Almost Midnight

by Paul Doiron

  A bald eagle flew overhead with nesting materials gripped in its talons like a quiver of arrows and an olive branch. Our national symbol is a waterbird that prefers to nest in a huge tree with a commanding view of the ocean, a lake, or a large river such as the Kennebec. I’d read about an eagle’s nest in Ohio that was supposedly twelve feet thick and more than eight feet in diameter. Charley Stevens had once told me how, as a boy, he’d climbed fifty feet to the top of a pine and spent the night in an abandoned nest after the eaglets had fledged.

  And people accused me of being foolhardy.

  Following the river south, I made my way to the wooded campus that houses the Maine State Police Crime Laboratory. I entered the building through the back sallyport. To prevent tampering with evidence, the lab has a complicated series of rules for how and when it receives materials for testing.

  I ignored them. One of the technicians owed me a favor.

  “Why are you doing this to me, Bowditch?” Paul Panagore asked when I presented him with the crossbow bolt. He was a bulging, thick-fingered man with a natural monk’s tonsure and a constant air of being put-upon.

  “I’ll never ask for special treatment again.”

  “That’s what you said the last time.” He squinted through his reading glasses at the arrow in the bag. “You do realize that if you don’t fill out the paperwork and submit this through channels, you’re going to break the chain of evidence? Whatever I find will be useless in court.”

  I had no intention of bringing this matter to a prosecutor, but I decided to stay mum.

  Instead I put my hand on his soft shoulder. “I want to know if we have the archer’s prints in the system. Dust this and tell me what you find.”

  “Someone here is bound to notice that I’m freelancing.”

  “You won’t be caught.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because you’re the best there is. Any chance you can get me the results by the end of the day?”

  Panagore removed his readers and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “You know what your problem is, Bowditch? You dwell happily in a state of constant chaos. It doesn’t occur to you that some of us are just trying to get through our days without being fired or arrested.”

  “Text me when you have something.”

  27

  From Augusta it took me a solid hour, traveling through leafless forests and across fallow fields waiting to be plowed, to reach Pennacook. I crossed the bridge over the thundering Androscoggin and hung a right on Main Street, which took me through what remained of the downtown.

  In the stark noonday light, I counted the boarded-up storefronts. There were fifteen, not including the shops with dusty windows and CLOSED signs that might or might not have been abandoned. Dani had told me that since Atlantic Pulp and Paper had decamped for South America, leaving the grand blue ruin of the mill behind, Pennacook had become one of the nexuses of the opiate scourge.

  The temperature wasn’t more than a few precious degrees above freezing, but a shirtless young man was arguing with a very pregnant girl on the sidewalk. Both of the disputants had the visible facial wounds, unhealed sores, and unbandaged scrapes that are common among addicts.

  The girl, who was wearing pajama bottoms, fuzzy slippers, and a hoodie, had her hands tightened into small fists. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

  I pulled to the curb and cracked my window. “Are you OK, ma’am?”

  The man inexpertly flicked his cigarette in my direction, where it exploded in an orange burst on the road.

  The girl snarled, “Fuck off, perv.”

  I turned the next corner and began climbing through a neighborhood of handsome clapboard homes dating from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but even these houses seemed in need of paint or new roofs, and most had election signs in their yards with the Penguin’s name on them.

  Dani had never told me the name of the street where she had grown up. Nor had I met her mother or brother. Her father resided in the town cemetery overlooking the Androscoggin.

  The parking lot of the Pennacook Hospital for Animals was so filled I had to park on the street. However tough times got, people cared for their beloved pets. They might not visit doctors or dentists themselves, but they would take their dog to the vet at the suspicion of a bad hip.

  The young woman with pink hair sat behind the welcome desk. On one side of the room, a young Lab was lunging against his collar to get at a coon cat that had climbed atop her owner’s shoulders to escape.

  The veterinary assistant sprang to her feet with a radiant smile when she saw me. “You’re back!”

  “I can see you’re busy here, but I wondered if Dr. Holman had a moment.”

  “I know you want to see Shadow.”

  I was doing my best not to interpret the woman’s effusiveness as good news.

  She told me she would be a minute and disappeared through a door behind the desk.

  “He’s trying to be friendly!” the lady with the Lab assured the man with the coon cat.

  The man grimaced as the terrified cat jabbed her claws deeper into his shoulder.

  The young woman popped back through the door. “Dr. H is finishing up a procedure but she said I could take you in.” She peered past me at the waiting pet owners. “Will you two be all right for a sec?”

  “Oh, yes,” said the dog lady. “We’re all friends here!”

  The cat man had begun crying tears of pain.

  The veterinary assistant led me past the surgery and around a corner to a door to the back side of the building. The sign said RECOVERY.

  One side of the room had stainless steel cages in three stacks. In the top row a little calico with a patch over her eye hissed at me. A tom the size of a bobcat turned away from us with what looked like disinterest but could have been contempt. Down below, a mixed-breed dog slept under a blanket with its tongue lolling out of its mouth.

  The assistant foresaw my question. “We couldn’t keep Shadow here because he wouldn’t fit into any of these kennels—and he was kind of freaking out the other patients.”

  We passed through a second door into a large storeroom that was evenly divided between racks of supplies and several oversize crates. In the cage farthest from the door lay Shadow. He appeared to be sleeping. Aside from having acquired a blanket, he looked no different from when I had last seen him, the day before.

  “Are you still sedating him?”

  “God no. We want him to be active.”

  “So why’s he out cold?”

  “He’s running a bit of a temperature. But we’re giving him antibiotics and keeping a close watch on him.”

  “That sounds like it might mean he has an infection.” I heard the anxiousness sneak into my tone.

  “Dr. Holman will explain the details. I need to get back out front. You can wait here if you’d like.”

  After the young woman had left, I knelt down beside the kennel.

  “You don’t look so hot, buddy. How are you doing?”

  When he opened a slitted yellow eye, I nearly fell over in surprise.

  Dr. Holman opened the door, wearing her usual scrubs, but with her hair bound by a headband. You could have learned facial anatomy by studying the bones showing through her skin.

  “He just woke up.”

  She arched a thin eyebrow. “Really?”

  When I turned around, I saw that his eye was closed again. His rib cage rose and fell rhythmically. Had I imagined his waking up?

  “Your assistant told me you’re treating him with antibiotics.”

  “Running a fever after surgery doesn’t mean he has an infection. But I’ve got him on enrofloxacin to be safe. He had that arrow in him for a long time. I cleaned the wound as best I could, but he’s still at risk of sepsis.”

  “How long until he’s out of the woods?”

  “Every hour gets us closer to a positive outcome.”

  “The truth, Lizzie.”

  “I’d only be
guessing. That arrow did more than puncture his lung. I can’t be sure of the nerve damage he might have sustained.”

  I nodded.

  “A state trooper named Dani Tate called me this morning, asking about him. I was surprised since I thought this was all supposed to be on the q.t. I hope you don’t mind my talking to her.”

  “You know Dani?”

  “She brings her cat here, Puddin.”

  As the vet escorted me to the waiting room, she asked, “Any luck tracking down the other wolf?”

  “I may have found a few leads.”

  “Do you know yet whether she’s alive?”

  “No.”

  Dr. Holman clutched the crucifix around her neck. I wished it were that easy for me to find comfort.

  * * *

  As I was returning to my vehicle, I remembered what Gary Pulsifer had told me about the father of Kent Mears. The old man, he’d said, resided in Pennacook, and from what Pulsifer had implied, I figured him for a recovering alcoholic.

  I texted Dani:

  What do you know about the Mears family? The guard who was killed grew up in Pennacook and I wondered if you knew him. He would have been ten years older than you. His name was Kent Mears.

  I waited ten minutes for a reply, but Dani must have been asleep. I proceeded to Plan B.

  Older people are reluctant to part with their landlines. On a whim I checked the telephone directory. Only one Mears was listed. First name also Kent. He lived up the street and just around the corner.

  Rather than call first, I decided to get some exercise and fresh air. As a warden investigator I spent far too much time indoors. When I wasn’t cooped up in my office, I was loitering for hours inside courthouses, waiting to testify in cases that required me to be on the stand for fifteen minutes tops. I spent even more time behind the wheel of my Jeep.

  God, how I missed the woods.

  The address I’d found was a triple-decker tenement. During the heyday of the mill, these apartment buildings had been alive with children, running up and down the external staircases, with lines of laundry stretching across alleyways from one block to the next. There had been kitchen gardens and sandboxes and men sitting around card tables, playing gin rummy and busting each other’s balls.

  Those days had died long ago. The firetrap that remained was peeling paint. The gravel lot between it and its neighbor sparkled with bits of broken beer bottles. Indeterminate pieces of litter tumbled about on the wind.

  Mears lived on the first floor. I pressed the button beside a speaker.

  There was no answer.

  I pressed again.

  “Knock it off!” came a voice.

  “Mr. Mears?”

  Again there was no answer.

  Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw movement in a window. A blind peeled away from the frame.

  I pressed the button again.

  “What do you want?”

  “My name is Mike Bowditch. I’m a game warden investigator. I knew your son.”

  One lie out of three seemed an acceptable ratio.

  “He’s dead! Haven’t you heard?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s why I am here. Would you mind if I came in for a few minutes?”

  “What for?”

  “To talk about your son.”

  I thought I’d lost him with that, but after a minute, the reinforced outer door opened, and one of the largest human beings I had ever seen filled the threshold. He had a mostly bald head and cauliflower ears and a nose that had been broken and reset so many times it was almost beautiful in its grotesqueness. His chest and stomach were one. He clenched a smoldering cigarette between fingers the size of breakfast sausages. He smelled strongly of beer.

  “How’d you know my boy?”

  “From the prison.”

  He clearly had no intention of letting me inside. Nor did I want to be trapped in a room with the still-muscular old giant.

  “So what’s this, a condolence visit?”

  “I would have brought flowers, but I didn’t know what kind you liked.”

  The utter ballsiness of my response caught him off guard and he came near to smiling. “I can tell from looking at you that you wasn’t his friend.”

  “What did his friends look like?”

  “They had big tits and fat asses.”

  “That doesn’t describe Dawn Richie. Wasn’t she his friend?”

  He flicked his cigarette away. “Show me your badge.”

  I produced the shield for him, and he studied it closely, although I doubt his aged eyes could read the embossed words without the help of glasses.

  “I wanted to make sure you wasn’t a reporter. I’ve gotten calls from a few of them. Fucking vultures. So you want to know about Richie, huh? Well, I can tell you this much. She got my son killed.”

  “My understanding is Kent was stabbed by a man named Darius Chapman.”

  “But it was Richie who got him involved in whatever scam she was running. I don’t have to guess how she lured him in either. Kent was a walking hard-on. I always figured he’d knock up one of the female inmates or get hauled into court on a rape charge. But getting stabbed in the neck, protecting some conniving bitch who never gave two shits for him? Pathetic.”

  “Did your son ever tell you what Richie had him doing?”

  Mears took a step onto the concrete stoop. He was wearing Indian-style moccasins that had probably been manufactured in the country of India. He scanned the ground as if searching for something he’d just dropped. After half a minute, he located it. He pointed at the dirt where a used syringe waited for some child to pick it up and stick himself.

  “Drugs?”

  “I doubt she had him preaching the Good News of the Kingdom of God.”

  “Can you confirm that she had him dealing?”

  “Not directly.”

  “Then why do you assume the two of them were smuggling in narcotics?”

  “When Kent told me he applied to work in the prison, I told him he was a sap. ‘You’re going to be poor all your life,’ I said. ‘Why not come to work in the mill and be useful and make something of yourself.’ When he mouthed off, I boxed his ears. Six months later I got my pink slip. I guess we were both saps.”

  He seemed to realize that he had wandered off track.

  “I got an email from him a couple of months ago with photos attached. He wanted me to know he’d just bought a new truck. It cost fifty grand. He wanted to rub my nose in how much it cost. I told him he was an idiot going into hock to buy a vehicle he couldn’t afford. He said he had a side business. He said, ‘Why should I be the only one here not earning?’ I didn’t have to think too hard about what that meant.”

  Mears let out a mild belch, for which he didn’t apologize. “I don’t know who you are, Warden, or why you’re here or what you’re really after. But I will tell you this. My son got what he deserved.”

  28

  I followed the same road over the mountains that Pulsifer and I had taken the day before. As I passed the turnoff to Alcohol Mary’s distillery, I weighed stopping. I had an idea of backtracking Shadow’s blood spoor myself—or trying to—but the blanket of new snow would have hidden whatever prints the wounded animal had left behind.

  I wasn’t sure how to feel about Mr. Mears. Unlike Gary Pulsifer, he hadn’t managed to stay sober, and I pitied him for that. On the other hand, he had raised a son who was, by all accounts, a sadistic bully. I had never believed that a son should be punished for his father’s sins, but I was less sure about the other side of the coin.

  Mears hadn’t exactly been forthcoming, but he had disclosed more than he intended. It sounded as if Richie had come to the prison to continue a drug-smuggling operation she had probably begun at the Downeast Correctional Facility. She had tried to use sex and money to recruit Billy into her operation, but when he’d rejected her proposal, she had settled for Kent Mears as her bodyguard. Billy had mentioned a spike in inmate overdoses that corresponded with the mo
nths since she’d arrived from Machiasport. The attack in the laundry room could have been retribution for disrupting some rival smuggler’s operations.

  Only as I was turning down the Tantrattle Road did I realize I had left my topographical map at home.

  What was Pulsifer’s new mantra? Let it go?

  It wasn’t the worst advice.

  Over the winter, the top few inches of the road had melted into mud during thaws and refrozen into ice during cold snaps. But underneath remained several feet of permafrost. As long as the rock-solid substrate remained, the road would be passable. Once we got the first warm spell of the season, all bets would be off. The mire would start swallowing vehicles whole, never to be seen again.

  For now, the Scout’s raised suspension and oversize tires made easy work of the potholes and exposed rocks. I found the bouncy, jostling ride exhilarating.

  Fresh nicks were on some of the roots that snaked across the road, caused by the underside of a low-riding vehicle, perhaps a heavily laden truck. Someone else had been into the camp this morning.

  I was within a mile of my destination when my phone began to buzz and vibrate in my inner pocket. It was Charley Stevens. I was surprised that I had any kind of signal in the shadow of the mountains.

  “Hello?”

  “Yeah, Charley, I’m here.”

  I hit the brakes and turned off the vehicle. The hot engine continued to tick beneath the hood, but the quiet made it easier to hear the old pilot’s voice.

  “There’s some wicked static on my end.”

  “I’m up near Tantrattle Pond in Intervale. I’m headed in to the warden cabin there.”

  “I know it well!”

  That came as no surprise. Having spent three decades in the service, including as a patrol warden in the same district now assigned to Gary Pulsifer, he knew every owl’s nest and bear’s den in the forest. Charley was the best woodsman I had ever known.

  “We’d better talk fast before the call drops,” I said.

  “So I checked into this Dawn Richie for you. Don’t start whining about it. You wouldn’t have asked me about her if you didn’t want me nosing into her past.”