently, have you?”
“Not for the past week. He wore out his welcome here pretty fast. You can’t run up a drink tab and have people spotting you chips and then sneak off without paying.”
I massaged my injured knuckles with my fingers. “So Eklund wasn’t here three nights ago, playing cards?”
“Is that his alibi?”
“His alibi for what?”
“He strikes me as someone who can’t keep his stories straight. The man has a problem with alcohol.”
I gave a nod. “You wouldn’t know if he has any particular enemies? Maybe there’s a club member he owes a wad of cash?”
He narrowed his eyes at me through his bifocals. “What did you say your name was again?”
“I didn’t.”
“That’s what I thought.” He took a step back into the unlighted building and closed the door.
It would have been easy to read too much into Kurt’s story not checking out. When I’d found him lying dead to the world in his sister’s bed, he’d been coming off a bender. It was just as likely he had no memory of what he had done over the previous days and had concocted an alibi to cover up the fact that he’d suffered a blackout. The question remained where he’d been during those crucial hours, however. The man had clearly pissed off more than a few people in his life.
My head was aching when I arrived at Kathy’s house and noticed that the formerly dented mailbox had been pushed over entirely and that letters and catalogs lay scattered about the road. Littlefield or some other local vandal had used Kathy’s hospitalization as an occasion for mischief. I stopped and picked up the dirty mail. It was just a collection of bills and leaflets, the usual stuff, except for an unstamped envelope with no address or name other than the word DYKE scrawled on the front. I tore it open.
Gammon was an AMERICAN hero and not some bull dyke who thinks wearing a gun makes her a man when really she’s just a scared pussy. I would throw a pillow over your ugly head and toss you down the stairs and whip you up with an electric cord until you start screaming like a bitch. I wouldn’t even bother to fuck you first.
At least the penmanship was good. The anonymous writer seemed to have missed the news that the object of his hatred had already been attacked by someone using a weapon more lethal than an electrical cord. I tended to forget that most unsigned death threats didn’t come from Mensa members.
I tucked the letter in my pocket.
Kurt still hadn’t returned.
I took another shower to wash away the filth from the quarry and found a pair of sweatpants, too long in the legs, in the guest bedroom. I stripped off my damp clothes and gathered all the other shirts, pants, and socks I’d dirtied over the past days. While my clothes were washing, I microwaved some chicken and rice dish I found in the freezer. Kathy shopped at health-food stores that sold quinoa in plastic bins and had coolers filled with expensive organic vegetables that weren’t as bright and leafy as the ones in the supermarkets. She used to drag me into these co-ops at lunchtime.
“Better than variety store pizza,” she used to say.
“Says you.”
“Someday your arteries are going to thank me, Grasshopper.”
I sat in the living room, leaning over the coffee table, and scarfed down my unknown lunch. I had to admit it was tasty. She’d used a lot of curry to give it some zing. The large-screen television taunted me from the wall; I couldn’t figure out how to operate the remote control. After I’d finished eating, I stretched out my bare feet on the sofa, leaned back, and closed my eyes, trying to think.
Where had Kurt Eklund gone in such a hurry? Maybe he’d gathered up a few of Kathy’s more valuable possessions to pawn. I wouldn’t have put it past him.
I moved my eyes about the room, looking for empty places on shelves and tables where I could remember having seen some family heirloom. Earlier, I’d had the impression that the scene had been disturbed. I had the same feeling again, but I couldn’t put my finger on what was different about the room.
I nearly tripped over one of Pluto’s rawhide chews on my way to the kitchen. The house was full of reminders of the dead dog: rubber balls Kathy had stuffed with peanut butter, soft beds for him to sleep on in just about every room, dried puddles of drool, and hair everywhere. Coonhounds are heavy shedders. I hadn’t asked Malcomb what he’d done with Pluto’s body. Knowing the major, he’d probably arranged to stash the cadaver in the state police morgue so Kathy could give the dog a hero’s burial.
That, of course, was assuming Kathy would recover. The prospect of suffering brain damage had always scared me more than death. What if Kathy awoke and she was no longer Kathy? I found myself empathizing with Lyla Gammon. The military had given her back a head-injured person it claimed was Jimmy, but whoever that disfigured man had been, he hadn’t behaved like her son.
My cell phone was ringing on the coffee table. It was Lieutenant Soctomah. “Where are you?” he asked.
“Back at Kathy’s house. What’s going on?”
“You wanted me to call you if we found any trace of Kurt Eklund.”
“So where is he?”
“We’re not sure. A trooper found Sergeant Frost’s Nissan abandoned at a scenic turnout on I-Ninety-five. It’s the rest area at Mile two fifty-two. The keys were still in the ignition, but there was no sign of Eklund anywhere.”
34
Interstate 95 is Maine’s central artery. It runs more than three hundred miles from New Hampshire to the Canadian border, east of Houlton. Mile 252 was a long ways north of Appleton. Had Kurt Eklund been heading home to Aroostook County when he decided to ditch the vehicle?
“Is that the rest area north of Medway?” I asked Soctomah.
“It’s the one with the view of Mount Katahdin.”
I knew the place. There was a small parking lot on a hillside above the highway where travelers could snap pictures of the tallest and most majestic mountain in Maine.
“Was the vehicle unlocked?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Was it out of gas?”
“No.”
“So why did he abandon it?”
The detective paused and I heard a phone ring in the background, then a garbled voice. It sounded as if he was in a crowded office. “I was hoping you might have an idea. You were the last person to talk with him—as far as we can tell.”
Kurt had been drunk and distraught when he’d left Appleton. Somehow he’d managed to travel more than a hundred miles through the population centers of
central Maine without crashing the SUV or being pulled over. It was a dirty secret among cops that some people—especially those with years of practice—could drive drunk without giving themselves away on the road.
“Have you searched the woods nearby?” I asked.
“You’re thinking suicide?”
“He told me he had cirrhosis,” I said. “He was definitely acting in a self-destructive manner. Or he might have just fallen down a hill while taking a leak.”
“I’ll have the wardens take a look around,” he said. “But the trooper said there was no evidence of a crime. Eklund never dropped a clue where he might be going?”
“His parents live in New Sweden, but they’re in Portland now with Kathy. Their house is still Kurt’s legal address. It could be he was headed back up there for some reason.”
“Unfortunately, we have no grounds to search for Eklund, since he’s not technically a missing person. He’s an adult who can go wherever he wants. It’s not our business unless we can connect his disappearance to a crime.”
In the legal sense, that was true. But I had a bad feeling about the abandoned Xterra.
“One of Jimmy Gammon’s buddies from the Four eighty-eighth is a potato farmer in Aroostook County,” I said. “Kurt saw his picture in the newspaper. Maybe you should try calling this Ethan Smith to see if Eklund contacted him.”
He paused, as if he were writing a note to himself. “Anything else?”
“I don’t know what other leads you’ve been following, but Kathy had printed out an article about a woman who died a few days ago named Marta Jepson. The newspaper said she fell down her basement stairs in Lyndon, near Caribou. Kathy must have known the woman.”
“Where did you find this piece of paper?” Soctomah sounded angry.
“In the wastebasket under Kathy’s desk.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about it sooner?” The forensic techs who had searched the house had failed to identify the paper in the trash as potential evidence and that was why the lieutenant was upset. I couldn’t remember what I’d done with the clipping. Had I left it on Kathy’s desk?