by Paul Doiron
He swung his head around to look at me again. “Tell him what?”
“Tell Menario the truth about where you were the night of the accident.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“What if he interviews your wife about what happened?”
“You leave Katie out of it.”
Hutchins was a paranoid, self-pitying bully, but looking at him now, slumped in his stinking undershirt on his stinking sofa, I didn’t believe he had murdered anyone. “If you don’t tell Menario the truth about that night, I will.”
“Is that a threat?”
“More like a promise.”
He waved his hand like a tyrant king dismissing one of his vassals. “Get the hell out of here, Bowditch. Go home to your girlfriend. I’m sure she’s as pure as the driven snow.”
For the past few minutes, a revelation had been trying to bust through into my conscious thoughts. My gaze went to the chewed-up arm of the sofa again. “What happened to your dog?”
“The bitch took him,” said Hutchins. “Can you believe that? She took my damn dog.”
37
The day was dissolving into darkness by the time I escaped from Hutchins’s cave.
I had no doubt that, under the wrong circumstances, he could be a very dangerous man. The idea that this thug identified with me, that he thought we were kindred spirits, bound together by mutual bad luck, a hatred of women, and who knew what else, sickened me more than anything he’d actually said.
I pulled the Jeep over onto the shoulder of the Catawunkeg Road to think through Hutchins’s story. He had been at the bar when Nikki disappeared. He had been at the crash scene when Ashley disappeared. He was a police officer. Women would trust him.
He could have easily shown up at the crash scene while Ashley Kim was still there and offered her a ride to Westergaard’s house. The next day, he could have sneaked back to Parker Point to rape her and abduct the professor. I remembered how Hutchins had gone alone into the house after Charley and I had broken in and the countless minutes he’d spent inside. Had he been searching for incriminating evidence he might have left behind?
I’d begun to wonder if I’d just escaped a close encounter with the Grim Reaper.
But if Hutchins was a cold, calculating killer, how could I explain the drunken mess of a man I’d just found at his house? He’d permitted me to walk into his den, accuse him of murder, and then waltz out again, unharmed, when he could have shot me and dumped my body at the bottom of a flooded quarry.
Something didn’t add up. It was as if I were standing too close to a painting in a museum and could only see splashes of color, when what I really needed to do was take a step back. Only then would I see the larger design.
I needed to return to the intersection where my involvement in this all began, back to the accident scene on Parker Point.
* * *
As the temperature had warmed through the course of the afternoon, a fog had crawled up from the sea. Chilled by arctic currents washing down from Labrador, the Gulf of Maine remained unbearably cold all year long. When the sun heated the land, a mist would creep in from the coves and harbors.
I drove directly to the site of the accident. The rain had fallen and the snowplows had come along and scraped the deer blood from the road. I pulled my Jeep over to the approximate place I’d first parked and tried to re-create the scene in my head, but my memories already seemed to be dissolving. The angle of the wrecked car along the road, the location of the blood pool, the places where I’d set up my hazard markers—all the details were melting away into a gray haze.
What if Ashley Kim’s homicide was never solved? Sarah had reminded me of the sad litany of unsolved murders in Maine. Every day that went on without a break in the investigation suggested that Ashley Kim was herself dissolving into some sort of fog. Without the closure of an arrest and conviction, the woman would become a kind of ghost. In time, her name would cease to refer to a specific person—an intelligent young woman from Massachusetts who had found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time—and become a local watchword for fear. People in Seal Cove would tell their daughters about her in whispers.
How did that old legend of the vanishing hitchhiker go? A traveling salesman sees a young woman standing along a roadside at night. He stops to give her a ride. She provides him with a street address, then sits mutely while he drives her home. When the salesman arrives at the house, he goes around to the passenger door to let the pale girl out, only to discover she’s disappeared. He knocks on the door, and the man who answers tells him that his daughter died in a car accident one year earlier, at the very spot the salesman saw the apparition.
A car came rushing past me out of the fog. It didn’t have its headlights on, so it seemed to materialize out of nowhere and then disappeared just as fast. My heart clenched up before it began forcing blood back through my circulatory system.
Think, I told myself. Try to remember.
I felt a sudden need to hash over these mysteries with Charley. On my own, I seemed to be getting nowhere. At the very least, I needed to stop telling myself ghost stories.
Bracing the steering wheel, I reached into my pocket for the mobile phone. I tapped in the old pilot’s number. It took me half a minute of utter silence to realize the cell was dead. Maybe the battery had gotten soaked while lying in the mud. For some reason, it reminded me of my visit with Erland Jefferts. Had he mentioned something significant about a mobile phone?
Or maybe I was misinterpreting the message that was trying to push its way through from my subconscious. Someone had used a nearby pay phone to report the deer/car collision. The identity of the unknown caller seemed to be the key to all this.
The man who had reported the crash had called from outside Smitty’s Garage, two miles down the road. I restarted my engine and pulled carefully back onto the pavement, headed south.
The garage was a drab little building assembled out of cinder blocks, asphalt shingles, and broken windows. Across the road, a lane led down to the fishermen’s wharf. Two antique gasoline pumps stood ready out front, but their tanks had run dry ages ago, back when gas sold for less than a dollar a gallon. The garage had been out of business for years, and the fading sign above the bays was the last remaining legacy of the late Mr. Smith.
For some reason, the local phone company kept a pay phone in operation here. It was just a hooded metal box bolted to the cinder blocks. Vandals had stolen the phone book—its snapped chain dangled to earth—but the phone itself was functional. I lifted the receiver to my ear and heard that distinctive hum a disconnected line makes. Seven nights ago, a man had used this phone to call the Knox County Dispatch to report a deer/car collision.
What had he been doing here? Smitty’s was pretty close to the end of the road, which suggested that the caller might live somewhere between the garage and the tip of the peninsula. At the very least, he must have known of the phone’s existence; this dark crossroads wasn’t a place you happened by.
Because of the mist, I could only see a short distance, but the briny smell of the sea was pungent here. The turnoff to the commercial fishing wharf beckoned from across the road. I decided to take a drive down to the water.
* * *
It was March, and with the exception of two fishing boats floating in the harbor, the local fleet was still in dry dock. At the edge of the parking lot, I passed the hulking shapes of lobsterboats balanced on cradles. Most were still cloaked against the elements in tight casings of white shrink-wrap. The sight of these ghost boats recalled the pale sheets the movers had thrown over the furniture in the Westergaard house.
The fishing wharf consisted of a steep boat launch beside a dock that teetered on piers above frigid gray waters. A shingled warehouse sat atop the pilings, which were slathered with black tar to keep marine worms from chewing through the wood. Towers of yellow-and-green lobster traps were arranged along the wharf, waiting to be returned to the bottom of the Mussel Shoals channel. On
the far side of the dock was the lobster pound: a fenced-in rectangle of the cove where the fishermen dumped their daily catch. Lobsters could be kept alive in that saltwater corral for weeks before being hauled up for shipment.
The parking lot was empty of vehicles, but there was a glow in the upstairs window of the fisherman’s co-op. I pulled up to the garage door and got out. The smell hit me at once. Even after the long winter, the lobster traps stank of rotten bait.
I peered around me into the mist. The air was damp and very still. I could hear the waves slapping against the pilings and, in the distance, the repeated moans of a foghorn out in the channel.
I wandered over to the lobster pound’s gate. The enclosed area was about an acre in size and fenced against predators. At night, lobsters will creep into the shallows, where scavengers can pick them off one by one. Raccoons will crack open their shells to get at the green tomalley, leaving all that precious meat to waste. Many lobstermen topped their fences with razor wire and used dogs to scare away the little bandits.
But of course the wiliest predator is man. I knew of thefts along the Down East coast where robbers arrived in the night to steal thousands of dollars’ worth of lobsters from these pounds. In almost every case, the heist was an inside job.
I slid my left hand into my pocket to feel the reassurance of my pistol and glanced over my shoulder at the warehouse. The entire wharf seemed abandoned, but a sallow light burned in one window. I crossed to the building and tried the door. It was locked. I pounded on the wood with my fist, but there was no answer.
Smell is the sense closest to memory. The stench of decomposing herring sent me time traveling; I remembered my days as a lobsterboat sternman, stuffing mesh bags with alewives, trying not to vomit. That was the summer Erland Jefferts had abducted and tortured Nikki Donnatelli. Jefferts had been a sternman, too.
There were two lobsterboats riding at anchor in the harbor. My eyes had flitted over the blurry names painted on the transoms when I’d arrived. Now I squinted to read them. The first boat was the Hester. The second, farther out, was the Glory B—the very same boat Erland Jefferts had been been working on the summer Nikki Donnatelli was murdered.
38
Back at the pay phone outside Smitty’s Garage, I dialed information and asked for the number of Arthur Banks in Seal Cove. It was common knowledge around town that he was the owner of the Glory B. A computerized voice asked if I wanted to be connected directly with the Banks residence. Needless to say, I did.
A woman answered. The warble in her voice told me she was elderly. “Hello?”
“Is this Mrs. Banks?”
“Ye-es?”
“This is Mike Bowditch with the Maine Warden Service. May I speak with your husband, please?”
She paused, as if waiting for me to continue. “Arthur passed away last fall.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” I usually read the obituaries in the local paper, but I had been so preoccupied by my father’s misdeeds over the autumn that I had missed a great many things during those months. “Maybe you can help me. Do you know who owns your husband’s old lobsterboat?”
“The Glory B? Why, Arthur left it to my nephew, Stanley.”
“Stanley Snow?”
“Ye-es.”
What were the odds the Westergaard’s caretaker would now own Jefferts’s old boat? Here was the connection I’d been searching for; I just needed to understand what it meant. “Mrs. Banks, what can you tell me about Erland Jefferts?”
When she spoke again, it was with audible caution. Jefferts’s name had that effect on a lot of the local people. “He just worked on Arthur’s boat that one year.”
“At the same time as your nephew?”
“The two boys were friends when they were little. Stanley’s mother is a Bates. He and Erland are second cousins.”
“They were friends,” I repeated quickly.
She must have sensed that my interest had unhappy implications for her nephew. “That was a long time ago! Stanley was just a boy.” The receiver seemed to be shaking now in her grip. “Excuse me. I have tea boiling.”
Before I could wish her good night, the phone clicked and went dead.
I pumped my last quarters into the slot. I keyed in Detective Menario’s cell-phone number and waited. My call went straight to voice mail.
“This is Bowditch,” I said. “I’m calling from that pay phone on Parker Point. I think Stanley Snow was the anonymous caller who reported Ashley Kim’s accident. He owns a lobsterboat at the fisherman’s co-op here. And he met with the Driskos at the Harpoon Bar before they died in that fire. Erland Jefferts is his cousin. They both worked on the same lobsterboat. There are way too many connections here for this to be a coincidence. You need to find Stanley Snow.”
I kept rambling until the last of my change ran out.
* * *
I didn’t trust Menario. It was easy to imagine him receiving my message and hanging up without even listening to it. In his mind, I was the man who cried wolf.
The tide was dropping in the harbor. I could smell seaweed through the gathering mist as the receding ocean exposed slimy beds of dulce and kelp. On nights like this, the Vikings had believed that trolls crawled out of the sea to steal babies from cradles.
The fact that Jefferts and Snow were distantly related was no great shock; Erland had cousins all over Seal Cove. Most of them, however, had come to his defense before and after the trial. When looking through Ozzie Bell’s box of files, I’d read letters and petitions signed by dozens of family members. But not once had I encountered the name Stanley Snow in those documents.
Why?
I needed to call Charley. He was the only person I trusted to act upon the evidence I’d unearthed. With luck, he could persuade some of the higher-ups in the state police to put out an all-points bulletin for Stanley Snow. I tried my cell phone again, but it was still short-circuited.
I began pawing around inside my Jeep, looking for coins. I found a handful of useless pennies in the cup holder—not enough change to make another call.
Erland Jefferts came wandering into my head, unbidden. I remembered that Arthur Banks had signed the J-Team’s letter to the attorney general asking for a new trial. Half the town had. So why hadn’t Erland’s cousin and boyhood friend, Stanley Snow?
In the back of the Jeep, I found Ozzie’s forgotten files. I switched on the rear cargo light and began paging through the overstuffed folders. My fingers stopped on a document I’d only skimmed the previous week.
It was an inventory of items the state police had removed from Jefferts’s person and his truck on the morning he was arrested. The list went on for pages: a Swiss army knife with a broken saw blade; a green plastic trash bag; an unopened pack of Camel cigarettes, slightly crushed; a single twenty-dollar bill; four quarters, two dimes, and fifty-seven pennies; a pair of sunglasses tucked above the visor; a permanent black marker; a tangle of polypropylene rope; an empty pint of Allen’s Coffee Brandy; a sawed-off baseball bat; a single Magnum condom in its wrapper; needle-nose pliers; a crushed ATM receipt showing a balance of $168 in his checking account; six Bud Light bottle caps and an empty bottle; and, of course, one roll of rigging tape.
Something was missing.
I needed to speak with Charley. He had the clout to mobilize a search for Stanley Snow. The word of a legendary game warden still carried some weight in Maine. And maybe my friend could help me understand what it was in this box that I was failing to see.
I closed the cargo hatch, slid behind the wheel of the Jeep, and sped off for home.
* * *
When I pulled up to my front door, I noticed that my patrol truck was the only vehicle in the yard. At first, it puzzled me that Sarah wasn’t home; then I remembered her mentioning something about parent-teacher conferences. I glanced at my dashboard clock and saw that it was just past five. She would go ballistic when she learned about my day. I still needed to set up an appointment with the Warden Service’s psychologist, I re
alized. It was the least I could do.
I had some trouble with my keys at the door: I dropped them once, trying to get the right one into the lock, then dropped them again. Inside, the house was cold and dim. The birch logs in the woodstove had burned away to ashes, and a draft had discovered some previously unidentified crack in the cedar shingles. The faint odor of bad fish told me that the trash can in the kitchen needed to be emptied. The sensation of returning to an empty house made me think of the weeks after Sarah had moved out. These days, I often ended my patrols with a feeling of déjà vu.
Awkwardly, I slid my coat off and hung it on a hook by the door.
I heard the floorboards creak and was just turning my head when a sharp pain exploded along my right biceps. I fell back against the wall, aware that I was being assaulted but unable to do more than raise my splinted hand against my attacker. The metal crowbar came down hard on my forearm. I howled in agony and kicked out with my legs, but the intruder leaped back.
I was left to squirm there for a moment, blinded by tears, before my assailant tapped me, almost delicately, on the forehead with a steel club. There was an instant of achingly hot light—like a flashbulb going off at point-blank range—and then I ceased to see.
* * *
I came to as my attacker was slinging my limp body onto the sofa. Whoever it was must have torn the splint off my wrist, because my first sight was of my own corpse-colored hand. My eyes were watery and had trouble focusing.
For a moment, I didn’t know where I was or what had happened. I was as disoriented as a surgery patient emerging from anesthetic. If a voice had whispered that I’d been in a car crash, I would have believed it.
I felt a boot kicking my shins and then heard a high-pitched voice say, “Sit up.”
As I did, a weight shifted inside my head like a bocce ball rolling around inside my cranium. Something was standing over me. At first, it was just a shadow. Then, as my pupils began to function once more, the shadow became a man.
He was a tall, balding man with darting eyes. He had bulbous cheekbones and a jutting jaw. He was wearing a dark peacoat, oil-stained work pants, and heavy rubber boots. In one gloved hand, he held a crowbar. In the other, he clutched a rectangular bottle of amber liquid, which he thrust into my face.