KILLING MAINE

by Mike Bond

“What the fuck were you doing in Ellsworth?”

  “You don’t know? You don’t know?”

  “Obviously I don’t.”

  “Running away. I knew the cops were ready to arrest me. And you were pushing me to testify for Bucky. That he was with me when my husband was killed. To exonerate him. Which I couldn’t do.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was with somebody else.”

  My head spun. I was out of brains entirely. Used up. “And now,” she gave me the look, “I’m done with all that. I want to be with you.”

  I went out into the cold morning sparkling with light, unable to think, to reason, grasping at straws. Now Bucky would go free. When he came home to Lexie I wanted to be far away. To go where, since I still was on local custody?

  Though Pa was burning a hole in my mind there was nothing I could do for him. He was out there in the Pacific somewhere, or drifting dead, or sunk, and as so many times since Afghanistan I tried to understand death, make peace with it, could not.

  Why raise us up, only to put us down?

  What mattered now was to free Abigail. She’d been framed, but how? By whom? It was just one more level of mystery and despair.

  LEXIE WAS IN a strange mood when she got back from teaching. “So if Abigail’s in jail for killing her husband,” I said, “then Bucky should go free.”

  She went right where I’d gone in my head. “Unless they killed him together.”

  “Why would they do that.”

  “He was banging her, wasn’t he?” She sat across the table from me, chin in her propped hand.

  Her eyes were red, I realized. Nervously she yanked at a tangle of long silky hair, as if it were an enemy. “Look, Lexie…” I stalled.

  “He was, wasn’t he? He was fucking Abigail.”

  “I asked him, in prison. He said no.”

  “I asked Uncle Silas. He said yes.”

  “Uncle Silas couldn’t find his dick in a rainstorm. Nor remember anything.”

  She clenched her fists on the table. “I know Bucky was screwing her. I know. Soon as he gets out I’m dumping him.”

  I wasn’t going to tell Lexie that Abigail had said they were doing it, though Bucky’d denied it when I’d asked him in prison.

  She brought her fists to her mouth as if stifling something. “He can have this house and the windmills and this poisoned farm and I’m going back to Hawaii.”

  I reached for her fists and pulled them into my hands as if they were little creatures and I could warm them. “Even if he was, what difference does it make?”

  “What difference?” Her voice went up a few octaves, Lexie-style. “What difference if my husband’s fucking some slut? Are you nuts?”

  “So have you been such a loving wife?” I thought of what she’d said about her and Bucky, how their marriage had devolved from fun into duty. “Or just put in the time?”

  A tear ran down her cheek. She grasped my wrists. “Oh God Sam, it’s been so hard.”

  I nodded. “And it’s going to keep on being hard… Driving up here today I realized it was like Pa, the pain will never go away.”

  Her grasp tightened on my wrists. “Oh God don’t say that.”

  “We can love more than one person at a time, Lexie. You know that.” I stood and kissed the top of her head, smelling the dusky essence of her. “I’m asking Erica to push for Bucky’s release, and Abigail’s too. Once Bucky’s out I’m leaving here.”

  “You can still stay here… the bunkhouse’s fine – you should stay – Bucky’d want you to!”

  I was crushed by tears in her eyes. “Bucky can’t stand me, nor I him.”

  “You’re moving in with Abigail. Aren’t you?”

  I shrugged. “She isn’t out yet. And she hasn’t asked me.”

  “So what’s Lobo gonna do, if you leave?”

  “She’s your and Bucky’s dog, not mine. Or rather, you and Bucky are her people, not me.”

  She laughed, then a wide smile. “God I love you Sam.”

  I sat down again. “And I love you. We’ll always have that.”

  She shook her head, biting her lip again. “That is such bullshit.”

  What’s Right

  WHAT WERE YOU DOING,” I asked Abigail, “in Ellsworth?”

  “Staying with Samantha, a friend from grad school, and her husband.”

  “They know why you were there?”

  “I told them I had to get away, after Ronnie’s death. They have a big farm in Surry, lots of room.” It was as if otherwise they wouldn’t have wanted her, a window to something hurting in her soul.

  “So what are we going to do,” I said, “to prove your innocence?”

  “Like I said, find the real perps.”

  “How?” The impossibility of it overwhelmed me.

  Erica had whittled Abigail’s bail down to $100K, a sum which Abigail promptly furnished from a money market account she’d set up with Kennebec Savings from her husband’s insurance settlement. Abigail and I drove in Bucky’s 150 to Surry to get her Saab out of her friends’ barn, and now we were sitting in her kitchen, where ten days ago I’d made myself blueberry pancakes in the early dawn while hoping the cops had given up trying to find me.

  “So where’s the little green book?” I said.

  She looked at me, shock in her violet eyes. “You know about it?”

  “Mildred told me. I broke in and looked everywhere for it.”

  She glanced up toward the second floor. “It’s in my desk, the top drawer.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  She leaped from her chair and dashed upstairs with me behind her, and yanked the drawer open. “It was here! Right here!”

  It was the same drawer I’d checked during the night I’d searched her house. She sat down, hands covering her face. “Oh shit.”

  “Is there any other place it could be?”

  She shook her head. “They took it.”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever wants to pin this all on me.”

  “The cops were here.”

  “No! When?”

  I explained her all about the cops looking for me the night I’d broken in, and about the letter with the red magic marker note that had disappeared also.

  “Whoever took the green book,” she said, rummaging in the desk again, “maybe they took that letter too.”

  “It’d be on the camera.” I pointed to the pinhole camera above the doorway. “The one the cops put in.”

  She shook her head. “Ronnie had that installed.”

  I recoiled, confused. “Why?”

  “He was starting to get worried about people breaking in. Kind of how he unraveled, you know.”

  “Maybe he was right.”

  “So now it’s just my word against theirs –”

  “Without the book? Mildred’ll back you.”

  “Not without the book. It was proof. Now they’ll just say we’re disgruntled employees, fire us.”

  “Let’s check the camera monitor, see who’s been here.”

  She shook her head. “It’s a twenty-four hour loop. Doesn’t store anything.”

  “Oh shit.”

  “Yeah, oh shit.”

  I changed the subject. “Were you sleeping with Bucky?”

  “I told you I was. Already.”

  “Were you?”

  She shrugged. “There was a while there, I’d sleep with anybody.”

  “Were you?”

  She half-shrugged. “He wouldn’t have wanted to anyway.”

  “Why’d you lie?”

  “Lie?”

  “To me?”

  “Who the fuck were you to be asking? I hardly knew you, remember?”

  “But why say yes? It don’t make sense, Abigail.”

  She pulled off her sweater, unbuttoned her blouse, slid out of her levis and came into my arms. “This is what makes sense.”

  BUT AFTERWARDS I was still confused.

  “I told you I was sleeping with Bucky,” she said, h
er lips against my shoulder, “because if you thought I was sleeping with lots of guys then you wouldn’t love me.”

  “I knew you were sleeping with lots of guys. I didn’t care.”

  “You knew? How?”

  I wasn’t going to tell her I’d been doing night recon on her. “You told me.”

  She nuzzled against me. “I don’t remember. There’s so much lately I don’t remember. Don’t want to…”

  “Why didn’t you want me to love you?”

  “I didn’t want anyone to love me. Not even Ronnie.”

  There was a crater inside her, an absence. It made me think of Afghanistan, where if there’s a crater it’s because something explosive had impacted there, an IED or bomb or shell. But what had impacted on Abigail? And when?

  “You wouldn’t let Ronnie love you?” I said tentatively.

  “No it’s not that…”

  “What is it?”

  “Go to sleep. I love you.”

  I pulled the blanket up around her shoulders, my arm cradling her lovely gracile back. I had to say it. “I love you too.”

  But who did I love?

  MAKING LOVE IS VIOLENCE also, I lay there thinking, the penetration, the Grail’s lance and sacred chalice in which life is created and nurtured to birth. And which we degrade with pornography, advertising, religion and shame.

  Her arms in the streetlight were pale and long, her hair had lost its color and seemed brown now; she was sleeping alone in her world. It seemed unconscionable that in the morning she’d dress and leave for her office as if she’d never been missing, and I’d leave, each of us folding further into our own worlds till one day we died, and this marvelous moment we’d had together would long ago have ceased to exist.

  She stirred and spoke in her sleep, her voice deep like humming wires, soft like moss and warm like rain, and I knew that yes I loved her but didn’t understand why it brought me such despair.

  “WHO IS DAWSON GRIVER?” I asked Lexie.

  “Oh Christ, him,” she answered.

  “Could he have shot at me?”

  “How the hell do I know?”

  I shrugged, a little hurt by her snappiness, but told myself it was because I’d spent the night with Abigail. It was confusing but inevitable that even though Lexie couldn’t have me any longer, it still pissed her off when I was with someone else. Even Erica, who had twice got me out of jail, had nonetheless been subject to Lexie’s wrath. “It’s in my genes,” Lexie’d once said.

  “You do look hot in jeans,” I’d answered, earning a brief scowl.

  I’d come to Lexie’s to clear out my stuff to move in with Abigail, and this entitled me to a heightened level of antagonism. “I’m picking up Bucky in the morning,” she said.

  “They’re letting him out?”

  “He’s still a suspect but now they’re giving him Own Recognizance, seeing how he’s got a farm and family and all that. They don’t realize the farm’s worthless –”

  “Tell him I fixed his damn truck.”

  “So now I don’t need you any more.”

  “C’mon Lexie, don’t be nasty.”

  She sat down hard, fists gripped before her face. “I can’t do it any longer.”

  “Do what?”

  She looked out the window where fat flakes of new snow were falling. “I don’t want to be with him.”

  “I asked Abigail. They weren’t fucking.”

  She shook her head as if none of that mattered. “Not being with him all these weeks, I’ve learned I prefer it… Don’t even want to see him.”

  “Cut the shit, Lexie, he’s your husband. You chose him over me.”

  “I did not!” She slapped the table. “You were down for twenty years! We’ve been through this –”

  “A million times.” I didn’t want to get into it but couldn’t help myself. “But why the fuck you end up with him?”

  She tugged at her hair ruthlessly, as if it were her enemy. “I told you goddamit. It was the closest I could get to being with you.”

  I got up, couldn’t take it any more. “It’s your bed,” I said bitterly. “Sleep in it.” I walked out, threw my stuff in the trunk of Abigail’s Saab, bent down for a last lick from Lobo, and drove miserably away, as if for the last time, from Eagle Mountain Farm.

  “I’M DOING A PRESS CONFERENCE,” Abigail said. “Tomorrow morning.”

  I looked at her across the table where we’d just finished our steaks, fried potatoes and salad. “Where?”

  “In the Capitol rotunda. I’m going to reveal the whole damn thing, the wind company payoffs and the Legislators who take them, the bribed enviro groups, the media… everything.”

  “To whom?”

  “The papers, TV, everybody.”

  “You think they’re going to believe you?”

  “It’s a start.”

  “You’re going to lose your job.”

  “Screw it. I’ve got another hundred grand of Ronnie’s insurance. I can sell the house.” She slapped her hands on her thighs. “I’m done.”

  “What about Mildred? Will she back you?”

  She gave me a complicated look. “Mildred’s two years from retirement.”

  “I see.” I poured the last of our bottle of Côtes du Rhône. Not great, but in Maine you take what you can get. “You’ve contacted all this media?”

  She nodded. “I called the major papers and TV and radio stations.”

  “They’re all in bed with the Wind Mafia…”

  She grabbed my wrist and shook it. “It’s the truth, Pono! Don’t they care about the truth?”

  I thought of my two jail sentences. “One person’s truth is another’s prison. You know that.”

  She gripped me tighter. “It’s all we have.” She shrugged, took a breath. “What else do we have?”

  I thought of what Mitchell had found via the internet, all the WindPower internal memos, the descriptions of how easy it was to bribe Maine elected officials, the tracking of wind company bribes from Legislators’ private accounts to banks nobody’d ever heard of. All of it useless in court because illegally obtained. “You’re still charged with killing Ronnie,” I said at last. “How’s this going to affect that?”

  She shook me harder. “We’ve got to stop worrying about consequences, Pono! We just have to do what’s right.”

  This didn’t impress me. Many times, it seemed, doing what was right just got you into deeper shit. Sometimes with no way out.

  SHE WAS IN THE SHOWER at 07:10 when the cops arrived. “Imagine finding you here,” C. Hart grinned.

  I blocked the door. “What you want?”

  “We’re taking your lady friend down to the station for a little chat. There’s some new evidence we want to discuss.”

  “She’s got a meeting this morning.”

  He stuck his foot in the door. “We’re not asking her, Mr. Haskins. We’re taking her.”

  Say Nothing

  “I WISH I’D NEVER MET YOU,” Erica said when I called her.

  “Who else do I have?”

  “How’s that my fault?”

  “What should I tell Abigail?”

  “Say nothing.”

  “Say nothing,” I told Abigail as she dressed, her hair still wet from the shower.

  “Screw them,” she snapped. “I’m doing my press conference.”

  “Erica says you have to go with the cops, be cooperative. Just don’t say anything.”

  “What have I got to tell them?” She looked at me furiously. “Somebody set this up to ruin the conference. How will it look when I’m not there?”

  “I’ll go. Explain things.”

  “Yeah,” she scowled, as if at the police, the world. “You do that.”

  AT 08:50 I arrived at the Capitol rotunda. People were walking in and out of the building but no reporters or TV were there. I stayed a half hour then went back to Abigail’s. She arrived soon after, threw her purse on the sofa. “They asked me about my relationship with Bucky. I said I
already told you about that, they said tell us again.”

  “So then what?”

  “I told them we’d become friends because of his involvement in the anti-wind struggle, that he’d met my husband but I didn’t think he’d had anything to do with his death. They said were you with Bucky when your husband was killed…” She shrugged. “I said no.”

  “That means either of you could have done it.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Where were you?”

  “When?” she temporized.

  “When Ronnie got killed.”

  “Here. With an afghan on my knees, watching House of Cards.”

  I thought of Officer Trask asking me after the four turbines got shot out, you got corboration? “You got any proof?”

  “Proof I was here? You kidding?”

  “You told me you were, with somebody else –”

  “I was.”

  “So why won’t he say?”

  “He’s married. Two kids. A state senator. He’d lose everything.”

  “The alternative for you may be life in prison.”

  “Where would I get a gun?”

  “From Bucky. The .308, that’s what the prosecution’s gonna say.”

  She laughed, said nothing, then, “I wouldn’t know how to shoot anyone.”

  “Did Ronnie know,” I persevered, “that you were fucking somebody else?”

  “He could have cared less.” She sat on the couch, hands on knees. “What happened at the Rotunda?”

  “Nobody came.”

  “Shit!” She snatched her cell phone from her purse, hit a number. “Hi Jim,” she said. “You weren’t at the Rotunda this morning –” She waited, listening. “But Jim… I see. No, I didn’t cancel, a friend of mine was there… Who told you it was canceled? No, I didn’t …Okay, thanks.”

  She killed the phone, looked at me. “Somebody called him, left a message the press conference was canceled.”

  “Who?”

  “It was just a message, no callback number.”

  Every move we make, I realized, they already know. “What’d you do with your phone, in New Hampshire?”

  “I shut it off, took out the battery and killed the GPS.”

  “When’d you turn it back on?”

  “When they arrested me.”

  “Turn it off again. And the GPS.”