by Paul Doiron
That explained the movers. She must have known days ago that even if her husband was found alive, she could never live in this house again.
“It must be difficult.”
“Let me tell you what’s difficult.” Her voice climbed in pitch. “My family’s been coming here for a hundred years, and still I’ve got illiterate clammers calling me a ‘summer person’ or, worse, a ‘Masshole.’ As far as I’m concerned, I have a far deeper connection to this place than people like you. And through no fault of my own, I am losing that connection forever. Being forced out of your favorite place in the world is a tragedy I hope you never have to experience, Warden Bowditch.”
Her predicament brought to mind the situation Charley and Ora were going through in Flagstaff. I didn’t much care for Jill Westergaard, but her speech did engage my sympathies. “Stanley Snow told me you were selling the house.”
“Stanley did?”
“We ran into each other last night at the Harpoon Bar.”
“The Harpoon?” She brought her hand to her mouth reflexively. When she took it away, I saw that she had smeared her lipstick at the corner of her mouth. “That wasn’t very discreet of him. What else did my caretaker tell you?”
“Only that you were upset.”
“You’re damn right I’m upset!” She flung her hands wide and accidentally knocked the mug from the railing onto the rocks below. “Who wouldn’t be upset?”
It had been a mistake to come here, I realized. I was only making her more emotional. “Maybe it would be better if I left.”
She grabbed my good arm with sudden fierceness. “Who are you? What’s your involvement?”
“Excuse me?”
“First you break into my house and find Ashley, and then a week later you discover Hans’s dead body in the forest. That’s not a coincidence. You’re involved in this somehow.”
I wasn’t certain if I’d just been labeled a murder suspect. “I’ve just been doing my job,” I explained.
“As a game warden?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a lie,” she said hoarsely. “Stanley told me about you. He says you’re a guilt-driven man obsessed with what happened to Ashley Kim. I want to know why.”
Was this the real reason she’d summoned me to her house? I’d assumed that her apology, however unwarranted, was genuine—that she’d only wanted to confess how deluded she’d been before. Now I began to wonder whether this calculating woman had played me for a sucker.
I didn’t know how to defuse the situation except with candor. “I found Ashley’s car on the night she disappeared, and I suspected something had happened to her.”
She laughed at me. “So is this some kind of mission for you? Are you trying to atone for your incompetence?”
“I need to go now. You have my sympathies, Mrs. Westergaard.”
“I don’t care if you have a guilty conscience,” she said. “You’d better stop sticking your nose into my life!”
Her threatening words chased me out of the house and up the streaming driveway to the top of the hill. It was obvious that Jill Westergaard knew how to push my buttons. The question was why she kept doing it.
Back at my Jeep, I did my best to scrape the mud off my boots with a fallen spruce branch. I replayed the conversation in my head but recalled nothing that helped explain this enigmatic woman. Ora Stevens had told me that people grieved in different ways. Maybe Jill Westergaard needed a scapegoat.
I did a U-turn and headed back to civilization. When I got home, I would abide by Sarah’s wishes and make my promised call to Kathy Frost. As I pulled onto the Parker Point Road, I passed a white pickup going the other way. Glancing in my rearview mirror, I saw its brake lights flash, as if the driver had recognized my vehicle, too. Then Stanley Snow’s truck shot forward again at a high rate of speed.
34
The fire on the Drisko property was first reported by an exhausted lineman from Central Maine Power. The electrical worker was suspended thirty feet up in the air in his bucket, repairing a balky pole-mounted transformer—a casualty of the previous week’s ice storm—when he spotted a wisp of smoke rising from a distant wooded ridge. At first, the lineman wondered if it was just someone burning brush in his yard, but as the cloud began to boil up in an oily mass, he quickly got on the radio to his dispatcher, who called in the fire to the Knox County Regional Communications Center, which, in turn, sent word out across the airwaves to the state police, the Seal Cove Volunteer Fire Department, and every other available first responder. That was how I learned about the inferno.
“Attention all units, Seal Cove,” came the call on my scanner. “Structure fire, Five Town Farm Road, time out, nine thirty-five.”
From Parker Point, I didn’t have far to drive.
I was one of the first men on the scene.
Two pickup trucks with spinning red balls clapped to their dashboards had pulled up outside the Driskos’ fence. Flames were shooting through the roof of the trailer and dense smoke poured from the vents and front door.
One of the volunteers was already fully outfitted in all his gear but was struggling to pull a scuba-type tank over his shoulders. The other man, who still had his fire pants around his ankles, kept looking down the drive, waiting for real help. I knew that most local firemen gathered at the station and rode with the town trucks, but all of the volunteers I knew kept their personal turnout gear—boots, pants, coats, gloves, and helmets—bagged in their vehicles.
The first fireman had pulled on his helmet and was plodding heavily toward the building as I leaped from my truck.
“Wait!” I shouted after him. “They have a pit bull!”
The fireman didn’t hear me. He just forged through the gap in the barbed fence. No dog rushed out to attack the intruder. Vicky wasn’t tied to her usual post. Maybe she was out back. I listened for barking, but the only sound was the crackling of the fire.
I stumbled forward to get a better view. Heat radiated down the slope, making my eyes water and smart. Peering through the smoke, I discerned the flatbed pickup, the beat-up Monte Carlo, the two ATVs.
Christ, I thought, both of the Driskos are inside there.
“Aren’t you going in?” I shouted at the other volunteer, who was still struggling awkwardly into his coat.
“I’m not certified,” he said over his shoulder.
I was startled to realize the man I was addressing was Hank Varnum. Then I remembered he lived around the corner. That’s why he originally thought the Driskos were the ones harassing him.
“You can’t let him go in there alone, Hank.”
The lanky grocer then did something nonsensical. He tugged on his Lincolnesque whiskers. “I can’t go in,” he said. “I have a beard.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The mask won’t fit on my face because of the beard. You can’t get a tight seal.”
“Who’s the guy who just went in there?”
Varnum held up a dog tag. The standard practice among volunteer firefighters is to leave a name tag, usually kept attached to the helmet, with someone outside the structure before going in. That way, the incident commander will know who’s inside the burning building.
“It’s Guffey,” he said.
“Dane Guffey?”
“We always go inside in teams of two,” said Varnum. “But Dane wouldn’t wait. He was here when I showed up.”
“I think both of the Driskos might be in there,” I said.
“Oh, damn.” He grabbed the radio from his truck and shouted into it: “Dispatch, this is Unit Fifty-one. I am ten twenty-three at Five Town Farm Road at nine forty-nine.” He coughed into his fist. “We have possible multiple ten forty-eights.”
I glared at the burning mobile home. Should I try following Guffey inside? I wondered. I figured if I crawled on my hands and knees, maybe I could help him. But the heat, even from fifty feet away, was too intense. And without a breathing apparatus, the carbon monoxide would knock me out in
seconds.
Varnum looked at me helplessly. “I’m afraid one of those propane tanks is going to blow. That damned Guffey! He knows we’re not allowed to go into the building until the chief arrives.” He glanced down the rutted driveway, but no more help seemed forthcoming.
In Seal Cove and other rural communities, the members of the volunteer fire department half-jokingly refer to themselves as the “Cellar Savers.” Because it takes so long for the team to respond, very often the only thing left of a burning building is its foundation. Every small-town fire department in Maine has its own rules—some departments are exceedingly well run—but I seemed to remember that the Seal Cove volunteers had a reputation for ineffectuality.
With their home ablaze, the words spray-painted on the Driskos’ makeshift fence seemed to take on a new and absurd meaning: KEEP THE FUCK OUT! WARNING, DANGEROUS DOG! TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. I didn’t think Dave and Donnie had ever imagined a day when they would be desperate for visitors to disregard those signs.
“You’ve got to move your vehicle,” Varnum told me.
“What?”
“We need to be able to get the pumper in close to the trailer.”
By the time I’d pulled my Jeep out of the way, more vehicles had arrived: random volunteers, some already in their coats and helmets. Men were shouting at one another. “Did we call for mutual aid?”
“What are you, stupid? It’s a frigging trailer.”
“Hank says there might be bodies.”
“Guffey’s inside, alone.”
“Those propane tanks are going to blow.”
A stocky old man I didn’t recognize was pulling on his own air tank. He handed Varnum his dog tag. “Tell Milton I couldn’t wait.”
A downwind pushed the smoke at us suddenly and we staggered away from the fence, our arms raised to protect our eyes, squinting into the billowing fumes. The smell was an acrid mix of burned metal and melting plastic, which made me choke violently and turn away.
“Where’s the dog?” I asked the men around me. “The Driskos have a pit bull.”
The volunteers looked at me like I’d just escaped from a mental ward. But the absence of the Driskos’ ferocious watchdog seemed important: a key to what we were watching unfold.
Ignoring me, the firefighters continued their frantic conversation.
“We’ve got to turn off the electricity before the pumper shows. Did anybody throw the breaker?”
“Where are we going to get water? Did you see a stream on the way up?”
“There’s a pond down the hill, I think.”
After what seemed like an eternity, two firefighters came backing out of the door of the trailer, dragging a crispy black-and-brown thing that might once have been a human being. Men rushed forward to help them. I took a step forward myself—a reflex action.
Just then, one of the propane tanks at the back of the building exploded, and we were all thrown off our feet. I landed facedown in the mud. When I looked up again, men were scurrying back from the building, terrified that the gas tanks of the Driskos’ vehicles, or some hidden cache of explosives, might detonate next. Guffey and the other man who’d gone inside had dropped the incinerated body, but they bravely returned to haul it outside the perimeter of the fence.
At that moment, the pumper truck came screaming up the road. If anything, the scene became even more chaotic as men gawked at the charred remains of either Dave or Donnie Drisko. The eye sockets were gooey and the gums were burned back from the teeth. Other men scrambled around to unroll hoses. The chief arrived, a tubby little character who ran an auto-repair shop in town that specialized in bilking out-of-staters. He began barking orders.
The firemen pulled this immense canvas object out of the pumper truck and then unfolded it next to the vehicle. It looked like a kid’s swimming pool, only on a giant scale. The tanker truck arrived and began dumping water into the pool. The engine inside the pumper truck functioned basically like an enormous squirt gun, sucking water from the canvas pool through one set of hoses and then blasting it out again at high pressure through others. The firemen used this second set of hoses to fight the fire.
Whenever the tanker truck became empty, the driver would rush away down the road to the nearest stream or pond to replenish the water supply and then would come racing back to refill the canvas pool. In a land without fire hydrants, this is how you fight a fire, and if you are skilled or lucky, it’s how you keep buildings from burning down.
The Cellar Savers were neither skilled nor lucky.
The Driskos’ trailer was made of aluminum, so it didn’t collapse. But the fire gutted the structure completely. And it took the state fire investigator a long time to collect the remains of the other Drisko.
Was it Donnie or Dave? Even at the end, no one could tell them apart.
35
I spent the afternoon at the scene of the fire, waiting and hoping that the cause of the blaze would be quickly ascertained. An investigator from the state fire marshal’s office had been summoned from Augusta, but determining the origin and cause of the fire would likely be laborious. Figuring out whether it was an accident or arson might take days. But I was hopeful for a quick answer.
Passing out drunk with a lighted cigarette seemed like something one of the Driskos might do. Father and son had both seemed destined for fiery ends. So I decided to stick around the smoldering trailer because I was curious. And I wanted to meet the mysterious Dane Guffey, who had materialized out of the past to haunt my recent conversations. I needed to ask him why he had resigned from the sheriff’s department. What had he been doing in the seven years since he’d arrested Erland Jefferts?
To keep myself occupied, I made a wide circle around the Driskos’ wooded property, looking for their pit bull. I figured Vicky must have broken free of her rope. Maybe the fire and smoke had given her that extra energy to escape. Having a vicious dog running loose through these woods would be dangerous to the local wildlife, not to mention the local children. For all their small-man bravado, I think the Driskos had been secretly scared of her, too.
The forest floor was sopped. I found no dog prints anywhere. At the very least, I could conclude that Dave and Donnie hadn’t been in the habit of letting their watchdog free to chase deer. The hollows between the oaks held pools of water that would soon fill with mating wood frogs and spotted salamanders. So far, the amphibians had failed to emerge from their hibernating places. To me, spring never truly arrived until I heard my first frog.
Eventually, I returned to the commotion. I leaned against the side of my Jeep, watching the volunteers scurry about in coats and boots that seemed too big for them, like boys playing firemen. Dirty smoke drifted through the treetops. The air carried the sour odor of wet ashes. I reflected on my last visit to this trailer and my subsequent confrontation with Dave and Donnie at the Harpoon Bar. I’d been struck by how gleeful they’d seemed on both occasions. How had Dave responded when I told him he seemed exceptionally happy? “You have no idea.”
What had he meant by that? The Driskos must have understood they were still murder suspects. There was evidence, in the form of deer hair and blood, tying them directly to Ashley’s last known whereabouts. So why had they been strutting around the Harpoon like little red roosters?
Was it possible they’d known the identity of Ashley Kim’s abductor? If they’d been on the scene that night, grabbing that deer, had they witnessed something they only later understood as significant? Rather than going to the police—since no reward had yet been offered—I could imagine them trying to extort money from the murderer. Had the Driskos made a fatal error in threatening the wrong man with exposure?
They’d been drinking with someone that night at the bar, a bald man who’d kept his back to the darkened room. Stanley Snow was bald, and I’d run into him in the rest room. I’d also just passed his speeding truck hours earlier on my way home from Parker Point.
Snow had keys to the Westergaard house. But what motive would he h
ave had to kill his employer and rape and murder an innocent young woman? As a local boy, he would have known the particulars of Nikki Donnatelli’s death well enough to copy it. In all the reading I’d done about Erland Jefferts, I realized, the caretaker’s name had never come up. He was just about the only guy in Seal Cove whom the J-Team hadn’t added to its list of potential predators. That seemed odd in and of itself.
God, I was driving myself crazy with questions, especially when the likelihood was that Dave or Donnie had just passed out with a smoldering cigarette.
My friend Deputy Skip Morrison had shown up in his Dodge Charger to direct traffic away from the fire. But there was no traffic to direct on the dead-end road, so instead he had wandered up the hill to watch the firemen hose down the burned-out shell of the trailer.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I heard the call on the radio.”
“I thought you were on leave.”
“I am.”
He shook his head at me and chuckled. “So much for the Driskos.”
“Did you hear if anyone found any trace of their dog? They owned a pretty vicious pit bull.”
“Guffey said he saw a crispy critter inside.”
“That’s weird. Dave told me she never went indoors.
“Maybe he made an exception occasionally.”
“I think they were afraid of her. I was afraid of her.”
“Well, it sounds like she perished in the fire. Wherever Dave and Donnie are at the moment, I’m guessing it’s just as hot as where they left.”
I spotted Hank Varnum standing in a circle of volunteer firemen, some of whom I recognized and some of whom I didn’t. They were rolling up their heavy hoses, but they didn’t seem in any rush. “Excuse me for a second, Skip,” I said. “Hey, Hank!”