by Paul Doiron
“Reverend,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“She came to see you,” said Sarah.
Davies’s forehead was creased with worry. “Sergeant Frost told me about Professor Westergaard.”
I wriggled free of my coat and hung it on a peg beside the door. The coat was heavy from the Walther pistol still hidden in the pocket. “Did Kathy and Pluto find that lost girl?” I asked with affected casualness.
“Yes,” Davies said. “The little girl is all right.”
“Kathy’s been trying to call you,” said Sarah. “We all have.”
“I didn’t receive any messages.” I stuck my hand in my pants pocket, but the cell phone wasn’t there. Nor was it in my wool coat when I checked. “I must have left it out in the Jeep.”
“I can’t believe you’ve been driving with a broken hand,” Sarah said.
“I managed all right.” Then I sat down on the bench and began to tug ineffectually at my boots.
Sarah watched me struggling for a while and then came over to help pull them off. As she leaned close to me, her nose twitched. “Have you been drinking?”
“I had a beer with dinner.”
She covered her eyes with her small hand. “Are you crazy? Mike, you’re taking Vicodin. What the hell is happening to you?”
“I’m fine,” I insisted.
“You’re not fine!”
I went to the front window and parted the curtains. Hutchins’s cruiser was still parked there. What was he waiting for?
Sarah peeked over my shoulder. “What are you looking at?”
I turned to block her view. “I should have told you I was going to see Erland Jefferts,” I said. “I shouldn’t have been driving with a broken hand. I shouldn’t have stopped for a beer.”
“That’s it? That’s your apology?”
“Perhaps I should go,” said Davies. “Please feel free to call me—either of you.”
“Thank you, Reverend.” Sarah opened the door for her.
I peered outside at the top of the hill. It was hard to see from the light spilling out into the dark trees. Hutchins’s cruiser was no longer there.
“Take care,” said Deb Davies. I sensed that she was speaking to my girlfriend, not me.
“Good night,” I said.
After she closed the door, Sarah spun around. “I am so mad at you, I can’t even think straight.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“I don’t want your fake apologies.” Her shoulders were rigid. “Ever since that woman disappeared, you’ve been like another person. And you’ve only gotten worse since that boy was injured. You’ve been avoiding your phone calls. Charley’s probably called ten times since your accident. And what about Kathy? You can’t just blow off your sergeant.”
“I told you, I misplaced my phone.” I knew she was right, but there was something afire inside me. “What do you want me to do, Sarah? Tell me, and I’ll do it.”
“I want you to get help.”
“From who? Reverend Davies?”
For a moment, I thought she might step forward to embrace me, but the pain in her eyes made me terrified to touch her. “Michael,” she said softly. “You can’t let yourself be destroyed by guilt or whatever this is. We’ve been through too much for you to fall apart now.”
“I told you, I’m fine.” I walked past her toward the bedroom.
“Michael?”
“I’m going to call Charley.”
I didn’t mean to slam the bedroom door. But I did. Through it, soon, I heard the sound of Sarah crying.
* * *
I sat on the bed, dialed Charley’s cell-phone number, and waited for him to pick up. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why I was so mad. I didn’t even know who I was mad at. Sarah had been correct about everything. Over the past week, despite all my best efforts to move forward, I’d become someone I scarcely recognized. Maybe I really was my father’s son.
“Charley?” I said. “It’s Mike.”
“Hello there!” said the old pilot. “I guess it’s true that a good man is hard to find. I heard about your accident from Lieutenant Malcomb. How’s the broken claw?”
The sound of his voice made me realize how much I’d missed the old fart. I could feel my heartbeat slowing down, returning to its usual rhythm. “I guess I’ll be joining you in physical therapy.”
“That bad, huh? It’s a shame about that Barter boy. How are you holding up?”
“I don’t know.” It was probably the first honest thing I’d said all day. “I’ve been a bastard to Sarah.”
He hesitated. “Has she said anything to you about her condition?”
“No.”
“Maybe Ora was mistaken.” He coughed away from the receiver. “So you found the missing professor, I heard. That’s some smart detective work.”
“Tell that to Menario.”
“Don’t worry about him. He’s just exercised because you keep embarrassing him in front of his superiors.”
“There’s no way Westergaard killed himself, Charley.”
“I’m inclined to concur.”
“There’s some connection to the Erland Jefferts case, but I haven’t figured out what it is yet.”
“You might want to ease up on the pedal and let someone else get behind that wheel.”
“Spare me the folk sayings, Charley.”
“I just worry about you. The state police will crack this case with or without your assistance. If I were in your boots, I’d stick closer to home for the time being.”
I paused and moved the phone away from my ear. Through the door, I could no longer hear Sarah weeping. The house had fallen completely silent.
33
Sarah slept on the couch that night. I offered her the bed, but she wouldn’t take it. By the time I’d finished my conversation with Charley, her sadness and pity had hardened once again into a firm resolve.
“Tomorrow morning,” she said in a calm, flat voice, “I want you to call Kathy Frost and arrange to set up an appointment with the Warden Service psychologist. Ask her to drive you there. If she doesn’t, I will. I don’t want you driving anymore.”
I agreed to do what she asked. “I’m sorry, Sarah. I really mean that.”
“I’ll believe you when you finally get some help.”
She left me alone in the bedroom.
I popped two Vicodins before turning in and started the Hemingway book to get my mind off Ashley Kim. I might have read a single page before I passed out. In the night, I dreamed that Sarah was in the bathroom and couldn’t stop vomiting. When I awoke from my coma the next morning, she had left for school, the paperback was spread open across my chest, and the phone on the nightstand was ringing insistently.
“Hello?” My speech was thick and dry. I desperately needed some water.
“Warden Bowditch?” It was a woman’s voice, a familiar one.
“Yes?”
“This is Jill Westergaard.”
I sat up against the pillow and tried to cough the phlegm out of my throat before continuing. “Mrs. Westergaard. I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“I wondered if you would meet me at my house. I need to speak with you.”
The request startled me. Stanley Snow had said she was having a bad time of things. I could see how she had suffered a double wound in the last few days. First, there was the hard truth of her husband’s affair with his teaching assistant. Then there was my discovery of his lifeless body in the woods. Despite the unpleasant way our last encounter had ended, I felt compassion for Westergaard’s widow. I also wondered whether she was clinging to some piece of information that might lead to his killer or killers.
Charley’s advice about leaving the investigation to the professionals murmured in my head. But what was the point of sticking close to home if Sarah was at school?
“I’ve had an accident since we last spoke,” I said. “I really shouldn’t drive.”
“Please,” she said. “It’s very important tha
t I see you.”
I told Jill Westergaard I would meet her in an hour.
I rinsed my face in the bathroom sink and brushed the fur from my teeth. I swallowed two ibuprofen tablets with a glass of orange juice. Then I put on the same mud-splattered pants I’d worn the previous day and a faded flannel shirt. As I grabbed my coat, I felt the weight of the pistol and remembered my missing cell phone. Where the hell was it?
I went outside to look in the Jeep.
There were new tire tracks in the driveway. I squatted down and examined them. They had been made earlier that morning, after Sarah had left for school, by a big vehicle—either a pickup or a very large and heavily loaded SUV. The tracks led toward the house and then back out again, so whoever had come to visit me hadn’t chosen to stick around. Probably just some lost driver looking for another house, I thought.
My mobile was nowhere to be found. All I could think was that I might have dropped it somewhere the night before, either outside the Guffey house or at the Harpoon Bar. Maybe it had fallen out of my coat when Hutchins stopped me on the road.
As I was rummaging through my vehicle, I noticed that my hand, while still a ghoulish mottle of purple, yellow, and black, was a bit smaller than it had been previously. I trudged back inside. I used our landline to set a date with the orthopedic hand specialist at Pen Bay Medical Center to be fitted for a hard cast. The sooner I moved on to that stage of my recovery, the better.
After I’d finished with the hospital, I considered the promise I’d made to Sarah. I was supposed to have Kathy make an appointment for me with the psychologist. I started to dial my sergeant on the landline, then stopped. Instead, I found myself punching in my own cell-phone number to see if someone had found it. But all I got was voice mail.
My hand was abuzz. I was tempted to take a Vicodin but resisted the urge for the moment. I tucked the vial inside my shirt pocket and set out for Parker Point.
It had rained lightly during the night, the ditches were again running with meltwater, and I spotted fewer patches of snow in the shadows of the trees along the road. The ice storm had distorted the forest into some grotesque version of its previous self, with birches and willows bent over like whipped slaves and snapped limbs lying strewn about the landscape in a mass dismemberment.
I turned on the police scanner I kept in the Jeep and listened to the chatter, but it sounded like a slow morning in cop land. Driving around like this, I could almost fool myself that I was on patrol, headed to Indian Pond to see whether the last smelt shacks had been hauled off the ice, as required by law. In reality, my destination was a house I had been warned to avoid in the strongest-possible language.
What I discovered at Schooner Lane took me by surprise. A big moving van had backed down the Westergaards’ steep driveway—I’m not sure how the driver had managed it—forcing me to park along the private road. I had located the professor’s dead body only the day before. How had his wife managed to hire movers to begin emptying her house the very next morning?
As I stepped into the mud, I notice a flag of yellow police tape flapping in a tree and a latex glove wrapper dropped by some careless deputy.
The movers were all dressed in coveralls. There seemed to be enough men working around the house to field a baseball team. I watched several of them carry some blanket-wrapped pieces of furniture down the walkway and up the ramp of the van before one of them made eye contact.
“Is Mrs. Westergaard here?” I asked.
The accent was straight out of South Boston. “Yeah, she’s here somewheres inside.”
By the light of day, the building seemed like an unfamiliar place—neither the shadowy horror show that Charley and I first witnessed nor the ghostly lit structure I’d toured via video at the sheriff’s office. It was just a mansion with tall windows and high ceilings, a place you wondered how any maid could ever clean. A draft blew through the open doors, causing the small hairs to lift along the back of my neck.
I found Jill Westergaard in the living room, overseeing the removal of the couch with a steaming cup of tea in her hand. She wore the same trench coat I’d last seen her in, but the rest of her outfit was new: brown turtleneck, blue jeans, and some sort of moccasin-type shoes that probably retailed for more than my week’s salary.
“Please be careful with that,” she was telling two men who were attempting to wrap a blanket around the sofa. “That davenport belonged to my mother.”
I coughed to make my presence known. “Mrs. Westergaard?”
When she turned to me, I noticed that her face was done up with eyeliner and lipstick. The makeup was very subtle; it had been carefully applied. Her bleached-blond hair appeared freshly washed. The whites of her eyes were clear. Not for an instant would I have guessed that this was a woman in mourning.
“Thank you for coming,” she said without smiling.
“It was no trouble.”
“I doubt that’s true. What did you do to your hand?”
“I broke it chasing some vandals in the woods.”
My answer didn’t seem to interest her. She shook her golden head in the direction of the back porch. “Do you mind talking outside, to get out of the way of the movers?”
“Not at all.”
I followed her through the living room. The shattered lamp had been removed and the glass vacuumed up. A towel, I noticed, had been placed carefully over the bloodstain on the carpet.
She stood against the porch rail, with her back to the ocean. A brisk sea breeze was blowing off the water, but the view was spectacular. I spotted a raft of eiders bobbing along in the current. In the distance, a tanker was crawling up Penobscot Bay, making for the oil piping station at Searsport.
“I owe you an apology,” she said. “You were right about Hans.”
“That’s not necessary, Mrs. Westergaard. In fact, I wanted to apologize to you for dismissing your concerns.”
“No, you tried to warn me. I can’t believe I was such a fool.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself.”
She found her sunglasses inside her coat pocket and put them on. I saw myself reflected in the lenses. “That’s easy for you to say. You didn’t hear me insisting to the detectives that Hans couldn’t possibly have been fucking Ashley Kim.”
“You were in denial.”
She took a sip of tea to recover her composure. “I remember telling you how well I understood Hans, how there was no way he would have chosen a twerp like Ashley over me. I still have no idea what he saw in that kid. But you never really know someone until your relationship with them is over.”
“What do you mean?”
“At the end is when all the secrets come out. I never would have imagined Hans could have committed suicide, let alone murdered someone. He had too much self-regard to take his own life.”
The last time we’d spoken, she’d been certain that her husband was also a victim. “You don’t believe he killed himself?”
“I never would have believed it was possible. But I never believed he was having an affair with Ashley, either.”
I chose my next words with care. “You might not know this, but I was the one who found his body yesterday.”
“Of course I know it,” she said brusquely. “That’s why I asked you to come here.”
“What did the investigators tell you?”
“They told me that his throat was slashed. Then they asked me if Hans had any enemies.”
So Menario was continuing to look at alternate suspects. I was relieved to hear he hadn’t believed Danica Marshall’s assertion that this case was a murder-suicide.
“Did your husband have any enemies?”
“No one except the rest of the Harvard Business School faculty, the executives he excoriated in his book, and many of his former students. Hans was an arrogant man who never minded being disliked. But I doubt he ever did anything in his life to make someone decide to murder his girlfriend before slashing his throat. Then again, what do I know? I thought he was a fai
thful husband.”
The sea breeze was beginning to flay my exposed skin. There were so many questions I wanted to ask. “What about Ashley? Did she have enemies?”
“I have no idea. We weren’t girlfriends, for Christ’s sake. Hans and I had her up here last summer, visited some lighthouses, bought lobsters off the dock in Seal Cove, had a few too many drinks.” The bottom half of her face, beneath the sunglasses, was contorted, but her forehead remained smooth. “These are the same questions Detective Menario asked.”
“Did he mention the name Erland Jefferts?”
“You mean the man in prison everyone says is innocent?”
I was somewhat surprised that she recognized Erland’s name, until I realized how much publicity Ozzie Bell had stirred up for him in the Maine media.
My hand was burning like a three-alarm fire. “It might sound ridiculous, but I wondered if there was some sort of connection between your husband and Jefferts.”
“What sort of connection?”
“Had he been following the controversy over Jefferts’s conviction in the papers?”
“I’m not sure what you’re suggesting,” she said warily.
“I’m just trying to make a connection.”
She put two and two together very fast. “You don’t think Hans’s death was a suicide. You think whoever killed the Donnatellis’ daughter also murdered him?”
It irked me that she gave no consideration to Ashley Kim. And I was about to protest that I actually believed Erland Jefferts had killed Nikki Donnatelli, when the weight of what she’d said smacked me in the temple. “You know the Donnatelli family?”
“Of course I know them. I remember Nikki from when she was a toddler.”
Now I was completely confused. It was my understanding that the Donnatelli family hadn’t owned property in Maine for seven years. “Didn’t you just move here, Mrs. Westergaard?”
“My family has had a summer cottage on Parker Point for three generations. I learned to swim off the dock in town. I practically grew up in Seal Cove.”
It took me a while to absorb the importance of what she was telling me. “I thought this was a new home.”
“It is a new home,” she said, “built to replace the falling-down cottage my family has always owned here. This was supposed to be my dream house. I spent years designing it and supervising the construction. And now I can’t even stand being inside it for more than five minutes without wanting to vomit.”