by Paul Doiron
The front parlor in the Eklund’s house was still a sitting room where the family entertained visitors. There was no television or reclining furniture, only rocking chairs and a stiff-backed love seat. The coffee table was a mess. There were three empty liquor bottles: one of vodka, one of aquavit, and one of coffee brandy, which Kurt had no doubt bought on the road. He’d used a tea saucer as an ashtray but must have dropped one of his smokes on the love seat, because it showed a black spot where the fabric had burned.
I raised my voice. “Kurt? Where are you?”
Again, there was no answer.
I found his old room down the hall from his parents’. The bed had been slept in. He hadn’t bothered to flush the toilet after using it. I checked every room, including the basement, but there was no trace of him. After five fruitless minutes, I returned to the parlor and sat down on the love seat, imagining him there, boozing it up and nearly setting the house on fire.
I’d had a suspicion that he might have come here to loot the place, looking for items he could pawn for cash. I’d thought he’d been looking to settle his gambling debts. But there were no indications that he’d rifled his mother’s chest of drawers again. So why had Kurt returned home to New Sweden?
Kurt was on a mission, and my gut told me it had to do with Kathy. Maybe he had some suspicion about who had shot her—something he hadn’t shared with me. But if he was set on coming back to Aroostook County, why had he abandoned his sister’s SUV at a scenic turnout a hundred-plus miles away?
* * *
Something about that rest area was bothering me. I tried to imagine myself back there. I saw the rail fence, the glistening lake, and the mountain in the distance. I heard the rush of traffic moving on the highway below.
So had he driven here from the overlook, gotten drunk, and then turned around and headed south again? But if that was the case, why was Kathy’s Nissan found at a rest stop you could only access via the northbound lane? The only reason that would make sense was if someone had wanted it to appear that Kurt Eklund had never made it to New Sweden.
And at the root of that question was another: What had compelled him to return to Maine’s Swedish Colony?
The last time I’d seen him was through Kathy’s bathroom window. I’d looked outside and seen him speeding off in his sister’s SUV. I’d assumed he was racing away to confront James Gammon, because of his infuriating quote in the paper. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might’ve had another reason to be angry.
Kurt had been downstairs in Kathy’s woman cave when I’d gone upstairs to take a shower. Later, I’d had the gnawing feeling that something wasn’t quite right about the room. Now I realized what had been missing. I had left the article about Marta Jepson’s death on the coffee table. Kurt had taken it with him.
36
The dead woman had lived in the neighboring village of Lyndon. I had originally thought she might have been a friend of the family, maybe one of Kathy’s former teachers. But Erik Eklund had shot down that theory when he said he’d never heard of her.
Somehow Kurt knew who Marta Jepson was. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have snatched the article from Kathy’s coffee table. And he wouldn’t have raced off in his sister’s vehicle for reasons I still couldn’t comprehend. Why had he been in such a hurry? The old woman had fallen down a flight of stairs five nights earlier. According to the article in the Aroostook Republican, the authorities didn’t consider the death suspicious.
I needed to read the story again. I tried my iPhone, but there was only a single bar, and I couldn’t get the browser window to open. Northern Maine might not be the wooded wilderness people assume it is, but like the rest of the state, it has lousy cell coverage.
I turned off the lights and made sure to lock the back door. I didn’t want the Eklunds returning home to find that they had been robbed. Aroostook County was generally a safe place to live, but it was also a border region that had seen a spike in drug-related offenses as more and more illegal prescription medications had been smuggled into the state from Canada. Burglaries, home invasions, and drugstore stickups were on the rise here—as they were back in Washington County—as addicts resorted to desperate measures to pay for their habits.
I drove southeast along the Caribou Road. It had been named for an animal that hunters had eradicated from these parts generations ago. Human beings love to commemorate the things they destroy. Building memorials to the dead and naming places in their honor is our way of recasting the past in terms that don’t hold us accountable.
At the crossroads outside Lyndon, I pulled over and tried my phone again. This time, I was able to pull up the Web site for the local paper and read the article about Marta Jepson. I’d forgotten that the Aroostook sheriff had hedged in his statement about the old woman’s fall clearly having been an accident. There weren’t any follow-up stories suggesting police had discovered reasons to continue investigating her death. Nor was there a formal obituary discussing funeral arrangements, which seemed unusual. Did she have no family?
The article said that Marta Jepson had lived alone in a house on the Svensson Road. My phone’s GPS worked long enough for me to find it on a map. Then my car rounded a bend and the signal dropped. I turned north at the crossroads and began poking along, watching for a road sign.
I drove into Lyndon village, past the post office, and crossed the bridge above the flooded St. John River. The rain from the previous week was still gushing down out of the highlands, and in the starlight I saw whitewater where there were standing waves in the river. As I neared the town center, I saw two big-wheeled all-terrain vehicles race across the paved road, traveling west along the local rail trail. If I had been the district warden, I would have felt obliged to chase down the riders and ticket them for speeding.
Kathy had missed the ATV craze when she had worked this district; the vehicles hadn’t been widely popular two decades ago. Now four-wheelers were as common in rural Maine as cars. It wasn’t uncommon to see them parked outside the local churches on sunny Sunday mornings or outside the local roadhouses after dark on Saturdays. Most of the veteran wardens I knew waxed rhapsodic about the days before wheelers, when your primary duties were catching poachers and finding lost hunters.
In truth, the warden’s job had always been dangerous. According to her own father, Kathy’s year here had been the worst in her life (until now), or she never would have requested a transfer to the southern part of the state. Her new husband, Darren, had died in a car crash. And she’d had to fire her weapon at a man who intended to carve her into pieces.
Marta Jepson’s home was a ranch house situated under a stand of tall pines. There were no neighboring homes within a quarter of a mile. At first glance, it reminded me of the rental property in Sennebec I had shared with Sarah. Our place had also been set back from the road and shaded by evergreen boughs. The difference was that we had lived in a drafty lobsterman’s shack that spouted a new leak every time it rained. This was a neatly kept residence with flower boxes under the windows and a flagstone walk swept clean of pine needles.
On one of the trees near the road someone had tacked a FOR SALE BY OWNER sign. A phone number was scrawled on it with a permanent marker. It was unclear to me in the darkness if the sign was old or new. Had Marta Jepson put it up herself, or had someone else?
I parked along the road and shined my flashlight on the dirt driveway leading to the house. At the Advanced Warden Academy, our instructors had taught us the obscure art of decoding tire treads. We learned automotive forensic terms—contact patch, noise treatment, and stress cycle. In the field, we measured tire widths to determine wheel-base dimensions by recording the turning diameter of a vehicle’s rear wheels. By examining the wear and tear, we could tell whether the tires were old or new, whether they were factory originals or retreads. And we could ascertain how recently the tracks had been made by using simple meteorology. Mud is Mother Nature’s gift to game wardens.
Many vehicles had been to the Jepson hou
se in the past week, but one had visited more recently than the others. Glancing at the set of tracks, I couldn’t swear that they belonged to a Nissan Xterra, only that the width indicated an SUV or a truck. What I could say for certain was that there was no standing water in the tread marks. This particular vehicle had left the property after the rain had stopped and the dirt had begun to harden again.
Kurt had been here. He’d come to this house, guessing that there was a connection between Martha Jepson and the person who had shot his sister. If so, he had almost certainly seen the FOR SALE sign nailed to that maple, and there was no doubt in my mind that he’d called the phone number.
I removed my cell from my pocket and checked the signal. Two bars. I keyed in the seller’s number.
A woman answered. “Hello?”
“Hello, I’m calling about the house for sale.”
“Can you repeat that? You’re not coming through.”
“I’m calling about the house in Lyndon.”
“OK?”
“I drove past and saw the sign. I was wondering if you’d mind showing it to me.”
“Now? It’s kind of late.”
Northern Maine didn’t exactly have the hottest real estate market in the nation. Aroostook County had seen its population decrease in the last census. There were simply too few good-paying jobs to be had north of Bangor, especially after the Air Force had closed Loring Air Base in the 1990s. Perfectly nice houses tended to stay on the market now for months, sometimes years. And those that did sell were rarely purchased by some random guy calling from a darkened roadside.
“I thought you might live nearby,” I said.
“No, we’re down in Presque Isle.”
That was where Ethan Smith lived. The man jokingly called “the Monster.”
“It doesn’t have to be tonight,” I said, not wanting to spook the young woman. “So I take it you’ve gotten other calls about the property?”
She was silent long enough that I thought the call might have been dropped. “You need to talk to my husband. It’s his mom’s house.”
His mom? I’d been under the impression that Marta Jepson had no immediate family.
“Is he there?” I asked.
“Hang on a second.”
While I waited, I weighed my options. If I obeyed the speed limit, I could be back in Presque Isle in half an hour. Travis, the tractor salesman, had told me that Ethan Smith lived on the Alder Brook Road, outside Mapleton. That should be easy enough to find.
But there was a problem: As soon as his wife told him that a man was on the phone asking about his mother’s house, Smith would realize I was on his trail. He’d already gotten one suspicious call from me earlier that evening, and now here was some stranger on the line claiming he was shopping for houses by the light of the crescent moon. Smith knew from Donato that I used to be a game warden. Five minutes from now, he’d be taking off for the nearest crossing into New Brunswick. Unless I found a way to convince the Canadian Border Services Agency to stop him, the customs agents would probably just wave him through the checkpoint. Maybe if I could get through to Soctomah, he could alert the CBSA.
My mind was racing through the options when the line went dead. I checked the signal. One bar. Had she hung up on me, or had I lost the signal?
I sprinted for the Cutlass and slid behind the wheel. I turned the sedan around in Jepson’s drive and floored the gas pedal. At that moment, I would have traded my soul for the V-6 engine in my old patrol truck.
I picked up a cell tower again when I hit the Caribou Road. Three bars showed on my screen. I braked hard and pulled onto the gravel shoulder. It was lucky I didn’t slide into a ditch.
I was scrolling through the recent numbers for Soctomah’s direct line when a realization came to me. The woman I’d spoken with had never said she was married to Ethan Smith. She only said that she and her husband lived in Presque Isle. Nearly ten thousand other people did, as well. I opened the browser on my cell and found a reverse White Pages site. I typed the number from the FOR SALE sign into the search bar.
Please, God, I thought, let it be a landline—one with a name and address attached to it.
The screen instantly showed a map of Presque Isle with a street address, but it wasn’t Alder Brook Road. The name associated with the number wasn’t Ethan Smith, either.
It was Jason Decoster.
37
The name of the first man Kathy had shot and killed was Jacques Decoster.
Jason Decoster had to be his son.
That meant Marta Jepson had been the abused woman whom Kathy had saved from being beaten to death so many years ago. She must have changed her last name after her husband died. And then, five days ago, she’d taken a mysterious fall down her basement stairs. The timing of her so-called accident—the day after Jimmy Gammon was shot, when Kathy’s face was everywhere in the news—couldn’t have been a coincidence.
A fat little boy had been at the house on the night Jacques Decoster died. Kathy had told me that the son had witnessed the event, seen her shoot a hole in his father’s chest. Jason had carried the horrible memory inside his heart, until one day he had turned on the TV, and there was the woman who had gunned down his father. It must have seemed like a ghost from his past had appeared with another man’s blood on her hands.
“Revenge can be a powerful motivator,” Billy Cronk had told me back at the prison.
But why would Jason Decoster kill his mom? You would have thought the child of a wife beater would side with his mother, but sons can have sentimental fantasies about their absent fathers, as I well knew. Maybe he blamed Marta for everything that had gone wrong in his life ever since. And seeing Kathy Frost on television might have been like throwing gasoline on coals that had been smoldering a very long time.
Erik Eklund hadn’t recognized Marta Jepson’s name, but Kurt knew who she was. Maybe Kathy had talked with her brother about the old woman. He’d told me how guilty his sister had felt about killing Jacques Decoster. When Kurt saw that clipping on the coffee table, that keen brain of his had made the connection: Jepson had died suspiciously just two days before his sister herself was attacked. What were the odds of something like that happening? Kurt was a gambler, and he would know.
And so Kurt Eklund had raced off to his own death. Because what other explanation could there be for the abandoned vehicle? Kurt had found Marta Jepson’s son, and he had paid the price for his own reckless desire for revenge.
That, at least, was how I imagined the events might have unfolded. I had no evidence to prove my theory, but it turned what seemed like random puzzle pieces into a completed picture inside my brain. I knew I was right, just as surely as Kurt had known as he drove to that fateful meeting with Decoster.
The question remained whether I could convince anyone else.
The problem I faced was time. The Canadian border was only miles away, and Jason Decoster could slip across it as easily as I had imagined Ethan Smith might. When this was over, I’d owe the MP an apology for suspecting him.
I tried Soctomah’s number and landed, as usual, in his voice mail.
“Lieutenant, it’s Mike Bowditch. I’m up in Aroostook County, and I think I know who shot Kathy Frost. If I’m right, it’s the son of the man she killed twenty-something years ago. His name is Jason Decoster, and he lives on the Lake Josephine Road in Presque Isle. His mother, Marta Jepson, fell down her basement steps five days ago. I think her son might have pushed her. There’s a good chance that he killed Kurt Eklund, too. Kurt was up here snooping around before he disappeared. I know this probably sounds crazy, but you need to alert the Canadians to stop Decoster if he tries to cross the border. I’m afraid I might have spooked him into running. Call me back, and I’ll try to explain this better.”
I hung up in despair. How could I expect Soctomah to take me seriously? For all I knew, the state police had already looked into Jason Decoster and dismissed him as a suspect for legitimate reasons. There wasn’t anyone else
I could call who might believe me, and every minute I sat in my car, the odds increased that Decoster would get away.
There was no choice but to drive down to Presque Isle. I had the grim feeling I might be following in the same steps that had led Kurt Eklund to his death. My only hope was that Soctomah would get my message in time and that he would believe my ravings.
* * *
My GPS showed the Lake Josephine Road as being on the southeast side of Presque Isle. It seemed to run through an open expanse of what I assumed were potato fields, given the absence of intersecting roads on the map. The house was less than seven miles from the New Brunswick border if a man had an ATV and was willing to drive it cross-country.
I pushed the Cutlass as hard as it would go, clutching the wheel tightly with my bandaged hands, waiting for a return call from Soctomah that never came. I kept expecting to be stopped by a deputy or state trooper as I raced down Route 1 at seventy miles per hour.
As I neared Presque Isle, I was forced to hit the brakes suddenly when a huge bird rocketed across both lanes of traffic, just feet in front of my windshield. At first, I thought the dark, flapping thing was an owl—but it wasn’t. Some predator had frightened a hen turkey out of her roost.
Three decades ago, there were no wild turkeys at all in Maine. The species had been wiped out by hunters as thoroughly as the woodland caribou. Then wildlife biologists had brought a couple of dozen birds back from Vermont and let them loose in the woods of southernmost Maine. The turkeys bred and spread, until they were considered such an agricultural pest that farmers were given permits to shoot them almost on sight. The department estimated that there were now sixty thousand of them running wild in the state of Maine.