The Bone Orchard: A Novel

by Paul Doiron

  Sure enough, he picked up. “Game warden,” he said, not even bothering to give his name.

  “Bard. It’s Bowditch.”

  He reacted with the same friendliness he might have shown a telemarketer. “What’s going on?”

  “I left you two messages today.” I wasn’t going to go through the charade of asking if he’d received them. “I wondered what you did about those two guys camping on Bump Island?”

  “I didn’t have a chance to get out there.”

  That figured. “One of them flashed a pistol at me and my clients. Displaying a firearm in a reckless manner is criminal threatening. You didn’t think that was worth following up on?”

  “Fuck you and your attitude, Bowditch.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard what I said. I am not at your beck and call anytime you see somebody breaking a law. You think being an ex-warden gives you special privileges? You should have thought of that before you quit.”

  Bard had been one of the wardens who couldn’t resist telling me how ill-suited I was for the job, so his giving me a lecture on resigning from the service was pretty rich.

  “My sports are staying at Weatherby’s,” I said with as much calmness as I could muster. “Can you meet us there in the morning to take our statements, or should I call the sheriff’s office instead?”

  He paused, and I could practically hear the sound of cogs laboring to turn in his rusty brain. “Did the guy actually wave his gun in your face?”

  “No.”

  “Then what the fuck, Bowditch? You know the DA isn’t going to bring a criminal-threatening case, especially if I go out there tomorrow and find they’ve cleared off the island.”

  Bard’s argument had the virtue of being the truth. The police in Washington County were too thinly stretched to chase down every third-rate complaint. But I was too fired up with alcohol to back down.

  “If someone had called me last year to report this,” I said, “I would have taken a boat out there ASAP.”

  “That’s why you’re a civilian now.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “What’s got you so wound up tonight?” he asked. “Is it that thing with Frost?”

  I sat up straight on my barstool. “What thing with Frost?”

  “She was the one who shot that guy last night. I thought you’d heard.”

  In my self-absorbed outrage, I’d forgotten about the shooting Mason had mentioned earlier. The whiskey I’d been swigging all night surged back up into my throat.

  “Frost and Tate shot a guy who just got back from Afghanistan,” Bard said. “Everyone’s saying it was a suicide-by-cop scenario. I guess the kid was wounded pretty bad over there. I can’t believe you didn’t hear about it.”

  “I was guiding,” I said.

  “The guy was a decorated vet, and his old man is well connected, from what I heard.”

  My palm had grown sweaty from holding the phone to my ear. My tongue stuck to the bottom of my mouth.

  “So, is that it?” Bard asked.

  “Are you going out to Bump Island tomorrow?”

  “You really are a piece of work, Bowditch,” he said, and hung up.

  I sat at the counter, looking down at my newly cleaned pistol resting on its bed of newspaper. In my short career as a law-enforcement officer, I had killed two men. On each occasion, I had been subjected to a government inquisition that stopped just short of tooth pliers and red-hot pokers.

  I sat down at the desk where Elizabeth Morse had arranged for a computer to be installed for the use of her guests. She wanted them to be able to check their stock portfolios every day.

  The shooting was the top story on all the Maine news sites. The headline on the Portland Press Herald page confirmed my worst fears: POLICE KILL ARMED VETERAN.

  Beneath the words was a photograph of the dead man in his dress uniform. With his low-slung beret and stern expression, I had a hard time recognizing Jimmy Gammon.

  7

  Law dictionaries define the term suicide by cop as an incident where an individual engages in consciously life-threatening behavior to such a degree that a police officer has no choice but to respond with deadly force. Other terms for this phenomenon are police-assisted suicide and victim-precipitated homicide.

  The Jimmy Gammon I had known was a young man who loved life. He took pleasure in expensive scotch, in wing shooting alongside his dog, in the private half marathons he ran on summer mornings before the heat began to rise off the cracked roadways. What had the war done to make him want to snuff out his own candle?

  The news reports were vague on this point. They said that he had been wounded in Afghanistan, but they didn’t say how severely. They mentioned that he had been receiving treatment at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Togus, but they didn’t explain what he was being treated for. They reported that there had been a previous call by his family to 911, but they didn’t detail what precipitated the prior emergency or how it had been resolved.

  Christ, I hadn’t even heard Jimmy was home from Afghanistan. I felt sick to my stomach just thinking about what had happened to him.

  I stared into the digitized eyes of the photograph. The picture had been taken after he completed his live-fire training at Fort Bliss, in Texas, but before he shipped out for the Afghan war. At first, I was inclined to see his grim expression as an affectation: the mask of a tough guy headed into battle. But the more I studied it, the more I realized that he hadn’t been acting. Even before he’d been deployed to a war zone, he had already changed from the goofy kid I’d known. His own death had ceased to be an abstraction for him. In the lens of the camera, he was seeing a reflection of his own mortality.

  Experience had made me an expert on the subject of police shootings. In Maine, the Office of the Attorney General reviews all such incidents. The investigators start by asking two questions: Did the officer reasonably believe that deadly force was about to be used against him or someone else? And did the officer reasonably believe that deadly force was needed to prevent that?

  If the answer to either question is yes, the shooting is deemed to have been justified. If the answer is no, then the officer is terminated and liable for criminal prosecution. But even if a cop is cleared of criminal negligence, he or she can still face a civil charge from the dead person’s relatives. I’d been fortunate in my two shootings. The men I’d killed had no family members with the resources to hire a lawyer to take a pound of my flesh.

  Not so with Kathy. The Gammons were not people I’d want as enemies. It was late, and on the nights when she wasn’t working, she tended to hit the sack early. I felt an overpowering urge to call her, but I didn’t know how welcome my words of support would be. We hadn’t spoken since my resignation two months earlier.

  The Warden Service puts all officers involved in shootings where deadly force has been used on paid leave until their reviews are completed. Regulations would prohibit her from discussing the incident. Her union-appointed lawyer would say that she shouldn’t even talk to her friends about it, not unless she wanted them to be subpoenaed.

  Was I still her friend? There was only one way to find out. I picked up the phone.

  As I’d expected, I got a machine. My words came out with a stammer. “Kathy, it’s—it’s Mike. I just heard the news. How are you doing? I know you’re not supposed to talk about it, and you’re probably still pissed at me for dropping off the face of the earth. But if there’s anything I can do, please let me know.”

  I didn’t expect her to call me back that night, but I left my cell on the bedside table.

  Last fall, Kathy had talked about getting me reassigned to my old district in the Midcoast, but I had dragged my feet. If I had taken her offer, it would have been me in the truck with her that night instead of Dani Tate. I should have been there.

  * * *

  I awoke before dawn to the sound of rain drumming its long fingers on the roof. The bedsheets felt damp from the humid air blowing in through t
he window screen. With all the wet weather we’d been having, I expected one morning to find my skin growing a coat of moss.

  No word from Kathy.

  I checked the Maine news sites, but there were no significant updates from anything I’d read the night before. The whole idea of Jimmy Gammon’s being in such physical and emotional pain that he’d forced another cop to end his life amazed me. As a former MP, he must have known the scars that would leave on the psyches of the responding officers.

  To combat my own feelings of despair, I did my morning workout: push-ups, pull-ups, and planks. I was trying to maintain the muscle mass I’d needed as a cop, since you never know when you might be called upon to wrestle a drunken Goliath to the ground. Now that I was a civilian, I could have let myself go to pot. Instead, I found myself pushing my body harder, as if I wanted to punish it for some betrayal.

  After I’d finished my exercises, I took a hot shower in the ridiculously luxurious bathroom Elizabeth Morse had installed for her guests—a round vessel sink made of polished granite, bronze fixtures, a heated toilet seat—then wrapped a hundred-dollar towel around my waist and padded out to the kitchenette.

  I sat down with a glass of orange juice at the computer. The weather forecast showed that the low-pressure system currently drenching the Northeast was settling in for an extended stay. I couldn’t imagine Jeff Jordan would have any clients for me to guide once Mason and Maddie headed back to the Big Apple.

  Charley and Ora Stevens were off on their Canadian adventure, so I couldn’t even swing by their cottage on Little Wabassus for a bottomless cup of coffee and tall tales. Stacey had never liked me hanging around the place anyway. I wondered if she and her friends were still planning to undertake their camping trip up West Grand Lake and over to Pocumcus and points north. I hope they’d packed plenty of bug dope and firewater.

  For more than a year, I’d drawn sustenance from my unrequited love for Stacey Stevens—not unlike the way a vampire bat draws sustenance from its sleeping host. But as the murky light of day filled the cabin windows, I found my self-pity turning to anger. Who needed her?

  The new librarian in Machias was single and had pretty legs, and I was willing to bet she didn’t walk around with her nerves pulled as tight as rubber bands. With the exception of Sarah, every woman I’d ever been attracted to should have come with a warning label attached to her forehead. Given my luck, that librarian had a box of strap-ons and anal plugs stashed under her bed.

  The phone rang as I was making my artery-clogging breakfast: eggs and smelts fried in bacon grease.

  It was the wife of my incarcerated friend, Billy Cronk.

  “Hi, Aimee,” I said.

  “Hey, Mike. I didn’t wake you, did I?”

  She was a cheerful, big-bosomed mother of four with ginger hair she wore pulled back in a scrunchie and an outfit made up entirely of flannel shirts, T-shirts, and jeans she’d purchased on sale at the bargain store in Calais.

  “I was just making breakfast.”

  “Smelts again?”

  I removed the cast-iron pan from the burner. “How in the world did you know that?”

  “The last time you were over here, I saw a five-gallon bucket in the back of your truck, along with a slimy smelt net. I figured you’d been out dipping and ran into a few fish.”

  Aimee Cronk seemed to have an intuition that bordered on the uncanny, but, in fact, her mind worked entirely through deductive reasoning. She’d never graduated from high school, but I’d always said she would have made an excellent psychologist—or detective.

  “I have three bags of smelts in the freezer,” I said. “Do you want some?”

  “I’ve been doing Weight Watchers, so I can’t be eating all that bacon fat.”

  She paused, and I heard a child scream in the background. Visiting the Cronk house, filled with four kids all under the age of seven, always reinforced my conviction that small children are essentially insane little people.

  “Is there any way you could come over here and give me a jump? I need one wicked bad.”

  I thought I’d misheard her. “What do you need?”

  “The Tahoe won’t start, and I ain’t sure if the battery’s dead or the alternator’s shot. What did you think I meant? That I wanted a quick lay or something?”

  I ignored the question. “It could be your distributor cap is wet, with all this humid weather we’ve been having.”

  “Whatever it is, I can’t afford to be stranded here in the boonies. I only got the Tahoe now that the bank’s repossessed Billy’s truck. I’m working lunch and dinner at the Bluebird Ranch and can’t miss another shift.”

  “I’ll be right over,” I said. “If worse comes to worst, I’ll be your personal chauffeur today.”

  “That’s the least you can do if you ain’t going to screw me.”

  I nearly dropped the phone.

  She laughed out loud. “I’m joking! Billy always said you was the most uptight individual he’d ever met. You’re a worse prude than my aunt Lillian, and she’s a Baptist.”

  8

  There was a dusky-looking Swainson’s thrush hopping around in the pine needles outside my cabin. It was hunting for ants and beetles. Like all thrushes, it had those big black eyes that looked like they’d been drawn by Walt Disney.

  Sarah had taught me a lot about birds during our years together, first at Colby and then in that on-again-off-again period after I’d become a game warden. She enjoyed the outdoors, but only as a playground. Cabin living was never her thing. It hadn’t surprised me when she announced she was leaving our backwoods shack to take a prestigious fellowship in D.C. The prep-school girl from the Connecticut suburbs had never been cut out for a life that involved splitting and stacking wood for the stove.

  Maddie had said that Sarah was back in Maine, working at some new school in Portland. I’d never believed that our destinies are predetermined. If you look back on your life, you might see what looks like a meaningful progression, but it’s no different from gazing at the moon and seeing a man’s face. Just because you perceive a pattern doesn’t mean it’s really there. I tried not to dwell too much on the circumstances that were drawing these people from my past into my life again.

  The forest road crossed a number of quick-flowing streams whose beauty disguised the fact that they were the breeding grounds for blood-thirsty insects. Unlike mosquitoes—which seek out stagnant pools to lay their wriggling larvae—blackflies only breed in swift, clean water. As the day warmed, the voracious bugs would rise from the streambeds in clouds so thick I was afraid to take a deep breath for fear of inhaling them. Spring is a season of pure misery in the Maine woods.

  When I arrived at the Cronk house, I checked my phone again for a message from Kathy, but there was nothing. It bothered me not having heard from her. I typed a text message and hit SEND. Please let me know how you’re doing, it read.

  In the meantime, I had plenty of chores to keep me occupied. The Cronks lived in a too-small shack of a place in a clearing in the woods down around Whitney. Looking through my bug-smashed windshield, I noticed that the pile of firewood Billy had furiously cut before he went to prison was a quarter of its former size. There also seemed to be a crack in one of the upstairs windows that was new since my last visit. And a roof gutter was dangling free and needed to be reattached.

  As I climbed out of the Bronco with my toolbox in hand, Aimee Cronk appeared in the doorway, holding their youngest child, a daughter, under her arm, while a snotty-nosed boy peeked at me from behind her leg. Billy called his blond brood of four “the Cronklets.” I could never keep them straight.

  Aimee was a big woman, but shapely; she carried her weight in places men found attractive. She had just washed her hair, and loose red strands hung around her open, freckled face. Watching her husband head off to jail for close to the next decade or so would have crushed lots of women, but not Aimee Cronk. “I always figured it was more a question of when and not if,” she’d told me. “You can’
t break the law as much as Billy did without it breaking you sooner or later.”

  “There’s the man of the house,” she said.

  “I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

  She showed the gap between her front teeth when she smiled. “You’re still thinking about that joke, ain’t you?”

  How did she know these things? I couldn’t imagine a single secret Billy had managed to keep hidden from his wife. It would have been like being married to Hercule Poirot.

  “So I guess I should have a look at your engine,” I said.

  She gestured with her free hand at the faded blue Tahoe parked beside the picnic table. “Keys are under the seat,” she said. “I got to get changed for work.”

  A damp gust blew the smell of blossoming apple trees down the hill while I worked, and a chestnut-sided warbler harangued me from the roadside willows. In my ears, the call sounded like words: Hey! Hey! Hey! What’s with you?

  I poked around under the hood, checked the electrical wires for loose connections, found none, then tried using my jumper cables. I ran the engine for a solid fifteen minutes, but the Tahoe failed to start. I was despairing of fixing it and figured I’d have to remove the air-intake system in order to get at the distributor, when an odd thought occurred to me. I used a screwdriver to pry loose the battery port covers.

  When I knocked at the front door again, I saw that Aimee had changed into her pale blue waitress uniform and was slipping barrettes into her newly dried hair. “What’s the bad news?” she asked.

  “I don’t suppose you have any distilled water.”

  “Billy might have a jug in his shed. What for?”

  “Your battery has no water in it.”

  “In all this wet weather?”

  “The battery is sealed,” I said, rubbing my blackened hands together. “The good news is that if we refill it, we can probably get you on the road, but you should have your battery changed in Machias while you’re at work.”

  She smiled. “Ain’t you the handy one, though.”