The Bone Orchard

by Paul Doiron

  An Afghan war veteran, a former military policeman, had barricaded himself inside a horse barn and was threatening to blow his head off with a shotgun.

  Frost and Tate were the first to respond.

  The two wardens were soaked to the skin from having spent a bug-bitten day checking turkey hunters who were either too determined or too dumb to let the rain keep them from setting up their blinds and decoys, often illegally on posted property. They’d had a bad encounter with a man from Maryland—a military contractor—who had claimed any criminal conviction would jeopardize his government clearances. They had written half a dozen summons and been on duty for close to twelve hours.

  Physically, the women were a study in contrasts. Kathy was past fifty, although she looked ten years younger, and was tall enough to have played college basketball. She wore her sandy hair cut in a shoulder-length bob and was considered attractive by male wardens, not because she was good-looking in any conventional sense, but because of her good humor and sheer likability.

  Danielle “Dani” Tate was newly graduated from the Advanced Warden Academy, and she was half Kathy’s age. At five-four she was also the shortest warden in the service. Her body was solid and square, and her shoulders were as wide as her hips. It was rumored that she held a black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu. She had flat gray eyes and a flat face that rarely displayed any emotion except seriousness of purpose. Every morning, she shined her patrol boots before zipping them up and pulled her blond ponytail through the hole in the back of the brimmed service cap all wardens are required to wear.

  In the rain, the lighted windows of the farmhouse must have looked fuzzy, as if seen through smudged eyeglasses. The clapboard building had been erected in the mid-nineteenth century, but the original structure was unrecognizable beneath the extensive renovations and additions that James Gammon had made when he’d purchased the property. The four-car garage was entirely new, as was the barn where Lyla Gammon kept her Morgan horses and taught riding lessons to the wealthy children of Knox and Lincoln counties.

  She was waiting for the wardens behind the misted glass door, a skeleton-thin silhouette around which the interior light had gathered like an angelic aura. As the patrol truck pulled up, Lyla Gammon stepped outside, wearing a waxed-cotton Barbour raincoat, riding pants, and knee-high wellies. Despite the rain gear, the wardens could see that she was thoroughly drenched.

  Kathy checked the time on the clock and radioed in that they had arrived at the scene. Then both wardens pulled up the hoods of their olive jackets and climbed out of the truck for the hundredth time that day into a raging downpour.

  “Thank God you’re here!” Lyla Gammon said. She’d come from Virginia originally, and she spoke with a Tidewater accent that was as out of place in midcoast Maine as the Chanel cosmetics smeared across her face.

  “You’re Mrs. Gammon?” Kathy asked.

  “I’m Jimmy’s mom. Yes.”

  “We received a report that your son was threatening to harm himself,” Kathy said. “Where is he now?”

  “Still in the barn.” Lyla stretched out her arm to indicate the long red structure behind the house. Its external floodlights had been turned off, and there was no glimmer visible through the windows. The double doors in front were both shut. “He locked himself in with the horses.”

  The two wardens exchanged glances. The bitumen smell of rain falling on asphalt hung in the air. The night was neither particularly warm nor particularly cold—just unrelentingly wet.

  “We understand that he is armed,” Danielle Tate said.

  “I believe so.”

  Kathy wiped her forehead. “You don’t know for certain?”

  “I found the case he keeps his shotgun in open on the dining room table. It was empty.”

  “Do you know what kind of shotgun it is?”

  Kathy wanted to know if they were dealing with a single-shot firearm or a tactical weapon capable of firing nine shells without being reloaded.

  “It’s a Royal,” said Lyla.

  The pouring rain made it hard for the wardens to hear; it must have been like trying to have a conversation while standing under a showerhead.

  Danielle Tate blinked water from her eyes. “A what?”

  “A British model—an over-and-under twenty-gauge made by Holland & Holland.”

  Meaning that the gun held two shells. But a person needs only one shell to blow his brains out—or those of somebody else.

  “Is it possible he has another gun with him?” Kathy asked.

  The mother gathered her raincoat at the throat and clutched the waxed cotton tightly. “I checked the safe, and the Royal was the only one missing.”

  “Why do you think Jimmy might be suicidal?” Danielle Tate asked.

  It was an important question, but Kathy would have known not to phrase it bluntly when his mother was already so distraught.

  “He was badly injured in the war. He’s been drinking all day. And he’s on pain medications. He’s not supposed to mix them.”

  “Is anyone else at home?” Kathy asked.

  “My husband is driving back from the airport. He should be here soon.”

  Kathy studied the darkened building. “How many doors does the barn have?”

  “Three,” Lyla said. “There’s another set of doors at the far end and a smaller door around the corner on the right that we use to enter the building.”

  “How do you know Jimmy is in there now?” Kathy asked.

  “Because that’s where he goes when he is sad,” his mother said. “Jimmy loves the horses.”

  * * *

  In the statement she made to the state police, and in subsequent interviews she gave to the media and the attorney general, Lyla Gammon recounted what (according to her) happened after the wardens arrived.

  The two women conferred for a minute or two, and then the taller one—the sergeant, Kathy Frost—told the mother to wait inside the house. Lyla wanted to go with them to the barn. She thought she could help calm her son down, but Sergeant Frost said that they needed to assess the situation first.

  Lyla believed the wardens had her son’s best interest at heart, or she never would have returned to the house. Sergeant Frost appeared to be a competent and experienced officer. The younger one, Tate, seemed nervous, although she didn’t say or do anything to confirm that impression; it was just a vague feeling Lyla had as a mother.

  She went into the house, where the dog—Winston Churchill, or “Winnie”—was whining anxiously at the door. Jimmy usually took the springer with him everywhere he went on the property. The two had been inseparable since her son was released from the hospital. But on this night, the young man had locked the brown-and-white spaniel in the house when he made his way through the torrential rain to the barn. That act alone had frightened his mother.

  Lyla didn’t pause to remove her raincoat or boots. She left a trail of water from the foyer, through the dining room and kitchen, to the mudroom, where a row of windows faced the barn.

  Through the rain, Lyla watched two silhouettes approach the darkened building. She couldn’t tell if the wardens had drawn their service weapons. She tried wiping the fogged glass with her sweater sleeve, but the condensation re-formed almost instantly. One of them went to the side door, while the other disappeared around the back. The sense of panic she’d felt before returned, as if her lungs were folding like black wings around her heart.

  It was then the cell phone rang. Her husband was on the line, driving home from the airport in Portland. He had just turned off the numbered rural route and onto the country road that led through the green hay fields that were the last remaining evidence of Camden’s agricultural past.

  “What’s happening?” he demanded.

  “The game wardens are here.”

  “Game wardens? Where the hell are the Camden cops?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “The wardens were the first to arrive. There are two of them—two women.”

  “Who are they? Do
you know them?”

  “No.”

  “Fucking hell.” James tended to curse more after his visits to D.C., and Lyla assumed it was something he picked up there: a way people had of establishing their hierarchies in the halls of power. “Is Jimmy still in the barn?”

  “I think so.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The wardens wanted me to wait in the house while they tried to talk with Jimmy.”

  “I need you to do something for me, Lyla,” James said. She always took comfort in her husband’s absolute confidence, the quick way he arrived at decisions. “I need you to go out there and call them back from the barn. I don’t want them talking to Jimmy until I get home. Tell them I’m only five minutes away.”

  “But what if they—”

  “Tell them he’ll listen to me. They just need to wait. Everyone just needs to wait.”

  “But James—”

  “Just do what I say. I can take care of this.”

  Lyla opened the mudroom door, and the springer tried to push past her leg, until she shoved his head down. The sound of the rain was a constant roar. The water gushing from the house’s roof drains was louder than if she’d been standing beside a rushing stream.

  She took several steps toward the barn, crossed half the distance from the house to the double doors, when a scream brought her up short. It was one of the Morgans. Lyla had grown up with horses and recognized when an animal was terrified.

  The next thing she remembered were the shots: two of them, back-to-back. And then all the horses were screaming, panicked by the echoes, and she was running to the side door, which was standing open now, the rain slanting in.

  An arm caught her as she stepped inside, holding her fast. It was the young warden, Danielle Tate. Their eyes met for a moment, and Lyla saw the other woman’s surprise and fear. The barn smelled of gunpowder in addition to the usual hay and manure. Tate was gripping a pistol.

  Sergeant Frost loomed over Jimmy’s fallen body. She was holding a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other. The tiny blue beam was the only illumination in that huge space, and it shone straight down on the disfigured face of her son: a face that had once seemed beautiful to Lyla because of its resemblance to his father’s, but which was now the texture and color of melted tallow, as fake-looking as the red wig the young man had worn in public after he returned from the war.

  Blood pumped from the hole in his neck and flowed across the rubber mat between the stalls. Even from the doorway, Lyla saw that his eyes were open, but they were fluttering, losing focus. In horror, she watched Kathy Frost kick the shotgun away from Jimmy’s clawlike hand, as if her dying son could possibly pose a danger to anyone now.

  It was only when the sergeant raised her eyes to Lyla that the mother found her voice. “What have you done?” she cried, louder than the horses. “What have you done to my boy?”

  3

  On the morning after the shooting, while the medical examiner was zipping up the body bag and the detectives were beginning their interviews with everyone involved—including James Gammon Sr., who had arrived home five minutes after his son was shot through the carotid artery—I was sitting in the stern of a Grand Laker canoe, many miles to the north and east.

  Two people were seated in front of me in the boat. One was a smooth-faced, bespectacled young man with a slight paunch and the weary air of middle age coming on way too fast; the other was his attractive girlfriend, who seemed to be compensating for her own long hours at a desk with militant dieting and exercise. Both were investment bankers from New York City who had paused in Freeport on their drive to Down East Maine to equip themselves from head to toe in outdoor clothing and fly-fishing gear from L.L.Bean.

  Before setting out from the lodge, I’d given them both casting lessons on the dew-beaded lawn. The man, Mason, claimed to have been a lifelong angler, but he threw awful loops that kept twisting his tippet into wind knots. The young woman, a button-nosed blonde named Maddie, had never held a fly rod before. Within fifteen minutes of instruction, she was shooting line forty-five feet with pinpoint accuracy. Her success just made her boyfriend red-faced, and the harder he tried, the worse he cast.

  I’d found it generally true that women were the best fly-casting students, since the secret to success is acquiring the smoothest form, which generates greater line speed. Men believe that the only way to prevail is to muscle their way through things, which is exactly the wrong lesson to draw from fly-fishing (and life). Too often I’d tried to use brute strength to solve my own problems, and I’d failed miserably. So I could sympathize with Mason.

  A week of steady rain had raised the surface waters of West Grand Lake to the point where it was nearly swamping the boathouses, and the dam keeper who watched over the gate at the south end had been forced to increase the flow to levels few of the locals remembered. Most of the fishermen who came to the North Woods village of Grand Lake Stream—a nine-hour drive from Manhattan—came for the landlocked salmon that gathered in the river below the dam. They came to wade in the gin-clear water and cast to fish whose movements showed as darting shadows on the gravel and sandbanks along the bottom. But only a suicidal fool would have attempted to wade the stream at a flow of three thousand cubic feet of water per second.

  In an effort to salvage some business, the local guides had switched to bass fishing on the surrounding lakes and ponds. The conditions weren’t much better, given the high, cold water. The bass hadn’t yet moved to their spawning beds and were hanging deep around the submerged boulders that dot the landscape of Washington County. If you wanted to catch anything, you’d be best off dunking a golden shiner down into the depths, something alive and wriggling, and even then you’d need some luck to catch a trophy.

  But Mason and Maddie wanted to fly-cast for smallmouth using streamers and poppers. I warned them to lower their expectations. I was a guide, not a magician who could produce fish from murky lake bottoms.

  “We don’t care if we catch anything,” Mason said. “We just want to be outside.”

  Those are the magic words every fishing guide hopes to hear.

  We dubbed around for a few hours, trying various rock clusters I knew to be fishy, as well as some hidden ledges and bars that the lodge owner, Jeff Jordan, had recommended. Maddie even managed to catch a decent-size pickerel. Mostly, though, I did my best to inform and entertain the couple. The mist made it difficult to take in the views, but occasionally a breeze would open a curtain in the fog and the pea-green hills would sharpen into focus, and you’d feel as if you were standing in a museum in front of the greatest landscape painting you’d ever seen.

  I pointed out the distinctive songs of the migrating warblers we heard along the shore, nineteen species in all that morning, including Blackburnian, Cape May, mourning, bay-breasted, and northern waterthrush—birds that serious bird-watchers paid money to add to their life lists.

  Coming around a bend, slowly because I was afraid of wrecking us on rocks that even in good conditions were hard to spot, we surprised a moose feeding in the shallows. It was a bull who had lost his antlers over the winter, and his shedding coat was mottled gray in patches across his shoulders. To me, he looked shopworn, but he was the first moose Maddie had ever seen and therefore something special.

  “Oh, wow, he’s beautiful,” she said, trying to take a picture with her cell phone while I paddled in close. The animal lifted his dripping camel nose and squinted at the unfamiliar shape approaching across the gray water. As excited as I was for Maddie, a sadness enveloped me as we drew near the shore. I had seen many dead moose as a game warden and had killed more than a few myself, but the ones that haunted me were the five I’d found along a logging road the previous autumn: slaughtered out of pure evil by men who’d left the corpses to rot. It was one of the experiences that had shaken my commitment to my chosen profession. I had discovered there were limits to the cruelty I could bear witnessing.

  I tried to shrug off the ghost images an
d nudged the canoe closer. But the bull decided he’d had enough of the paparazzi and shook his enormous head before splashing away into the forest.

  Maddie turned to me in her high-backed chair. Her face was flushed. “That was awesome!”

  “Thank you,” Mason said.

  “My pleasure.” I scratched my chin. It was a new experience, touching my face and finding whiskers there.

  Maddie had been looking at me strangely all morning. There was something about her face that seemed familiar, too. We must have been thinking the same thing.

  “Mike, what did you say your last name was again?” she asked.

  “Bowditch.”

  “Did you go to Colby?”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew I’d met you before! I’m Maddie Lawson! Sarah’s friend from Choate.”

  I barely remembered my ex-girlfriend’s roommate from prep school. Maddie had come to visit Sarah a couple of times in Waterville. The picture I had in my memory was of a homely brown-haired girl who had struggled unsuccessfully to keep off weight.

  “You’re … blond,” I said.

  “Yeah, and I have a new nose, too. I can’t believe we’ve spent the whole morning together and I didn’t even recognize you. Sarah told me you were some sort of forest ranger.”

  “A game warden,” I said. “I used to be.”

  “I was so sure you two were going to get married someday.”

  I had thought so myself. “Sarah and I realized we were going in different directions.”

  “Did you know she was back in Maine?”

  The news took a while to settle in my gut. “The last I heard, she was in D.C., working for Head Start.”

  “She’s living in Portland now,” Maddie said, “doing development work for a new charter school. We talked about meeting for a drink on the drive home. She’s going to be so freaked-out to hear that you were our fishing guide!”

  We were drifting closer to shore than I had intended, and suddenly I heard a scraping sound under the boat and quickly pushed the paddle over the side to keep from running aground.