KILLING MAINE

by Mike Bond

  “Abigail could’ve given him that, whatever it was. If it was proof.”

  “Would he have changed sides? Did you ever meet him?”

  “Several times. WindPower throws big parties every time they get another victory – when some town’s beaten down, forced to take the turbines, when WindPower kills some proposed regulation in the Legislature, or buys their way out of court… I’ve seen him there, also at the Senator’s Christmas party, he showed up with her.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Tall, gangly, big Adams apple, skinny head, balding slightly, kind of a geeky slope-shouldered stance. Never shaved close enough. Wore wide-lapelled suits from J.C. Penney but used to tear out the labels.”

  I looked at her amazed. “You should be a novelist, Mildred.”

  “And,” she laid chubby hands one atop the other on the table, “he had bad breath.”

  “God why’d she marry him?”

  “Abigail’s half crazy,” she said, and instantly came into my head that Leonard Cohen song about you know that she’s half crazy and that’s why you want to be there. “Or maybe we’re all crazy,” Mildred added, “and Abigail was the sane one.”

  I tried not to think about the was Mildred had just used. “Maybe she was giving Ronnie the truth about Big Wind so they both had to die.”

  “Abigail was a whistleblower. She cared about what was fair for Maine people and wasn’t afraid to stand up for it.” Mildred nodded, seeing Abigail in her memory. “She had courage, that girl. Lots of courage.”

  This made me feel no better. In war the most courageous are usually the first to die.

  “What could she have given her husband that was so dangerous?”

  “Dangerous? The book.”

  “The book.”

  “The little green book where the Senator kept a list of all his real funding. It went missing a few days before Ronnie Dalt was killed. We didn’t even know it existed till the Senator started interrogating us about it.”

  “Real funding?” I was getting excited now.

  “The under-the-table, one-million-max, per year. Money he has to pay back with pro-wind legislation, like Senator Alfond did. He has to get certain bills through and strangle others or the wind money shuts down.”

  “What’s in this book?”

  “You should’ve asked Abigail. I think she’s the one who took it.”

  Little Green Book

  SO I HAD TO BREAK INTO Abigail’s again in hopes of finding this little green book. In my imagination it had lined accounting pages where each sellout was listed, each exchange of cash for a piece of Maine. Where would she have put it? Or did she still have it, wherever she was?

  Or had somebody destroyed it?

  At 02:17 I parked the same three blocks above her house and hiked down the slippery chiaroscuro of frozen streets. The temperature had risen to ten below, with a keen north wind, the stars like shattered crystal between the tumbling clouds. I slipped into the spruce hedge behind her barn and waited twenty minutes to see if the cops showed. When they didn’t I crossed the snow-crinkly yard and tried to reach through the small window pane I’d broken last night and my hand clunked into new glass.

  I jumped back rubbing my knuckles, glanced up at the house grim, austere and empty as before. Yet someone had fixed the glass.

  This meant I should get out of here, squeeze back through the hedge, up to the truck and never return. But I wasn’t going to.

  I didn’t want to break the glass again. I tried the handle. It opened.

  That made me want to leave, fast.

  WANTING TO RUN, I stepped inside.

  A great wham made me dive for the floor smashing my ribs into a chair. I rolled to a crouch ready to fight but it was just the furnace coming on – I’d let in a blast of cold air and set it off.

  I stood massaging my ribs and swearing silently. Why was the back door unlocked?

  Who fixed the broken pane?

  I reached in my pocket for my penlight and it came out in pieces. Broken when I hit the chair.

  I crouched low, trying not to breathe, listening, waiting for the rib pain to subside, the words Leave right now thundering in my brain. Leave this instant.

  Instead I crossed the kitchen into a hallway then the dining room, oriental carpets soft and silent underfoot, the white damask on the mahogany table and the twelve mahogany chairs with their pale needlepoint cushions starkly visible in starlight through the ice-clad windows.

  Living room dim, couches, coffee tables, armchairs, bookcases, potted plants, more Orientals, a sense of abandonment. I headed up the stairs I’d climbed several times with Abigail barely two weeks ago, keeping to the silent edge of the oriental runner, halting to hold my breath and listen every few steps, tasting her absence.

  Only the sound of this ancient wooden home creaking in winter wind, the moaning trees, once a distant diesel pickup warbling its way along Water Street far below.

  Where would Abigail have put the green book? Most likely in her bedroom or her office beside it. Everything about Abigail was order and efficiency. Even when she made love. Where like all good deal-makers she extracted all she could get.

  God love her.

  Why was the back door unlocked?

  Who fixed the window?

  Why am I even trying this without a light?

  HER BEDROOM gave me a stab of sorrow, the bed where we’d had so much fun, the memory of her getting dressed in pale dawn, a winter nymph. A half-open oak dresser with underwear still fragrant of her, two bedside tables piled with books, too dark to read the titles. A dark-covered notebook.

  I took it to the window to see better. A green cover. But inside only music and lyrics.

  In her office I scrabbled in the desk drawers hoping for a flashlight. Found an old cell phone but it was dead. Pencils, pens, scissors, scotch tape, stapler, paper clips, markers – all exuding a faint memory of her. But no flashlight.

  Maybe in the bathroom there’d be a night light.

  No. Abigail seemed unafraid of everything, certainly didn’t fear the dark.

  Damn. I was going to have to turn on a light.

  No curtains on the windows. Abigail didn’t give a damn who saw her. “It was the first thing I did after Ronnie died,” she’d said. “Took down those hideous mauve curtains.”

  Who would see if I turned on a light? At 02:00? What about the next-door neighbor with the round pink face, curlers and plaited pink bathrobe? Would I wake her?

  Would she call 911?

  If she did would I have time to get out?

  This was crazy. Angrily I flipped on the bedroom light, did a quick recon of her books and papers finding nothing, inhaling the lusty scents of see-through nightgowns in her closet as I reached past them but there was no hiding place behind, looked under the bed, in the bathroom with its see-through shower we’d made love in one night.

  Everything was reminiscent of her but she was nowhere. I flicked off the bedroom light, checked through the window that no cops had arrived, and went into her office and turned on the light.

  Three walls of bookcases full of books. An old cherry double-sided desk, three computers, lots more books, three tennis rackets leaning against one corner, their handles taped and polished by wear, and two guitars on three-legged stands in another. The ancient desk was the kind they used to make in Maine, with a wide top and a set of drawers on each side, for two people to work on it facing each other. If I could look at Abigail right now. Please, to see the flickering moods shadow her face, her small sharp mouth, tall incised cheeks and violet eyes, the tumble of tawny hair over her lovely brow, biting her lips as she concentrates on something – even making love she does that and it makes you want her even more.

  No green book in any of the drawers. I quickly feel behind the books in the bookcase. Nothing there but an old Margaux bottle, empty. Then behind another shelf a Mason jar of weed. Nothing unusual about that – most Maine homes have a stash somewhere.

  Un
fortunately just then a gray Taurus with no roof lights pulls up out front. I hustle downstairs but already two cops are coming in the back and another at the front so I head back upstairs past the still-lit office up to the third floor and a creaky corridor of empty stale rooms, my footsteps hollow on old floorboards. In one naked room a square trapdoor in the ceiling just low enough that I can reach it leaping up one-handed. I pull myself up into a cold attic and reset the trapdoor just as a cop jangles up the stairway and starts checking the second floor rooms.

  My heart’s hammering so hard I can’t hear. I know I’m done. Finished. I wonder if they’ll shoot me and stick a drop gun in my hand, imagining one of them rolling the cartridges across my dead fingers, to show it was me loaded the gun.

  “Clear up here!” he calls. A voice answers below and he clunks down the stairs.

  I wait a half hour. No sound but this frozen old building creaking and moaning. The attic so achingly cold I can’t stop shivering. The joists and rafters lined with foil-backed fiberglass insulation glittering faintly in the light through the gable windows. I lift the trapdoor silently and slide through it, awkwardly trying to pull it down after me and it clatters loudly into place.

  I crouch there unmoving for ten minutes; no one comes. I slide along the corridor wall to the stairs. The light I turned on in the office below is off.

  Staying to the side of the stairs to avoid squeaking them I go down to the second floor. Somewhere outside a motor rumbles. I look out the window; the gray Taurus is gone and snow is falling in great thick flakes.

  Could they all be gone? Or are one or two still here, waiting?

  If they’re going to shoot you this is where it will be.

  If they’re here, where are they?

  THE OLD HOUSE shivered and creaked. Wind gnashed at the gable ends, rattled the windows and wailed away. It came to my mind unbidden, silence is the enemy, but I couldn’t figure why or how.

  If the cops were still here I just had to wait them out. The fact that I was cornered made it worse but I couldn’t change that. And if they were staking out the place how could I leave to get to the cop shop by nine?

  04:17. Sitting on the fourth step from the top I tugged Bucky’s coat tighter but it didn’t warm me. Beyond the windows the streetlit night was pale with flailing snow, the trees and houses gone, only this rabid wind circling this house like a demon trying to tear its way in.

  A creak on the stair one flight below. Another one two stairs closer. Somebody coming up fast.

  If I moved he’d hear me.

  Another creak below. Two of them.

  They’d stopped. Wind battered the windows; the house shook.

  For a long time they made no sound.

  04:48. Two hours to first light.

  I’ve known a lot of cops but none of them would be this good, to wait silently in a rattling old house for two chilled hours in the hopes of catching a malfeaser upstairs, when all you had to do is yank out your Glock, turn on the lights and nail him.

  No way I could now risk turning on a light. But earlier, who’d seen the office light and called the cops? The curlers lady lived on the other side, she could have only seen the window’s dim glow on the snow. Which implied an unusually high degree of watchfulness on a winter night.

  Or was it one of the two saltbox colonials across the street under huge old oaks? No, they were lower because of the down-sloping street, could have barely seen the lit window through the snowstorm.

  Maybe the unmarked Taurus just happened by on a routine patrol – but why? Crime doesn’t exist in Hallowell – except of course Ronnie’s murder and Abigail’s disappearance. And except for all the crimes perpetrated in the town’s fine restaurants by Maine’s cabal of legislators, lobbyists, lawyers, sham enviros, PR experts and all their other accomplices. But it’s always been like this, as Aesop says, we jail the petty crooks and elect the big crooks to high office…

  05:53. Snow completely blankets the windows, giving one a false sense of haven. On the streets outside the snowplows were grumbling like old bears, pushing everything aside, their chains clunking like great claws.

  It was too cold to sit any longer. Not a sound from below. I got up and walked downstairs like I lived there. Nobody. I told myself it had just been the Afghanistan memories that keep me up most nights. That’s all.

  So my choices now are do I try to get out while it’s still dark and the blizzard is hiding everything? Or wait for first light to search the rest of the house for this allegorical green book? My lizard brain said Let’s stay while my body wanted to run.

  So we stayed.

  Keeping an eye out windows for errant cop cars – not that I could see them through this hurricane of snow – I went down to the kitchen, found some Starbucks Italian Roast but couldn’t locate a grinder (did she take it with her?) so with a small cast iron frying pan I mashed the beans on the granite countertop, boiled water and dumped them in it, stirred it a bit and drank this delectable nectar slowly, letting it overwhelm my taste buds and warm my body all the way down to the toes.

  In the freezer were blueberry pancakes I put in the toaster and in the reefer maple syrup from a farm in Winthrop. I made lots more coffee and ate all the pancakes. They were whole wheat with wild blueberries and I was sure she’d made them. Then I chugged more syrup and licked the leftover off the plate, washed everything and put it away, licked then washed the syrup off my face and began searching the house.

  Nowhere in the kitchen, pantry, dining room cabinets or living room was a little green book. I even opened heat vents and checked ceilings for crawl spaces and behind the closets for false walls.

  This pissed me off. I feared for Abigail so badly that I found myself angry at her for disappearing, for not telling me the whole story so I could’ve helped her.

  For maybe being murdered.

  Again I searched the bedroom and office and the vacant third floor where I’d scrambled up the ceiling trapdoor to hide from the cop, but never was there anything hidden except two dead mice and a child’s pewter spoon which I left in situ, but no little green book.

  Was Mildred selling me a line?

  Why would she do that?

  INTO ABIGAIL’S CELLAR I go, flick on the ancient black wire lights at the top of the stairs, go down the cobwebbed wide old pine steps to a dirt-floored musty jumble of low-beamed rooms, one with an ancient pile of coal in a corner, another dominated by a black cast iron furnace and fuel tank, several pine-planked cubicles of broken furniture, old lumber, a rusty push mower, boxes of canning goods and other stuff, and mysteriously a venerable Old Town canvas canoe, and how they got it down those narrow crooked stairs I cannot imagine.

  But no green book. With the exception of the furnace nothing down here had been disturbed in years.

  It felt spooky in the cellar so I go up to her bedroom for one last search, thinking when she and I had so much fun there, and her absent proximity near drove me crazy as I tried to figure what to do next.

  It was 07:52 and I had to get out soon to be at the cop shop by nine. And if they knew I’d been here maybe they were just waiting to arrest me.

  Then I thought of the barn.

  The blizzard was slowing down. You could make out dim outlines of the two saltbox colonials across the street, and from the kitchen window see the pink-faced curler lady’s window. So I was going to have to cross the back courtyard in some visibility to get to the barn.

  Nonetheless I chanced it, having checked the house one last time that I’d left no trace except fewer pancakes in the freezer, shut the door behind me, unlocked as before, and stepped through a side door into the barn’s frigid tall dimness, its hand-hewed beams and tracks of early sky through broken siding where the wind hissed in.

  At the far end three beautiful old cars making my heart pound. A Hudson, maybe ’52, a lovely sleek Packard about ’48, an immaculate blue Studebaker Avanti with a blue leather interior. I wanted to touch them, caress their sleek fenders, raise their hoods
and stare lovingly at the engines, open their doors and sit inside them.

  I checked the garage all over, finding nothing, and returned to the house for a last look at the mail. The red-marked letter still wasn’t there. I bent down to leave the mail as I’d found it. And as I stood saw the little red pinhole over the door.

  I was on candid camera.

  And in twenty minutes I had to be at the cop shop.

  Corruption Rate of Return

  AT THE AUGUSTA COP SHOP they didn’t seem glad to see me. I wasn’t happy either, having spent most of the night hiding from them, and the remainder expecting them to grab me any instant. And there’d been the worry of the drop gun. A lousy way to die.

  And now they had me on candid camera.

  Hemingway was at the desk. No, he said, Officer Hart wasn’t in yet.

  I sat there wondering if it was better to tell them I’d been at Abigail’s rather than them seeing it on the camera shots the alarm company would have forwarded to them by now. I could say I was there because I’d seen the red-marked mail, but already Hemingway was chewing his moustache and checking furtively that I wasn’t armed, then with his foot set off a bell that rang elsewhere, and another cop sauntered in, this one in a flak jacket, and they were looking at me the way two cats look at a sparrow.

  Luckily, as one might put it, C. Hart arrived and nodded me into a back room with Hemingway. “You’re like a piece of shit I can’t dig out of my shoe,” Hart says amicably. “You keep showing up when I don’t want you.”

  I shouldn’t have said it but I did, “Maybe you should stop walking in shit. Or does that turn you on?”

  He gave me an amused look, said nothing.

  “This is crazy,” I snapped. “You guys aren’t even trying to find her.”

  “Her?”

  “Abigail, for Chrissake.”

  “Tell us again,” Hart says, “what you was doing the night she disappeared.”

  So I explained him all over again. He shook his head despondently, looked out the window. “You’re more trouble than a rabid skunk. And I ain’t even allowed to shoot you.” He tipped back in his chair, thumbs in his belt, Caterpillar hat down over his forehead, looking me over.