Almost Midnight

by Paul Doiron

  I secured the three sharp-pointed arrows in the attached quiver and set the unloaded contraption on the back seat of my vehicle.

  Afterward, I headed off to the only grocery store in a fifty-mile radius. Dani’s offhand remark about Dr. Holman’s feeding Shadow an entire ham had helped me realize something I hadn’t properly considered. From the start, I had assumed that the wolf had been drawn close to the shooter by the use of bait. Most serious predator hunters obtained their meat scraps through unconventional means: either by using deer or moose carcasses they had killed themselves or by purchasing unsalable beef and pork from slaughterhouses.

  But this much I knew now: I was after an amateur.

  I made a direct line to the meat counter at the rear of the market in Phillips, where I had a five-minute conversation with the butcher. By the time I exited through the automatic door, I knew the name of the person who had tried and failed to murder my wolf.

  37

  Being a vintage vehicle, my Scout didn’t have a dashboard thermometer, but I could tell from the squishiness of the road and the fog drifting through the trees that the snow was melting in the mountains.

  Isaac Stoll’s wrecked carriage had been removed from the field. The Amish had even repaired the fence with new rails. The only reminders of the recent violence were the scars in the earth.

  Outside the farmhouse, a buggy was drawn up, along with a handful of automobiles owned, no doubt, by well-wishers from the community who had come to offer support to their Amish neighbors. Indigo Mazur had angled her Subaru Baja outside the barn, where the Stoll family stabled its horse and donkey.

  I glanced through the open door and breathed in the scent of hay. The wooden floorboards were cleaner than the “washed” plates in my dish rack at home. I heard the breathing of a horse somewhere in the dark and the swishing of its tail.

  “Hello?” I called.

  “Good morning,” came Samuel’s small voice.

  His sisters were with him, along with three other girls. The girls hung back, but the big-eyed boy seemed glad to see me.

  “How is your uncle Isaac doing?”

  “He is in the hospital.”

  I had hoped for a more detailed description of his condition, but it made sense that Samuel’s parents hadn’t disclosed the extent of his uncle’s injuries, especially if there was a prospect of paralysis or traumatic brain injury.

  “How about the horse? Her name is Tilda, right?”

  “She has a strained shoulder and cuts and bruises. Mamm made a poultice. We can give her apples, but not too many because they make her stomach sour.”

  “I see that Indigo is here.”

  “And Zane!” said one of the older girls, a preteen.

  The young farmer appeared out of the shadows with straw in his hair as if he’d been playing hide-and-seek with the children. “Hello.”

  “I thought you were inside with the adults.”

  He pulled a thread of straw from his hair. “What’s an adult?”

  “I stopped by your yurt on my way in, but neither you nor Indigo were there.”

  “She’s inside with the Amish and some concerned people from the community. They’re discussing how to deal with Peaslee, now that he’s free on bail. Indigo wants the Stolls to take out a restraining order.”

  “I actually came here looking for you.”

  “Me?”

  “I have one last question before I let this matter go about the wolf. How about we go for a walk together?”

  “OK.”

  A fox sparrow was scratching at the leaves under the big maple that towered over the dooryard. As on the other maples around the farm, a bucket hung from the trunk to collect sap. The warm spell would cause it to run better now.

  “How is Isaac Stoll really doing? It didn’t sound like the Stolls are sharing the details with the kids.”

  “Ike has a concussion and bruised bones in his back. And a broken arm, of course. I guess there were multiple fractures. Is that the question you wanted to ask?”

  “You’re a vegan, aren’t you, Zane?”

  He came to a halt. “You know I am.”

  “So why did the butcher at Edmunds’ Market tell me you were in there last week buying three whole hams?”

  The color drained completely from his bearded face.

  “To donate them, maybe? Like to a food bank?”

  “Which food bank?”

  He contemplated his boots. “The one in Farmington.”

  “They must have really appreciated such a generous gift. I’m sure they’ll remember your coming in clearly. But I have to ask, why would you, as a vegan, choose to support the animal industrial complex that way? I thought you had ethical issues about pigs being bioengineered, raised in confinement on factory farms, and then slaughtered with a bolt to the head?”

  The gory image I had evoked brought a flush of anger to his face. “Not all of them die when they’re ‘stunned.’ A lot of them die later in the scalding tanks. There’s a video online. You should watch it the next time you think of eating a hot dog. You really should watch that video.”

  The foraging fox sparrow had been joined by two gray squirrels, whose drey, or nest of leaves, I’d noticed in the higher reaches of the maple.

  “Zane, why were you putting out hams around Mary’s property? Before you answer, I am going to suggest a reason. It was to draw Shadow in close, wasn’t it?”

  “I didn’t shoot him.”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  His eyelids began to flutter. He opened, then closed his mouth so that his lips disappeared.

  What Zane Wilson hadn’t noticed was that, in our seemingly directionless stroll, I had been leading him to his girlfriend’s vehicle. I slowly moved my head so that he would follow my gaze down into the tail bed of the Baja.

  A Spider-Bite X2 crossbow bolt lay on a small mat of straw.

  He snapped his head up in alarm. “Indigo said she—”

  “Got rid of the other arrows?”

  Zane wasn’t the brightest guy, but he was bright enough to know he’d given himself away.

  “Here’s what I think happened, Zane. I may have a few details wrong, but I am fairly confident about the big picture. After Shadow killed the Stolls’ donkey Little Amos, Indigo got very, very mad. You yourself said she has a big temper for a small woman. So, being worked up, and with the killer wolf still presumably in the area, she went looking for a weapon. Not a rifle because she knows how much you disapprove of guns. Instead she bought a crossbow, arrows, and broadheads from the local sporting goods store, Fairbanks Firearms in Farmington. Then she started practicing with them on your property, probably against your wishes.”

  “How did you…?”

  “There were two things that made me suspicious. The first was that, when Warden Landry and I were visiting Mrs. Stoll, Indigo left ahead of us, and I had the strong impression her purpose was to block us from driving onto your land. It could have been for any number of reasons, of course.

  “It was the next day when I began to piece things together. There was straw all over your road that hadn’t been there when Landry and I had driven partway in. But I knew you didn’t keep livestock. And when you showed me around the place later, I didn’t see a single hay bale or even a scarecrow stuffed with cornstalks. Now any archer will tell you that the best targets to use—if you’re cheap and don’t want to spring for synthetic ones—are hay bales, because you’re unlikely to damage your broadheads on the fibers.”

  Zane stood there like a zombie.

  “This was all conjecture on my part. Then yesterday, Warden Landry found a broadhead in the back of Peaslee’s truck. Gorman claimed it was planted—which gave me the idea for this little trick with Indigo’s car, I have to confess. I asked him where he’d driven that day, and he rattled off a bunch of locations. But one interested me in particular. Peaslee said he visited the Farmington hospital to fight with their accounting department over a billing dispute. And you had told me
that Indigo was at a doctor’s appointment.”

  From behind me came a shrill voice: “Shut up, Zane!”

  The young man raised his hands in the universal gesture for helplessness. “He already knows!”

  Indigo came striding toward us with her hands clenched in tight little balls. Someone inside the house must have spotted us. “What did you tell him?”

  “I didn’t have to tell him. He’s figured it all out.” He pointed at the bed of her little Subaru.

  She flicked her eyes from the arrow to me. “You planted that there, you fucking asshole. That’s entrapment.”

  “Actually, that arrow belongs to me.”

  “So what the fucking fuck is this about?”

  “I was telling Zane about my theory of how you shot Shadow because you were angry over him killing Little Amos.”

  Her hand went to her lips, hovered there a moment, then dropped to reveal a curled smile. “What’s your evidence?”

  “Fingerprints recovered off the bolt the wolf carried inside him for a week. I had them tested by the Maine State Crime Lab.”

  “I’ve never been arrested or fingerprinted—unless you stole something of mine to take prints.”

  “That’s not how I conduct investigations, Ms. Mazur.”

  “You just plant arrows in other people’s vehicles.”

  Zane interrupted before I could respond. “He knows about the hams, Indy.”

  She came out with the explanation so quickly there was no doubt she had been rehearsing it in her head. “It’s true Zane bought those hams. Maybe you’re too much of hard-ass to notice, but my man has a big, soft heart. He saw that wolf with an arrow sticking out of him, and he couldn’t deal with it being in pain, and he bought those hams to lure the animal in close so he could help it. That’s what you told him, Zane, isn’t it? Because it’s the truth, so help me God.”

  “I know it’s the truth. From the start, I wondered why Shadow ended up where he did, and it was because even though he was dying, he wanted to eat. So I believe you about the hams.”

  I held up a hand before she could lay into me again. “There’s something I need to add here, because it’s important. I use the term wolf to describe Shadow, but strictly speaking he’s what’s known as a high-content wolf hybrid. He has gray-wolf and domestic-dog genes in him. He’s been in the wild for a few years, but he started life as a pet. He was a puppy who lived in a box in a living room. His original owner fed him dog chow in a plastic bowl. A lot has happened to him since then—and it’s clear he has become an accomplished hunter—but some part of him will always be a dog. Which is why, I believe, he sought shelter at a human’s house.”

  Indigo’s dreadlocks swung when she cocked her head. “That’s touching. But if you know Zane bought the hams to feed an injured animal, why are you still harassing us? Didn’t one of you wardens find a broadhead in Peaslee’s truck yesterday? He’s the logical suspect.”

  “There’s one more thing I need to show you.”

  From my pocket I removed the copy of a sales receipt from Edmunds’ Market. It was dated two days after Shadow killed the donkey. The slip tallied the total for a rack of lamb and a leg of lamb. The purchase had been made on a personal account. The receipt was signed with the name of the holder of that account.

  Indigo Mazur.

  38

  “She was only trying to help the Stolls,” said Zane, his voice rising. He had never seemed so young as at that moment. “She didn’t want him to take any more of their animals.”

  “Did she tell you what she was planning?”

  The question rendered him mute.

  “I didn’t tell him until afterward,” Indigo said. “I knew he’d try to stop me. He thought that wolf—or whatever he is—was innocent. As if that matters.”

  “He was acting out of instinct!” Zane spoke these words as if he had uttered them to her before, perhaps several times before. How often, I wondered, had they argued about her near-lethal decision?

  She turned to me as if we were two adults discussing a naïve child unable to understand us. “What did I tell you about him?”

  Her condescension wasn’t lost on her boyfriend. “Do you know how hard it was for me to lie for you? I felt like I was betraying everything I believe in.”

  “Then why did you?”

  “Because I love you.”

  “Oh, Zane. I know you believe that. You’re such a sweet, beautiful man.” She held out her tattooed wrists to me. “Let’s get this over with.”

  “I’m not going to handcuff you, Ms. Mazur.”

  She interpreted even my gesture of courtesy to be an insult. “Is it because you don’t believe a ‘girl’ would attack you on the ride to jail?”

  I could have told Indigo Mazur that I’d once been stabbed by a “girl” who bore a slight resemblance to her. And that I’d learned a hard but valuable lesson from that experience. Never underestimate the threat even the least outwardly intimidating person can pose to your life.

  But I wasn’t there to tell them about my brushes with death. “I’m not going to arrest you. I’m not even going to write you a summons, although I could probably come up with a charge that might even stick if the district attorney happened to be feeling generous towards me. But there’s no point in punishing you.”

  “What’s your game here?”

  “I’m not playing a game. I’m telling you that the State of Maine will not be bringing charges against you, not for luring a domestic dog to a bait pile, not for failing to pursue the animal you wounded, not even for planting a broadhead in Gorman Peaslee’s truck when you saw it parked at the Farmington hospital.”

  “Why not?”

  “First, because it’s not worth the time of the state employees who would be assigned to a case we might not even win. But second, and most important, because I choose not to.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you’re free to go.”

  “Am I supposed to thank you for being magnanimous?”

  I retrieved my crossbow bolt from the back of her Baja. “If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.”

  Zane had been stunned into silence by his girlfriend’s diminishment of him. Now I saw that he was struggling to ask the question that had pained him from the moment he’d seen the injured animal on Alcohol Mary’s mountain.

  “How is the wolf dog doing?”

  “His name is Shadow, and it looks like he’s going to live.”

  “Can I go see him?”

  “What the fuck, Zane?” Indigo said.

  “I can take you there if you’d like,” I said. “He’s in the Pennacook Hospital for Animals, so it’s going to take about an hour to get there and another hour back.”

  “Thank you.” Zane turned to his girlfriend, the unspoken question hanging in the air between them.

  Her answer was a snort and a shake of the dreads. “Are you crazy? Why would I want to go?”

  “Because you…?”

  “What?”

  She honestly had no clue.

  I had felt sorry for Zane before. But Indigo had revealed herself as clearly to him as she ever would. I understood that he had a choice to make that would shape the rest of his life.

  What had Dani said to me? “You have all the information you need to make a decision.” And now Zane did, too.

  * * *

  When Dr. Holman’s pink-haired assistant showed us to the back room of the clinic where they were keeping Shadow, I was surprised to find the wolf on his feet. He still looked hollow eyed and gaunt, and the unevenly shaved spots in his fur gave him a sad, patchwork appearance, but he had been eating heartily, the young woman said, and had showed no signs of aggression to the doctor or herself. He did, however, make a noise that wasn’t quite a growl but signaled his displeasure with the three of us gawking at him in his confinement.

  “He’s even bigger than I realized,” said Zane, who held back from the cage as if the animal might have the strength to crash th
rough the bars. “What a specimen!”

  “He’s inglorious,” agreed pink-hair. She cast a glance at me. “Am I using that word right?”

  “You are,” I lied.

  Holman was in surgery, dealing with an unlucky cat whose teeth were being painfully resorbed into her jaws—a condition I had never heard of. The vet promised she would peek in if she got free. But I suspected we wouldn’t be seeing her.

  “What’s going to happen to him?” Zane asked.

  I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Holman had said Shadow would heal in time, but not completely. If he really had suffered nerve damage, he might never be able to run at top speed. Clearly I wouldn’t be releasing him back into the woods to find his female companion—not that I would have. No wolf could dwell safely in this part of Maine, not for the foreseeable future.

  Nor could I think of a sanctuary where I might deliver Shadow for safekeeping where he could live out the rest of his days in the company of other wolf dogs. The closest such facility, across the border in New Hampshire, was a compound consisting of acre-size enclosures in the woods. The inmates were fed scraps from a slaughterhouse and had either the same vacant stares or nervous tics I had observed among their human equivalents at the Maine State Prison.

  Taking responsibility for the well-being of a creature such as Shadow—unpredictable, dangerous, and wild at heart—was a life commitment of the first order.

  “We’re still working out the details,” I said.

  Zane lingered behind me. “When I look at him, I can’t decide if he’s a dog or a wolf.”

  “Both. Or neither.”

  “I wish Indigo had come with us.”

  “I do, too.” I cleared my throat. “I’m going to hang out here a second if that’s all right.”

  I wanted a few more minutes with the wolf now that he didn’t have the pall of death hanging over him. I suppose I was curious if he remembered me. We’d only been together a few short days, and that was several years prior. I felt that I was projecting a bond with him that was one-sided and as sentimental as the beliefs I ridiculed when I heard them expressed by animal rights activists.