Almost Midnight

by Paul Doiron

  The old geezer understood me too well.

  “Not many people around Machias knew her. She wasn’t much of a social butterfly, it seems. Nor active in the community. Her ex-husband, though…”

  “She’s divorced?”

  “Widowed. Her husband committed suicide a year ago. Carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage after getting liquored up and stuffing wet socks in the tailpipes of his BMW M4.”

  “How come I didn’t find a mention of this online?”

  “Newspapers still believe suicide is a private tragedy.”

  “She should have shown up in his obituary, though.”

  “She did—under her first name, Janice. Dawn is her middle name.”

  Why hadn’t it occurred to me to widen my search? “A BMW M4 is a fancy car. What did this husband of hers do?”

  “Owned and operating a trucking company. People who worked for him were shocked he killed himself. They said he was an upbeat, high-energy businessman. Always talking, always on the go. Maybe too much so.”

  “As in he used cocaine?”

  “How’d you get so cynical at such a young age? But yes, that’s what I reckon. Freight transport being an industry that—”

  There were two beeps and the call dropped.

  I tried redialing but couldn’t connect.

  Instead I restarted the Scout and backed down the rocky, root-crossed road until I could turn around. Then I barreled back to the paved way.

  When I tried again, Charley picked up. “There you are.”

  “I’m not sure how long we’ll have a signal. The coverage in this valley seems spotty even by Maine standards. So you’re always warning me against making assumptions, but it seems like you’re having a hard time following your own advice here. What are you thinking? That someone murdered the husband and made his death look like suicide?”

  “The state police considered that possibility, but there was no evidence and no suspects they could identify.”

  “What about Dawn?”

  “She was on duty at the Downeast Correctional Facility when her husband took his life. Hard to beat being in prison when it comes to an ironclad alibi.”

  “Maybe she had an accomplice.”

  “The detective who investigated Mr. Richie’s suicide came up dry when he looked into that theory. She collected a decent payday from the life insurance and the sale of her dead husband’s business.”

  “So why is she still working as a prison guard risking her life every day and making forty grand a year?”

  “I’ve been asking myself that very same question.”

  I let the possibilities tumble around my skull.

  “Mike?”

  “I’m still here. Charley, if it’s not too much to ask, I wonder if you could make one more inquiry for me.”

  “You want to know if any other guards from Machiasport got hired at the Maine State Prison along with Dawn Richie?”

  I nearly slapped the steering wheel in delight. “How did you know that’s what I was going to ask?”

  “Ora says you and I suffer from the same mental affliction. OCD—obsessive curiosity disorder. I’ll make a few more calls and see what I can find.”

  I warned the old man that I was likely to be out of range when he phoned back, so we set a time later in the day for me to drive closer to civilization and attempt a call.

  As I headed into the woods, again, I weighed the information Charley had given me. Trevor Dow had called Sergeant Richie a “rat” before he slashed her, as if she had exposed a conspiracy—maybe a smuggling operation that included both guards and inmates. Perhaps her decision to turn informant wasn’t motivated by high-mindedness but by a desire to take over the drug trade inside the prison walls. It was one way of getting rid of the competition.

  I remembered Dawn Richie’s sangfroid at the hospital and grew increasingly anxious. She had seemed to shrug off being slashed across the face and watching her fellow CO die violently in front of her. The coldness of her reaction had bothered me at the time, but I had chalked it up to the shock of what had happened. Now I began to wonder if the woman might be a sociopath. Billy Cronk was getting out of there just in time.

  * * *

  The gate to the cabin was open when I drove up. Nonetheless, I got out, searched for the keys Ronette had promised to leave me, and found them in the agreed-upon hiding place. Then I continued on to the camp at the edge of the half-frozen pond.

  The whine of a saw pierced the air with the loud insistence of a cicada. When it stopped, I heard nails being hammered into wood.

  I had been correct in inferring that a loaded pickup had scraped the roots snaking across the road. But I had undercounted the number of trucks. Two identical white Ford F-250s were parked in the dooryard outside the cabin. They both bore the same name on their mud-spattered doors: HUNTER MOUNTAIN BUILDERS.

  Sawdust lay upon the dead leaves and patches of trodden mud like a beige snowfall. A door made of brighter yellow wood leaned against the logs, waiting to be hinged into place. The shutters were all raised, and new windows, tacky with fingerprints, gleamed in the former voids.

  One of the carpenters—a burly, bearded man—looked up from his portable table saw. I recognized him as Ronette’s husband, Peter. Now it was clear why she’d told me I shouldn’t worry about needing to repair the cabin myself. She had recruited—or more likely dragooned—Pete Landry and his crew into making the building habitable for me.

  “Ronnie was hoping to surprise you!” he said, wiping his dirty hands against his Carhartt coveralls.

  He wasn’t any taller than his wife, but the bones in his wrists were thick as two-by-fours. I clenched my teeth when we shook hands. I bet he could have crushed a walnut in that big brown palm.

  “Who’s paying for this, Pete?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  He had such an effective deadpan that my heart seized up. Then he swatted me on the back.

  “Just joshing with you. Ronette said she can arrange for me and the boys to use this place as a hunting camp next fall. You know how she is: always looking for a win-win. The cabin gets fixed up and she gets me out of the house for a couple of weeks. And if it helps you find that she-wolf…”

  I might have cautioned Ronette against sharing the details of my private obsession with Peter, but it would have been presumptuous. Who was I to tell her what she could say to her husband? But I suspected that the two men working for Peter now also knew about the other wolf. I had no reason to expect them to be discreet with the information.

  He introduced me to his employees, then took me by the arm and guided me around the exterior of the cabin, pointing with pride at the work they’d already done and explaining what they still needed to do. Next, he escorted me inside through the frame where the door would soon be hung. I didn’t recognize the place as the same vandalized structure I’d seen the day before.

  “You can thank Ronnie for cleaning things up. She and her mom were over here at the crack of dawn. Frenchwomen are human dynamos. But you already know that, being half-frog yourself.”

  The last thing my Franco-American mother had been was a cleaning dynamo. My only memories of her lifting a broom were from my early childhood when we had dwelled in cabins smaller, draftier, and dirtier than this one. She didn’t so much clean a room back then as attack it with fury at her miserable life situation.

  “I stopped in your uncle’s place a couple of weeks back, before the end of ice-fishing season,” Pete said. “Same old Denis. He acted like I was inconveniencing him by wanting to buy some shiners.”

  I had forgotten that Peter Landry and I had once been distantly related. Denis had been married to Pete’s aunt, a coal-eyed, jet-haired woman infamous for her frequent public infidelities. For years my uncle had worn his suffering on his sleeve—he thought he was the only man who would put up with her affairs—only to have her leave him for another sucker.

  “You know he sells crossbows and arrows there?” Pete said.

&
nbsp; “I do.”

  “I’m not saying he sold the one that was used against that male wolf.”

  “I’ve already had a conversation with him. He denies all knowledge.”

  Pete grinned. “My aunt used to say Denis Cormier had a Ph.D. in denial. I hope you don’t mind my saying that, him being your uncle.”

  “We’ve never been close.”

  Pete nodded sagely, wanting me to know that he saw our estrangement as a good thing.

  “What can I do to help?” I asked.

  “Go find the man you’re looking for.”

  “Seriously.”

  “I am serious. We’ve got a rhythm to working together, my boys and me, and you’d just be in our way. Come back before dusk for the grand unveiling. We’ll have a little toast to celebrate. Ronnie said she’s bringing over some food and beer for you.”

  I couldn’t say I was disappointed having my schedule wiped clean. Enough hours were still left in the day for me to poke around the Amish farms, since they were the last place where Shadow had been seen. With luck I might find something—wolf tracks, a donkey bone—that would help fill in the gap between the bloody events in the Stolls’ sheep pasture and Shadow’s turning up injured at Alcohol Mary’s house.

  As I was putting the Scout in reverse, Pete looked up from his table saw and hurried over. I cranked down the window. The crisp air smelled of newly sawed wood.

  “Ronnie said I should tell you that she paid a visit to the Beliveau boys. She pinched them on trespassing, vandalism, breaking and entering—the whole shebang. I begged her to bring along a couple of Franklin County deputies as backups. It’s good she did because she needed help transporting those three stooges to the jail in Farmington.”

  “I’m glad it went smoothly.”

  He scratched his beard, dislodging some wood chips. “She did leave a message for you, by the way.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She said to forget about the Beliveaus as suspects in the attack on your wolf. She and the deputies didn’t find so much as a broadhead when they searched the house. She called the place a shrine to modern sporting rifles. Those hillbillies are too in love with their black guns to pick up a weapon that went out of style in the Middle Ages.”

  29

  The perforated sign warning about the presence of horses and buggies swayed in the wind that had begun blowing down from the hills. Even by the demented meteorological standards of New England, the weather in the Sandy River Valley seemed freakish and nasty.

  A half mile along the road, I overtook a horse-drawn carriage with a reflective orange triangle affixed to the back. The buggy was black, box shaped, and being pulled by a bay horse that trotted along at an impressive speed. I eased my foot off the gas, concerned the animal might spook as I approached, but it must have been accustomed to motor vehicles and continued on without breaking stride.

  The buggy had rearview mirrors—salvaged from an auto junkyard—mounted on either side, and in the one on the left, I could make out a man’s face and beard beneath a black hat. To my knowledge Intervale’s Amish community had only three adult males. I was eager to speak with each of them, but it seemed rude for me to pull over a man in a moving carriage for no good reason.

  Instead I let the distance between us grow. When I came to the tire-track road leading up to Zane and Indigo’s yurt, I swung a left. I could always catch up with the carriage driver later.

  Clumps of fresh straw that hadn’t been there the day before lay in the road.

  Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have thought twice about this. The young hippies were living on a hardscrabble farm they had carved out of the birch woods. What else would you expect to find in such a place?

  But Indigo had mentioned that Zane had argued her out of owning a horse and, presumably, other herd animals. I supposed there must be other uses for straw and hay on a farm. Maybe they stuffed their mattress with the dried-out stalks or used it to thatch roofs. Possibly they’d piled bales around the outside of their yurt as insulation against the hard winter weather. Maybe they made their own scarecrows.

  But if there was one thing I had learned as a game warden, it was to notice the object out of place, the item that had been disturbed, the detail that didn’t belong. Although I couldn’t have told you why at the time, the newly scattered straw bothered me.

  Where the trees opened up and the road entered a smallish field, still not entirely cleared of glacial rubble, I came upon a sign planted in the ground: FOREST FARM II. YOUR GOVERNMENT IS NO LONGER MINE.

  So this homestead was a sequel to another whose name I didn’t recognize. The confrontational motto surprised me, I had to admit. It seemed like a proclamation Gorman Peaslee would have shouted from his barricades.

  At the far end of the field stood a hooped greenhouse made of torn plastic sheeting. With every gust, the tattered structure would fill with air, then, as the wind leaked out, it would contract again. The potting shed seemed to be breathing.

  Indigo’s Subaru was nowhere to be seen. Zane’s truck, I assumed, was either still perched precariously on the side of Number Six Mountain or had been hauled away for repair or demolition.

  I had never set foot inside a yurt before. The Mongolian structure sat upon a raised wooden platform. Stairs led up to a single, impressively carpentered front door, engraved with artful images of storks and carp. The house was round with a conical roof. The walls were made of a fabric like sailcloth. The heavy fabric seemed to be stretched tightly over hidden ribs that provided structure to what was, in essence, a glorified tent. The windows were of translucent plastic. Curlicues of woodsmoke issued from a metal stovepipe jutting from the top.

  Around the property I saw assorted sheds. One looked to be a sugarhouse; another was perhaps Zane’s attempt at building his own distillery. Some were equipped with solar panels, but none had a thatched roof. Nor were any hay bales in evidence.

  The bearded farm boy must have heard me drive up because he came around the greenhouse with a root chopper in his hand and a wary expression. After a moment, he managed to summon a smile. I had hoped no one would be at home so I could snoop around in private. As a game warden, I was not bound to obey property lines, woodland fences, or even NO TRESPASSING signs under certain circumstances; I suspected, however, that the assistant attorney general who advised our department would have said that none of those conditions applied to this particular freelance caper.

  Zane wore a bright white bandage on his head wound, but it was the only clean thing about him. His hair and beard were matted, and he reeked of perspiration with a hint of weed, but all it would have taken was a shower and a shave for the handsome dude to win a modeling contract.

  “I didn’t expect to see you here.” I had forgotten about his hearing difficulties until he spoke in that telltale monotone.

  “Where did you expect to see me?”

  He didn’t realize it was a joke until I cued him with a smile of my own.

  He played with his erratic hearing aid. “Any news about the wolf?”

  “Still alive.”

  “Really? That’s amazing!”

  “He’s not out of the woods. When I saw him this morning, he was unconscious and running a fever. Dr. Holman is worried about sepsis.”

  Zane glanced in the direction of the tree line and dabbed at his eyes, trying to hide the pain this news caused him. I found it hard to dislike the man. His feelings ran so deep.

  “What’s the status of your truck?”

  “Not good. I snapped both axles. I’m going to need to buy a replacement, it looks like.”

  “So you’re stranded here, in other words. Where’s Indigo?”

  “Farmington. She had a doctor’s appointment.”

  “Listen, I was hoping you had time to answer a few quick questions for me.”

  “What about?”

  “The wolf.”

  “I’ve told you everything I know already.”

  “Pretty often in my line of work, I
discover that people know more than they realize. And I’d love to see the inside of your yurt if it’s not too much trouble. I’ve never been in one before.”

  Zane Wilson, I had seen from the moment I’d met him, was a polite, accommodating man—perhaps too accommodating. While he might have been willing to stonewall me concerning Shadow, he was too well-mannered to resist my request to see the inside of his one-of-a-kind dwelling.

  “I don’t want to impose,” I added with false graciousness.

  “No worries, man.”

  I followed him across the piazza of mud.

  “I noticed you call this place Forest Farm II. Where was Forest Farm I?”

  “That was the Nearings’ place in Cape Rozier. Scott and Helen Nearing. You ever read The Good Life?”

  “No.”

  “It’s essential reading.”

  “I was struck by the motto on the sign, about your government not being my government. What’s up with that?”

  His high cheekbones took on a pinkish tint. “That was Indigo’s idea. It’s one of Scott’s quotes. Kind of like his mission statement. She feels the same way about things, I guess.”

  “But you don’t?”

  “I’m more into compromise and reconciliation. Restorative justice. That kind of thing.”

  The yurt consisted of a single circular room, larger than I had expected, with a king-size bed at the center. The rest of the furniture was minimal: a folded futon, a table with four chairs, a couple of bureaus and end tables. An opaque skylight at the apex of the roof let in some grainy light. The floors were all of varnished pine except where Turkish carpets lay scattered about. The woodstove, which doubled as the cooking stove, was kicking out some serious heat. An old-time icebox and a sink with a hand pump rounded out the décor.

  “This is a beautiful space,” I said, genuinely impressed.

  “It took a lot of work.”

  “I bet it did.”

  Instead of kitchen magnets or to-do lists, the icebox had a hand-lettered plaque attached to the door.

  OUR COMMANDMENTS

  We wish to set up a semi-self-contained household unit, based largely on a use economy, and, as far as possible, independent of the price-profit economy which surrounds us. We would attempt to carry on this self-subsistent economy by the following steps: