by Paul Doiron
“I was going to ask you that.”
“I heard a lady from Boston hit a deer. I’m supposed to haul off her car. Hey, you look like you’ve been mud wrestling.”
“Yeah, I took a spill. Did the woman say she needed a ride? Because she doesn’t seem to be around here anywhere.”
“Well, I didn’t talk to her myself, you know. That’s not the way it works. But I can find out for you.” He picked up a clipboard from the passenger seat and held it close to his eyes to read the chicken scratch. “Her name is Ashley Kim. What’s that—Korean?”
I shrugged.
“My old man fought in Korea,” he said. “He hated that show M*A*S*H, though.”
While the trucker got on the CB to his dispatcher, I ransacked my memory for the blond man’s name. I’d learned all sorts of mnemonic tricks at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy to help recall information for my police reports, but for some reason, I never applied these strategies to my personal life. As a result, I was constantly forgetting dentist’s appointments, high school classmates, et cetera. I had a vague recollection that the driver went by some odd nickname.
He swung open the truck door and hopped down: a misshapen man whose legs seemed too short for his torso, as if he’d been cobbled together out of two different bodies, a small and a tall. Just like that, his name came to me: Stump Murphy.
He wore canvas duck pants with the bottoms rolled up, a blaze orange hunting shirt, and a camouflage vest. Curly blond locks escaped from beneath his watch cap, only to be recaptured in a ponytail. On his belt, I noticed a small holster contraption holding a corncob pipe.
“Here’s the scoop,” said Murphy. “I guess Miss Kim said she didn’t need a ride. I don’t know if she was calling her husband or friend or what, but she said she already had a lift. She just wanted the car hauled off. She said she’d contact the rental company later.”
I followed him around to the passenger door. He reached under the flaccid air bag for the glove compartment and groped around until he found the rental agreement. “Here you go, Warden.”
Ashley Kim had reported her address as Cambridge, Massachusetts. Probably she’d been visiting someone on Parker Point.
“Did she leave a cell-phone number with your dispatcher or any way to contact her locally?”
“Nope.”
“Does your phone system have caller ID?”
“I have no clue.”
I worked my flashlight beam around the inside of the car, but there were no personal belongings to be seen. Same with the trunk. The situation seemed to be exactly what it appeared. “I need to fill out an accident report.”
“Guess Miss Kim didn’t know she was supposed to stick around,” he said.
“She’s not the first.”
“Maybe she was afraid of the Breathalyzer.”
I left Stump Murphy to refill his pipe and went to start the paperwork. My sergeant, Kathy Frost, jokingly referred to her own GMC pickup as her “office,” but mine was more of a dusty shed. Inside I kept a laptop computer, toolbox, rain gear, change of clothes, personal flotation device, ballistic vest, spotting scope, binoculars, Mossberg pump shotgun, shells and slugs, tire jack, come-along, assorted ropes, flashlights, body bag, fold-out desk, batteries, law books, maps, spare .357 ammunition for my service weapon, a GPS mapping receiver, wool blankets, an official diary, and lots of bags to stuff animal parts in. If I was lucky, I might even find what I was looking for.
I had the interior dome light on and was readjusting the movable arm that held my computer in place above the passenger seat when a state trooper arrived. He pulled up behind my truck and paused awhile inside, as if making a phone call, before he finally got out. He cast a damned big shadow as he came toward me.
“What’s the story, gentlemen?” He was the size of an NFL offensive lineman: shoulders a yard wide. I’m a big guy—six-two, 180 plus—but he made me feel like one of the Seven Dwarfs. He had on a heavy raincoat and that wide-brimmed Smokey the Bear hat Maine state troopers wear. At first glance, I didn’t recognize him.
Murphy broke the news: “A woman hit a deer.”
“So I heard.” He stuck out his hand for me to shake. He could have palmed a basketball with that hand. “I’m Curt Hutchins,” he said by way of introduction.
“Mike Bowditch. You’re the new guy at Troop D.”
“New? I grew up in Thomaston. But, yeah, I transferred over from the turnpike.” His hair had been shaved so close to the scalp that he looked bald, but his face was handsome and boyish, with a big dimple in the middle of his chin. “Sorry, I couldn’t get here sooner. The engine wouldn’t start after I went home for supper.”
“Dead battery?”
“Bad spark plugs.” He pointed at the crash site. “So where’s our unlucky driver?”
I told him the entire sequence of events, from the initial call I’d received from Dispatch, to my belated appearance on the scene, to Murphy’s arrival shortly thereafter and our quick search of the vehicle. “I have this bad feeling I’m having trouble shaking,” I admitted.
“Because somebody stole the deer?”
“Not just that. I’m just wondering where she could have gone. This is an isolated stretch of road. I’d feel better if I knew where to find this Ashley Kim.”
“She caught a ride,” he said confidently. “She was probably shit-faced and called a friend before the cops showed. I ran the plates just now with the rental company, and her Mass. license says she’s twenty-three. Probably a party girl.”
His characterization of a woman he didn’t even know grated on me. “I’m thinking I’ll poke around in the woods.”
Hutchins didn’t respond.
His silence made me uncomfortable, so I rambled on: “I just want to make sure she didn’t wander off, injured.
He crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes. I could tell he’d just made a mental connection. “You’re Jack Bowditch’s son.”
Seven months had passed, but I still couldn’t escape the notoriety. No matter what else happened in my life, I would always be the son of Maine’s most notorious criminal. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Nothing. I’d just heard a rumor that you’d left the Warden Service.”
“You heard wrong.”
Without meeting my eyes again, he said, “I’ll handle things here if you want to take off.”
“What about the missing woman?”
“I’ll make a few more calls, take a look around.” Somehow, I doubted his intentions. After mere minutes of knowing him, Hutchins already impressed me as an arrogant asshole who operated with utter disregard for protocol. He wouldn’t be the first cop to fall into that category. My own conduct during my father’s manhunt had made me the poster child for the fuck-the-rules school of law enforcement. “I guarantee you she ran away before we could bust her for OUI,” he said.
Stump Murphy ambled over, trailing a pungent cloud of pipe smoke. “What’s the holdup, fellas? I’ve got other calls, you know.”
“I’ll file the report,” Hutchins said. “It’s a state police matter now.”
I glanced at the wrecked car one last time. I was exhausted, cold, and slathered in mud. An hour earlier, I’d embarrassed myself in front of Hank Varnum. Now this jerk trooper was rubbing my nose in my father’s guilt.
To hell with Hutchins, I thought. To hell with this lousy night.
“It’s all yours,” I said.
I climbed into my truck, started the engine, and turned carefully in the road to avoid the pool of blood.
And then, God forgive me, I went home.
3
I first met Sarah Harris during our freshman year at Colby College, in central Maine. I’d fallen asleep in the back row of Chemistry 141, and she gently touched my shoulder after the lecture had ended and the classroom was emptying. “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty” were the first words she ever spoke to me. From the start, I knew I was bewitched.
Sarah had grown up in suburban Connect
icut, and she’d come from money. Her father had started a profitable Web site in the nineties, during the first round of the dot-com boom, only to lose millions when the bubble burst. The specter of poverty continued to haunt her. In college, she had a recurring nightmare of the bursar kicking her out of school because her tuition check had bounced.
We didn’t share many interests, beyond an insatiable sexual appetite for each other and a passion for the outdoors. Her hobbies were less bloody than mine—she was an avid hiker, swimmer, and bird-watcher—but she found it fascinating that I would get up before dawn to go deer hunting in the woods outside Waterville. Her city friends used to call me “Bambi killer” and mock my camouflage jacket and L.L.Bean boots. But Sarah ignored them. She recognized something feral underneath my clean-cut exterior, and like many good girls from proper families, she was aroused by the scent of danger.
After graduation, when I told Sarah I wanted to become a game warden, she initially took the news as a prank. When she realized I was serious, she came to the conclusion that the experience would merely be a rite of passage for me—like riding a motorcycle across Mongolia or working on an Alaskan crab boat for a season—but that eventually I would settle down and make money. Maybe move to Boston and get a law degree.
Sarah’s own obsession was with kids, early-childhood education specifically. Her life’s plan was to teach for a few years—“get my hands dirty,” she said—then enter a Ph.D. program. She saw the radical transformation of the nation’s school systems as being one of the historic imperatives of our times and talked about dedicating her life to educational reform.
Our first attempt at cohabiting fell apart when she’d realized that my interest in being a game warden seemed to be growing, rather than abating, with each night I spent crouched in the puckerbrush with a mechanical deer decoy. After many lonely evenings and at her older sister’s urging, she’d moved out of our run-down shack. She was gone for three months. But then in the autumn, after my father’s crime spree made the national news and I achieved notoriety for my part in the desperate search for him, we met for dinner. The next thing I knew, I was unloading from a rental truck the same furniture that I had so recently watched vacate our shared dwelling.
For my part, I tried not to psychoanalyze her motivations. It was enough that she was back in my life. Like most men, I subscribed to the hackneyed theory that women are essentially unknowable.
* * *
The house we were renting was a little ramshackle place overlooking a tidal creek that flowed into the Segocket River. Big pines shaded the roof, and sometimes at night, a great horned owl would roost in the tallest trees to eat his dinner. In the mornings, I would find fur-and-feather pellets on the hood of my patrol truck. Once, I found the flea collar from a neighbor’s missing cat.
When I got home, Sarah was already in her flannel pajamas, sitting in front of the computer. She’d replaced her contact lenses with glasses and fastened up her shoulder-length blond hair in a scrunchie. She took one look at me in my mud-crusted uniform and frowned.
“Don’t ask,” I said.
“You’re worse than a dog, the way you track mud in.”
“Well, I’m certainly dog-tired.”
“You and me both, baby.”
I had to dig out the mud impacted around the laces to get my boots off, shedding dirty flakes all over the doormat. Carefully, I stripped down to my boxers and undershirt. By the time I’d finished, I was already sweating from the heat.
The house was always too warm for me now that Sarah was back in residence—we might as well have belonged to different species, polar versus tropical—but the house was also cleaner by an order of magnitude. During the months we’d lived apart, my existence had been reduced to microwave burritos, wrinkled shirts, and unwashed dishes. Now instead of bare walls, there were colorful Audubon bird prints and windowsills lined with Christmas cactuses; the refrigerator contained fresh broccoli instead of leftover pizza. Sometimes I missed my unshaven days without a woman in residence, but mostly I was grateful. I once read that, on average, married men live five years longer than single ones, and I could easily believe it. The human male fights the domestication process tooth and claw, but it’s the best thing that can ever happen to him.
I walked over and rested my hand on her shoulder. “What are you looking at?”
She closed the browser window before I could see the screen. “Work stuff.”
“Just as long as it isn’t porn.”
“You’re the only man I’ve met who doesn’t download it.”
“I’m not going to participate in other people’s degradation.”
“That’s very self-righteous of you.” She hit the power switch, and the machine stopped humming. “Speaking of which, the Warden chaplain called for you again. She said she wants to go for a ride-along one of these days.”
The Reverend Deborah Davies had been on my case for months. She wanted to talk with me again about my father’s strange criminal behavior. As required by the Warden Service, I had already put in my hours with both a psychologist and the reverend herself, but I’d found counseling a waste of time.
“I don’t need that woman tagging along on patrol.”
“You should talk with her. It wouldn’t hurt for you to open up to people about what happened.” She peered at me over her glasses. “Avoidance isn’t a successful life strategy.”
“What am I avoiding?”
After the events at Rum Pond, all I wanted to do was move forward with my life. Meeting the retired warden pilot Charley Stevens and his wife, Ora, and seeing their love for each other, it seemed like I’d finally found an example of what a happy relationship could look like. And then when Sarah agreed to come home, I felt like I had reason to believe my luck had changed.
“If you don’t know what you’re avoiding, then I can’t tell you,” she said. “I’m going to read in bed. I made some biscuits you can have with your soup.”
I watched her shuffle in her slippers into the bedroom, thinking how beautiful she looked even dressed in flannel pajamas, with her hair tied up in a frumpy knot.
In the kitchen, I poured myself a whiskey and reheated my dinner. Sarah usually corrected her kids’ homework at the kitchen table. Tonight, I found some government forms scattered among the spelling quizzes. One of them was something called a Mandated Reporter Worksheet from the Child and Family Services department; the other listed signs of possible abuse or neglect: “Unexplained bruises and welts on the face, torso, and back; cigarette and other burns; mysterious fractures and dislocations; bald patches on the scalp.”
I wondered now if these forms explained her somber mood.
The lights were off when I finally went to bed, but even in the pitch-blackness, I could sense that she was still awake beneath the covers. I brushed my teeth, then crawled in beside her.
“Honey?” I said.
“Not tonight, Mike, OK?”
Sex, for once, was actually far from my thoughts. “I wanted to apologize again for missing that movie.”
“I’m not feeling well anyway. My stomach’s been giving me trouble.”
“Do you think it’s the flu?”
“Every kid in my class is sick with some virus or other, so who knows?”
I turned on my side and rested my hand on her shoulder. “I saw those forms from Child and Family Services on the table. Do you think one of your students is being abused?”
In the dark, she made a sound that was almost like a laugh, but I knew it wasn’t a laugh. “One of them? All my kids have cuts and bruises. I could report my entire class if I was paranoid. But no, the principal just wanted to remind us what we should be looking for, so she handed out those forms again.”
When I’d first met Sarah, she was one of the least sarcastic people I’d ever met. “It doesn’t sound like you had the best day,” I said.
She yawned. “You never told me what happened with that car accident.”
“The driver wasn’t ther
e when I arrived. I guess she caught a ride. In the meantime, somebody came by and swiped the deer.”
“Weird,” she said sleepily.
“The trooper who showed up was this asshhole, Hutchins, who transferred over from the turnpike. He said a rumor was going around that I’d quit the Warden Service.”
“You shouldn’t care what jerks say.”
“It just pisses me off.”
“Everything pisses you off. Sometimes I think that moral indignation is your natural condition.” She yawned again. “You might sleep better, you know, if you didn’t have a drink before bed.”
For a while, I’d dealt with my anger by throwing myself into my work, but everywhere I went my reputation preceded me. Seven months after my father’s manhunt, I was still receiving crank calls (some of them, no doubt, from my fellow cops), with suggestions about where I should insert the barrel of my SIG SAUER P226 before squeezing the trigger.
Of course, you can’t erase the past. You can only avoid making the same mistakes over again.
In my dissolving thoughts I saw the image of a young woman lying unconscious in the dirty snow. I realized that Hutchins never had any intention of searching the woods. But Ashley Kim had told the tow company she was uninjured and catching a ride. Besides, the thought of driving back to Parker Point—to do what exactly?—was insane. While I was fretting about this woman’s safety, she was probably at her friend’s house, recounting her brush with death over another glass of wine.
Don’t think about it, I told myself. Go to sleep.
Eventually, I did. But my sleep was a fitful one, and when I awoke in the morning, it was with the same gnawing uncertainty that had troubled my dreams.
4
Late March. Mud season in Maine. Not yet springtime but no longer winter, either—a slippery seasonal limbo. Weather even more freakish than usual. Rain, snow, ice, and sun, all within the span of an hour. A meteorologist’s worst nightmare.
The only constant is mud. Mud creeping up your boots, splattering your pant legs, finding its way onto clothes you never even wear outdoors. Your fingernails jammed black with it. The impossibility of ever feeling clean. The inside of your truck transformed each day into a pigpen. Mud splashed onto the windshield, then smeared back and forth by the wipers. The wheels gummed up with mire and packed with gravel into the axles. Every car on the road painted the same shit brown.