by Paul Doiron
What the hell was up with this half-assed inquisition?
“Where?” I asked.
“I have an office downstairs.” The officer kept a blank expression that made it impossible to read his emotions. “I’m just trying to straighten some things out.”
“Russo, leave the guy alone!” said the bartender.
“Lexi, you do your job, and I’ll do mine.” The words themselves had an edge, but he managed to keep his tone even.
“The guy’s a fucking forest ranger. Show him your badge, Mike.”
“Is that true?” the man named Russo asked.
“I’m a game warden.”
“Are you on duty here today, Warden?”
“No, I’m not.”
“And have you been drinking today?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Can I see your badge real quick?” Russo had the patter down, that was for sure.
Whatever this guy was, he was no ignorant rookie following a script he’d just learned. He had shown up here for the deliberate purpose of hassling me, and I had no idea what it was about.
I reached slowly—very slowly—into my inside chest pocket.
Russo examined my badge and photo ID. His eyes remained as absent of human response as a doll’s.
With all the noise from the dining room, I hadn’t heard another person approach me from behind.
“That’s all right, Russo,” a man said. “We saw everything.”
The officer stood at attention. “Mr. Cabot.”
I turned and found myself face-to-face with the mustached member of the Night Watchmen.
The whites of Cabot’s eyes were more of a lemon chiffon color. His breath smelled strongly of beer. “My friends and I witnessed the whole incident. Warden Bowditch acted appropriately. He defused the situation before it could get out of hand.”
I had come to the conclusion that Russo must be some kind of deputized security guard. Perhaps Widowmaker had an arrangement with the sheriff that granted some of their people arrest powers. I had seen similar setups on certain offshore islands.
“That’s good enough for me, Mr. Cabot,” said Russo, as if he worked for the man.
The guard returned my badge to me. “Sorry for the inconvenience, Warden. Just trying to straighten some things out. You have a good day now.”
Meanwhile, the man with the gold-rimmed glasses extended his hand. “Name’s John Cabot. Like the explorer. I apologize for Russo. He’s a zealous officer, and usually that’s a good thing here. Widowmaker has always attracted a certain unsavory element.”
The odor of alcohol coming off Cabot was overpowering, and yet he spoke more coherently than almost anyone else I’d met that day. Clearly he was a person of some power, too, the way the officer had practically bowed to him.
“Thanks for backing me up,” I said.
“Those brats were out of line.” He gestured to his corner table. “Are you sure you won’t join us for a drink?”
I remained fixed in place. “How did you know my name, Mr. Cabot?”
“What’s that?”
“You said, ‘My friends and I saw the whole incident. Warden Bowditch acted appropriately. He defused the situation.’”
His sallow skin sagged around the mouth. “You have a remarkable memory, young man.”
“So I’ve been told.”
His teeth were as yellow as the rest of him. “I knew your father. He worked for my company years ago, although we never met at the time. I got to know him later at various watering holes. Jack was quite the character, needless to say. He made a sizable impression.”
“You own Cabot Lumber?”
“I did before I retired. I’m still the president of the board, but my sons run the business.”
It was one of the state of Maine’s larger independent building suppliers and had several sawmills, lumberyards, and dozens of retail stores. My father had felled trees for the company before being fired for some offense or another.
I crossed my arms. “But how did you know who I was?”
“You underestimate your own notoriety, Warden. At least in this part of the state.”
Looking over his shoulder, I saw the ruddy British-looking chap waving me enthusiastically toward the table.
I had come up to Widowmaker promising not to call undue attention to myself. Clearly, these Night Watchmen jokers had me at a disadvantage. The whole sequence of events since I’d returned to the restaurant—Amber’s unexplained disappearance, the grilling I’d received from Russo, being “rescued” by Cabot—left me feeling uneasy.
“Please come join us at least for a coffee.” Cabot extended his scarecrow arm toward the back table. It was a grand, welcoming gesture that made me think of the ticket taker at a haunted house.
What other choice did I have?
I followed him.
The ruddy man in tweed pulled out a chair for me as I approached. “Welcome! Welcome!” he said in a posh accent.
“This is Johnny Partridge, late of Fleet Street,” said Cabot. “And this taciturn fellow is Chief Petty Officer Lane Torgerson, U.S. Navy, retired. Gentlemen, we were correct in our deductions. This is indeed Warden Mike Bowditch, the son of the notorious Jack Bowditch, whom we were discussing earlier.”
Torgerson I didn’t know. But he looked like someone who had seen combat in a handful of theaters—from Vietnam to Iraq—and who could still hold his own against you in a bar fight and might even help you pick up your teeth afterward.
Partridge, however, I recognized.
He was a British-born reporter who had worked at several Maine newspapers over the years. I had no idea what had brought him from London to our little backwater state, but he’d had a long and controversial career. Everyone who worked in state government knew him by reputation and few were willing to take his phone calls. I remembered one particularly cruel column he had written attacking two friends of mine after they had been involved in a tragic suicide-by-cop shooting. Partridge had called wardens Danielle Tate and Kathy Frost “frantic female fish cops.”
He had written about me, as well, following my father’s death. Or so my friends had told me. I had managed to avoid reading the column he had published questioning my worthiness to carry a badge and a gun.
“Have a seat, young man,” said Partridge boisterously. “Join us for a drink.”
Torgerson nodded respectfully.
“He says he’s drinking coffee,” said Cabot, pushed his sliding spectacles back up his nose again.
“You must have a beer at least!” said Partridge.
The thought of sharing a table with this vile man soured my stomach.
“I apologize, but I didn’t realize how late it is,” I said. “I need to get going.”
All three of them stopped moving at once and went completely quiet long enough for an old-time photographer to have made a daguerreotype of them.
“We noticed you talking to Amber Langstrom earlier,” Partridge said, showing off his British dental work. “How do you know her?”
“I don’t.”
“Didn’t she hug you?” the Brit asked. “I’m sure she did.”
“She mistook me for someone else,” I said. “She thought I looked like someone she knew.”
Cabot raised one of his bristling eyebrows. “Really? We were all sitting here envying you.”
I forced a smile. “I really made myself the center of attention, it seems.”
“You’ve got to excuse us for being nosy Parkers,” Cabot said. “We’re all retired—in Johnny’s case, partially retired. We have too much time on our hands, which makes us dangerous, of course. And we pay particular attention to Amber for obvious reasons.” If he had shaped the outlines of her breasts in the air, he couldn’t have been any more lewd.
“It’s a shame about the poor woman’s son,” said Partridge to me.
I didn’t have Officer Russo’s gift for maintaining a deadpan expression. “Her son?”
“Sex offender,” s
aid Cabot. “Convicted child rapist. The kid was a promising skier, too. And now he’s run off.”
“He’s human garbage,” said Torgerson. I’d been wondering if he possessed vocal cords.
“That seems like too strong a word,” said Cabot.
Partridge followed a swallow of scotch with a sip of beer. “What would you prefer?”
“I’d say that young Adam has forsaken his personal savior.”
“Foss?” growled Torgerson. He really did sound as if he’d spent a lifetime breathing in napalm fumes and desert sand.
Partridge laughed uproariously. “That’s a new name for Don! Personal savior!”
Torgerson’s cell phone buzzed in his shirt pocket. He rose quickly to his feet and turned from the table, making sure I, at least, couldn’t hear what he was saying.
“Now tell us about you,” said Cabot.
“You already know that I am a game warden.” The conversation seemed to be careening in the wrong direction. “The bartender said you gentlemen are part of a club,” I said, trying to change the focus.
Cabot fingered the beads of moisture on his beer glass absently. “We enjoy a pint together.”
“She said you call yourselves the Night Watchmen,” I said.
“In jest,” said Partridge.
“I don’t get the joke.”
“We all own homes on the mountain,” said John Cabot by way of explanation. “The irony in my case is that I don’t even ski. But my wife and her children can’t get enough of it. We have an interest in protecting our property values. That’s all there really is to it.”
“Protecting your property values from what?” I asked.
“Fugitive sex offenders!” said Partridge.
Cabot raised his pint glass. “Touché.”
Torgerson leaned over the table. “I have to go.”
He didn’t wait for a reply from them. Nor did he leave any money for the bill. Maybe the Night Watchmen ran a monthly tab.
“Are you sure you won’t sit down?” said Partridge. “I wrote about your father, you know. Horrible thing, and so embarrassing for you, as a warden. I am curious to hear what your life has been like over the past years.”
For another column? “Thanks for the invitation, but I need to get on the road. Nice meeting you gentlemen.”
Cabot and Partridge silently raised their glasses to me and didn’t speak a word to each other while I made my way to the door.
Well, that was a first, I thought. Usually when you are being threatened, you have some clue as to why.
14
The sky was as white as the slopes now. It was a cold, dry, nearly weightless snow, beyond the ability of the snowcats to shape. Skiers zoomed along the trail beside the lodge—momentary flashes of color—and then were swallowed up again by the silent storm.
The powder came off my truck with the faintest push of my gloved hand. I didn’t bother getting out the scraper. I started the engine and watched my breath, my life, unfurl into the cold before my eyes.
Had Officer Russo deliberately tried to bully me away from Widowmaker—or was he just another ham-fisted rent-a-cop? Did the Night Watchmen really suspect I had a secret relationship with the Langstroms that threatened them somehow—or were they just the drunken old busybodies they admitted themselves to be?
The phone buzzed in my pocket. When I saw that it was Stacey’s number, I felt my pulse begin to ease. The calmness lasted all of two seconds.
“You asshole!” she said. “You lying son of a bitch! Did you think I wouldn’t hear what really happened, Mike? You had a ‘scuffle with a tweaker’? Is that warden code for being stabbed in the back?”
“I’m sorry, Stacey. I didn’t want to worry you.”
“You lied to me.”
“I lied by omission.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Her nose still sounded plugged up. “My dad told me you could have died. He said every cop in the county came to the scene because they thought you were bleeding out.”
Of course I should have anticipated that her father would have heard the news of my stabbing. Charley Stevens had been the worst gossip in the Warden Service before he retired, and he was even worse now that he was uninhibited by department politics. The old pilot had sold me out to my girlfriend—not that I could blame him.
“It wasn’t that bad,” I said.
“That’s not the point.” She began to suffer a coughing fit. “You need to tell me what happened, Mike, or I swear to God, I’m going to come down there tonight and kick your lying ass.”
“I let a woman named Carrie Michaud get the drop on me. She’s this little ninety-pound drug addict, and I didn’t take her seriously enough. She stabbed me in the back, but the blade didn’t puncture my vest. She did manage to cut me in the arm before I subdued her. I only needed ten stitches.”
“You only needed ten stitches? And what do you mean, you subdued her? You didn’t shoot her?”
“I didn’t need to. I knocked her out.”
“If it had been me, I would have shot her!”
“Where are you?” The question slipped out before I realized how it might sound.
“Ashland. We got grounded by the snow. Where are you?”
“I’m not sure you want to know.”
“I am so going to kick your ass.”
“I’m at Widowmaker.”
She coughed some more. “What?”
“DeFord said I should take some sick days, but since I felt all right, I thought I would drive up to ask around about Adam. I told you I was coming here in my e-mail this morning.”
She fell silent for a moment before launching her second offensive. “Ever since that woman showed up at your house and told you about your brother, you’ve been on this downward spiral.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” I argued, despite the black thoughts that had been plaguing me only minutes earlier.
“It’s your dad, isn’t it? You’ve let him back into your head again. Jesus, Mike, get a grip!”
“I can explain everything if you just calm down.”
“Don’t talk to me like that. You should have called me from the hospital. If you don’t understand how much that breaks my heart, there’s nothing more to say. I’m not interested in being with someone who’d rather be lonely than be loved.”
Then the line went dead.
A moment later, the phone buzzed again.
This time it was a message. Just one word: Asshole!
* * *
Before I had become a warden, and during my first years on the job, my thoughts had been so clouded with guilt and anger that I couldn’t see anything clearly. At the time, I had believed my mind was perfectly sound. It was only later—after I had participated in my fourth or fifth critical incident stress debriefing—that I had realized I couldn’t necessarily trust my own mental process; a sick psyche is, by its very nature, incapable of understanding it is sick. I remembered a question I had asked a counselor after she had diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress syndrome: “How can you think through your problems when your problems are your thoughts?”
If Stacey was right, I might be suffering some sort of psychological relapse brought on by that knife in my back. I needed to take a step back and make an attempt to assess my present difficulties with some objectivity.
I was miles from home—and my distance from Stacey at the moment couldn’t be measured in mathematical units.
My superiors at the Warden Service had forbidden me to return to work until my wounds healed, but they would hardly have been pleased to learn how I had spent my so-called sick day.
Not to mention that Amber had taken off without so much as a note about where she was going.
And then there was the matter of the snow. Another inch had accumulated on my windshield since I had returned to the Scout, with only more to come. I flipped the switch and watched the hard rubber blades clear half-moons in the powder.
The easiest problem to deal with was Amber.
As soon as I hit disconnect, I felt a pang. Amber might have been a self-involved schemer, but I had no business taking out my self-disgust on her. For all I knew, she had received horrible news.
With everything that had happened at the Sluiceway, and then my disastrous conversation with Stacey, I had nearly lost track of the important details I had learned from Josh Davidson: about Adam’s needing money, about his having a black eye, about his driving a truck no one knew he even owned.
Amber had told me to seek out Don Foss, though she doubted he would speak to me. I had to admit that every mention of the man had left me more intrigued.
Pulsifer had called him “a secular saint or a modern-day plantation boss.”
Shaylen Hawken had said he was “the last chance some of these men will ever have.”
And to Cabot and the Night Watchmen, he had been Adam’s “personal savior,” in ironical quotation marks.
What else did I have to do tonight but go searching for this enigma of the North Woods?
On my way down the mountain and out of the resort, I passed an open maintenance hangar. A PistenBully was idling out front, and I saw someone who looked like Elderoy having a conversation with another man while two dogs played in the open lot. The men seemed to be watching the animals leap into the air and bite at the snowflakes.
As I drew closer, I saw that it was indeed Elderoy. The other, younger man I didn’t recognize, but he was dressed in a Widowmaker snowsuit and leaning on a shovel. The dogs were large hounds of some sort; they had appeared black from a distance, but the coloring of their coats, even coated with frost, seemed to have more nuance than I had first thought.
I honked my horn and waved.
Elderoy glanced at my Scout, and we made eye contact, but he didn’t reciprocate my gesture. We hadn’t parted on the best of terms, it was true. He must also have muttered something to the snow shoveler, because the man gave me a look of such intense interest, I lifted my foot from the gas pedal. Then something even more curious happened: The man whistled. I couldn’t hear the sound from the moving vehicle, but I saw the reaction of the hounds. Both dogs ceased to play and faced their master with absolute attention. It made my untrustworthy brain wonder what Elderoy had told the stranger about me.