by Paul Doiron
“Thank you for flying with us,” the pilot said as I handed him my headset. “We hope you enjoy your stay in Portland or wherever your final destination may take you.”
I felt a little sorry for him. He had tried so hard to coax a smile out of me.
The only luggage I was carrying was my waxed canvas duffel. I’d packed it with all the personal items I thought were worth keeping—my tent, my Snow & Nealley kindling ax. I’d left the rest in the trunk of Kurt Eklund’s Cutlass.
The more you know, the less you carry. That was a saying they used in wilderness-survival schools, but it applied to more than just bushcraft.
Malcomb grabbed the bag away from me before I had a chance to resist. He tossed it into the backseat, beside the locked case in which he kept his AR-15 rifle. He’d done a lot of vacuuming, but the stale smell of cigarettes lingered. Regulations said he wasn’t permitted to smoke inside the state-owned vehicle, but who was there to punish him now?
“How was your flight?” His throat sounded as cracked as a waterless arroyo.
“Faster than driving.”
He spun the wheel in the direction of outer Congress Street and pressed the accelerator. I’d seen Maine Med standing like a citadel on the Western Promenade as the plane had turned and banked over the city.
“I heard she’s awake,” I said. “Soctomah said you were going to break the news to the family. How did it go?”
“It didn’t come as much of a shock.”
“Kurt told me he had cirrhosis. I’m guessing they’d given him up for dead a long time ago.”
He’d put on his mirrored sunglasses, but I felt him glancing at me out of the corner of his eye. “How old are you again, Bowditch?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“That’s what I thought. Parents don’t give up on their kids until they see them in a casket. Doesn’t matter how old the kids are.”
I leaned back against the seat, feeling properly chastened. “How did Kathy react when you told her about Pluto?”
“I think you know the answer to that question.”
The major seemed unaccountably hostile. I hadn’t expected a hero’s welcome, but when Soctomah told me that wardens had paid for my hotel room, I’d experienced a brief period of forgiveness, as if I might be welcomed back into the fold.
We crossed the Stroudwater bridge, headed toward downtown Portland. A snowy egret was standing in the tidal muck, one leg tucked beneath its tail feathers. I saw its bright yellow foot. I unrolled the automatic window and let the salt air clear away some of the tobacco reek.
Malcomb pushed a button on his door and my window rolled back up.
“I suppose you heard the latest about the colonel,” he said.
“No.”
“Harkavy announced his resignation last night.”
Colonel Duane Harkavy had been both my commanding officer and my personal nemesis for as long as I could remember. In my mind, he’d represented everything wrong with the Warden Service—the resistance to new ideas, the cronyism that rewarded political savvy over experience in the field, the sexism toward female officers. I had a hard time imagining the department without him. I should have been hopeful about the future, but Malcomb’s sourness suggested he wasn’t planning on throwing his hat in the ring.
“Does that make you the acting colonel?” I asked.
“Until the commissioner replaces me, it does.”
We paused at a stoplight. Malcomb wasn’t upset because he had inherited the job; he was upset because he would never be allowed to keep it. His new boss, the current commissioner, was an incompetent bureaucrat who didn’t give a shit about protecting the state’s natural resources. She was just a shill appointed by a governor who cared even less about Maine’s environment.
“You did a good job up there,” Malcomb said out of the blue.
“Thanks.”
“I don’t think I could have stopped myself from shooting the guy, but you did the right thing.”
“I’m still not convinced.”
His eyes never left the road as we crossed the busy intersection at St. John Street. “I read Tate’s report about that incident at the quarry, too.”
It didn’t sound like a question, so I didn’t reply.
“You did an exit interview when you resigned from the service,” he said. “Who did it? Peasely?”
“Yes.”
“Did he mention that you had a year to rethink the decision? If there’s an opening, you don’t need to formally reapply.”
“He said the provision was applicable only if a warden left under good circumstances.”
“Did he say you were fired?”
“No.”
“That means you left under good circumstances.”
I had never imagined that returning to the Warden Service was a possibility. I had too many enemies in the Augusta headquarters. My resignation had felt irrevocable from the moment I’d offered it.
The hospital loomed ahead.
“So I could just come back?” I said.
We entered the darkened interior of the Congress Street parking garage. “At the colonel’s discretion,” he said.
Or the acting colonel’s, I realized.
* * *
Malcomb escorted me as far as Kathy’s private room. “I’m going to get myself a cup of coffee. Do you want anything?”
“I’m good,” I said.
I knocked and heard a man’s voice tell me to come in. I braced myself before turning the doorknob.
Kathy’s parents were seated in chairs they’d pulled up beside the bed. They both rose to their feet as I entered. The father I knew from the chapel, but the mother I recognized only as an older version of the woman I’d seen in the family photograph hanging in their dining room. Alice Eklund was as tall as her husband. Her hair had faded but still had a slightly blondish tint. There were deep folds of skin along her neck, and the blue veins were prominent in her hands. But she seemed fit and healthy for a woman in her eighties.
The hospital bed was adjustable, and Kathy had raised it so that her head and shoulders were only slightly elevated, as if sitting upright might be a step too far in her recovery. Her skin was no longer gray, but there was no other word to describe her complexion except sickly. Her hair hung close to her scalp, as if she’d recently been wearing a cap; the sutured wound above her ear looked painful. She was wearing actual pajamas rather than a hospital Johnny. They were white, patterned with images of Walt Disney’s cartoon character Pluto.
“Hey, Grasshopper,” she said in a hoarse voice.
“Hey, yourself.”
Kathy raised a hand weakly to indicate her parents. “Did you meet my folks?”
“Reverend Eklund.” I extended my hand to the old man.
“Erik,” he reminded me. “Alice, this is the warden we were telling you about, Kathy’s friend Mike.”
The old woman stepped forward and pressed both of her wrinkled hands around mine. They were ice-cold. Her eyes welled up with tears so fast that they were running down her cheeks before she could lift a tissue. “Thank you.”
Erik Eklund put an arm around his wife’s shoulders. “We can never repay you for what you’ve done for us.”
“Papa,” said Kathy from the bed.
“What?” asked her father.
“You’re embarrassing him.” She was having a hard time getting her words out, but her tongue didn’t have the swollen sound of a person with a speech impediment. “Can you leave us alone? Just for a little while?”
“Of course,” said her father.
Her mother wouldn’t let go of me. It became a bit awkward. Her husband nearly had to pry her fingers loose.
After the door closed behind them, I remained standing at the foot of the bed, as if Kathy had a contagious disease.
“You’ve looked better,” she said to me.
I smiled and raised my hand to the side of my face. “You should see the other guy.”
“Decoster, huh?”
“She asked me what she should tell Jason about that night, and I said she could blame me. I’m sure he grew up hating my guts. But he held it against Marta, too. I think he wanted to kill her his whole life.”
“It doesn’t make much sense, does it? The son avenging his abusive father.”
“I think I heard that story before.”
She gave me a faint smile to indicate that it was a joke. My own father had been a bastard, and no one had been quicker to defend him than yours truly. She waved me forward. I took a seat beside the bed. Her arm was connected to all sorts of tubes and wires, but she held out her hand to me. Her grip was so light, it was barely there.
“I’m sorry about Kurt,” I said.
“You can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.”
I had learned that lesson before. But it’s one you keep forgetting. “So, how are you feeling?”
“Like a pincushion. Or a piñata. Both, I guess.”
I was trying to gauge from her speech how her mind was working. “You’d lost a lot of blood when I found you.”
“They put it back. Now they’re afraid I’ve got brain damage. The docs keep testing me. ‘Count backward from twenty. Remember these three things.’”
She seemed dehydrated and more exhausted than I had ever seen her, but her thinking seemed sound enough. Whatever the doctors were giving her for the pain had left her a little loopy, though. It seemed to have the same effect as truth serum.
“You don’t remember anything about that night?” I asked.
“I remember arguing with you. Did I forgive you?”
“Yes.”
Her laugh was as soft as a sigh. “Of course I did.”
We sat there gazing at each other. She really looked horrible with her sunken eyes and flat hair—almost as bad as my mom had on that last night of her life. I was afraid I might choke up if I didn’t distract myself.
“Do you want to hear some gossip?” I asked.
“Harkavy? Yeah, I know.”
“It’s good for the major, though.”
“He won’t get the job. Doesn’t kiss enough ass.”
“The wardens chipped in for me to stay at the Northeastland last night.”
“Fancy.”
“Maybe after you get out of here, you can show me around Aroostook County. I’d like to see all your old stomping grounds.”
She shook her head. “Too many memories.”
The reference might have been to Jacques and Jason Decoster or to the tragic life of Marta Jepson, but my gut told me she was talking about her late husband, Darren.
She seemed eager to change the subject. “Guess who was just in here? Tate.”
“I thought you two weren’t supposed to communicate until the investigation is complete.”
“She broke the rules.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You’re a bad influence, Grasshopper.”
I studied her smiling face, and I realized that there was something I needed to tell her. The attorney general’s investigation was still proceeding. Kathy had time to come clean.
“Kathy,” I said, lowering my voice. “I know you didn’t shoot Jimmy Gammon in that barn. It was Tate who killed him, but you took the blame.”
Her bloodshot eyes widened. “How?”
“You kept saying to me that it wouldn’t have happened if I’d been there. At first, I thought you meant it wouldn’t have happened because I was more experienced. But you were speaking literally. Then, later, I found a diagram in your wastebasket. I thought it was just a doodle until I realized you were plotting out the trajectories of the two bullets. You lied in your report, Kathy. You could be prosecuted for obstructing justice.”
It took her some effort, but she rolled her eyes. “Who’s going to tell?”
Not me, obviously. “Tate might confess if she figures it out.”
“She thinks it was me who hit him. I told her I did it, and she believes me.”
“What about the ballistics investigators?”
“The bullet went through his neck. No way to tell which one hit him. But I know I missed. I plotted it out, and there was no way I could have hit him in the carotid from where I was standing.”
The confession left me feeling like I’d gotten the wind knocked out of me. “Why did you lie to protect her?”
“She’s a good warden. I thought she deserved more than a few second chances.”
“Like me, you mean.”
“Yeah.”
Why should it have surprised me that the woman who had spent years stopping me from throwing away my career—who had sacrificed so much on my behalf—would do the same for another promising young warden?
“Jesus Christ, Kathy.”
Her lip curled on one side, the way it did when she was being a smart aleck. “I think she has a crush on you.”
“Tate?” The woman disapproved of everything I did.
“I told her you were taken, though.”
I leaned back in the chair and frowned. “I’m taken? Tell that to Stacey Stevens.”
“She’s an idiot. She’s going to end up with a dog if she isn’t careful.”
Without meaning to, she’d brought up a topic I’d been avoiding. “I’m sorry about Pluto.”
“He was a good dog.”
“The best.”
A tear slid down her pale cheek.
I squeezed her hand as gently as I could, afraid of injuring her. Her eyelids lowered. “Are you getting tired?” I asked.
“A little.”
“I’ll come back when you have more energy.”
“No. Stay.”
She shut her eyes. I thought she might be falling asleep, but then she opened them again.
“When are you going to shave that fucking beard?”
41
My new vehicle was a shiny black GMC Sierra, the crew cab version with the standard box. The bed was spacious enough to carry a snowmobile or an all-terrain vehicle. The truck came with a set of tires so rugged, I felt like I could have driven it up the side of Katahdin, right into Pamola’s living room. I cruised from Augusta up I-95 through Bangor, enjoying the smoothness of the acceleration, and turned east when I saw the billowing smokestacks of the Lincoln Paper and Tissue mill rising above the eastern treetops.
May had turned to June. Where there had been only dandelions before, there were now lupines growing wild in the fields: pink, blue, and white. Now you could walk through the forest and identify every tree by the shape of its newly formed leaves. Jeff Jordan had told me that the salmon were biting on Pale Evening Duns in Grand Lake Stream, which was where I was headed.
I followed Route 6 east to the crossroads, where I paused at the stop sign, thinking about the past few months. If I turned left on Route 1, the road would lead me north to Houlton, Presque Isle, and the outskirts of Maine’s Swedish Colony. The Eklunds, I’d heard, were back home after a somber trip to Arlington National Ceremony. They had wanted to bury their son in the town cemetery, but Kathy had convinced them that—whatever lies Kurt might have told to win his Purple Heart—he deserved to rest in the company of heroes.
Kathy hadn’t been well enough to make the trip herself; the doctors said it would take months for her wounds to heal, and even then she shouldn’t expect to return to her former routines. In short, she would never be the same. The initial neurological tests showed no signs of traumatic brain injury, but she had lost her spleen, which meant that she would be more susceptible to the bacteria that cause pneumonia, meningitis, and other dangerous infections. She had survived her brush with death, but at a significant cost.
There might be additional costs yet to come. After burying their own son in the hallowed ground of Arlington, the Gammons had returned home to read the official report on the circumstances surrounding his death. The report was titled “Findings of the Attorney General in the Shooting Death of James P. Gammon by State Game Wardens in Camden,
” and it declared that Sgt. Katarina Frost and Wdn. Danielle Tate had been justified in their use of deadly force to protect themselves from physical harm. An independent review conducted by the Maine Warden Service had arrived at the same conclusion. There was no definitive ballistic evidence to indicate which officer had killed Jimmy Gammon, but the investigators had accepted the wardens’ independent statements that Sergeant Frost had fired the fatal shot.
Only two people in the world would ever know otherwise.
The newspapers said that the Gammons were still contemplating a suit against the department and the warden sergeant who’d killed their boy. The burden of proof was lower in civil cases, so it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that a jury would excuse Kathy’s actions. At the very least, James Gammon had the resources and connections to make her life difficult. Maine’s intemperate governor had condemned the AG’s report as a “whitewash” upon its release. Later I saw that the Gammons were listed as major donors to his reelection campaign.
Revenge is a powerful motivator.
I’d received a voice mail from Aimee saying that her husband been moved back to Medium Custody for good behavior and asking why the heck I hadn’t told her he’d been in the frigging Supermax. I owed her a personal apology, especially now that I would have less time for household repairs.
Jason Decoster was being held in the Aroostook County Jail in Houlton, pending his trial for the murder of Kurt Eklund and the attempted murders of Sgt. Kathy Frost and Michael Bowditch. The investigators from the attorney general’s office had been unable to prove that Marta Jepson’s death had been anything but an unfortunate accident.
The Neanderthal was proving to be a most intelligent sociopath. If I hadn’t caught Decoster attempting to move Kurt Eklund’s corpse off his property, he might well have escaped justice. His lawyer would need to get creative to explain the dead body with the 9mm bullet in its head.
Eventually, Jason Decoster was going to find himself behind the walls of the Maine State Prison, where I had a dangerous friend who was inclined to do me favors. The truth was, though, I would never ask Billy Cronk to bloody his hands on my behalf, not when he needed to keep his nose clean to keep his sentence from being extended. I’d already had an opportunity to take revenge, and I’d been unable to pull the trigger. One of the other things I’d learned about myself over the past months was that I was no vigilante.
