Almost Midnight

by Paul Doiron

  “I’m counting the minutes. Aimee—you know how she can be—she says she’ll believe it when she sees it. Thanks again for putting them in that motel.”

  “It’s the least I can do.”

  “I’ve never blamed you, Mike. Almost never. I guess I did for a while. But I always understood that you had a duty to tell the truth about what happened. That’s why I respect you so much. I’ve never respected anyone more, my brother.”

  “Gee, Billy.”

  “It’s the truth, so help me, God.” He put his hand on one of the sober-living paperbacks on the tabletop.

  Exhausted as I was, I was in danger of choking up. I needed to change the subject.

  “So who else has come by to visit?”

  “Aimee and the kids. Our lawyer. The chaplain. A friend you don’t know who I used to share a cell with who got out last year. Some of the COs. That detective, Klesko. Deputy Warden Donato.”

  “I bet he had a shitload of questions.”

  “Yeah, but my lawyer said not to answer them. Donato was ripshit when I told him that. He’s being set up to take the fall for what happened in the laundry room. They’re going to fire his ass, and he’s doing everything he can to save his job.”

  “Was Pegg one of the officers who visited?”

  “Someone told me they’d seen him outside, but he never came in. I don’t know what his deal is. Why do you ask?”

  “He seemed troubled when I talked to him at the hospital.”

  “Pegg’s a good kid. He reminds me of a guy in my platoon in Iraq. He put on a tough act, but you could see that, inside, he was too sensitive to be a soldier. He didn’t make it.”

  We talked a little longer. I told him about Shadow, and he gave me some technical information about crossbows—about the draw weight, which is the amount of tension on the bowstring. He told me that a sixteen-inch bolt was typically paired with smaller youth models. A serious hunter who pursued larger game and wanted the most penetrating power was unlikely to have used arrows shorter than twenty inches.

  Eventually, a guard appeared to kick me out. Billy bear-hugged me again. I promised to look in on his family.

  25

  On my way home, I detoured through Rockport and slowed as I approached the Happy Clam Motel where I had paid to put up Aimee and the Cronklets. Lights peeked out from under and around the curtains in their rooms. I told myself the purpose of my visit was to see if they needed anything, but the truth was, I was curious to learn more about what was happening with Billy’s pardon.

  The Cronk family occupied the two end units overlooking Clam Cove. The inlet was well named. At low tide, the water receded, leaving an expanse of mud bubbling with bivalves.

  Aimee answered the door with Emma clutched, almost upended, under her strong arm. The girl was a big-eyed blonde whom you could tell would grow up to break hearts.

  “Oh, it’s you,” Aimee said.

  “I got pulled away all day on an investigation in the Sandy River Valley and wanted to see how you were doing.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be on vacation?”

  I was still standing in the doorway because I was afraid of tracking in mud, not that the carpet wasn’t already sullied in just about every way possible.

  “It’s kind of a personal investigation.”

  “That seems to be a hobby of yours.” She dropped the child beneath her arm, who somehow managed to land on her bare feet, like a cat. “You want a Mountain Dew? We had pizza for supper, but there ain’t none left. The kids just about ate the box, too, the little goblins.”

  “Pizza and soda? I thought you were all about healthy eating.”

  “I figured the kids deserved some junk food after everything that’s happened, and there’s only so much meal prep I can do with a microwave and a bathroom sink.”

  The televisions were on in both rooms, turned up loud and tuned to different stations. Aimee had been watching a documentary on Marie Curie, while, through the other door, Homer Simpson’s voice was droning on about an extraterrestrial roaming Springfield’s forest.

  “Emma, why don’t you go annoy your brothers.”

  The little girl shot off like a bottle rocket into the next room.

  Aimee muted the volume on her TV, then closed the pass-through door. The walls were thin as cardboard, and I could hear every word of The Simpsons.

  “This looks like a nice enough place. How do you like it otherwise?”

  “The manager took one look at us and asked if we’d ever had bedbugs. Other than that it’s peachy.”

  I felt my neck grow hot. “What?”

  “I guess we don’t fit the profile of his usual customers.”

  I reached for the doorknob.

  “He’s gone home for the night and there’s a lady on behind the desk. Don’t go venting your wrath on that poor woman.”

  “Do you want to move to another motel?”

  “What for? We’ve already been insulted. And who’s to say the next place will be any more welcoming? I’ve always hated motels. Now sit down and have a Dew. It’ll cool off that famous temper of yours.”

  Aimee had to clear aside the empty pizza boxes—six of them!—for us to have room to set our drinks down on the ridiculously tiny table. It was a testament to the stress she felt that she’d broken down and bought her kids this fast-food dinner. She hadn’t yet pulled the shades on the back window, so the view was a reflected version of us, projected on black glass. My face looked like the ugliest version of me.

  “The manager had no cause to insult you like that.”

  “Mike, look at us. You don’t think it’s the first time someone asked me if I’d checked my kids for head lice? We’re trailer trash. That’s how the world sees us, anyhow. You need to let it go.”

  I grasped for a response that wasn’t falsely reassuring or tainted by well-meaning condescension. Instead I changed the conversation.

  “I just came from visiting Billy.”

  Her happiness at this news made the world right again. “That’s wicked cool. I’m so glad you went to see him. That man looks up to you like you wouldn’t believe.”

  The sentiment embarrassed and confused me. I was the last person I would have recommended to be anyone’s role model.

  “You’d never know he’d nearly died yesterday,” I said.

  “The man’s always been a regular Rasputin.”

  Why did Aimee’s self-taught erudition keep surprising me? I was nearly as bad as the judgmental jerks who kept putting her down.

  “He told me you’d been by, also your lawyer. I guess a couple of guards came to visit, too?”

  “There are a few nice ones at the prison. The trouble is, the good guys all leave when they get a whiff of the shit piled up in there.”

  Out of an abundance of caution I decided against sharing my encounter with Rancic with her.

  “How are you doing with all this?”

  “Me?”

  “You said you can’t quite believe it’s happening. I understand your skepticism. I share it. But aren’t you a little hopeful?”

  “Prosecutor Hildreth was all over the news earlier saying how Billy Cronk is a menace to society, and how he was convicted by a jury of his peers, and how letting him out is just a political stunt—which it is.”

  “Meanwhile you have to keep up a brave façade.”

  She narrowed her eyes and lifted her chin. “I can see why the ladies like you, Mike Bowditch. You may be as clueless as any man about the female sex. But at least you know your limitations.”

  I wiped the condensation from the soda can on my pants. “Thanks. I guess.”

  “Yeah, I got to be strong for the kids’ sake. But also on account of Billy. The man’s terrified of coming home again.”

  “That’s common among people getting out of prison, I’ve heard.”

  “I’ve got more confidence in him than he does in that regard. Hell, I was there when he came home from his last deployment, and that wasn’t no picnic. But
that’s not what’s got me rattled. The thing that kept me up all night was what really happened in the prison laundry room.”

  “The police think it was simple revenge against Dawn Richie for throwing those two guys into solitary.”

  “So what did the remark mean about her being a rat? Billy told me what Dow said when he attacked her.”

  “Maybe she had gone to the higher-ups with suspicions they were engaged in something. Drug smuggling would be my first guess.” I declined to share with Billy’s wife what he had told me about Dawn Ritchie’s propositioning him in exchange for protective services.

  “How is that ratting, though? That’s a term you’d use for another inmate. Richie is a CO. It’s her job to snoop out the convicts dealing inside the walls.”

  “I doubt Trevor Dow or Darius Chapman possessed a sophisticated lexicon, Aimee. You may be reading too much into things.”

  “Says the pot to the kettle.”

  At that moment the door to the other room burst open and one of the boys—Logan, maybe? I always got them mixed up—came rushing in. He was shirtless, despite the chill in the rooms.

  “Ethan’s puking!” he said with delirious excitement.

  “He ate enough pizza. Is he getting it into the toilet at least?”

  “The bathtub!”

  “Darn it!” The mother of five sprang into action, no doubt for the hundredth time that day. “Gimme a couple of minutes, Mike. You can change the channel on the TV if you don’t like these historical shows.”

  I sat watching the beads of condensation slide down the Mountain Dew can. I’d spent hours trying to solve the puzzle of who had shot Shadow and what had become of his mate. Evaluating the merits of Aimee’s suspicions concerning Dawn Richie was beyond the power of my sputtering neurons.

  When Aimee returned, I was standing by the door with my coat buttoned.

  “You leaving so soon? This is the time of night when things get all wild and interesting in the Cronk household.”

  “You don’t need to tell me. I’ve babysat for you. I need to get home before I pass out behind the wheel from lack of sleep.”

  “At least your house ain’t too far. You need to have us over for a combination housewarming, welcome-home-from-jail party. I’ll bring the yellow ribbons.”

  “It’s a promise.”

  As I stepped out into the night, she called to me in a softer, more vulnerable voice than the one she’d been using. “Mike? There’s something wrong with that Richie woman. Not just wrong but bad. I got a sour feeling this ain’t over for Billy—not as long as he’s still locked up and at the mercy of those punishers.”

  “I’ve learned to trust your intuition, Aimee.”

  She thought about my response for a moment, then cracked a smile. “Aw, hell. It’s probably just gas pains from that shitty pizza. Poor Ethan got his brain from his dad. But he got his sensitive stomach from me.”

  26

  The first thing I noticed when I arrived home was that someone had driven down the long driveway to my house. The mud had thawed in the sun and then hardened again after dark, and the narrow treads showed clearly in my headlights. The marks had been left by small tires, not far from bald. The car had been a front-wheel-drive model. I couldn’t think of anyone I knew who drove a vehicle that fit the description, but it could have been a census taker, a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses, or some lost person. Since the little car had turned around and headed out again without stopping, I felt no sense of alarm.

  On my way inside, I gathered an armload of firewood from the two cords I’d had delivered to see me through the spring. My woodpile didn’t have the benefit of a roof to shelter it from the rain and snow, so I’d been forced to cover it with a series of blue tarps and ropes that tended to come loose no matter how well I’d tied them down. I’d come to believe that nimble-fingered gremlins must live among the logs.

  After I’d started a fire, I sat down at the kitchen table and thought about Aimee’s experience at the motel. There was simply no way she and her family could continue staying there after what had happened. I didn’t care if she was used to shoddy treatment.

  I checked my phone for messages and found a single text from Dani:

  It hurt my feelings to learn about Shadow from Ronette Landry. But I guess if you were reluctant to reach out to me, then I have my answer. You don’t need to respond to this. I’m on patrol.

  Reading those words took me back to my first months as a game warden, when, in my intense focus on my work, I’d failed to respond to the many messages left by my live-in girlfriend. Here I was repeating a pattern I thought I had put behind me years earlier.

  How could it be possible that I was both a quick study and a slow learner?

  At least I knew better than to obey her injunction.

  You’re right to be upset, Dani. I will call you tomorrow and fill you in on everything that’s been happening. Xoxo Mike

  It was the first time I’d used the shorthand for hugs and kisses. At least guilt hadn’t suckered me into signing the text with love.

  In my mailbox I also found an email from Angelo Donato, of all people. I hadn’t anticipated the deputy warden of the Maine State Prison joining my list of pen pals, especially after our battle royal at the hospital. I skimmed down to the relevant section:

  I tried to reach you by phone earlier but the call kept dropping. I wanted to apologize for the tone I used with you yesterday. I was upset about what had happened to my officers and frustrated that our security protocols had failed so spectacularly. There will be a reckoning here in the coming weeks. I might even be among the casualties. You have no reason to help me but I believe you might have information you don’t realize is important that might help save my job. I would appreciate a call back at your earliest convenience.

  Aside from the bizarre politeness of the letter, what kind of important information did Donato believe I possessed? My exhausted brain couldn’t conjure an answer to the question.

  I trudged up the stairs to the bedroom. Somehow I managed to brush my teeth and strip off my muddy clothes before falling headlong into a sleep so bottomless it came close to being a coma.

  * * *

  I hadn’t gotten around to hanging curtains in my bedroom’s east-facing window. As a result, I always awakened as soon as the sun poked above the treetops. Even as a teenager, I had preferred rising at first light.

  For that reason, I was stunned to open my eyes and see the room filled with sunlight. It was nearly nine o’clock.

  I took a quick shower, shaved, and ate a banana for breakfast. I had much to do if I wanted to get back to the Sandy River Valley before noon.

  I hauled out my collection of topographical maps and found the quadrangle that included Number Six Mountain and Intervale and Tantrattle Pond and spread the curling paper across the kitchen table, using my coffee mug, my gun, and my elbow to keep the corners pinned. Seeing the geography translated into print for the first time—the rises in elevation marked by rings, the blue streams wriggling downhill, the paved roads and the Jeep trails—I was finally able to plot several possible routes Shadow might have taken from the valley to Alcohol Mary’s mountain. I circled the Tantrattle cabin and used an X to mark the pasture where the wolf had killed the donkey and another X for where the road dead-ended at Gorman Peaslee’s house.

  I had worried yesterday that Shadow might have wandered for miles before he finally collapsed beside Mary Gowdie’s woodpile, but looking closely at the map, I had a powerful intuition that he had been shot somewhere within a three-mile radius of Number Six Mountain, somewhere to the north or east. The steep cliff faces to the south and west would have closed off access to all but the most determined bow hunters. And no serious outdoorsman would pursue his quarry using a youth crossbow and a cheap bolt.

  Given the condition of the road into Tantrattle, I decided to drive my personal vehicle back up to the Sandy River Valley. Taking my Scout would also help if I was called to explain myself to the Warde
n Service brass. It would be much easier to portray my actions as personally motivated if I seemed to be on vacation.

  I made a practice of keeping my Scout loaded with everything I might want for an impromptu weekend in the woods. I had a tent, tarp, sleeping bag, reflector oven and cooking supplies, ax, come-along, chain saw—anything and everything I might conceivably need. To this I added a toolbox, two-by-fours to repair the door, as well as a mop and a bucket to clean up the filth.

  When I saw it was close to ten, a brainstorm came into my head.

  “I want you to check out,” I told Aimee when I reached her by phone.

  “I told you to let it go, Mike. Besides, where are we supposed to stay?”

  I was about to tell her that I would find them another motel when the invitation erupted from my mouth. “You can stay at my house!”

  “Your house?”

  “I won’t be here for the next few days, and there is a lot of space for the kids to play outside. It will give you a place to lie low from reporters after Billy is granted his release. Besides, didn’t you tell me you’ve always hated motels?”

  “You’re not afraid of us trashing the place?”

  “Not at all,” I lied.

  * * *

  I followed the sun west until I reached the state capital of Augusta and saw the Kennebec River in full flood and pushing free of its banks.

  When I was young, there had been a dam here, but it had been taken down to free the river for salmon, alewives, and other seagoing fish to return and spawn in upstream tributaries. Now the head of tide was twenty miles to the north, in Waterville. Looking down from the high eastern bank, I saw standing waves and whirlpools where the fast-flowing current collided with the surge of salt water. Whole trees, torn up by their roots, were being carried along, their branches like skeleton arms outstretched for help. I hadn’t heard if any of the towns along the river downstream had been swamped, but it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that the streets of Hallowell and Gardiner were underwater.