Widowmaker

by Paul Doiron

  Gail Evans bore some culpability here, too. By naïvely putting out food for deer, trying to help them survive, she had lured this young animal to its death. People never want to believe that their best intentions can lead to the worst outcomes.

  I decided to leave the deer to the crows. Birds need to eat, too.

  Then I followed my own trail back to the gingerbread house.

  “Well?” asked Evans.

  “It was a dog,” I said loudly, leaving no room for rebuttal.

  “I knew you were going to say that.”

  “I’ll ask around and see if I can find out whose it is. We’ll make sure it stops doing this.” I handed her my business card with a number to call in case she spotted the renegade dog again. “You really should stop feeding those deer, too. It’s hurting them more than it’s helping them.”

  Gail Evans planted her feet and stared me in the eyes. “If it’s not against the law, you can’t stop me from doing it.”

  “Don’t be surprised if the dog comes back, then.”

  She made a loud sniffing noise, as if her nose had begun to drip. “A dog! Right!”

  “There are no timber wolves running around your neighborhood, I can assure you.”

  “I know what I saw,” said Gail Evans. “It was a wolf, and nothing you say will convince me otherwise.”

  5

  The prospect of canvassing the area for a deer-chasing dog didn’t excite me. Knocking on doors is one of the fundamentals of police work; nothing yet has been invented to replace it. But that didn’t mean I was eager to make the rounds.

  I dug my hand into my pants pocket for my truck keys, but when I pulled them out, something else came with them. My father’s dog tags. The willful chain had tangled itself around my finger.

  I was certain that I’d hung them up back at the house. Hadn’t I?

  Obviously not, because here they were.

  “At least make some calls for the poor woman,” Stacey had told me. “Start with Gary Pulsifer. Ask him how he knows this Amber Langstrom. Then ask him what the hell he was thinking, sending her to look for you.”

  I drove to the Pondicherry Pond boat launch. I counted three ice-fishing shacks, all with trucks parked beside them. None of the vehicles was familiar to me, but I didn’t patrol this district often enough to recognize all the local scofflaws by sight. The people in the shacks would see me driving toward them across the ice and have time and cover to dump any illegal fish they might have taken back through the holes they’d drilled. There was nothing I could do about them but check their licenses.

  Besides, I was too preoccupied by the events of the night before. There was no point in denying it anymore.

  I turned off the engine and keyed in Pulsifer’s number. I was embarrassed to admit that I knew it by heart.

  * * *

  Gary Pulsifer was a district warden, like me, but he was also the designated representative to the Maine State Law Enforcement Association, the union that collectively bargains for our compensation and benefits and that defends us if we are ever the subjects of disciplinary proceedings from the Internal Affairs division.

  In my five-plus years as a game warden, I had faced four such tribunals. As such, I was intimately acquainted with Article 11 of the union’s bargaining agreement, the section titled “Complaints and Investigations.” I knew my rights going into a disciplinary hearing. And Pulsifer had been at my side for every one of them.

  The accused are given the option of taking a lie-detector test.

  Nobody is foolish enough to take one.

  Except me, of course. In the months following the manhunt for my father, when rumors were flying that I had conspired to help him elude capture, I had submitted to a polygraph exam. An assistant attorney general was hell-bent on proving that I had been Jack Bowditch’s accomplice. I had seen no other choice but to surrender my fate to a machine widely known to be an imperfect determiner of guilt or innocence.

  I’d spent five hours in that airless room, being asked question after question, rat-a-tat-tat, by a man who never displayed one recognizable human emotion. The examiner refused to make eye contact. He spent the entire time staring at his computer screen as if it were the true gateway to my soul.

  “Is your first name Michael?”

  “Is this the month of September?”

  “Do you plan on telling me a single lie today?”

  “Did you communicate with your father while he was a fugitive?”

  “Did he admit to you that he killed Jonathan Shipman?”

  “Did he admit to you that he killed Deputy William Brodeur?

  “Did you love him?”

  The examiner didn’t ask me that last question, but I kept waiting for it to come.

  When I came out of the interrogation room, I found that every muscle in my body was as sore as if I had just scaled a cliff without a rope.

  “That was brutal,” I told Pulsifer afterward.

  “You think so, do you?” he’d replied, giving me that half-suppressed grin I would come to know so well.

  Pulsifer was in his late forties and at a place in his career when many wardens consider applying for leadership positions, not just because they have families and can use the increased pay but also because pensions are based on the rank you have when you retire. Pulsifer didn’t seem to care about money or rank. He lived simply with his wife and four children on a farm in Flagstaff, just down the road from where my family had once rented a ratty-ass trailer.

  He had a narrow face and clever brown eyes that were set a little too close together over his nose. The effect was to make him appear somewhat foxlike. He wore his rusty brown hair on the long side, right at the limit of what was permissible in the warden handbook. Pulsifer seemed to inhabit that perilous borderland. He always seemed to be fighting back a smile, as if he were in on a joke the rest of us were missing.

  “How do I know if I passed the test?” I’d asked him. “I’m worried I didn’t.”

  “Well, how much were you lying?”

  “I wasn’t lying.”

  “Everyone lies,” he’d said with a merciless grin. “It just depends how good you are at doing it.”

  That was my introduction to the untrusting, ever-mocking worldview of Gary Pulsifer.

  * * *

  He began our phone conversation the way he began all our phone conversations: “What fine mess did you get yourself into this time, Bowditch?”

  “It’s not what I did. It’s what you did.”

  “Amber Langstrom found you, did she?”

  “What the hell, Pulsifer?”

  “I didn’t tell her where you lived. I just pointed her in your general direction.”

  “Come on!”

  “You’re right,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done it, but I was curious to see what would happen, and I couldn’t help myself. So what did she want to talk to you about?”

  Pulsifer was aware that his last name sort of rhymed with that of a certain fallen angel. At times, it seemed, he liked to play up the resemblance.

  “She didn’t tell you?” I asked.

  “She said it was personal. She didn’t explain how you two knew each other, just that you went back a ways and she needed to get in touch.”

  “I never met her before last night.”

  He chuckled. “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time Amber Birch lied.”

  “I thought her name was Langstrom.”

  “Birch was her maiden name. She was the hottest girl at Mount Abram High. She’s still smoking. Don’t you think?”

  “Is that why you helped her find me—because you want to get in her pants?”

  When he spoke again, his voice was different, harder. “I hope I haven’t created a problem for you.”

  “Yeah, well, you have. What can you tell me about her? Is she crazy?”

  “Crazy, no. Trouble, always. She works in the pub over at Widowmaker. Been there forever now, ever since the Red Stallion closed. She married A. J. Lang
strom right out of high school. Who knows why. We used to joke they hooked up because A.J. had the biggest dick at Mount Abram. Everybody knew his only ambition in life was to take over his old man’s gas station. But Amber had champagne wishes and caviar dreams, as my old man used to say.”

  He paused to take a sip of something.

  “I think Amber realized she’d made a mistake pretty fast. I used to go over to the Sluiceway during my drinking days, and she had a reputation. I remember she didn’t wear her wedding ring at work, said it would get scratched or something. I think she was hoping one of the rich skiers would sweep her up and take her off to Fiji. Then she got pregnant, and that was that.”

  I needed to be careful about what I said next.

  One of the impediments to Pulsifer and me ever becoming friends was the history he had with my father. I might have called them archenemies if the rivalry hadn’t been so one-sided. Gary had been a district warden during the heyday of my father’s poaching career, and he had never managed to catch him in the act. My dad delighted in spreading stories about all the deer and moose he was taking out of season, knowing how much it would humiliate the local warden. The relationship between Gary Pulsifer and Jack Bowditch was not unlike the one between Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.

  To his credit, Pulsifer never seemed to hold my dad’s misdeeds against me, although he was far too subtle to reveal his true feelings. Still, I had no intention of asking him if my father might have been the one who knocked up Amber Langstrom.

  “So what’s the story with her son?” I asked.

  “Her son?” He seemed genuinely taken aback. “Now I get it. She asked you to help find Adam, didn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “Christ! I should have made the connection,” he said. “Amber came to see me first, asked if I could go looking for her kid. She flirted like hell, trying to get me to say yes. But I’m not going to risk what I’ve got for a piece of ass, not anymore. She was pissed when I turned her down. I can’t believe I didn’t make the connection.”

  Pulsifer was one of the smartest, savviest wardens I knew. The possibility that this hadn’t occurred to him defied belief. “What can you tell me about Adam?”

  “He fucked the wrong girl, first of all. I’m pretty sure it was consensual, but he should have realized that there’s a different standard for eighteen-year-olds. Not that I feel sorry for him. Adam Langstrom was no angel. He beat up the Davidson girl’s brother pretty bad when he tried to put an end to it. Did Amber tell you that part?”

  “No.”

  “I think that’s what set their father off, hearing his son had been busted up in a fight and then finding out why.”

  “Who’s his PO?” I asked, meaning his probation officer.

  “Shaylene Hawken in Farmington. Talk about a hacksaw! That woman could stare down a grizzly. I feel sorry for the guy in that respect.”

  “Amber said he was living at some sort of halfway house, but it shows up on his registry page as a logging outfit.”

  “It’s a company owned by a guy named Don Foss,” Pulsifer said. “He’s got some sort of arrangement with the state where he takes in sex offenders who can’t find a place to live. Gives them beds and jobs working on his crew. I can’t decide whether he’s a secular saint or a modern-day plantation boss.”

  It sounded like an unconventional operation, to say the least.

  “Have you seen Adam since he got out?”

  He took another sip of whatever he was drinking. “A couple times at the tagging station in Bigelow last month. I think he was hanging around just to torture himself. As a felon, he can’t own a gun, and he can’t hunt ever again. I’ll tell you, before he went to prison, that kid was a wicked deer killer. Bagged two-hundred-pound bucks three years in a row, and we don’t have as many of those up here as we used to.”

  As a convicted sex offender, Adam had to observe a crushingly long list of prohibitions: no owning guns, no drinking alcohol, no using a computer, no searching the Internet, no looking at pornography, no living where he wanted without approval, no unsanctioned travel out of state. While he was on probation, the slightest slipup—even just a speeding ticket—might be enough to send him back to jail. I tried to imagine how I would feel living with those restrictions, and I kept ending up at the same place.

  “Do you think he might have killed himself?” I asked.

  “You know, it won’t surprise me if they find him hiding out with some skank and a gallon of Allen’s coffee brandy in a motel in Machias, and it won’t surprise me if they find him hanging from a redbud tree.”

  I had never heard of a redbud tree, but Pulsifer was full of obscure references to books and movies.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said. “I’ve got to get back to work.”

  The truth was, I had about a thousand more questions about Adam Langstrom, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answers.

  “What are you up to today?” Pulsifer asked.

  “A woman in Pondicherry swears she saw a wolf chase a deer through her backyard.”

  “Good luck with that!” The mischievous lilt returned to his voice. “So you’re not going to tell me why Amber came knocking on your door? You said you didn’t know her, so why did she pick you to be her knight in shining armor? You’ve got me intrigued.”

  “Good-bye, Pulsifer.”

  “I’ve missed seeing you at Loudermill hearings. You were always my favorite shit magnet, Bowditch.”

  “That isn’t funny.”

  “It’s a little funny,” he said. “Seriously, I’ve been hearing good things about you lately. It made me wonder if there might be two Mike Bowditches. If you are ever up this way, give me a call and we’ll grab a coffee.”

  After I’d hung up, I sat in my cold truck, watching frost form on my windshield. On the one hand, Pulsifer had confirmed my suspicion that Amber shouldn’t be trusted. On the other hand, everything he’d told me about Adam’s character—his cockiness, his fighting temper, his marksmanship with a deer rifle—made me think the missing man really might be my father’s second son.

  6

  The driveway of the next house hadn’t been plowed, and there were no lights in the windows or smoke coming from the chimney. I gave it a pass. The same with the one after. The homes along Pondicherry Pond seemed to be mostly seasonal cottages.

  Toward the end of the camp road, I came upon an old guy in a green bathrobe, sweatpants, and pack boots. He was pushing a snowblower that was throwing an arc of glistening powder high into the air. When he spotted my warden truck at the end of his drive, he turned off the gas and leaned his weight against the handles in lieu of a walker. He studied me as I came around the front of the vehicle.

  “Morning!” I said.

  “Morning, Warden,” he said in an accent that eschewed all r’s.

  “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

  “A mite chilly, I’d say.” He had a roseate nose, a scruffy beard that was more like a really bad shave, and was probably bald under his fur-lined bomber hat. “What can I do for you?”

  “You wouldn’t have a dog, would you?”

  “Used to.”

  “What about any of your neighbors along this road?”

  “Some do. Some don’t.”

  I could see how this conversation was going to unfold unless I took the initiative. “Any of them let their dogs run free? I got a call from a woman down the road saying a dog was chasing deer through her yard. It killed a little yearling in the woods back of her property. I’m trying to find the owner.”

  “Was it that lady with all that artsy crap in her dooryard?”

  I nodded. “That’s the one.”

  “Didn’t know you wardens was moonlighting as dogcatchers,” he said.

  “Only when the dogs chase deer.”

  His bathrobe opened when he straightened up and revealed a faded T-shirt with a Green Beret logo on the front and the Latin words De Oppresso Liber.

  “Think Carrie Michaud migh
t have a new dog,” he said. “Some kind of shepherd or husky mix, I think. Black as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat. Saw it riding in the truck with her the other day. Thought I heard it howling the other night, too.”

  “What do you mean, howling?”

  “You know,” he said, and let loose with a loud and shockingly accurate wolf call.

  I was getting a churning feeling in my stomach that told me my strange day might yet take a stranger turn. “You sure it wasn’t barking?”

  He gave me a look as if the question was the most asinine thing he’d heard.

  “Which house is Carrie Michaud’s?” I asked.

  “Blue one at the corner. Got lots of yard art out front. You can’t miss it. Don’t tell her it was me who told you, though. Carrie’s a little thing, but she can get worked up pretty good.”

  “I won’t.”

  Before I could thank him for his help, he restarted the blower. I watched him shuffle along behind the noisy machine, smelling the heady gasoline exhaust on the cold air and wondering what this old Green Beret’s story was. You never know who you’ll meet holed up in some backwoods shack. I suspected that it might take a long time to pry this man’s tale out of him, and then I would be disappointed to learn he had bought the T-shirt for two bucks down at the Goodwill store.

  * * *

  Some breeds of dogs bark; others bay. I had heard dogs moan or wail when they were hurt or unhappy. They were capable of all sorts of unexpected vocalizations. But the old man had perfectly imitated a wolf’s howl, and unless he was having fun with me, which was a distinct possibility, it meant that I might owe Gail Evans an apology.

  I had no trouble finding Carrie Michaud’s house. The front yard was littered with snow-covered appliances and rusting scrap metal. By “yard art,” the old geezer hadn’t meant sculptures like those outside Gail Evans’s house. He had meant junk.