by Paul Doiron
“Bibi told you this?”
“She was high at the time. I am sure she’s regretted it every day since. We’re not as close friends as people think. We never hooked up, because that ain’t my bag. I’m only telling you this in case I’m found shot someday. Bibi Chamberlain is quite a marks-woman.”
Again I sensed that Felice was lying to me, not about Bibi’s proficiency with firearms, but this story about a new will was outlandish. All I had to do was call the president of Bollingbrook to ask if he’d made an appeal to the professor. So why was Felice wasting my time spinning a transparently ridiculous story? She must have known I would see through it.
I didn’t hear a beep, but Felice pulled her phone from her pocket, glanced at the screen, then tucked it away without a word of explanation. Evidently it wasn’t the text she was dreading from Levi.
“What were you saying?” she asked.
“I wasn’t saying anything. You were telling me a story in which an old man is murdered before he can rewrite his will.”
She began to swing faster so that her feet left the ground. “Make fun of me if you want, but it’s the truth.”
“You’re suggesting Bibi Chamberlain killed her grandfather?”
“I didn’t say that.” Her smile was coy. The expression didn’t suit her face. “I only meant that, whatever happened, Bibi didn’t grieve for the old guy. He probably fell out of his boat, like everyone says. And it was lucky timing for Bibi. What’s that term for when someone dies by getting crushed by a car while they’re changing a tire or knocking an electric radio into a bathtub?”
“Death by misadventure. It’s a legal term that describes a situation where someone does something to contribute to their demise.”
“Like threatening to cut their granddaughter out of their will.”
When I didn’t respond, she laughed. “I’m joking!”
“A few minutes ago, you called Bibi Chamberlain your friend. Now you’re going out of your way to cast aspersions on her. You’re even suggesting she might kill you because you know her secrets.”
“Forgive me for having fun,” she said, swinging high. “I’ve been stuck inside the house with a sick kid all day.”
“In that case, I’ll let you get back to him.”
She leaped off the swing in midair and landed with the agility of a teenager. “Wait! I’m sorry. What else do you want to know? I promise not to be a wiseass.”
I had to consider whether she was worth another question.
“I want to know about Arlo Burch,” I said.
“The eyewitness!”
“What can you tell me about him?”
“He’s sweet and goofy, not to mention easy on the eyes. If he didn’t have such lousy taste in women—anyway, he wasn’t living the high life when it was just him and my dad up here. Then he fell into some easy money, starting with the reward. Arlo’s circumstances changed overnight. And the hill’s did, too.”
“How?”
“He hooked up with those nasty girls. Tiff, or maybe Tori, met Arlo at the Brass Monkey, and they got their claws in him. My dad said it was only a few weeks later that trucks were hauling trailers to the top. Suddenly, the hill was teeming with Dillons.”
“Your father didn’t find that strange? One family taking over a housing development en masse?”
“Bruce Jewett thought they must be gypsies. He tried to scare them off at first by shooting in the woods below the hilltop. As if anyone could ever scare off the Dillons! By then, my dad had no use for Bruce anyway. My mom was half-black, and my father didn’t like it when the fucker started going on about the ‘dindoos.’”
“Dindoos?”
“‘Didn’t do nothings.’ Black people.” The phone beeped in her pocket, but this time she didn’t bother to look at it. “So what are you going to do?”
“Are you asking if I plan on reopening this investigation?”
“Yes.”
Now it was my turn to lie. “I haven’t decided.”
She removed one of her mittens to nibble on a hangnail. She worked on the skin tag in silence for the better part of a minute. But she only succeeded in drawing blood.
“What I said about Arlo before,” she said, pulling her mitten on, “about him coming forward with a made-up story in order to collect a reward? You get that I was joking, right? My dad always says, ‘Arlo Burch is as sharp as a marble.’ But he wouldn’t have lied to the investigators about what he saw.”
“What if someone prodded him?”
“Like I said, Tori and Tiff didn’t live here then.”
I hadn’t mentioned the Dillons.
One of the crows started cawing at us, and the others joined in. Crows, in my experience, are as easily annoyed as they are annoying.
“How does you dad get along with the Dillons?” I asked.
“Fine,” she said in a flat tone. “He plays cards with them.”
Someone—was it Rivard?—had mentioned that Vic Bazinet had a gambling addiction.
“What about you?”
“You heard Tina’s lies about me. If you think I enjoy having that family as neighbors, you’ve missed the point I’ve tried to get across. Those people are scary as fuck.”
“I’ve met scarier.”
“If you’re not frightened of the Dillons, you’re a fool.”
“Is there something you’re not telling me, Felice? About what’s going on up here?”
It took me a moment to realize she was staring down the road at her father’s house, its windows glowing warmly in the deepening cold. She was thinking about her children inside.
“I wouldn’t be helping my family if I snitched on my neighbors, would I?
“That’s pretty close to a tacit admission that the Dillons are running a criminal enterprise.”
“I didn’t say that. But even if I did, what does it have to do with Professor Chamberlain?” Her body grew rigid and her voice became louder. “Why are you even asking these questions? You didn’t need to come up here today. It’s so … senseless.”
“I’m asking questions because it’s my job.”
“I don’t understand why you’re still here. If I were you, I’d leave and never look back.”
“If you hate it so much, why do you stay?”
“I can’t abandon my dad. I can’t leave him alone with them.” She jammed her fists into the pockets of her parka. “What business is it of yours, anyway?”
“None.”
“If you don’t think I spend every waking hour trying to figure a way out of this trap.”
“What do you mean ‘trap’?”
“Desperation drives you to do things. Things you might hate doing. It takes away all your choices. Please understand, please remember, that everything I’ve done, I’ve done for my family.”
This time I finally heard the message beneath her words.
Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for my family.
She wasn’t talking about the past few years. She was talking about the past few minutes.
35
How long am I out? Long enough that by the time I can refocus my eyes, I am stretched flat on my stomach with my arms extended before me. My wrists are being tied together, and when I lift my face from the snow, I see a stooped figure lashing the ropes to an idling snowmobile.
The sound of revving engines reverberates inside my skull. Ice adheres to my lips. My mouth tastes of blood and exhaust fumes.
In my life I have incurred as many concussions as an All Pro tight end. But I don’t feel like I’m going to vomit. Bells aren’t ringing in my ears. Aside from the double vision and the localized headache, I am not experiencing any of the familiar symptoms of traumatic brain injury.
Even my confusion passes. I blink and squint and realize that the person tying the ropes is a woman. She has a scoped AR-15 rifle slung over her shoulder. The machine she climbs aboard is ruby red, which means the woman is probably Tiff, reclaiming her ride.
And the torture she h
as planned for me is obvious even before she casts a glance at my trussed body.
“He’s awake!” she shouts, and there’s no missing the joy in her voice.
“We’ve got to go!” shouts a man.
I get a glimpse of the big vehicle that rammed Reynolds’s pickup. It is an ancient Chevy Suburban with a push bumper grill guard on the front, and it is the first to peel out. The sleds take off, one after another. At least three of them, maybe four. Tiff waits. She wants a clear lane ahead so she can open the throttle.
I have lost my gloves or had them removed. I close my hands around the rope above my wrists before she accelerates because I don’t want the sudden force to snap bones or tear ligaments in my wrists. I don’t know if it will help. But I know I don’t have the strength to hold on for more than a couple of minutes.
When the sled takes off, there is an instant that seems elastic when I don’t budge. It feels like a miracle has occurred. The knots have somehow slipped free. Then a barrage of powder and ice hits me and I feel a jerk, like my arms are being pulled from their sockets. The rope goes taut, and I am being dragged on my chest and thighs across the field.
The ground looks so smooth beneath its blanket of snow, but the sensation is of being pulled bodily across a cheese grater. My hidden ballistic vest absorbs a lot of the punishment. If they’d taken a moment to search me, they would have stripped me to the waist. But the Dillons are in too big of a rush.
Still, the pain—head, arms, torso, and especially my bad leg—is so intense my left hand loses its grip on the rope, and now my wrist is being squeezed as the cords tighten. How long before the rope severs my hand?
I struggle to keep my chin raised despite the projectiles being churned up by the sled’s tracks. I am having trouble breathing. It’s not just the pressure on my chest. The engine smoke is displacing the air from my lungs.
My legs start fishtailing as Tiff accelerates.
I pull hard with my right hand, straining the muscles in my arm to gain a few precious inches. I’m not sure how I manage it—adrenaline is said to give you extra strength—but I get hold of the rope again with my left hand. I throw back my head and puff out my chest. Skidding along on my forearms and chest, I reach ahead with my right hand, trying to climb the rope.
Tiff must be watching me over her shoulder. She doesn’t like what she sees.
She begins to switchback across the road, moving from one snowbank to the next in a sine wave pattern. Being jerked around like this is about as pleasant on the spinal column as you might imagine. But the maneuver has the unintended consequence of introducing slack into the line that I can use to continue climbing toward the rear of her sled.
Tiff’s attempt to dislocate my shoulders and flay the skin from my body isn’t working out the way she planned.
She tries something new. She veers off the road. I feel the bounce as she goes up and over a snowbank. When my body hits the plowed ridge, I go airborne. If I flip onto my back, I will be dead in seconds; there will be no way to protect my head in an upside-down position.
Maybe I imagine the sound of Tiff laughing.
But it comes moments before a terrific crash.
I feel a sudden slack in the rope while my own forward momentum continues. The next thing I know I am rolling on my side. The line catches around a tree and I am whipped halfway around its trunk.
I find myself lying on my back, gasping for air. I have no idea what has happened. The agony is so all-encompassing, I can’t move.
A red glow rises around me to the black branches above. Except for the hissing of snow against hot metal and a steady, bomblike ticking, the engine of the Yamaha has gone quiet. The air tastes of burned plastic and hot petroleum.
I seem to have bit my tongue. With a great effort, I roll onto my side to spit blood. My wrists are still tied, but the rope lies in a loose S on the forest floor. I feel like a medieval prisoner removed from the rack.
Then I hear the whine of a returning snowmobile.
The approaching sled pushes me to try harder, and I end up on my knees with my bloody wrists limp before me. The left one is sprained. Maybe even broken.
I have trouble assessing the scene because, among other things, the headlights of Tiff’s sled have been smashed. The only illumination comes from the two red taillights perpendicular to the ground. The machine has come to rest on its side.
One of my jobs, as a warden, is to reconstruct snowmobile crashes. Every winter I am called out to a dozen or more sites like this in the woods. Many of them are death scenes. I have seen this before.
When Tiff left the road, she must have caught one of her upturned skis under a log hidden beneath the snow. The jolt caused the sled to tumble as it broke apart. The spindle connecting the skeg to the chassis snapped. The shock-absorbing spring came loose. The front end crumpled while the machine, still moving forward, tilted onto its side, then came to an abrupt stop when it collided with an ancient birch tree. Birches will bend very far before they break, but the sudden impact caused this one to snap like a pencil.
I don’t see Tiff beyond the faint glow of the dying machine. I don’t hear anything at all except the engine of the sled speeding toward us.
You’ve got to get up.
But I can’t. My body is too bruised, too battered. It needs time to recover from the damage done.
The snow is coming down lightly now, a few lazy flakes. The storm might have stopped in fact, and what I am seeing isn’t falling snow but windblown bits dislodged from the boughs and branches above.
The returning snowmobile slides to a stop with its headlights trained on the wreckage. The rider leaps clear of the machine and throws aside her helmet and goggles. It is Tori, and I notice she has “my” shotgun slung over her shoulder again.
Her gaze is fixed on something beyond my field of vision, beyond the crashed sled.
She takes a step forward, then stumbles. Her mouth opens but nothing comes out. No words, no screams, not even a moan.
She drops to her knees and disappears from view.
Now is my chance.
Move, God damn it.
I pull my wrist against the knot, but it won’t yield. Even if I get loose, I don’t have the energy to outrace Tori on foot, let alone on her snow machine. There seems to be no escape, but my mind refuses to accept the inevitability of death after what I’ve already survived.
Maybe the dispatcher pinged Reynolds’s phone.
Maybe responding units are on the way.
But it’s not sirens that I hear next. It’s the recognizable chugging of a V8 engine racing down the forest road.
My frost-damaged fingers are useless. There is no untangling this knot.
A white light finds me. I blink into its source. Tori Dillon has the shotgun aimed at me again.
I spit blood onto the snow and take a few rasping breaths. My tongue is beginning to swell. Not that I have anything to say to her.
Tori’s face is contorted. It looks like a mask some ancient craftsman carved to represent the mortal sin of wrath. Her hands tremble. Her sister’s were steadier.
A vehicle door opens somewhere behind me and a man says, “Jesus!”
“No,” cries a woman with a hoarse voice.
Two new flashlights find the wrecked sled.
I don’t recognize the man, but he’s broad across the chest, with a strawberry blond beard and a mullet, and a 1911 semi-automatic holstered on his belt, which means he’s another Dillon. The hair color and the guns are the family’s field marks.
Tina, tall beneath her black coat, trains her light on an area beyond Tiff’s sled. The man bends down and is gone for what seems like a minute. When he straightens up, he has a limp form in his arms. Held that way, Tiff Dillon appears as small as a child. Something is wrong with her neck.
“What did you say?” Tori hisses.
I hadn’t realized I’d spoken. I feel her finger curling around the cold metal trigger of the Benelli. I don’t dare open my mouth again.
Instead I repeat the words to myself.
Death by misadventure.
36
I watched Felice Bazinet set off down the road into the purple twilight. She had her head bent and her hands in her pockets. The swing she’d been sitting on came to rest.
There was not a breath of air. The stillness was eerie and ominous.
I had spent the better part of an hour in Felice’s company and still had no idea what to make of her. She was a proven liar and an admitted tax cheat. Almost certainly she dealt drugs or served as an accomplice to people who did. There had been moments when I’d felt she’d been toying with me, and yet I’d never sensed malice in her, the way I had in some of the people I’d met that day. She seemed to have a conscience, or she made a good show of having one. I had no question she cared for her father, the elusive Vic Bazinet, who seemed to have run up gambling debts with the Dillons, if I read the situation correctly. And I did not doubt Felice’s love for her boys. I found that I liked her, pitied her, and mistrusted her all once.
If her intent had been to overwhelm me with information, she had succeeded. She had stalled me long enough for the sun to vanish. I was to blame for that, as well, though. I had hoped to linger long enough for Vic to return from work in his septic truck.
A black cloud passed, or what I thought was a cloud until I realized the wind had died.
Thousands of crows were flapping overhead, moving in a great flock across the Androscoggin toward the city limits of Lewiston.
When Charley had told me about the roost, I hadn’t expected anything this vast. The image that entered my mind now was of John James Audubon dismounting from his horse as a multitude of passenger pigeons darkened the sky from horizon to horizon—a living storm of wingbeats instead of thunder.
