by Paul Doiron
For some reason, what I’d said made her chuckle.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Too late is right.” She turned around, but in the darkness I couldn’t see her expression.
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind.”
When she was naked under the covers with me finally, I put my arms around her, but her whole body remained rigid. Then she started to shake. At first, I thought she was crying again, and then I realized it was laughter.
“What are you laughing at?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“Do you know what I saw on my way home this afternoon? A turkey vulture. Talk about an ill omen.”
Bird-watching was one of Sarah’s great joys in life. She kept a list of every species she had ever seen and recorded the date in the springtime when each of the migrant warblers returned from its southern vacation. The happiest I had ever seen her was one bright morning as we stood on a sunlit hillside listening to the first redstart of the season, a vivid black-and-orange bird singing from atop a distant tree.
“Vultures are some of the first birds to come back after the winter,” I said, repeating something she’d once told me. “So it was just a sign of spring.”
“Tell that to Ashley Kim,” she said, rolling away from me.
14
I almost never remember any of my dreams. Sarah says that my eyelids twitch like any normal person engaged in REM sleep, but as a matter of course, I awaken each morning with no nocturnal memories. A psychologist would probably say that this amnesia is a symptom of some deep repression, but it just happens to be the way I sleep—like a machine being turned off for six or seven hours a night.
When I do recall a dream, it always startles me. The temptation is to search for profound meanings, as if my subconscious is so accustomed to being gagged that it must be screaming at me from the depths of my brain.
Take this one: I am walking through a forest of birches, trees as white as bone. I’m not lost, but I have no idea where I am headed. After a while, I become aware of footsteps in the leaves behind me. I turn, and there is a young Penobscot Indian woman with braided hair following me, and I feel a shudder because I know that she is dead. But the expression on her face is passive. We walk on together for a while. I look over my shoulder again. Now a man with a black mustache and a red spot over his heart is part of our silent procession. The trail begins ascending a steep hill and a breeze whispers through the leaves. Glancing farther back now, I see a sight that should terrify me, but it doesn’t. It’s a shambling corpse whose face has been blown to smithereens. Where are we all headed? I look up the hill and there is my father’s cabin at Rum Pond. Smoke is rising from the chimney. The door opens before me, and I step inside. But it is my own house I am entering, and no one is there.
* * *
There was a knock at the door. A shaft of sunlight streamed through the window. I flopped over and found Sarah’s side of the bed empty. I had been so exhausted that I’d slept through her leaving for school.
She’d sounded so strange the night before. The shock of the murder had affected her almost personally. And she hadn’t even seen the corpse.
The knocking at the door continued with greater emphasis. From the bed, my view of the driveway was blocked. If I wanted to discover who was bothering me, I’d have to get up.
I slipped on some jeans and shambled out to greet my visitor.
On my steps, in the freezing cold, stood a stocky gray-haired woman. She wore the standard uniform of a game warden, with one noteworthy exception—around her throat was a white clerical collar. Along with the Reverend Kate Braestrup, Deborah Davies was one of the Maine Warden Service’s two female chaplains. An ordained Methodist minister, her job was to counsel the parents of children lost in the woods, the families of victims of careless hunters, and wardens like myself who had suffered some trauma in the line of duty. She wore her hair cut fashionably short and spiky, and the red frames of her eyeglasses made her look like a refugee from a New York ad agency. In her hands, uplifted, she bore a doughnut box and a cup of coffee.
“‘Then the Lord said to Moses,’” she intoned, “‘Behold, I will rain down bread from heaven for you.’”
“No thanks,” I replied. “I’ve already eaten.”
Her smile didn’t falter. “You’re not going to make me eat another doughnut, are you? I’ve already had two honey-dipped and one chocolate-glazed. Show some compassion for an overweight woman with weak willpower, will you?”
Without really thinking about it, I accepted the greasy box and the cup. We regarded each other across the threshold.
“I thought I’d invite myself on a ride-along,” she said with a flash of teeth.
“Today’s really not the best day, Reverend.”
“Lieutenant Malcomb said I needed to drag my keister over here and park it in your passenger seat.”
So this was an order from on high, then: Comply or else. “I’m not even sure if I’m going out on patrol. I’m supposed to go over to the jail to watch some video taken of the Ashley Kim crime scene. I’m assuming that’s why you’re here. To talk with me about last night.”
She shrugged, never losing that megawatt smile of hers for an instant. “I can keep you company either way.”
“I haven’t even showered yet.”
She removed a Rite in the Rain notebook from her pocket. “I’ll work on my Sunday sermon while I wait.”
Resisting Deb Davies was obviously futile. “Come on in,” I said, stepping aside.
* * *
In the shower, I stood under the stream of hot water and thought about the blood-spattered diorama I’d discovered at the Westergaard house the night before.
I wondered if they’d nabbed the professor yet. It was only a matter of time until they did. “It’s always the boyfriend,” Skip Morrison had said.
So why had Charley seemed unconvinced? He always cautioned me against jumping to conclusions. But who else could have killed Ashley Kim? I supposed the Driskos needed to be considered suspects, especially if the DNA evidence came back linking the deer blood on their truck to the sample I’d taken from the road. Those bastards seemed capable of murder—although the timing didn’t make sense. I’d visited their trailer before Ashley Kim was murdered. It scarcely seemed possible that they could have been hiding her somewhere without giving themselves away.
Then there was the anonymous caller who had initially reported the collision. He, too, had been at the scene. But I doubted Menario was investing time or manpower in tracking down the Good Samaritan.
Who else? The caretaker, Stanley Snow, had keys to the house. Add his name to the list.
The philosophical principle called Occam’s razor argues that the simplest explanation is almost always the right explanation. By that reasoning, the murderer had to be Westergaard. Why else would he go missing if he hadn’t killed her?
The eerie similarity of this homicide to the Jefferts case defied my ability to understand. What was the point in Westergaard making the murder look like a replay of the Donnatelli slaying, especially if he was going on the lam? Occam was no help with that question.
When I got out of the shower, I heard the growl of a vacuum cleaner. The Reverend Deborah Davies was, incredibly, vacuuming my living room carpet.
“What are you doing?” I asked, buttoning up my uniform shirt.
“I tracked some mud in.”
This was a fib. Her boots were spotless. “Do you always come into someone’s house and start cleaning?”
“I’m a neat freak.” She wrapped the cord in perfect loops. “But I’ve come to terms with my addiction and admitted I have a problem. That’s the first of the twelve steps. Just eleven more to go.”
“I thought you were writing a sermon.”
“Finished! Do you want to hear it?”
“Not particularly.”
“I’m going to talk about Dante’s Inferno.”
“Sounds uplifting.”
She laughed a little too raucously. “Did you ever read The Divine Comedy?”
“I was supposed to read it in college.”
“It’s actually pretty funny in places. Dante used his poem to settle a bunch of personal scores. He devised all sorts of elaborate tortures for his enemies in Hell.” She eyed the cardboard box on the coffee table. “Are you going to eat that last doughnut? I get the feeling you don’t really want it.”
“Go ahead.”
More and more, I was coming to the conclusion that Deborah Davies was one of the oddest ducks in the pond. But Ora had told me how helpful she’d been with Charley after their plane crash. I just couldn’t square the idea of a cleric with this chirpy little woman. In my life, I’d known plenty of Roman Catholic priests. Some of them were cold fish, some were a little creepy even, but none was a Bible-quoting, hyperactive goofball.
Outside, the air smelled of snow. The sky had a pewter cast, which erased the shadows from under the trees, and the mud had grown tacky with the falling temperature. I noticed that the reverend’s personal vehicle was a lemon yellow Volkswagen Bug. It glowed from the end of my driveway like a miniature sun.
Davies raised a quizzical eyebrow. “What’s the matter?”
“My patrol truck is still at the jail. The technicians were going to vacuum it for fibers.” One happy consequence of the situation dawned on me. “It looks like we’ll have to do that ride-along some other day.”
The reverend removed an iPhone from her pocket. “Why don’t you call the jail? Maybe the tech people are done with your truck. I can give you a lift over there.”
The next thing I knew, Davies had connected me with the sheriff’s secretary, who informed me that, yes, the state police were done collecting fibers and I could now retrieve my truck from the jail garage. I looked at the chaplain’s Volkswagen, imagining the sad picture of me riding in the passenger seat of that ludicrous vehicle. Her vanity license plate read REVDD.
“Don’t be such a sissy,” Davies said, once again exhibiting her uncanny ability to read my mind. “Hop in.”
I obeyed.
Fastening my seat belt, I had a premonition of the reverend using the circumstance as a trap to investigate the inner corners of my emotional state. My intuition proved correct.
“Michael,” she began. “I deal with lots of people in pain. That’s my area of expertise. You know the one thing that never works? Bottling up your emotions.”
I squared around. “Look, Reverend. I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but you’re not going to get anywhere with me. I’m kind of an atheist.”
“‘Kind of an atheist’?” She gave me a dazzling flash of teeth. “That’s like being kind of pregnant. Are you an agnostic?”
“I don’t believe in God,” I said flatly.
She seemed to ignore this comment. “Remember what I was telling you about my sermon on Dante. In the Inferno, he condemns suicides to the seventh circle of Hell. In the poem, he transforms people who have killed themselves into thorny trees that bleed when a branch is broken off. It’s a horrible image of souls condemned to suffer forever, unable to move or defend themselves from torment because of the offenses they’ve committed against their own bodies.”
“Why exactly are you telling me this?”
“Even an atheist has to admit it’s a powerful metaphor. I think you feel responsible for more than you let on, Michael. Your father especially. No one should carry that amount of guilt.”
I cracked the window so the wind would drown her out. “Who says I feel guilty?”
Davies reassessed her approach. We drove along for five minutes through a brown-and-gray wasteland. Some flakes of light snow began to fall, salting the windshield. She flicked on the wipers, but the crystals blew off on their own.
Finally, she spoke again: “Monhegan Island is part of your district, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Located ten miles off the Maine coast, Monhegan is the glacier-scraped top of a submerged mountain; nothing but sheer cliffs and twisted spruces soaked in perpetual fog, alone in a howling ocean. In 1614, Captain John Smith claimed the island for the English Crown. Today, Monhegan is home to fifty or so year-round residents who make their livings lobstering through the bitter winter months and then catering to tourists all summer.
The reverend continued: “I don’t suppose you go out there much?”
“There’s no real reason to. There’s nothing to hunt except sea ducks and a few pheasants. I leave it to the Marine Patrol.”
“Something you said made me think of a story,” Davies explained. “You weren’t around for this, but in 1997, the islanders hired a sharpshooter to kill every deer on that island.”
“I know this story.”
Back in the 1950s, the locals had arranged to ship some white-tailed deer to Monhegan, the idea being to provide meat and sport to the local populace. At the time, the island’s only resident wild mammal was the Norway rat.
For many years, the deer were considered local attractions. They foraged in the village and nibbled apples from the hands of small children. But over time, the pets became pests. Islanders were forced to fence their vegetable gardens with barriers at least six feet tall. Entire species of wildflowers were eaten to extinction. And in-breeding among the deer began to produce deformed antlers and stunted growth: real freak-show specimens. The last straw was when the deer and the rats began passing ticks back and forth. The ticks carried Lyme disease, and by the 1990s an epidemic of the illness plagued the island.
“What you don’t know,” said Deb Davies, “is that I was the island chaplain—every year there’s a different volunteer who gets to spend the summer out there—when the town debated the issue of what to do about the deer.”
“That must have been pleasant.”
“The island was totally divided over the issue. On the one hand, you had people concerned about the public health risk and the general nuisance factor. On the other hand, you had people who couldn’t imagine Monhegan without its deer. The town meetings were so contentious. But in the end, the discussion kept coming back to all the people who’d gotten Lyme disease. Still, it was a close vote, and I’m not sure folks out there have entirely forgiven one another for what was said. There was some talk at first of just capturing the deer and transporting them to the mainland, but they were dealing with more than a hundred animals, and the cost was just astronomical. So the islanders asked the state to find a sharpshooter.”
“I know the man they hired,” I said. “He’s a biologist from Connecticut who specializes in controlling nuisance animals—‘the world’s best deer killer.’”
“That’s what he calls himself.” Davies smiled at me. “The sharpshooter set up feeding stations around the island to get the deer used to gathering in the same places. A month later, he returned with a couple of assistants and an ATV to haul out the carcasses. The men worked after dark, using silencers. I was told that if you stayed away from the shed on Lighthouse Hill where they butchered the animals, you would never have known what was happening.”
I had the sense that the reverend was drawing near to the moral of her sermon, so I let her finish.
“It took three years to kill them all,” she said. “They shot seventy-two that first winter, thirty-five the second, and six the third. I wasn’t on the island when the last deer was killed, but I heard about it from a lobsterman friend. After a fresh snow in March, the sharpshooter and his team returned to Monhegan. They scouted Cathedral Woods and located the tracks of a doe and two fawns. And then they killed them. Today, there are no more deer on Monhegan.”
We crossed the border between Thomaston and Rockland. The reverend put on her blinker.
“My friend the lobsterman, he’d grown up living with deer. Every year, between the Harvest Moon Ball and Trap Day, he would go hunting for them. He was a hunter, but no one loved those deer more. On his mantel, he had a photograph of a little doe that had wan
dered into his living room and settled down on his couch. He loved those deer, but in the end he voted to exterminate them, because he didn’t want his family getting Lyme disease.”
The Volkswagen turned into the jail parking lot.
“I remember my friend calling me the week those last deer were shot,” she said. “It was unusual for him to call, because he’s never been much of a talker. Lobstermen are like game wardens that way.” She piloted the car into a parking space outside the main entrance and brought us to an abrupt halt. “After he told me what had happened, I asked him if he felt guilty, and do you know what he said?”
I knew the response she was calling for. “He said, ‘Why should I feel guilty?’”
The reverend gave me a sly smile and turned the ignition off.
15
There was a television and digital video player set up in the training room, waiting for me. At the reception window, I’d managed to shake loose the Reverend Davies with a promise to continue our conversation later, only to be shepherded quickly by the receptionist into the cluttered, brightly lighted room. I sat alone at the table for a while, examining the ringed Olympics pattern made by a series of coffee cups. Finally, Detective Menario and Assistant Attorney General Danica Marshall came in. The detective, baggy-eyed, unshaven, had on the same wrinkled shirt and trousers from the night before.
I’d glimpsed Danica Marshall in the Knox County Courthouse on a few occasions when I was giving testimony at trials, but we’d never been formally introduced. Her office was located in Augusta, the state capital, but as one of several prosecutors assigned to murder investigations in Maine, she got around a lot, leaving a trail of lewd comments and dirty jokes in her wake. This was my first look at her up close.
My impression had always been that Danica Marshall was a stunner, but there was something severe about her deep-set eyes and cheekbones under the fluorescent lights of the training room. She was petite: five four tops, with a lean body that suggested lots of hours on the elliptical machine. She wore heavy blue eyeliner, an open-throated blouse, heels, and a raven black suit, which matched her hair. I guessed her to be in her late thirties, ten years older than me at least. Her hair was mussed in a way that made you think she’d just climbed out of bed. Maybe it was the hairstyle that explained her reputation as a courthouse sex symbol.