by Mike Bond
So I’d been the last email she’d ever sent.
The cops knew this too.
And they’d pored through all the public camera records, including all the gas stations, banks and other videoed locations. Neither Abigail nor the white Saab was on any of them. But I was still free as a bird. In a cage.
Three times I’d walked every street in Hallowell and twice in Augusta, checking every driveway and trying to peer into every garage, looking for her angelic face in every department store and fast food joint, seeking the Saab in gas stations and parking lots, never seeing it, as if it’d never existed, nor she.
I’d begun to fear she was dead.
Therefore it was only a matter of time before they pulled me in.
Horrendous as that was, I cared much more about what had happened to her than what was coming at me.
MILDRED PIERCE was a bit like I’d envisioned, gray-haired and rotund, soft-voiced and grandmotherly with oval glasses, a small gold crucifix between ample breasts, a thin wedding ring and tiny diamond on a pudgy finger, freckles on the backs of her hands, sharp blue eyes and a careful smile.
06:55 and the Capitol cafeteria was mobbed, people buying coffee and pastries to go, cups of yogurt, shiny apples and all the other accoutrements of modern gastronomy. We took a table to one side but with all the clatter of trays and voices it was hard to hear.
“Still no news?” she said.
I was still shivering from the drive from Erica’s in Portland and the time at Abigail’s. “None.”
“I’ve decided to talk to you,” she leaned forward, “because there’s more to this than just Abigail. But I have concerns.”
“Like?”
“My husband works for the State Highway Department. If you reveal what I tell you, he loses his job.”
I squeezed her hand. “Understood.”
“Good.” She squeezed me back. “Abigail’s disappearance is tied to other issues.”
“Like?”
“I’ve worked in Maine government ever since I graduated Westbrook College way back in ‘72. Started as a secretary for Representative Rosenthal, a wonderful man who cared deeply about Maine. When he retired I worked for several different senators and reps…” she looked at me intently “… and every single one of them worked their hearts out for Maine.”
“What’s this got to do with Abigail?”
“The Legislature’s not like that now. It’s all out-of-state money, bribery, cash under the table…” She flattened her hands on the tabletop. “It’s unbelievable how Big Wind has taken over Maine.”
“They took over Hawaii too, till the people fought back. But as long as there’s federal subsidies the Wind Mafia will never give up.”
“Here in Maine they’re almost untouchable. They’ve bought both US Senators, the State Demo leadership, most Dem Legislators and even some Republicans.”
“I grew up in a moderately lefty household, so I assumed Dems were more moral about taking bribes than Republicans. But in reality they all are crooks.”
“They have to be. Or they wouldn’t get the corporate money that gets them elected. And then tells them exactly what to do.” She wiped her glasses with a napkin and put them back on.
“You’d be shocked,” she said, “to see how the top Democratic Senators dominate the Committee chairs. They come into Committee meetings and tell everyone how to vote. New Legislators are told if they don’t vote pro-wind, the leadership will run someone in the next primary against them, make sure they’re defeated.
“One new Legislator came on the Energy Committee and I had hopes for him,” she went on, “because he hadn’t been part of the bunch that created the Wind Law. And he was asking smart questions, poking holes in the wind lobby. So the top Dems took him aside and straightened him out. After that a lobbyist from one of the wind contractors came into the chambers for every vote and stood staring at him, making sure he’d vote the right way.”
“I don’t need to hear this.” Not anymore.
“Once someone asked a Dem Legislator from Portland how she was going to vote on a wind-related bill, and she said, Just a minute, I have to call my wind lobbyist. This was the same woman who said on TV that wind turbines in Maine would cut coal-fired greenhouse gas emissions in the Midwest. But that’s ridiculous because there’s no connective grid between Maine and the Midwest. So wind projects in Maine could never have any effect on the Midwest. Even worse, Maine wind projects sell carbon credits to Midwest coal-fired utilities so they can pollute more…”
“I haven’t yet found the recipe for honest government.”
She patted my hand, a teacher with a moderately good student. “This breaks my heart, that they’d do this to Maine. And to know when you die that you were instrumental in destroying one of the most beautiful places on earth? To take that to your grave?”
I couldn’t speak. About the earth’s annihilation and how humans lie about it. It had wrenched my heart so long I couldn’t stand it anymore. “So what’s this got to do with Abigail?”
She leaned forward, chubby forearms trembling the table. “Pono, have you listened to a single thing I’ve said?”
I thought about it. “The wind industry has paid millions to buy Maine, they’re going to make billions, and they’re not going to let anyone get in their way?”
She clasped her hands. “And?”
“How did Abigail get in the way?” It froze my heart to think it. “Yeah,” I said sadly. “I can answer that.”
“I’m afraid,” Mildred said, “she knew who killed her husband.”
“And that would be reason,” I made myself say, “for them to kill her too?”
“Look at it this way,” she said. “Central Maine Power is actually owned by Iberdrola, the Spanish wind developer that helped bankrupt Spain with windmills. Iberdrola is the largest corporate welfare recipient of US taxpayer subsidies – over two billion dollars. Its largest investor is a group of oil sheiks in Qatar, that desert dictatorship whose two main exports are oil and the funding of Islamic terrorism. So every time Central Maine Power raises rates, some of those millions out of our pockets end up in Qatar, and maybe even help shoot down a passenger plane or blow up a school bus – who’s to know?”
Sell Your Body Parts Here
IWAS EVEN MORE WORRIED about Abigail after talking with Mildred. One moment I’d reassure myself she was fine, just shacked up somewhere, then I’d realize how wrong this was, that she wouldn’t naturally go missing like this.
If something had happened to her, why? The question made me so sick I wanted to run down to the cop shop again, but that would just piss them off.
So what could I do?
If something had happened to her she was either dead or kidnapped. She was tough, no one could easily take her down. If she was dead and buried somewhere?
Mitchell could not trace her phone. She’d not showed at work or home. The Saab had vanished. I called Mildred at the Senator’s office three times that afternoon but there was never a trace of Abigail.
I kept coming back to the question if she’s dead? After I got over the horror of imagining it I tried to figure why someone would do it. What was she hiding? What did she know?
Was it because she was meeting me, and that I knew about her and Bucky? About her husband’s change of heart? Was that it?
Had I caused her death? If she was dead?
If she was dead. I will not think like this, I told myself. But what if it’s true? Or what if I could be saving her, if I only could figure out how?
Who’d hurt someone like Abigail?
The same ones who killed her husband?
In twenty-six days I was leaving for Tahiti.
How could I when Abigail was missing?
“THIS STINKS,” Mitchell said.
“You nut.” I checked my phone, always a perilous process when driving the 150. “What the fuck time is it out there?”
“03:22. Your fault, you bastard. I can’t sleep.”
&n
bsp; “What stinks?”
“I’m still digging into Legislators’ private accounts. It’s not a pretty story. I’ll tell you when I get it figured out.”
“In the meantime, you learn anything from my snowmobiler list?”
“You got fifty-one names. Most are couples. Thirty-one are vets – twenty-eight guys and three women. Only five, all guys, would seem to meet your shooter’s profile, assuming it was a he, and in shape, somebody hard core.”
“Yeah?”
“Anyway I sent the whole list to Lexie. Most have bios and pix. You and her can figure it out.”
I explained him what I’d learned from Mildred Pierce.
“That’s fucking nauseating,” he said. “Like in India, all over the third world. You’ve got two kidneys, so a body parts broker will buy one for a few hundred bucks, sell it for thousands in London or New York. You get get paid enough to survive for another year or two in whatever overpopulated impoverished autocracy you inhabit, and the broker gets rich.”
“Just what the Wind Mafia’s doing, selling off Maine’s body parts. And making billions on it.”
“Gets you in the guts, don’t it?”
WHEN I FINALLY get to Lexie’s after the night with Erica and the morning at Abigail’s empty house and the meeting with Mildred and my chat with Mitchell on the way home, Officer Trask is sitting in the driveway in his battle wagon with the engine running. It was maybe 15 below but Lexie hadn’t invited him in. He slid down the driver window as I walked past. “Where,” he sniffles, “were you last night?”
“In Portland. Why?” I suddenly feared the worst, they’d found Abigail’s body.
“Over at Paradise Lakes somebody shot out four turbines.”
“Fantastic!” I raised a clenched fist.
“We think it was you.”
“I was in bed all night with a beautiful woman. But I didn’t get much sleep, so if you’ll excuse me –”
“Not so fast. You have corboration?”
I wasn’t sure if he’d said carburation or corporation. “That truck has carburation,” I pointed to Bucky’s 150, “it’s much better than the fuel injection in this pig of yours.” I knew I shouldn’t taunt him but kept going, “and no, I’m not a corporation.”
He smiled. His teeth weren’t great. “You got somebody to corborate your story, is what I said.”
I pulled out my phone and hit Erica’s cell. It went to voice mail. I hit it again.
“Think fast,” Trask said.
Motion on my perimeter caught my eye. It was Max, methodically going from one tire of Trask’s battle wagon to the next giving each a good spray.
Trying not to grin I punched in Erica’s office number. “Ms. Tillson is in conference,” the sonorous lady said.
“Please, I have to talk to her, it’s personal. Essential. Just for a moment…”
“It’s a very important conference.”
“This’s even more important.”
Moments later Erica came on, at about two thousand volts. “I’ll kill you!”
“Officer Trask of the Freedom Police needs to know where I was last night. Apparently people’ve been shooting out more turbines.”
“Put him on!”
She must have been somewhere private because when he took the phone you could hear her voice ten feet away. “Mr. Hawkins was with me,” she said. “He fucked me all night so I’m sure he was there.”
When he handed me back my phone he was blushing. Or maybe it was just the north wind.
As he backed down the drive I knelt to to scratch Max under the chin. And I swear he smiled.
“What’d Trask want?” Lexie said when I got in the door, as if he were an inferior form of ferret. And she had that fierce look she gets every time I spend a night with another woman. So I explained her about the Paradise Lakes turbines.
“Good,” she says. “Maybe soon they’ll all be gone.”
“Interesting to know if they can find a bullet.”
Her eyebrows raised. “And match it?”
IT’S A 20-MILE DRIVE from Lexie’s farm to Paradise Lakes. All the way, through farm fields and forest, all you can see are rows and rows of ugly turbines like satanic three-bladed crucifixes blocking off the sky. And once again it amazed me at the scurviness of American politics, that a governor can set up a multi-billion scam while in office, then make millions on it when he leaves, then use that to buy himself a US Senate seat. Oh, and see to it that his son gets a big job in the wind business.
It must be nice to own the government.
Today was an average wind day so none of the turbines were turning. I took the access road to the top of the first ridge, and from there looked across thousands of acres of turbines, clearcuts, roads, blasted rock and mud where just three years ago had been limitless forest and its myriad creatures. And atop it now these diabolical towers as if they have taken over our world.
I followed the ridge between the rows of towers to the blasted and bulldozed far end looking out over the lakes, and lo, there were trucks and hard hats and a police SUV and all sorts of activity going on.
“Who are you?” a guy in a yellow hard hat says when I pull up.
“I heard there was an accident or something? Some turbines down?”
“What’s that matter to you?”
“I’m looking for work, wondered if maybe –”
“No jobs here. Beat it.”
Just then the door at the bottom of one tower opens and three guys come out, one with an attaché case. “You get one?” somebody calls.
“Got two. But they’re no good,” attaché case says.
“How come?” I ask, innocently, as if I belong there.
“All smashed up,” attaché case says. “Can’t use them.”
Yellow hard hat looks me over. “Outta here.”
“I can run a chainsaw, a backhoe, you name it. You sure there ain’t work?”
“You local guys should know by now, it’s all out-of-state workers on wind projects.”
SOME OF THE SNOW had blown off the road when we drove to Warren for visitors’ hour. I waited in a glass and wire room looking at a tattered Car and Driver while Lexie argued with someone in the warden’s office.
She came out with a fierce look. “Let’s go!”
“What the Hell? We came to see Bucky!”
She turned on me tartly. “He’s not seeing visitors.”
Rage flamed through me. “The Hell he’s not!”
She tugged my arm. “They can’t make him. He has the right to refuse.”
My fingers itched to reach through concrete walls and steel bars and strangle him. “I’ll kill him.”
She gave me a worried glance. “Don’t say that in here.”
We walked out into the cold. Fuck you, Bucky, I said silently. I’m crossing you off my list.
BACK AT LEXIE’S I called Lobo into the den and made her sniff Bucky’s guns. She wagged her tail and looked at me curiously – Why are we doing this? I already know what they smell like.
“This’s what we’re looking for,” I explained her.
Her ears peaked, eyes bright. We went outside. The thermometer said minus 17 but the sun felt good. Lobo dashed ahead doing pirouettes in the snow, barking and running back to me – Come on, you’re so slow!
There was a good wind but the turbines weren’t turning. The male eagle was circling high above the turbine that had killed his mate, his white head gleaming in afternoon sun.
We hiked up the ridge then along it, Lobo sniffing the snow and galloping back, till we got closer to the turbines Bucky’d shot out, and as before Lobo sat in the snow and would go no further.
I crossed the top and down the other side and called her. After a minute she showed, ears back, tail between his legs. “The turbines aren’t running,” I said. “You’ll be okay.”
We went down to where Bucky’d hid the .308 and spent the whole afternoon doing wider and wider sweeps, but Lobo never found the scent of Bucky’s gun. It
had probably been a waste of time but I’d had to make sure. One by one to knock off options, narrow down the search. And options didn’t always turn up positive.
WHEN SOMEONE TRIES TO KILL YOU, you can run away and hope they won’t find you. Or you can circle back on them and make sure it doesn’t happen again.
So there’s really no choice.
After midnight I gave up trying to sleep, got dressed, grabbed Bucky’s .243 and drove from Lexie’s to the snowmobile trail beyond Jane’s.
The trail’s crust was hard packed and crunchy underfoot. The night air stung my nostrils. The ghoulish flickering strobes of the turbine towers bloodied the snow.
A quick hour’s trek took me to the ridge above the Missalonkee Hard Riders clubhouse. I crouched in a spruce thicket and watched it a while then dropped down to the clubhouse, popped open a back window and squeezed through.
Inside was cold as outside and stank of cigarettes and old beer. Moving forward I banged my knee on something that hurt like hell. I flicked on my headlamp. It was the damn bathtub. It was full of empty beer cans and empty five-pound plastic ice bags.
Now I understood. During meetings they’d fill the tub with Coors Lite. Not a tantalizing thought.
Trying not to bang into anything else and keeping the headlamp hooded I checked out the place. A long desk down the front of the room with metal folding chairs behind it. A bunch of plastic picnic tables with four metal chairs each. Two pool tables in one corner, a rack of cues on the wall. A trails map on the opposite wall above a wide riverstone fireplace that smelled of dead ashes and beer, and down which a frigid wind descended from the open chimney. There was a white industrial sink at one end with a shut-off cold water faucet, two ancient Admiral refrigerators beside it with their doors hanging open.
A fat-bellied woodstove crouched like a toad against the back wall, a 2015 Maine Heating Oil calendar with a photo of a large-breasted woman pinned to the pine slab wall behind it. Circled in red was February 18, 6 pm till ??? was Feb Members Mtg. I tried to remember today’s date; yes, the meeting was tomorrow night.
And in a drawer under the long desk a members’ list. And next to each name an address, phone, and the license number of their machine.