by Paul Doiron
The younger woman took several steps back without turning.
Then Becky began to close the door.
I thrust my boot between the door and the frame to stop her. “Who is that?”
“My sister. What’s it to you?”
The other one had disappeared into the next room. “What’s your sister’s name?”
“She didn’t see any pigs either, if that’s what you want to know. Try the llama farm up the road.” Becky glared up at me with those fierce eyes of hers. “Do you want to move your foot?”
“One more question. Have you seen anyone suspicious around in the past few days?”
“What do you mean—suspicious?”
“A vehicle you didn’t recognize parked at the side of the road. Maybe some young people who didn’t look like hikers searching for a path up the backside of the mountain.”
Her ragged lips pulled back from her teeth. “Do you want to move your fucking foot now? Or do you want me to amputate your toes?”
As soon as I slid my boot back, Becky slammed the door. We spent five seconds trying to outstare each other through the window before she yanked the blind down.
I backed away from the house and raised my head so I could see the upper floor. The silhouette of a woman was outlined in the window above the stoop. I couldn’t make out her features, but from her shape, I recognized her as Becky’s sister. What struck me was that she had both palms pressed against the window. Adults rarely did that, I realized. Unlike children, they were careful to avoid leaving smudge marks on the glass.
Then I saw her turn as if summoned away by her sister, and the light in the window went out.
I wasted no time returning to my truck. I felt that I should call Pomerleau to report what I had seen, but it hadn’t been fifteen minutes since the detective had made me promise not to overstep my bounds.
What to do?
I turned on my cell phone and stared into the glowing screen. Then I hit the icon for the contacts app. I scrolled with my finger until I came to Danielle Tate’s name. I wasn’t sure how she would receive a phone call or text from me at this late hour. But the State of Maine uses a standard system for employee e-mail addresses. I started a new message and commenced to type:
Tate:
Pomerleau told me you’ll be doing knock-and-talks tomorrow morning along Rankin Road. There’s a suspicious house you should check first. I found it while I was following pig tracks. Two strange women were there tonight. Not sure if there’s a connection to the dead infant, but something weird—drugs?—is going on in this place. Call me in the morning, and I’ll show it to you.
Bowditch
As soon as I’d hit send, I realized that I had deliberately withheld identifying the house. I didn’t have to plumb the depths of my psyche to know why: I wanted an excuse to come back. Now Tate would have no choice but to include me in her interview.
It still blew my mind that she, of all the wardens I knew, had chosen to leave the service to take a job with the state police. Usually you saw people move in the opposite direction: troopers who were tired of a life on the highway who gave up their better salary and benefits to take a position working as “off-road cops.”
Tate was smart enough to know why I had withheld the location of the house and what it was about the women that had triggered my suspicions, beyond the older one’s surliness and the younger one’s blankness.
Start with the fact that they had both been wearing identical crimson wigs.
Suspicious? I would say that qualified.
9
Stacey was asleep when I got home. Given her problems with insomnia, I was surprised and relieved to see her stretched out across the bed. Our house had no air-conditioning, and she’d kicked the covers down around her ankles. She was wearing only her underwear.
I went downstairs to my so-called study, which was less of a den or an office than a random room where I stored unwelcome reminders of the past. After my mother had passed away, my stepfather had kindly “suggested” that I clear out my possessions from the attic of his suburban McMansion. Sometime before she fell ill, my mom had gathered up all my mementos—toys, report cards, God only knew what—and packed them into cardboard boxes.
“You’ll want these someday, Michael,” my stepfather, Neil, had said. “You should be able to get at them without having to call me first.”
He’d explained everything with such calm rationality that it hadn’t occurred to me until later that he was systematically redecorating the house to remove all traces of my mother. My mom and he had met long ago, after her divorce from my father, when she was temping at his law office in Portland. I wondered if Neil had recently found himself a new secretary.
Not that I could blame him for moving on. My mother had been dead four years now. My visits to the house where I had spent my teenage years had become fewer and fewer. My stepfather was a good man who had loved my mother and endured her tantrums with patience and good cheer. He had treated me, his unadopted son, as well as I had deserved. But I had found that I didn’t miss him at all. These days, when one of my patrols took me past his cul-de-sac in Scarborough, I just kept going without a thought, as if the home belonged to any other stranger.
I plugged in my laptop, pulled up the home page for the town of Birnam, and opened the tab for the property records. A searchable map allowed busybodies to see who owned each parcel of land. It took a while, but eventually I identified the house of the crimson-wigged ladies. The owner was a limited liability corporation—Pequawket Properties—which meant that my guess about the home’s being a rental had been on the money.
Next, I checked my e-mail. Gary Pulsifer, a warden I knew up in the ski mountains bordering Canada, had sent me a message earlier that I hadn’t bothered opening. The title of the note was “A Woman Set Up a Night Camera in the Woods and You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.” Pulsifer was such a joker I’d assumed it was one of his usual dumb links. But when I actually opened the message I found the following:
Thought you might be interested in these photos Jill Beveridge took near her camp in Chain of Ponds. Recognize a familiar face? Looks like your boy’s found a lady friend.
Attached were four pictures taken with a night-vision camera, the kind we often use to record the comings and goings of poachers at illegal deer stands.
I didn’t know this Jill Beveridge, but she must have had a permit to put out a bait pile for predators. People sometimes set a camera with motion sensors over a road-killed deer carcass, hoping to catch images of skittish animals. Pulsifer had sent me four of these photos. Each was black-and-white with a time and date stamp at the bottom.
The first had been taken around dusk—I could tell from the fuzziness of the light—and showed a golden eagle plucking at the rotting deer flesh. Golden eagles are not often glimpsed in Maine. This was a rare photo indeed. Very cool, I thought.
The second and third pictures knocked the breath out of me.
At first glance I assumed they were of a large, dark-furred coyote. But in the third photo the canine had raised his big head, and his retinas were shining like the eyes of a four-legged phantom straight into the camera lens.
This animal was no coyote. This animal was a wolf.
This animal was Shadow.
Five months earlier, I had lost a wolf dog in my care in the high timber roughly twelve miles south of Chain of Ponds. I had previously confiscated the canine from some drug dealers and been searching for a home for him when I’d found myself in a firefight and been forced to let him loose so he wouldn’t take a bullet for my carelessness. I’d worried that Shadow, who had been raised, as far as I knew, among people, might have trouble surviving in the wild, but here he was, as healthy and magnificent as ever. If anything, he looked even bigger.
The date stamp showed that the picture had been taken a few days earlier. It cheered me to think that Shadow was still out there roaming the impenetrable no-man’s-land along the Quebec border. A fleeting thought
went through my head that I should drive up to Chain of Ponds and meet this Jill Beveridge and have her show me where she’d set up her camera. I’d only known Shadow for a few days, but I’d felt he had taken a liking to me and had considered adopting him myself. Maybe I could coax him out of the wild.
And then what? I doubted that I could convince Stacey that we should open our home to a nearly purebred 140-pound wolf.
I scrolled down to the fourth and final photo.
By then, I’d forgotten Pulsifer’s cryptic remark: “Looks like your boy’s found a lady friend.” Now I understood his meaning.
In the fourth picture Shadow was joined by a second canine, not quite as large, with a lighter, almost whitish coat. It was another wolf, and knowing how aggressive males tended to be with one another, I had to assume, as Pulsifer had, that this one was a female. Where had she come from? Wolves had been native to the state at the time of its colonization by European settlers, but had been wiped out over subsequent decades. Today, both the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wild-life categorized eastern wolves as “extirpated.” The nearest breeding population was in the mountains north of the St. Lawrence River in Canada. Still, occasional credible reports—and even forensic evidence—came of isolated individuals in Maine. Whether these animals had been released from captivity or were intrepid wanderers that had somehow found their way south through the enemy territory of Quebec remained an open question.
Yet Shadow had met up with one. Too bad for his new friend—and for the environmentalists pushing to bring a breeding population of wolves back to Maine—that my former wolf dog had been neutered.
I looked forward to showing Stacey these pictures in the morning. As a young girl, she had believed in the cursed project to reintroduce woodland caribou to the slopes of Mount Katahdin, and we’d argued more than once whether mountain lions—also officially extirpated—had established a new redoubt in the state. Nothing would make her happier than seeing that Chain of Ponds was now the home of a nascent, if inevitably doomed, wolf pack.
I wandered back out into the living room, thinking of her. She’d always been erratic, even worse than me at my lowest moments, but I’d seen myself as a stabilizing influence in her life until last winter, when a helicopter carrying three of her biologist friends had crashed, with no survivors, way up north, near the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. She’d skipped an important meeting with her boss to go hog hunting with me, and there would be consequences. Was she intent on being fired?
In the half dark of the house I studied the big leather sofa in front of the fireplace. I was afraid of waking her. Maybe if I slept downstairs tonight? It was hot enough that I needed no blanket.
I stripped down to my T-shirt and underwear and stretched out across the soft, cool animal hide. What did it say about me that I slipped so easily into a dreamless sleep? That I was bone-tired or that I had finally reached the place I had long feared—where repeated exposure to humanity’s worst sins had permanently removed my capacity to be shocked?
* * *
The cardinal woke me. We had a pair of them, as one always does, a male and a female, and he was whistling in a crab apple outside the living-room window.
It was five o’clock sharp.
Punctual bird, I thought.
I found my phone and checked my e-mail again. Tate was also up before the sun.
It would be nice if I didn’t need a Magic 8 Ball to figure out your secret messages. But whatever. I’ll call you at 6:30.
I gathered up my dirty hunting clothes—I hadn’t realized how much they reeked—and softly padded upstairs to the bedroom.
In the night Stacey had flopped over onto her stomach. She lay with her arms at her sides in the same posture a drowned woman might assume floating beneath the surface of the lake that had claimed her life. It seemed too early to wake her, given the extent of her sleep debt. So I gathered up the same field uniform I’d worn the day before. I shaved in the guest bathroom downstairs. My deep suntan had made my blue eyes all that much brighter, and since Stacey had moved in and I’d cut down on my beer and whiskey consumption, I had managed to push middle age even further into the future.
My last ritual, after dressing in my uniform in the morning, was to put on my dead father’s dog tags. He had worn them from basic training at Fort Benning, through Ranger school, on two tours of duty in Vietnam, and nearly every day of his life afterward, believing them to be some sort of amulet that protected him against death. Recently, I had begun wearing them myself, maybe for the same superstitious reason, despite my long estrangement from the man.
Stacey was still out cold when I stepped into the darkened bedroom. I couldn’t sneak off without waking her, I realized. She needed to get up, needed to go back to work and face the music. Before we’d started dating, I’d heard the words some of her male coworkers had used to describe her: “difficult,” “arrogant,” “crazy,” “bitch.” It always amazed me to contemplate the double standard that strong-willed women had to endure in the workplace.
I sat down on the bed beside her so that the springs swayed. “Stace?”
No response.
“Stacey?” Gently I touched the middle of her back.
One eye fluttered open. “What time is it?” she mumbled.
“Five-thirty, but I’ve got to get going.”
She rolled onto her side. The sheet was damp beneath where she’d been sleeping. “The piglets?”
“I took care of them.” What an obnoxious euphemism that was.
“Did you—?”
I reached out to take her hand. “I buried them on my way home last night, on the public land near the Wire Bridge.”
She yawned against the back of her hand and looked about the dim room, her mind slowly returning to wakefulness. “You didn’t sleep here.”
“I slept on the couch. You were sacked out, and I didn’t want to wake you.”
“So where are you going now?”
“Rankin Road. I followed the pig tracks and met a couple of strange women at a rental house. Something isn’t right there. I’m meeting Tate in a little bit so she can interview them.”
Stacey sat up at last. “Say that again?”
I settled down on the corner of the warm bed and told the story of the night before, this time in detail.
“What do you mean the women were strange?” she asked.
“They were wearing matching crimson wigs.”
Her eyes opened wide. “I’ll be curious to hear how your conversation goes.”
“Are you going in to work?”
“Of course. My dad always says that when trouble’s brewing, it’s best to confront it right away.”
So her supervisor really had been angry with her, despite her denials. “How much trouble are you in for missing that meeting?”
She waved a hand. “I’ve been in worse.”
Plenty of times in the early days of my own career I’d seemingly been dead set on pushing my superiors to fire me. But every time, I had pulled back from the abyss. Stacey, on the other hand, seemed to be throttling up the closer she drove to the cliff’s edge.
“I almost forgot,” I said. “Shadow’s turned up. A woman up in Chain of Ponds got a picture of him at a bait pile with a night-vision camera. He was with a female wolf.”
“No shit?” She reached a hand around the back of her slender neck to massage the muscles under her long hair. “I thought he was neutered.”
“It doesn’t seem to be cramping his style.”
“You know he’s going to get shot by a coyote hunter eventually? Either that or be hit by an eighteen-wheeler on Route 27.”
I released my grip on her hand. “That’s a cold thing to say.”
“I’m sorry, but you know it’s the truth. You have a weird fixation on that animal, Mike. The way you talk about him—”
“What do you mean?”
“Like he’s some supernatural being or something.”
“It seems that there’s more to it than that.” She drew her knees up to her chest, revealing the bandage on her wounded leg.
“And I think you’re trying to distract me from worrying about you, Stacey.”
“Is it working?” She tried to suppress a smile.
“Not in the least.”
She crouched, gathered the rumpled covers from the floor, and heaped them onto the mattress. “Don’t say I didn’t try.”
10
Instead of making coffee at home as usual, I decided to take Eddie Fales up on his offer and visit his store at the intersection of the Saco and Rankin Roads for some free joe.
I drove without stopping all the way to Birnam. The drive gave me an opportunity to reflect on our brief conversation the night before. It wasn’t always easy for me to distinguish between people who were cagey because they had something to hide and people whose senses of humor inclined toward the eccentric. Fales’s seeming lack of interest in the dead infant might have been a red flag. Or it might just have been that he’d spent all day gabbing about the subject and was tired of talking. I could have taken his statement that he didn’t know those two women were living in that hidden house as his attempting to conceal something from me. Or Becky and her so-called sister might just have rented the place recently.
In any case, I found his rusted Chevy parked out front—small business owners often worked longer hours than game wardens—but a sign in the window said the doors opened at six o’clock, and I wanted to play it cool.
Fales Variety was aptly named. Failure seemed just around the corner for this corner store. It was small and old and dirty looking with a couple of ancient gas pumps out front. All it would take to put it out of business would be for some modern convenience-store chain to open a shiny new station down the road, and all the regulars who’d been coming here for ages would abandon Fales in a heart-beat for cheaper gas and make-your-own milk shakes.