KILLING MAINE

by Mike Bond

  I stood on Water Street’s uneven brick sidewalk, breath freezing to my face. No matter what I’d done to piss Abigail off I needed to talk to her. To know why she wouldn’t tell the cops Bucky’d been with her that night. And why Bucky wouldn’t implicate her, even to avoid life in jail.

  It made no sense. Life rarely does. I called her.

  Her phone went to voicemail. I drove up the hill. Her lights were off.

  I knocked on her front door. No answer. Went around to the back and called up to her bedroom. No answer. Looked through the barn window: the white Saab wasn’t there.

  A window lit up next door, a woman’s round pink face peering out at me, brown curlers and a plaited pink bathrobe.

  I sat in the truck trying to figure it out. Called her every five minutes. No answer.

  She had walked out of Slates about 19:30. It was now 20:40.

  The likely thing was she’d met some guy, gone to his place, had shut off her phone and was having fun. Or saw it was my number and didn’t answer.

  If I went to the cops she’d think I was jealous.

  I felt weird and alone, hadn’t realized how much I enjoyed being with her. How much I liked her sharp savage mind. And needed her to fill in the picture of her and Bucky, her husband and whoever killed him.

  When I got back to the farm Lexie’s lights were out and the bunkhouse was frigid. I lay there waiting for the bed to get warm, strangely missing Abigail, sick and tired of it all.

  AT 06:17 I parked the truck down the street from Abigail’s, hoping she’d come home. The Saab was still gone. Her phone still didn’t answer. By 09:00 she still hadn’t appeared.

  I was freezing. I phoned her again. “The number you are calling,” a nice lady said, “is no longer in operation.”

  I was starting to get weird fears, seeing her lovely chiseled face, hearing her exciting hushed voice, feeling her lovely litheness and silken flesh in my arms. The taste of her breath.

  I’d done something wrong but didn’t know what.

  ABIGAIL’S ALWAYS ON TIME,” a lady named Mildred in the Senator’s office said. “Even in flu season she never misses work.”

  “But she hasn’t come in this morning?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Can you check her calendar, see if she noted something, yesterday or today?”

  “You’re her friend, you say?” She was distant, reserved. “Excuse me, I have another call –”

  “I’m worried about her! She’s vanished!”

  She came back on the line. “Tell me your name again?”

  “Hawkins. She and I were at Slates last night; she stepped out for a minute and never came back.”

  “Pono Hawkins? Her calendar says she was meeting you at Slates last night. Seven o’clock.”

  “What’s she supposed to be doing today?”

  A clicking of pen on teeth while she scanned the calendar. “Meeting with the Senator 9:10, the Energy Committee 10:30 – all day meetings and things to do. She’s amazing, Abigail, what she gets done in a day.”

  “YOU GOT QUITE A SHEET,” the paunchy moon-faced Augusta cop said. It was 11:35 and I’d finally gone to the cop shop and this guy was at the desk, “C. Hart” on his nameplate. Of course the first thing when I’m telling him about Abigail he pulls up my record, see who he’s dealing with. Cops can smell prison meat a mile away.

  “All my sentences got vacated,” I says. “I was cleared.”

  A sarcastic nod. “Good lawyer? A nice envelope of cash somewhere?” He reached out as if to grab my lapel, caught himself. “In Maine we don’t do that, mister. Once we get you–” he gave me that mealy-mouthed smile, “we keep you.”

  “The charges were wrong,” I tried to explain. “I didn’t do nothing.”

  “Yeah, you guys never do. I don’t know why we bust our asses, risk our lives, chasing you assholes down, and then you get off on some technicality. Me, I’d like to shoot all the lawyers. Shoot you all.” He looked at me steadily. “A dead man don’t commit another crime.”

  “She’s been missing since last night. We were at Slates and she went outside for a moment, never came back. Never went home, isn’t at the office today.”

  “What, you have a fight?”

  “No we didn’t have a fight.”

  “Maybe she’s sick?”

  “I’m asking you to check her house, see what you can find.”

  He rubbed his bristles. “We’ll get there.”

  “When?”

  “When we can.”

  I glanced around the cop shop. Two cops on computers, two others drinking coffee and looking out the window. “What,” I said, “it’s too cold for you guys out there?”

  He looked at me grimly. “You’re a wiseass are you? See where it gets you.”

  I went outside and called Abigail’s office. She still hadn’t come in, Mildred said. “Can you have the Senator call the cops,” I said, “see if he can get them to do something?”

  “We’ll try,” Mildred said.

  Not knowing what else to do I drove back and parked in front of Abigail’s house, begging her to come home.

  NOON IN MAINE was 07:00 in Hawaii, and Mitchell was drinking coffee with Stolichnaya and destroying Islamic websites when I called. “Can you take a break?” I said.

  “It’s already 78 degrees, sun gleaming on the blue ocean. Thank God you’re not here.”

  I told him about Abigail. “People don’t usually drop routines like that,” he said. “You check the hospitals?”

  “Nobody’s seen her.”

  “She liked to fuck new guys, you said.”

  “Loved it. How I got near her.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “I’m really getting worried, Mitchell. Cops don’t give a shit. Her phone says it’s no longer in service. Can you check it, see who she’s been calling?”

  “Yeah, and I can tell you within a yard of where she is.”

  I felt suddenly hopeful. “That would be fantastic.”

  “Call you back,” he said, and was gone.

  I imagined him in his basement “IT Palace” rolling his wheelchair silently across the carpet from screen to screen, checking, watching, figuring how our enemies think and work. And how to stop them.

  A police cruiser turned the corner and stopped at Abigail’s house. A chubby cop got out and knocked on the front door. After a while he went around back, checking windows, peered into the garage. I could have told him her white Saab wasn’t there.

  He sat in the cruiser talking on the radio. As he drove past he gave me a hard look. Highway to Hell rang on my phone so I grabbed it.

  “Her phone’s not working,” Mitchell said.

  “What do you mean not working?”

  “Somebody took the battery out, disconnected everything or ran over it with a semi.”

  “What about her calls?”

  “Last one was from you, yesterday, 15:47.”

  “That’s when I asked her to meet up at Slates. I wanted to hear what she was going to say about Bucky.”

  “Bucky’s a prick but I can’t see him banging other women.”

  “Everybody fucks everybody these days; the uptight ones just pretend they don’t.”

  “Anyway, been no calls in or out on her phone since then.”

  “I left her tons of messages! Is there a history on the GPS? So you can tell where she’s been?”

  “I can’t find it. Somehow it got smashed up too.”

  I hung up, found a gear the truck was willing to use, and rattled down the Hallowell hill and upriver to the Augusta cop shop.

  “So maybe she shut her phone off.” It was the same cop, C. Hart, lethargic and hostile as before. “People do that, case you didn’t know.”

  “I told you, her phone’s been destroyed.”

  “How you know?”

  “I got a buddy works for Verizon, he checked it out.” The cop took out a pencil. “What’s his name and number?”

  “Can’t tell yo
u. He’s afraid to lose his job.”

  “You can’t tell me where you’re getting this story and you want me to believe it?”

  “Look, she works for Senator Coleman, never misses a day, never late.”

  “We looked her up,” he says expansively. “Her husband got himself killed, few weeks ago –”

  “I know.”

  He eyed me carefully. “So where were you last December 29?”

  I let out an exasperated sigh. “Home in Hawaii.”

  “That so?” He made a show of stacking papers. “And we’ve learned she has quite a night life, your Abigail.”

  “That’s her business.”

  “Yeah? Well, it makes us think she’s just shacked up somewhere,” he smiled, “screwing some new guy.”

  “She wouldn’t miss work. Nobody’s seen her! You guys need to get off your ass and find her.”

  He gave me that cop stare: I can mess you over any time I want and there’s nothing you can do about it.

  I shouldn’t have said what I said next. “If something happens to her and you could have stopped it, I’m coming after you.”

  He gave me the smile prison guards give you when five of them come into your cell to beat you up. “You know where to find us,” he said. “And don’t worry,” he added as I reached the door, “we’ll know where to find you.”

  I CALLED ERICA about tonight and got her in Atlanta on her way home. “Can’t,” she said, “working on a brief.”

  “No you’re not. I’m coming down to see you.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “You won’t believe the trouble I’m in.”

  “Nothing new about that. Sam, I gotta go…”

  “Abigail’s gone missing.”

  “Oh shit.” Erica sighed, listened while I told her. “Okay.”

  “Where?”

  “DiMillo’s? Six-thirty?” Nothing more, then, “I’m going to kill you, Sam.”

  “After we’ve made love ten thousand times, you can kill me then.”

  “Okay,” she laughed, “I’ll kill you then.”

  It was the first time since I’d come back to Maine I’d heard her laugh.

  HIGHWAY TO HELL on my phone. I grabbed it expecting Pa. But my heart plunged when I saw the display: Mildred Pierce, Senator Coleman’s PA. Abigail’s boss.

  “Still no word,” Mildred said. “We’re getting a little worried.”

  “What about Senator Coleman, can’t he get the cops to do something?” I said.

  “He’s too busy but we’re keeping him updated.”

  “Good for him.”

  “Pono?”

  “Yes?”

  “You were close to Abigail…”

  “She might not say so.”

  “We should talk.”

  This stunned me. “But she – ” I started to say and stopped.

  “Why not meet in the Capitol cafeteria,” Mildred said. “Do you know it?”

  I started to say that’s where I met Abigail but didn’t. “I know it.”

  “Seven tomorrow morning then?” When I didn’t answer right away, she added, “I think you’ll be happy you did.”

  DIMILLO’S IS A MAGICAL place, fabulous food in a gleaming restaurant on a ship moored at the downtown waterfront, surrounded by fishing boats, yachts and the blue waters of the port. In summer it’s lovely to sit on the top deck in the sun and chatter of seagulls and chug of tugs and ferries and the salty cool tang of the sea, with marvelous food and wine, and suddenly all the world makes sense.

  Though sitting outside in January is unwise, the inside restaurant has a luxurious air of softness, privacy and quiet, the smells from other tables delectable, with just a nod sometimes from the waves, subtle and seductive.

  Erica was certainly seductive though hardly subtle. “You have to stop messing with my life,” were her first words when she arrived twenty minutes late, tossing her black camel-hair coat over the other chair. “I’m too busy.”

  I got up and kissed her. Her lips were cold, her hands too. “What are you doing all this for, Erica?”

  She smirked. “Having dinner with you? God knows.”

  “No, why are you working so hard, by yourself? What are you trying to get from it?”

  She gave me a severe look, brushing her hair back over her collar. “You ask me again I’m leaving.”

  The waitress saved me. When she’d left I said, “I’m beginning to fear Abigail’s been kidnapped or something.”

  Erica gripped my fingers and I curled hers into my palms, warming them. “If something’s happened to her,” she looked at me, hard, “you are totally screwed.”

  “That’s how it seems.”

  “You have no alibi. According to witnesses you’re the last person she was with. She left angrily. You’ve shown excessive interest in her absence. Despite frigid weather you spent hours in that horrible truck watching for her. You set up a meeting with her under false premises in the Capitol cafeteria. You were seen in public together at The Liberal Cup and Slates, you have a known history of violence toward women –”

  “You know that’s a lie –”

  “That’s how the prosecutor will twist what you did in Afghanistan.”

  I sat back despairingly. Maybe I should just disappear. Right now, while I could, before the Maine cops got me. But do what? Go where?

  She gave me a fierce look. “You’re a sitting duck. And if something happens to her they’ll take you down.”

  “That has two meanings.”

  “I know.” She picked up the menu. “What are you having?”

  I finished my second martini, glanced through the window at the port, the tilted pilings and busy tugs, the cranes and ice-flecked water, and it seemed the universe was like that water, frozen and deadly. I’d been hungry but wasn’t now, ordered mechanically hoping I might want it when it came.

  “So it’s either accidental,” Erica said, “or perpetrated.”

  “What is?”

  “Abigail’s disappearance.” Erica looked at me gently. “Either way we have to find you an alibi.”

  How strange that days ago I’d been seeking an alibi for Bucky, and now I needed one. And Bucky was in jail. Would I soon be too? “If it’s perpetrated?”

  “Then they’ve got you, unless serious evidence says otherwise. They won’t look any further… And since you didn’t do it, someone else did. So here’s the easy part –”

  “What is?”

  “To save your ass, all you have to do is find who did do it. And prove it.” She killed her Allagash, licked her lips. “And somehow stay out of jail till you do.”

  North Wind

  IFOLLOWED ERICA’S 911 to her mansion on the Eastern Promenade. Bucky’s 150 looked definitely out of place in front of this two-mile string of sedate, elegant residences overlooking wide lawns, tall trees and island-studded Casco Bay.

  Erica owned a two-story stone and clapboard place from the 1870s, tall and stately in gray paint and white trim, a widow’s walk atop its gabled, slated roof.

  She lived upstairs and rented out downstairs. Her floor was all stone fireplaces, oak floors, Orientals, leather couches and wide windows on Casco Bay. There were two bedrooms, a big one with a king-size bed that got me imagining all the things she’d done on it, and making me want to go there right away, but I held my tongue.

  “This is a lovely place,” I said mindfully as I could.

  She sat on a couch arm, knees crossed under her long batik dress. “I’ve been thinking – since I got so mad at you for challenging me – that this place too is like the condo in St. Thomas and the tickets to Europe. Stuff I never allow myself to enjoy.”

  “That’s a shame.” I stood beside her brushing hair from her eyes. “Why work so hard?” I stopped. “Oh Jesus I said it again. You gonna throw me out?”

  “But maybe if I don’t work this hard,” she rubbed her cheek against the back of my hand, “there’ll be nothing. Can you imagine…”

  I kissed the t
op of her head inhaling all the lovely odors of her hair. “There will always be you. And you’re magnificent. Without even working at all.”

  She nuzzled me. “Maybe if I’m not working I’m nothing. Or everything’s going to cave in… I’ll lose it all.”

  “In twenty-five days, no matter what, I’m leaving for Tahiti.”

  She leaned back to look up at me. Tahiti?”

  “The Tsunami, an international surfing competition. Why don’t you come?”

  “Oh God,” she sighed. “I’ve got a court calendar nine months long. Not even a free day.”

  “Fuck all that.” I raised her up in my arms, kissed down her neck and around her ear, slid her dress above her waist and kissed down between her slender thighs. “Let’s make a plan… you’re going to dedicate more time to sex, and less to law. And to start with, I’m going to take away your briefs.”

  AT 05:00 I slid into my icy clothes. Erica nuzzled me goodbye. “To find the perp,” she said fuzzily, “all you have to do is swim upstream.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” I was a little cranky and needed coffee, and was facing a 60-mile subzero drive to meet with Mildred at the Capitol cafeteria in Augusta.

  “From the act to its source. Determine what they were trying to get by what they did. Then you’ll know who they are.”

  “Right,” I said exasperatedly, closing the door softly when I left.

  Since she and I had basically been up all night I started dozing at the wheel, the 150 wandering a bit, so I pulled off 295 and washed my face in snow. Falling asleep at the wheel is a horrible way to die.

  I STOPPED AT ABIGAIL’S on the way to the Capitol. No one there. She’s having a hot time with someone, I told myself, she’s too smart to get in trouble. Telling myself who would hurt her?

  First thing I’d looked for was her white Saab. It was nowhere to be seen in the area. And had not appeared, according to Mitchell, in any database since its last oil change three months ago. Looking at her Carfax service record it was clear how organized and conscientious this wild woman was.

  Her cellphone was still dead.

  Mail was piling up inside her door.

  According to Mitchell she’d had 217 emails in the last week but she had sent nothing since the last one to me, before we’d met at Slates.