Widowmaker

by Paul Doiron

  “The parents demanded that the school investigate. It would have been bad enough if they’d just expelled him, and taken away his dreams of skiing professionally, but the fucking headmaster decided to bring in the police.”

  “And they arrested Adam for statutory rape,” I said.

  “They totally set him up to make it look worse than it was.” Her hair fell around her face. She pushed the strands away violently. “I had to sell my condo to pay for the lawyer—thirty thousand dollars—and all he did was lose the case. Adam still ended up going to jail. They were both just kids!”

  Not in the eyes of the law. “How long was he in jail?”

  “Two years.”

  “Where?”

  “Bucks Harbor.”

  It was a prison in easternmost Maine, not far from one of my old districts. It was a minimum-security facility—low- to medium-risk prisoners. Informally, it was known to be a warehouse for convicted sex offenders, although the Department of Corrections would deny up and down that it was a dumping ground for the lowest of the low.

  I noticed she hadn’t mentioned Adam’s father. There was no ring on her finger, either.

  “How long has he been out?” I asked.

  “Three months,” she said with a sneer. “He’s on supervised release, which means he has to register as a sex offender for the next ten years. He has to meet with a probation officer in Farmington every week and pay to go to counseling with a bunch of child rapists until he’s ‘cured’ or something.”

  At least he hadn’t been fitted with an electronic monitoring device, I thought.

  She removed a pack of Capris from her vest and then seemed to realize she shouldn’t light up in my house without asking permission. She stuffed the cigarettes in her pocket. When she looked up again, her eyes were full of fury.

  “Do you know what the worst thing is, though?” she said. “They put his picture on the Internet! There’s a Web site where you can look up who the sex offenders are in your town. So people see there’s this new ‘predator’ named Adam Langstrom living nearby, and they freak out about their kids, even though he is completely normal and would never, ever hurt a child. My landlord wouldn’t allow him to stay with me because the fucking neighbors saw his picture on the Internet. Adam had to go live at this logging camp in the middle of nowhere.”

  “A logging camp?”

  “It’s kind of like a halfway house, too. The probation officer sends people there who don’t have anywhere else to go. All I know is that Adam hates the place. He said the man who runs it is a lying sack of shit who doesn’t care about the safety of his workers. A man died there a month ago when a tree fell on him!”

  I could guess the rest. “How long has Adam been missing?”

  “Two weeks,” she said. “He was supposed to check in with his parole officer, but he never did. She got a judge to put out a warrant for him.”

  In Maine, game wardens are trained alongside state troopers and have all the same arrest powers, but searching for fugitive sex offenders didn’t normally fall within our purview—not unless they ran off into the woods. “And you haven’t heard from him?”

  Her voice had a sharp new edge. “If I had, I wouldn’t be here, because at least then I’d know he was safe somewhere. His fucking PO thinks he ran off, but she’s not going to go chasing him. She says he’ll show up eventually, and then the cops will just arrest him again. Only this time, he’ll be going to prison for ten years!”

  “Your son is an adult, and he is going to have to live with the consequences of his actions.”

  “You don’t understand. I’m afraid something happened to him!”

  An image came into my mind of a friend, a veteran of the war in Iraq, who hadn’t been able to escape his own demons after he returned home from the VA hospital.

  “Was Adam suicidal?” I asked carefully.

  “I don’t know. I never used to think his father was.”

  Her answer raised so many questions, I had to resist diverting the conversation down a new path. “What about the people at the halfway house?” I asked. “Maybe Adam said something to them before he vanished.”

  “The asshole who runs the place wouldn’t talk to me. He said he has a rule against violating his workers’ privacy. But I’m Adam’s mother!”

  “I’m not a private detective, Amber.”

  She seemed stunned by my refusal. “What about Jack? You helped him. Everyone says you tried to prove his innocence.”

  “That was different. I’m sorry, but I just can’t help you.”

  If I had known her at all, or been in any mood to explain, I might have confessed how embarrassed I was, humiliated even, by my past self. As a first-year warden, I had been reckless and headstrong. My insubordinate actions had nearly gotten me fired. I had no business getting a second chance in the Warden Service, but sometimes life rewards the undeserving. These days, I took every opportunity to distance myself from that Mike Bowditch. I treated him as a disreputable stranger—not even a blood relative—just someone who happened to share my name.

  “You don’t understand,” she said yet again.

  “I hope your son is all right and that he comes home soon.”

  She inhaled, then let out a long breath, as if preparing to jump off a cliff into deep water. Her eyes filled again wth tears. “Adam is your brother!”

  I thought I had misheard her. “What did you say?”

  She leaned across the table. “Jack and I had an affair—I was married to A.J. at the time—and I got pregnant.”

  I felt as if I had been punched in the sternum. “That’s impossible.”

  “He is!”

  How old was Adam? Twenty-one? I did the math. Twenty-one years ago, I had been seven, going on eight, and my parents had still been married. Soon after, I would come down with pneumonia when my father dragged me through the woods checking his trapline; my devoutly Catholic mother would get an abortion but pass it off as a miscarriage; she would pack her station wagon with little more than a few changes of clothing, and we would take off in the night while my father was out drinking, without even leaving a note, never to return. Twenty-one years ago my world hadn’t yet fallen irretrievably apart.

  Amber’s face became fuzzier and fuzzier as she spoke: “I’d thought about telling you when Jack died—and then again after I heard your mom had passed away. I thought you should know you weren’t alone in the word, that you had a little brother. But then Adam went to jail and everything spun out of control.”

  I found myself taking the photograph from her hand and sitting down hard in the armchair opposite her. I stared at Adam Langstrom’s face, searching for a resemblance I hadn’t noticed at first glance. He had the same brown hair and sky-blue eyes as my dad and me. Maybe the jawline looked faintly familiar. But the similarities were all superficial.

  “How do you know?” The words came out as a croak. “How do you know that my dad is the father?”

  “I know.”

  It felt as if every muscle in my body had gone taut. “Why should I believe you? You just dropped this on me after I refused to help find your son.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “A letter from him. A picture of you together. Anything.”

  “Your dad didn’t write letters,” she said, as if I should have known better than to ask. “And A.J. burned the only picture of Jack and me together when he found it.”

  I rose stiffly to my feet. “I’m sorry, but you need to leave.”

  “Wait!” she said. “I have these.”

  She reached into her jacket pocket again and pulled out a pair of dog tags on a chain. She passed them to me across the table. I read the words stamped into the stainless steel:

  BOWDITCH

  JOHN, M.

  004-00-8120

  O NEG

  NO PREF.

  My father had done two tours of duty in Vietnam with the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment and had returned home a hero. But the war had left him bad
ly scarred, both physically and mentally. What he’d experienced in the jungles of Southeast Asia—killing men, nearly being killed by them—had managed to turn him into the worst version of himself, or so people told me who had known him before he left Maine.

  He had continued to wear his dog tags long after he’d left the army. In every memory I had of him with his shirt off, they hung around his neck. They seemed to have some talismanic power, as if he credited them with having saved his life, while so many of his friends had died. I had been surprised to hear those tags hadn’t been found on his body at Rum Pond. I had always wondered what had become of them.

  “Jack gave those to me the night he first held Adam in his arms,” Amber said. “He wanted me to give them to him when he was older.”

  Another invisible blow struck my chest. “You mean my dad knew?”

  “He offered to take care of us, but I was still with A.J. and trying to make things work. Besides, as young as I was, I knew that Jack wasn’t going to make a good husband—or a good father.”

  I was having a hard time getting my wind back. “You need to leave.”

  “What about Adam?”

  “What about him?”

  “You won’t help me find him?”

  “No.”

  “Not after what I just told you?”

  “Especially not now,” said a rough voice issuing from my mouth.

  She remained seated, looking up at me. I could see her in the act of thinking. In the quiet, I heard the furnace start up in the basement.

  Then Amber twitched her nose. “Is something burning?”

  I had left the venison stew simmering, and it had begun to scorch the pot.

  I hurried out to the kitchen. I used a dishrag to lift the handle and drop the bubbling contents into the sink. A haze hung in the air, its odor as foul as a failed animal sacrifice.

  When I returned to the living room, I found Amber standing with her purse over her shoulder. I had thought I might have to throw her out, as emotional as she’d been. But she seemed strangely composed now.

  I held the door open for her. Sure enough, it had begun to snow while we were inside.

  “Don’t you want to know how to reach me?” she said.

  “I can always ask Gary Pulsifer.”

  Her expression softened. “It’s better that you know about your brother, Mike.”

  I barely stopped myself from saying “It doesn’t feel better.”

  I followed her out into the driveway and waited while the Jeep started up and the headlights came on. After she had driven off, the silence of the woods closed in around me. The sensation was of being imprisoned inside a snow globe.

  I went back into the house to deal with the burned mess in the kitchen. It wasn’t until later that I found Adam’s picture where she had hidden it, under a dirty plate on the coffee table. She had scribbled her phone number on the back of the photograph. She had left the dog tags, too.

  3

  I read a lot as a kid. My mother used to come home from the library with free books she’d found in the donation boxes by the door. I remember one battered paperback in particular. It was an encyclopedia of different kinds of ghosts: phantoms, wraiths, apparitions, et cetera. A field guide to the undead. There was a chapter on poltergeists that has stayed with me. We tend to think of them merely as noisy, mischievous specters, but what this book explained was that, unlike other ghosts that tend to haunt places, poltergeists haunt specific people. No matter where you go, those loud, disruptive spirits will always follow you.

  My father was my personal poltergeist.

  I tossed the dog tags in my hand, listened to them jingle, turned them in my fingers, felt the stamped letters like braille I was unable to read. I had never known that we shared the same blood type. As if I needed another reminder of how much we had in common. I clenched my fist so hard around the tags that they left a rounded rectangle imprinted in the skin of my palm.

  I knew that my father had always been a womanizer. He had been a handsome, red-blooded mountain man, possessed of an unshakable self-confidence and an animal magnetism I had seen on display in too many barrooms. But he had also loved my late mother in his own oddly ardent way, and the idea that he had fathered a child with another woman while he was still married to her—I didn’t want to believe it.

  And yet my dad had made a fool of me before. Why shouldn’t he do it again from beyond the grave?

  I tucked the tags into the chest pocket of my uniform and picked up the photograph Amber had left behind in a last-ditch effort to manipulate me into doing her bidding.

  Adam Langstrom’s eyes were so blue, many people would have thought they had been retouched, but I saw the same color every morning in the mirror. If she had been lying to me, either she was a terrific actress or she had also been lying to herself.

  I felt a sense of panic growing inside my gut that I had never experienced before. For the past five years, I had thought I was the last in a cursed bloodline. But now …

  Not knowing what else to do, I reached out for Stacey.

  I dialed the number of the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s office in Ashland, a remote logging town north of the forty-sixth parallel in a part of Maine that had more moose than people. That was why Stacey and several of her colleagues were holed up there for the winter. They were investigating how an epidemic of blood-sucking winter ticks was devastating Maine’s moose population. Thousands of the big animals from Minnesota to Nova Scotia had already died, and there seemed to be nothing biologists could do to stop the plague. The direness of the situation had only hardened Stacey’s resolve. Like her father—my friend and mentor Charley Stevens—she seemed to fight the hardest for causes other people had given up for lost.

  “Stacey’s not back yet,” said the man who answered the phone. “They’re still out in the field.”

  “Isn’t it dark?”

  “Let me check. Yep, it’s dark all right.”

  “Isn’t it snowing?”

  “It snows every day this time of year.”

  “What you’re telling me is not to worry,” I said.

  “I’ll have her call you when she gets back.”

  I tried to keep busy while I waited. I took off my gun belt again and changed out of my uniform into a flannel shirt and jeans. I even washed the dishes. But worrying about Stacey and not being able to tell her my news only added to my agitation.

  I had a fifth of Jim Beam in my cupboard that I hadn’t yet opened. My father had been an alcoholic, and I’d had more than my share of moments when things were going badly and I had felt the pull of the bottle. But if ever I needed a drink, it was now. I filled a glass with bourbon and sat down in front of my laptop to read the sad tale of Adam Langstrom.

  And sad it was.

  I started by accessing the state law-enforcement database to see if there really was a warrant out for his arrest. The page that came up showed a picture of Langstrom taken by the Department of Corrections and listed him as a fugitive, wanted for violating his probation. He looked older and more hardened than he did in the photo his mother had left behind. He had put on muscle, and his hair was dull and in need of cutting, but what was most noteworthy was his right ear. It was missing the lobe, as if something—or someone—had chomped it off.

  It listed his age: twenty-one, as Amber had stated.

  It listed his height as six feet two inches—my height.

  It listed his weight as two hundred pounds—ten pounds heavier than me. Adam Langstrom was a big kid.

  I then pulled up the public sex offender registry and typed in his name. The same photo came up, along with his “town of domicile,” which was Kennebago Settlement, east of Rangeley on Route 16. It listed his place of employment, too: Don Foss Logging, also located in Kennebago. The site identified him as a ten-year registrant and said he had been convicted of one count of unlawful sexual contact and one count of unlawful sexual touching. No additional details were given about his crimes.


  I had to continue my search elsewhere.

  The Maine newspapers had barely covered his arrest and trial, in deference to the sensitivities of the Alpine Sports Academy, no doubt. It wouldn’t have been in ASA’s interest to trumpet the news that one of its scholarship students had raped the daughter of some captain of industry. The school tended to enroll kids who had spent their formative years on the ski slopes of Vail, Park City, and Jackson Hole. It had produced a handful of Olympians, but its greatest achievement was building its endowment, which some sources said rivaled that of some Little Ivies, including my own alma mater, Colby College.

  There was no mention in any of the articles of a prior romantic relationship between Langstrom and the unnamed girl. To read the stories, you would have thought the case came down to a single assault. Langstrom had claimed the sex was consensual, but under examination, the girl had said she had been coerced.

  Even though the papers hadn’t identified her by name, I remembered that Amber had called her Alexa Davidson. From there, it was easy enough to search the academy’s archived press releases and discover that a Seattle couple named Ari and Elizabeth Davidson had given a million-dollar gift to the school five years earlier. Now I could see why the headmaster had been so eager to turn the investigation over to the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department.

  The only other photograph of Adam Langstrom predated the picture on the registry. It had been taken at his sentencing. He was dressed in an ill-fitting suit, and his tie was askew, as if it were a noose he had managed to loosen. I couldn’t see his right ear to see if it was missing its lobe. What struck me most about the picture was the expression on his face. So often defendants in court appear ashamed and already defeated; either that or emotionless and temporarily brain-dead. But Langstrom was glaring straight into the lens, as if he wanted to vault across the room and strangle the photographer with his own camera strap.

  Langstrom’s anger was as familiar as the color of his eyes. I had seen it too many times in my father’s face and, sometimes, in my own bathroom mirror.

  The cell phone buzzed on the desk. I took another sip of bourbon before I answered.