by Paul Doiron
“You didn’t have to fight your way out of that river.”
“True.”
“What about Arlo Burch? Are you going to arrest him for blackmail?”
“He doesn’t strike me as the brightest bulb,” said Finch, who’d grown tired of my grilling and was making a show of putting on his coat over his blazer. “I don’t think he ever really understood that he was involved in a criminal conspiracy.”
Pomerleau had practice ignoring her partner’s rude gestures. “The prosecutor has a busy day ahead. I don’t think Arlo is going anywhere, and I’d lay down money that he’ll come quietly when we put the cuffs on. He broke into tears when we gave him the news of his girlfriends’ deaths. He really seemed to care for those pieces of shit. He kind of reminds me of a lost puppy.”
“Ellen has a thing for the guy,” said her partner.
I remembered something Dani had told me about Finch: how he smirked through every state-mandated sexual harassment video.
Pomerleau acted as if she hadn’t heard him now. She hadn’t gotten where she was in the state police by rising to every bait dangled before her. Maybe Dani was right to jump ship.
“Any other questions for us?” she asked me.
“Yeah. The big one. How did you find us?”
“That woman you spoke with, Felice Bazinet—”
“That’s her maiden name.”
Ellen ignored my hair-splitting. “She called 9–1–1 when she saw the Dows hauling out the heavy weapons. I don’t think she wanted your murder on her conscience.”
“But how did she know where we were?”
“Her father. She called and got him to tell her. I think her alerting us was as much about saving her old man as about saving you.”
I pictured again the sad woman with the shaved head and the exotic eyes. “What’s going to happen to her?”
“That’s another conversation we’ll be having with the prosecutor,” said Finch curtly.
“And her dad, Vic?”
“Right now he’s in lock-up as an accomplice to criminal conduct,” said Pomerleau. “I’m sure we’ll be adding charges. Conspiracy, felony murder, there will be no shortage of them. But my gut tells me you wouldn’t have been the first of Tempest Dow’s enemies to be chopped into pieces and trucked away as raw sewage.”
Finch very much wanted to make a sewage joke at my expense—I could see it on his face—but he restrained himself.
“The prosecutor will offer him a deal for flipping on the Dows,” I predicted.
“Will it bother you if he does?” she asked.
“No.”
I had put off the hardest question for last because I hadn’t wanted to hear the answer.
“The man they tortured to death, Reynolds—did he have a family?”
Pomerleau opened her notebook. “Reynolds Pedersen, age sixty-one. Resided at 252 River Road in Strickland. The van was registered to Carpet-Clean in Lewiston. We spoke with his employer who said Pedersen’s wife died unexpectedly last spring, and he’d been having trouble coping. They had no children, the employer said. So far, we’ve been unable to locate any next of kin. It happens sometimes. A person dies and there’s no one to inform.”
“Is that better or worse?” I said.
Finch looked at me as if I’d asked the question in Cantonese.
* * *
I’d instructed Colonel DeFord to send a strongly worded message to my friends telling them I was “fine,” whatever they might hear or read online, and that I would be in touch when I was ready to receive visitors.
“I don’t want them rushing here,” I’d said.
I feared Charley would be unable to help himself. He’d be gassing up his new Cessna 185 to fly down-state no matter what I said unless I escaped the hospital first. Stacey was right about her dad’s feelings for me. I was the son he’d never had.
I heard from my doctor that wardens and other police had come by and been turned away as per my instructions.
The one person who managed to slip in to see me came as no surprise.
Danielle Tate peeked around the edge of my screen while I was drifting in and out of sleep. She was dressed in her powder blue trooper’s uniform and holding her campaign hat. No doubt she had convinced the security guards and attending nurses that she’d been charged with keeping out unapproved visitors.
Dani was the shortest trooper the state police had ever hired, but she was sturdily built. The uniform hadn’t been designed for female officers, but underneath the ill-fitting clothes she had the body of a former gymnast. Her face was square; her eyes a stony gray. She wore her dark-blond hair pinned up with barrettes. Most men considered her plain. But the longer I had known her, the lovelier she had become to me. She had more grit than any of the men in her barracks and a heart twice the size of mine.
“Jesus Christ!”
“Hey.”
“What did those SOBs do to you?”
“Everything they could. At the end, I managed to avoid losing my leg to a chainsaw, but it was a close call.”
She came over and lightly took my hand, the one that didn’t have an IV needle threaded into a vein. “Why didn’t you tell me what you were up to when we were on the phone? I had to hear about you nearly dying from Ellen Pomerleau.”
“I thought I had everything in hand. Besides, you were so excited about your interview with Jemison.”
“I should be pissed at you, but you look so damn pathetic I can’t do it. What happened, Mike? What did those people put you through?”
“Later,” I said. “I went through it all with Pomerleau and Finch, and I don’t have it in me. Ellen can fill you in on the details.”
“I don’t want the official version,” she said, showing the frustration she’d tried to suppress. “Oh, Mike, why do you have to be so fucking reckless?”
“That’s who I am, Dani. You should know that by now.”
She set her broad-brimmed hat down on the wheeled cart beside the bed. “I guess I should. I guess I do.”
“There you go then.”
She let her gaze drift around the room with all its pumping, blinking medical wonders. “I used to think it was cool. I remember watching you jump thirty feet into a quarry to pull a girl out of a sinking car and I thought, Holy shit! But it’s been exhausting being in a relationship with someone who risks everything all the time.”
“You have to be willing to die to do the job.”
Her cheeks flushed as she turned to me. “Don’t give me that. You enjoy taking risks. You live for the danger.”
“I can’t apologize for being who I am.”
“I used to think you’d grow out of it, but now I know you won’t.”
“‘Women think men will change, and men think women won’t.’ That was one of my mom’s favorite quotes.”
“I wish I’d met her.”
“She would have liked you. She would have thought you were good for me.”
She released my hand and patted it almost the way one would a small child’s. “I tried to be good for you,” she said with resignation.
I attempted to raise myself up and must have made a pained face. She helped me by sliding another pillow under my head.
“The last time we were in a hospital together I was the one visiting you,” I said.
“But I didn’t put myself there. It was a random virus. You played an active part in landing in this bed.”
“True.”
“I almost died from that virus, Mike. It’s still unreal how close I came.”
“The first near-death experience is always the hardest.”
“I wish you wouldn’t joke.”
She was right, of course. Ever since I’d arrived at the hospital, I’d tried to use humor to ward off the emotions that would soon be busting down my door.
“Do you remember what I asked you?” I said. “When I visited you in the hospital, I suggested we should move in together. You said I wasn’t ready for happily ever after. You told me
to take care of my wolf first and see how it went. I didn’t do a very good job of that, it seems.”
“I’m so sorry about Shadow, but you’ll find him. I know you will.”
She hadn’t offered her help, and I took that for what it was.
We both became quiet. I let the silence stretch on until I couldn’t take it anymore.
“You have your interview today,” I said.
“At ten o’clock.”
“You deserve to get the job. You’re one of the best cops I know.”
She smiled, showing her killer dimples. “One of the best?”
“The best. Good luck, Dani.”
“Thanks, but I won’t need it.” She took her hat from the cart, put it on at the forward angle troopers preferred, and fastened the chin strap. She looked very official. “I’ll swing by afterward and see how you’re doing.”
“If I get my way, I’ll be long gone by then.”
She leaned down and kissed me on the forehead.
41
On Christmas morning, I awaken before dawn, as I have the previous three days, and drive my Scout west to the Androscoggin. We have had consecutive subzero nights after the weather event I nicknamed “Emma Cronk’s Magic Snow,” and now the river is frozen solid from bank to bank. I drive up and down the road along both shores looking for signs of Shadow.
The day can’t be more beautiful. The skies are blue all the way to the heavens. Fresh snow glistens from the boughs of the evergreens. And the bracingly cold air reminds me with each new breath of my continuing existence as a living creature on this planet. An eagle passes downstream, heading south to hunt ducks and gulls on the open water below the dams, and my soul rises to meet it. Even the slopes of Pill Hill, glimpsed across the frozen river, shine like hammered gold in the light of the newly risen sun.
My friends don’t like me coming here, not like this. I might tear my stitches if I move awkwardly, they say. I shouldn’t be driving at all while on pain medication (they don’t know I’ve ditched the Vicodin the doctor pushed into my hand). After what I endured on the night of the solstice, they say, I shouldn’t be alone.
They assume I must be suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome because what person wouldn’t be suffering from PTSD who was nearly drowned, frozen, shot, battered, and then threatened with dismemberment and disposal in a tank full of shit? Surely, too, the night’s dead must haunt me. And it’s true that new souls have joined the parade of ghosts that follow me silently in my dreams. After everything I endured, how can I not be a wreck?
But I have had post-traumatic stress syndrome before, in the fall and winter following my father’s death. I hadn’t recognized it at the time, but I remember the symptoms vividly: the paranoia, the edginess, the increasingly self-destructive behavior. Most of all, I recall the guilt. None of which I am experiencing now.
Instead of breaking my spirit, the ordeal seems to have strengthened me. Every day since I left the hospital, I have awakened in severe physical pain but with a serenity that doesn’t require an hour of meditation to attain. This calmness puzzled me at first. Even troubled me a little because I kept expecting the demons to arrive.
Then I found a metaphor.
There is a word that blacksmiths use, annealing, to describe the process a blade undergoes when it is allowed to cool slowly. Tempering makes metal harder, sometimes so hard it risks shattering. Annealing makes steel ductile: capable of withstanding tremendous stress without breaking.
I have been annealed.
Only my friends who are combat veterans understand this.
Charley was a prisoner of war in Vietnam where he endured unimaginable tortures, and yet he’d somehow come home a functional human being. More than functional. He is the best man I’ve been privileged to know.
Billy Cronk was not so lucky. His tours with the 10th Mountain Division in Iraq and Afghanistan left his body unscarred but his spirit shattered. With the help of his family and counselors, he is gluing himself together. But I suspect he will never be fully intact again; there will always be sharp edges not safe to touch.
When Billy came to the hospital to take me home, he looked into my bloodshot eyes and went quiet.
“I look that pretty?” I said.
“No.”
“What then?”
“Have I ever told you you’re my hero?”
“Isn’t that a song?”
I was joking because I could see he was sincere, and it embarrassed me.
“I’m serious, man. You’ve gone through shit in your life that would’ve broken the toughest guys in my brigade.”
“It was your knife that saved me, Billy.”
“The blade is just an extension of the man.”
“Now you sound like a samurai movie.”
But it was those words—that uncomfortably admiring sentiment—that gave me the analogy of the annealing process.
Two nights after returning to my empty house, I celebrated Christmas Eve at the Cronks’ place.
“You sure you won’t let me go with you tomorrow?” he said.
“It’s Christmas morning, Billy! Your first since you got out of prison. You can’t not be here with your family.”
“I’ve already received my gifts.” He smiled at Aimee who was seated with Emma in her lap while the girl read aloud from the new Harry Potter book she’d unwrapped, my present to her. “I don’t deserve the blessings I’ve been given.”
He’d had a few glasses of eggnog and his emotions were running high.
I sipped my own (unspiked) eggnog. The Cronk boys were passing back and forth the personalized jackknives I’d bought (with their mother’s permission) from L.L.Bean. The gifts seemed appropriate after the crucial role Billy’s blade had played in saving my life.
“Is your phone still ringing?” my friend asked.
“I’ve unplugged it.”
The national media had gotten wind of my torment at the hands of the Dows and wanted to interview me. I’d kept silent at the advice of counsel (and my own common sense), but that hadn’t stopped a few online outlets from flailing me for having shot and killed a woman half my weight, ignoring the fact that she’d nearly murdered me. The polemicists wanted Tori Dow to be in death someone she had never been in life. They wanted her to stand for a cause she would have found laughable.
“I still can’t get over it, Mike,” Billy said, lowering his bearish voice. “How you managed to survive everything you did.”
I had worried he might return to the subject of my heroism the deeper he got in his cups. “It was Emma’s magic. Remember she cast protection spells on Shadow and me that morning?”
“It was more than that.”
“If I had to credit anyone, I guess it would be Felice Bazinet—or whatever her married name is. She called the police to tell them where the Dows were going to take me. I don’t know how she got the information out of her dad. But I’m glad she did.”
“You said she was in on the plan, though. It was her job to delay you until dark. The Dows needed time to plant those spikes in the road and alert everyone in their network.”
“It wasn’t the Dows who planted them—it was Jewett. Tempest liked nothing better than manipulating people into doing her dirty work for her. She had Bruce Jewett under her thumb for years because of what Arlo Burch had seen. Now Jewett is probably going to prison for the rest of his life. But after years of being bled dry, I think he’s relieved it’s finally over.”
“But he still won’t say why he did it?”
“Just that he and the professor got into a heated argument and the boat began to rock and Chamberlain fell over. Jewett claims that life vest came off when he tried to haul the old man onboard, which can happen. He says the professor went under because the river was fast and cold, and there was nothing he could do.”
“Not a lover’s quarrel?”
“That’s what Mariëtte Chamberlain thinks. I have no idea. But it’s interesting that Jewett gets so enraged at the implic
ation that he and the professor had a sexual relationship. He doesn’t mind being branded a murderer, but he considers being outed as gay as the worst stigma a man can suffer.”
Billy had finished his eggnog and poured some straight rum from the bottle into his mug. He was secretive, turned his broad back, not wanting his wife to see. He only thought he got away with it. Aimee Cronk missed nothing.
“You sure you don’t want some?” he whispered. “Oh, right. You’re on those meds. Be careful with that stuff. I’ve lost too many of my army friends to opiates.”
“You don’t have to worry about me.”
“That’s what they all say.” But even drunk, he seemed to sense I was telling the truth. “One thing I’ve been wondering about. Who left the note on your windshield?”
“Beats me.”
“Don’t you want to—?”
“It doesn’t matter, Billy. You’re never going to solve every little mystery in life. So forget the unimportant ones.”
He brooded on this, and I could see he was far from satisfied. “And you never explained about that Felicia.”
“Felice.”
“Why she’d do it? Why did she inform on the Dows after helping them?”
“Felice kept me talking because Tempest ordered it, but she didn’t know why. She should have suspected it was more than a mean prank. But I never got the feeling she was an evil person. She might not have liked me, or maybe she did, but she didn’t want me to die. Sometimes people become brave when they’re more afraid for others than they are for themselves.”
I didn’t mention to Billy that Felice had confessed that everything she’d told me about Bibi Chamberlain had been a lie. The granddaughter loved her grandfather and vice versa. There had been no changes in the will. It was all bullshit meant to string me along until darkness fell.
“What’s going to happen to her?” Billy asked.
“To Felice? Nothing, if I have any say in the matter. I’m not sure what crime the prosecutor could even charge her with. But I’m guessing her friendship with Bibi Chamberlain is over.”
