by Paul Doiron
“There’s someone inside,” I said. “Turn off the engine. Turn off the lights.”
The chaplain had fast reflexes. When her headlights went dim, the darkness seemed to seep inside the Beetle. Then my eyes began to accommodate themselves to the night, and I noticed another light go on in the house, in a window adjacent to the first one.
“I don’t suppose you have a gun with you?” I asked, not really serious.
“There’s a revolver in the glove compartment.”
I thought she was joking. She wasn’t. It was a Smith & Wesson .38 Special. The handle was pink.
“I’ve been called to some pretty scary places over the years,” she said by way of explanation.
The pistol-packing pastor, I thought.
I popped open the cylinder to check if the gun was fully loaded—it was—and snapped it shut again.
“What are you going to do?” Davies asked me.
“I’m going up to have a look inside the house while you call nine one one.”
“I can’t convince you to sit here and wait with me?”
She already knew my answer.
I turned the collar up on Soctomah’s windbreaker and stepped out of the Beetle, closing the door quietly behind me until I heard the latch click shut. I crept to the side of the driveway so I could sneak up the road in the shadow of the maples. Why would someone be lurking in Kathy’s house, especially so conspicuously?
As I crept closer to the dooryard, I could see that the car was a battered Oldsmobile Cutlass. It had probably rolled out of the factory with a midnight black paint job, but twenty years of sitting in the sun and being driven along salted roads had weathered the vehicle a lead gray. There were dents in the driver’s door and the rear fender. The side mirror was bent back, as if it had recently clipped a telephone pole.
I didn’t recognize the car, but it had a Maine license plate. It was one of those Purple Heart specialty designs with the words COMBAT WOUNDED at the bottom. I remembered hotheaded Tommy Volk’s theory that the shooter might have been a crazy vet looking for revenge. I memorized the number in case it might prove important later. I saw a crumpled white Burger King bag on the passenger seat and a cardboard box full of recyclable booze bottles in the back. The car didn’t fit at all with my impression of the sniper as a cautious, methodical person.
Whoever it was had broken the police tape that had been strung across the door and found his way inside the house. I tried to avoid looking at the dark stains on the front steps but found myself unable to resist the impulse.
Slowly, I swung the door open and waited. I wasn’t sure if I expected shots to be fired from across the foyer, but the only sound I heard was the oil furnace humming a tune in the basement. Someone had turned on the heat.
The house smelled of dog. Pluto lived on after death in that distinctive canine odor that clung to every fabric surface. The hallway became pitch-dark when I closed the door behind me. I would have preferred to turn on a light, if only to avoid stepping in the blood that I had glimpsed on the carpet runner and the maple boards. I pressed my body against the wallpaper and slid along until I reached the staircase to the second floor.
When I peered up the stairs, I saw a bluish glow coming from the direction of the bedrooms. I took a careful step onto the first riser. The wood gave out a painful-sounding creak, which made me clench my back teeth together. The second step seemed even louder. I pointed the barrel of the revolver at the top of the staircase.
There was light coming from two rooms: the bathroom and the bedroom beside Kathy’s. I straightened up and drew in a deep breath. I took the remaining two stairs with one big step. Again, I pressed myself against the wall, keeping the pistol pointed in front of me in case the intruder leaped out of one of the rooms.
When I got to the bathroom, I paused to listen for the sound of running water or a toilet seat creaking, but I heard nothing. I poked my head inside. The shower curtain concealed the tub. I used my left hand to peel back the plastic liner. No one was there.
I moved on to the lighted bedroom. The door had been left open a crack. I gave it a gentle push. I saw an empty bed with rumpled sheets and an heirloom quilt in a heap on the floor. I had never been on this floor of Kathy’s house. It seemed to be less a guest room than a space belonging to a specific person: a teenage boy, maybe. There were athletic trophies arrayed along a shelf and framed family photographs. A red-and-white sports pennant for the Caribou Vikings was tacked over the window.
I bent sideways to see if someone might be hiding under the bed and felt a disorienting head rush when I straightened up.
The closet?
Standing to one side and raising the gun, I eased the door open. Clothes hung from wire hangers, but they seemed more like the pants and shirts of a grown man. I had no idea whose room this was.
The basement furnace chose that moment to cease running, but the radiators continued to make a ticking sound. I heard something dripping and noticed a faded army fatigue jacket slung over a chair beside the window. Beside it were a pair of enormous work boots. The coat and the boots were still wet.
I became aware of another sound: snoring. It was coming from Kathy’s darkened bedroom.
I stepped back into the hall and gave the door a tap with my boot so that it swung in on itself. Light from the hall leaked into the room around my head and shoulders.
A tall, fully dressed man was lying facedown on Kathy’s bed, his right arm hanging over the side. He had a full head of sandy hair and was wearing a Nordic sweater and paint-splattered jeans. There were holes in the bottoms of his tube socks. On the rug beside the bed, an open bottle of vodka stood upright. The sweet scent of exhaled alcohol was cloying.
I pointed the revolver at the sleeping man. “Hey!”
He didn’t budge or flinch.
I stepped forward and poked his sole with the pistol. He moved his foot lazily, the way a horse flicks its tail at a biting fly. His snoring continued without so much as a pause. He was so drunk, he’d gone to the bathroom and forgotten which bed he’d been sleeping in.
“Wake up!”
The man was either out cold or putting on a very convincing act.
I took a chance and picked up the bottle of vodka from the floor. It was Absolut, Kathy’s brand of choice. The man had consumed the better part of the bottle. I dumped the rest on his face.
He awoke with a start, sputtering. He rolled onto his side and sat bolt upright, his legs thrashing.
“Motherfucker! Motherfucker! Motherfucker!”
“Police! Don’t move,” I said. The words came out so fast, I forgot they were untrue.
He had clapped a hand over one eye, and I saw that he was wearing a black patch over the other. It was like something a pirate might wear. I was sure the alcohol must have stung like acid.
“I can’t fucking see!” he said.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?’
He worked his knuckle back and forth in his good eye. “I live here. This is my home.”
“Bullshit. This is Kathy Frost’s house.”
“I’m her brother.”
It took me a moment to connect the dots. “Kurt?”
“Yeah,” he said, squinting at me with an eye as red as a crushed tomato.
I knew all about him.
19
Kurt Eklund was Kathy’s one and only sibling.
In the dark days when my father was accused of killing two men and had taken off into the woods to escape capture, Kathy had told me things about her brother. She saw certain similarities between Kurt and my dad. Both had come back from Vietnam physically and emotionally wounded and fundamentally changed from the good people they had been before; both used alcohol to numb the chronic pain that had infected their souls in the jungles of Southeast Asia; both had volatile tempers that blew up unpredictably, like the summer thunderstorms that come in over the mountains.
“He’ll call me late at night when he’s been drinking,” she’d said. “Just ranting and raving
about the Republicans, how they’ve become the party of the old Confederacy and want to reinstate the plantation system for the twenty-first century. He starts quoting Marx and calls himself ‘the last American Communist.’ He gets totally weird and paranoid when he’s wasted, and I can’t calm him down. When he sobers up, he has no memory of even calling me. You can have a normal conversation with him in the morning about politics—Kurt’s really smart and well read—and you never hear any of that Communist stuff. I don’t know where it comes from.”
Kurt was older than Kathy by close to a decade—so somewhere in his early sixties. I had always understood that he worked as a carpenter and that he made his home up north in the town of New Sweden, where their aging parents still lived. She hadn’t mentioned that he had moved in with her. He was a handsome man, or he had been in his youth. He had a full head of blond hair (dripping now with vodka) and he had made it well into middle age without acquiring even the hint of a potbelly. He was as lean and long-limbed as his sister.
If you looked closer, though, you could see that his body was on the verge of breaking down. The blood vessels in his cheeks and nose were in the process of turning from pink to purple. The effect made him look like he’d gone twelve rounds with a heavyweight prizefighter. His skin elsewhere had a lemonish cast, which I took to be the outward manifestation of an ailing liver.
“What did you do that for?” he said in a slurring nasal accent that sounded almost Midwestern.
“You wouldn’t wake up.”
He ran a hand through his mop, pushing the wet strands off his forehead. “You’re a cop?”
“My name is Mike Bowditch. I’m a friend of your sister.”
It didn’t seem to mean anything to him.
“You have a pink gun,” he observed.
I lowered the revolver. Kurt didn’t strike me as dangerous—if only because he was so deeply drunk—but I remembered what Kathy had told me about his violent mood swings.
“Why’re you in my house?” he said with sudden defiance.
“I saw a light on. Someone had torn down the crime-scene tape.”
“What tape?”
The ramifications of the question took a moment to settle in. “You know what happened to your sister?”
“Course I do.”
He seemed to make an effort to collect himself. He rubbed his face hard, as if his cheeks were frostbitten and he was trying to get the blood flowing. He readjusted his black eye patch, snapping the band.
“Kathy’s in the hospital, Kurt. She’s been shot.”
“What?”
“You didn’t notice all the blood downstairs?”
“You’re nuts, man,” he said. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I tucked the revolver into the pocket of my jacket. “Your sister was shot outside, in the yard, but she managed to crawl inside and call for help. She’s in the hospital.”
His voice rose an octave. “I don’t believe you.”
“Stand up, and I’ll show you the blood.” I found myself resenting his pathetic drunkenness.
He swung his legs off the bed and planted his feet on the floor. He tried to stand, but just as quickly he lost strength in his legs and sat back down again. The bed bounced under him. He turned his discolored face to me with an expression that seemed to dissolve from one emotion to another while I watched.
“Gimme a minute,” he said.
If I hadn’t dealt with so many alcoholics in my career, I wouldn’t have believed this display. But nothing drunks did surprised me anymore. Once, back in Machias, I’d seen a drunk girl leave a grocery store and drive off across the parking lot while her baby screamed in the shopping cart where she’d abandoned him. Another time, I’d responded to a report of an intoxicated motorist driving the wrong way on the interstate, dodging oncoming traffic, before she’d gone off the road and into a telephone pole, decapitating herself. On yet another occasion, I’d assisted the dive team in the retrieval of a man’s body from the Penobscot River after one of his drinking buddies dared him to jump off a bridge into the frothing water—in October.
I heard the siren through the half-open window beside the bed. The wailing sound was faint at first but grew louder as the cruiser came speeding up the hill. Soon I saw the flashing blue lights of the Dodge Charger reflecting off the glass behind the curtains.
“Can you stay there on the bed, please?” I said.
“Sure.” He seemed relieved to remain stationary.
I turned on lights as I went back down the hallway, until the entire house was ablaze. The stain on the floor downstairs seemed more brown than red now. In the brightness of the flush-mounted ceiling light, I noticed a man’s big footprints in the middle of the drying pool. The sight of Kurt’s boot marks made me sick and angry.
Deputy Skip Morrison peered in through the front door, his service weapon in hand. “Mike?”
“I’m OK,” I said.
“What’s going on?”
“It’s Kathy’s brother. I found him passed out on the bed upstairs.”
“I called in the plate just now.” Morrison holstered his pistol. “But I didn’t recognize the name. The guy’s a habitual offender. He just got his driver’s license back last month, after the judge had suspended it for six years.”
“He says he lives here,” I said.
“Not according to the DMV. They have his address as New Sweden.”
“We could ask him about it, but he happens to be drunk off his ass.”
“If he lives here, where was he when his sister was shot?”
“Off on a bender.” I gestured at the floor. “When he got home, he tore through the police tape and trampled through her blood on the way to find the liquor.”
Morrison folded his arms and shook his head at the sadness of it all. “So what’s the plan, then? I could take him back to the jail until he sobers up. Call it a B and E for now.”
“She might have given him permission to stay here,” I said. “I already feel bad about hitting him with the news about Kathy.”
“The last thing we need is for him to get behind the wheel tonight.”
That was true enough and a real possibility. “I can stay with him.”
Morrison smiled. “Baby-sitting duty, huh?”
“I think Kathy would want me to look after him.”
“Anything you want me to do?”
“If you happen to swing past the Square Deal, I left a duffel bag in room six.” I gave him the key, reached into my back pocket for my scrawny wallet, and pulled out three twenty-dollar bills, leaving me with one. “Give this to Dot while you’re at it. Tell her she can keep the change.”
“You know Dot’s not going to take your money.”
“Give it to her just the same.”
I followed Morrison outside and found Deb Davies standing in the wet weeds beside the cruiser. She’d opened an umbrella against the drizzle. It was child-size, with pink flowers and cats and the words Hello Kitty written all over it. Something about the sight of her with that little girl’s umbrella made me laugh in spite of myself.
I explained to her about Kathy’s brother and his condition. I told her that I intended to stay with him until he sobered up.
“Maybe I should talk with him.” Her face was blue from the pulsing pursuit lights.
“He’s pretty drunk.”
“It’s not the first time I’ve counseled someone who is intoxicated.”
I reached into my pocket for the revolver. “Before I forget…”
“If you’re going to stay here tonight, I’d prefer you keep it.”
I shrugged and put the gun back in the jacket. We turned and headed together for the door.
“You know I could arrest you for impersonating a police officer,” Skip Morrison said when he saw the logo on the back of the windbreaker. When he smiled, he showed a set of teeth that would have made a horse feel inadequate.
“Someone could do the same to you,” I said.
“Stop the presses! Mike Bowditch told an actual joke. You really have changed, dude. I’ll be back with your bag.”
Inside the house, Davies paused in the entryway, staring at the trail of tacky blood and the smeared pattern where Kathy’s body had been before the paramedics spirited her away. The sight seemed to send a shiver through her body. She gripped the handrail and physically pulled herself up the first riser the way you might use a sapling to help climb a hill. I followed her up the stairs.
Kurt Eklund was still sitting on the bed, where I had left him, leaning back on his outstretched arms to keep himself upright. His head was tilted back and his good eye was squeezed shut. In this posture, he resembled a sunbather taking in the rays.
“Kurt? I’m Reverend Davies. I’m a chaplain with the Warden Service.”
He opened his good eye. It was still pink and painful-looking. “Reverend?” His tone was suspicious.
Davies plucked at her spiky gray hair to lift it up. The drizzle had flattened her do. “Your sister has been badly wounded. Someone shot her last night. She’s in very serious condition at Maine Medical Center, but the doctors have managed to stabilize her.”
“Is she going to die?”
“She is out of surgery. Your parents are with her now.”
How had I missed seeing the Eklunds at the hospital? I had always wanted to meet them. Kathy’s parents were Swedes from the northernmost part of Maine: a flat farmland that had been colonized by Scandinavians who considered the climate to be balmy compared to the Nordic wastes from which they’d emigrated. Her father had been a minister before he retired.
Kurt Eklund pushed himself up suddenly from the bed, using his long, strong arms to give himself some leverage. He wobbled on his knees and reached out for the bureau. He nearly fell on his face.
“I’m gonna go see her,” he said.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said.
He staggered forward, his shoulders bent like Methuselah’s. “I’m gonna go see her.”
“You need a good night’s sleep first, Kurt,” said Davies. “In the morning, I can go with you if you’d like.”
She touched his arm, but he shook it off.
