Almost Midnight

by Paul Doiron

  “I’m not surprised you don’t remember me,” I said to the wolf.

  He stood with his head tucked beneath his shaggy shoulders.

  “There’s no reason you would, I guess. Considering the crazy life you’ve led. I wanted to tell you that she’s alive. Your female. I’m not sure what I can do to keep her safe, but I am working on it. But you’re not going to see her again, bud. I’m sorry about that, but it’s for the best.”

  His yellow eyes didn’t blink.

  “I’m starting to feel ridiculous now so I guess I’ll be on my way. I’m glad to see you looking strong again. I’ll never understand how you survived what you survived. But I’ll see you again soon.”

  As I began to turn toward the door, I heard the click of his long nails on the painted concrete. He had approached the bars and had pushed his black nose through them and was sniffing at me with that nasal inquisitiveness all canines possess.

  I squatted down on my heels and held out the top of my hand. The bars were too close together for him to bite it off the way the Norse wolf Fenris did to the god Tyr. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to extend any fingers.

  He continued his loud snuffling. Then he let out a whine. He extended a tongue that was about twice as long as I had anticipated and rubbed my knuckles with it. I fought the primal urge to jerk back my hand. His luminous gaze held me spellbound, unmoving, as if by unspoken command.

  * * *

  Roughly an hour later, I dropped Zane Wilson off at his yurt. The ground fog was still rising from the sublimating snow, but we could see, driving across the field, that no lights were on in the walled tent or any of the outbuildings. Nor was the Baja parked in its usual spot. I wasn’t surprised that Indigo had left without explanation, even if Zane seemed both baffled and hurt.

  We had been quiet on the drive over the mountains. I had asked him about his search for a new truck, and he’d said some of the urgency was no longer there as Alcohol Mary had, for vague reasons, revoked her offer to apprentice him. My take on Mary Gowdie was that most of the reasons behind her decisions were vague. She was one of those people who, living alone in the woods, have no interest in explaining or justifying themselves to others. But if Zane and Indigo were on the verge of a split—and I wagered they were—he would need a new set of wheels.

  “Am I right that Indigo owns this land?”

  He was slow to answer. “Her dad does.”

  It seemed a little cruel to be pushing these revelations on him, but he wasn’t a kid even if he possessed a childish innocence. I could have taught a Ph.D. seminar in betrayal. I knew what it felt like to learn that someone you loved, someone you thought you understood inside and out, lacked a hole in the chest where a heart should have been. But Zane was going to have to suffer through his own epiphanies.

  He mumbled a goodbye in the back of his throat. Then he unlatched the door. The air that seeped inside had the damp taste of rain even though a drop hadn’t yet fallen.

  “Zane?”

  He looked back at me, neck bent, with the bone weariness of a man twice his age.

  “Take care of yourself.”

  I didn’t envy him.

  39

  The rain still hadn’t started falling as I turned onto the Tantrattle Road. Then the sky burst open, and all the fog that had risen from the softening snowbanks returned to earth with a sudden and terrific weight. The drops that splashed off my windshield were as big as dimes.

  I crept along carefully, afraid to outpace my rain-hazed headlights.

  I realized I was about to reenter a cellular dead zone and took the opportunity to check my phone for new messages I had missed. There was only one of consequence. Steve Klesko wanted me to call him back.

  He sounded tired. “Billy was at Pegg’s house, Mike. We found size-fourteen sneaker prints inside matching the ones he wore at Bolduc. Not to mention his fingerprints all over the mudroom.”

  After I’d recovered from the bombshell, I said, “But you told me whoever murdered the Peggs tried to make it look like an accident. Why would Billy go to the trouble of trying to conceal the cause of death only to give himself away so clumsily?”

  “No offense, but your friend isn’t exactly Einstein.”

  “You said you found all the prints he left in the mudroom?”

  “Yep. Why?”

  “Wouldn’t it make sense for you to have found them near the furnace, or wherever else the killer sabotaged the system?”

  “Maybe he was looking for gloves in the mudroom. Maybe he found the gloves. Maybe he removed his shoes. Maybe he left the house without remembering to clean up after himself. The point is Billy Cronk was there.”

  The call dropped. I put the Scout into park and redialed the detective’s number.

  I wasted no time asking the question. “Why would he kill Pegg?”

  “We’ll be sure to ask him when we make the collar.”

  “He didn’t do it, Steve.”

  But the call had dropped again, and my friend, the detective, hadn’t heard my testimony.

  None of this made sense. I wasn’t going to be of much help if I remained holed up in my vacation cabin. I needed to return to the Midcoast if I was going to intercede—yet again—on behalf of my star-crossed friend.

  But a thought came to me as I reached for the shifter.

  The phone connection being so sketchy, I texted a message to my self-appointed private investigator, Charley Stevens:

  Do me a favor and check something else. Find out if any guards from Machiasport transferred to the Maine State Prison in the year *before* the shutdown.

  If Dawn Richie really was a budding criminal kingpin, she had to have more than one accomplice besides the late CO Mears.

  With luck, an answer from Charley would be waiting when I drove back out with my gear.

  Before I reached the gate, the beams of my headlights bounced off the reflectors of a parked vehicle. I stomped on the brake and leaned over the wheel. The SUV was big and dark, maybe black, maybe blue. Definitely blue. I didn’t have to read the license plate to know it spelled out BB544.

  Aimee’s Tahoe.

  How had she known where I was?

  The answer smacked me against the side of the head. She had found the topographical map I had left on my kitchen table, I realized. I’d mentioned that I was heading to a remote camp in the woods. She had deciphered the marks I’d made on the map and known exactly where to find me.

  The Tahoe was blocking me from driving past.

  I pulled my hood over my head and reached behind the seat for a Maglite. In my pocket I always carried a small SureFire, but it was time to bring out the heavy artillery. Made of machined aluminum, the Maglite was as long as my forearm. With six D-cell batteries inside, it weighed three pounds. Those big flashlights used to be standard police issue before the LED revolution. Who needed a baton when you could club a hooligan into submission with your handheld torch?

  I ducked under the metal arm of the gate and started up the road following the light. Where there had been potholes, there were now ankle-deep ponds. My Bean boots kept my feet dry, but they offered terrible traction on the slick rocks and skinned tree roots.

  Whatever footprints the Cronks had made in the mud had been washed away by the downpour.

  I smelled woodsmoke even before I saw the glow from the cabin windows. My heart was pounding beyond the physical exertion of navigating the muddy trail. My anxiety came from not knowing what I would find—whom I would find—when I opened the door.

  I switched off my flashlight and mounted the steps to the rebuilt porch. Hopefully Aimee would be expecting me and not have a firearm pointed at the door. Then again, they were running for their lives.

  Better to announce myself than to barge in. I rapped on the new door. “It’s me, guys! It’s Mike!”

  The next thing I knew the door had swung open, and Aimee Cronk had her arms around me, her face pressed against my damp coat.

  “Thank God!”

&nb
sp; Over her head I saw the five Cronklets: two peeking out from a bedroom, two sprawled by the stove, the girl hanging on to the back of her mom’s thick leg.

  I whispered into Aimee’s ear. “Is Billy here?”

  She raised her wet face. “We don’t know where he is. He said it would be safer that way.”

  “Safer from whom?”

  “Come inside and get warm, and I’ll explain.” She invited me into the cabin as if she’d built it with her own hands.

  Ethan took my coat and hung it on a clothesline over the stove. Little Emma was charged with unlacing my boots and placing them beside the stove to dry. Aimee had water boiling for tea and cocoa.

  We all sat around the picnic table with our steaming mugs while she began her account of the past two days.

  * * *

  The manager of the Happy Clam Motel had watched them check out. He seemed to suspect that they might abscond with a stack of towels, ice buckets, the television remotes, whatever wasn’t nailed down.

  From there they’d stopped at the grocery store because Aimee would be damned if she didn’t pay for her family’s food. Plus, she wasn’t sure I had the healthiest diet as a bachelor game warden.

  But my house in the woods had raised her low-down spirits. Right as they pulled up, Logan had spotted a fox and her kits in the backyard. He was even more thrilled when he found three bloody squirrel tails under the platform bird feeder. Two came from gray squirrels and one came from a red squirrel, declared the ten-year-old aspiring biologist.

  The day was pleasant enough. She spoke with their lawyer, who was tracking the pardon and commutation warrants as they made their way from the governor’s office to the secretary of state. Once they were certified, the attorney said, Billy would be a free man. He could walk out the front door of the Bolduc Correctional Facility as if the past four years had been a bad dream.

  But when Billy called and she passed along this information, he received the news with a strange subdued silence.

  “How soon can I get out of here?” he’d asked.

  “Maybe today!”

  “Who else knows where you are?” He was being vague because all calls made by inmates in Maine prisons are recorded.

  “Nobody.”

  “Not your sister?”

  “No.”

  “And you’re sure you weren’t followed there?”

  “What’s going on with you, Billy? Why are you afraid?”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Billy.”

  “I’m antsy over getting out. I’ll believe it when I see it, you know?”

  “That doesn’t explain who you think might be following us.”

  “It’s probably nothing.”

  The conversation had pricked Aimee’s balloon, so to speak. She considered leaving the kids in the care of the oldest and driving back to the prison farm to hear the real reason her husband was acting paranoid. But the last time she’d left Logan in charge, she’d returned home to the final flag of a demolition derby. And it would be foolish to show herself in public if Billy was worried about some unnamed but evidently dangerous person stalking them.

  She resolved to get through the afternoon by watching the birds come to the feeder—including the first red-winged blackbird of the season—and waiting for the lawyer to call back with confirmation.

  Then Aiden came running inside to tell her that a creepy car had snuck up the driveway. It backed out wicked fast when the bad man behind the wheel saw him there.

  “How do you know he was bad?” she asked.

  “’Cause he backed out wicked fast.”

  “Can you describe the car, honey?”

  “White with spots.”

  “Rust spots?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was it big or small?”

  “Real small. Like the smallest car I’ve ever seen. Well, not as small as a go-cart.”

  The boy hadn’t gotten a look at the driver, other than to notice he was wearing dark glasses, but the appearance of the unidentified man after Billy’s warning made Aimee nervous. She told the kids to repack their backpacks and sleeping bags in case she decided they needed to leave in a hurry.

  Emma interrupted us. “I gotta go poo-poo.”

  “Brady, take your sister to the outhouse.”

  “Mom!”

  “And check it for spiders. You know how she hates creepy-crawlies.”

  Aimee bundled them up and gave them a flashlight. When the kids opened the door, a warm gust of humid air caused the lanterns to flicker. The rain had begun to lighten. It might even have stopped. The sound on the roof was no longer a martial drumbeat but more erratic, as of drops falling from the bare branches to plink like coins off the new shingles.

  Aimee returned to her story.

  The rest of the afternoon passed without incident, she said. All was calm and quiet—or as calm and quiet as the Cronk household ever got—until the phone rang after she’d put the kids to bed. By then she’d found my topo map and made a game of figuring out where I had gone up-country.

  She’d hoped it was the lawyer calling with news, then realized it was almost midnight: too late for such a thing.

  Instead she heard her husband’s voice on the other end of the line. From the rushing car sounds behind him, she knew at once he wasn’t calling from the prison farm.

  “You need to get out of there!”

  “What? Why? Where are you? What’s going on?”

  “You need to go someplace no one would ever think to look.”

  Her stomach had begun to agitate. “Billy, have you … escaped?”

  “I’m pardoned, ain’t I? It’s only paperwork keeping me locked up. And it’ll be too late if I wait any longer.”

  She placed no trust in her husband’s legal acumen. But what worried her most was the real fear in his voice. “Who are you afraid of?”

  “It’s a group of renegade COs. They were going to try to kill me tonight before I was released, which is why I had to leave early. When they realize I’m gone, they’re gonna come for you. They know I won’t talk if they have you as hostages. Please, baby, you need to run and run fast. Tell me where you’re going and I’ll find a way to catch up.”

  The cabin on Tantrattle Pond was the first place to leap to her mind. For one thing, she knew I would be there and able to protect them. Second, she didn’t figure many people outside of a few wardens knew where I was since it was obvious I was up to my usual mischief.

  “And so we shot up here like shit through a goose,” she said by way of conclusion.

  My mug was empty. “What about Billy?”

  “He said he’d find a way to get here.”

  “Warren is close to a hundred miles from Intervale. And I’m sure his pardon doesn’t exonerate him in advance for stealing a car. Oh, shit. What did you do with the topo map I left—?”

  Her rebuking smile reminded me she was smarter than I was when it came to the practicalities of life.

  So far, I had resisted sharing details of my abbreviated conversation with Detective Klesko. She would agree with me that there was no way on God’s earth that her husband would have murdered another man’s family to protect himself. But I owed it to her to share the investigators’ suspicions and the direness of Billy’s situation. I couldn’t make my mouth form the words.

  “So who are these men who are after us?” she asked. “Do you know any of their names?”

  “Are you sure this is a conversation we should have in front of the kids?”

  “At this stage, they’ve gotten the idea that we’re kind of in a pickle.”

  “What I have to tell you is bad, Aimee. Whoever these guys are, they already killed a fellow guard by the name of Tyler Pegg. They made it look like accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. I can’t be sure, but I suspect one of them is the CO who allowed Darius Chapman to get loose at the hospital. Letting him ‘escape’ was a pretense to shoot him before he could trade what he knew for a lighter punishment.”

&
nbsp; “Is his name Rancid?”

  “Rancic.”

  “That’s not what the inmates call him. I thought he and Pegg were friends.”

  “So did Pegg, I suspect, until Tyler saw what happened at the hospital and began to have doubts about things he’d seen and heard.”

  “But this Rancid guy ain’t the mastermind.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think he is.”

  “So who’s the big shot running the show?”

  I resisted sharing my suspicion about Dawn Richie. It felt premature and raised questions for which I had no answers. “We’re going to need to ask Billy, if he ever makes it here.”

  “When he makes it here. My husband’s got his faults and failings, but he’s the most motivated individual I’ve ever met when the spirit moves him.”

  Just then, I heard a distant blaring noise. I recognized it at once. Someone was leaning on the horn of my Scout, which I had left unlocked in my haste to reach the cabin.

  “Who is that?” Ethan Cronk asked.

  “He sounds mad,” said Aiden.

  I picked up my Maglite from the table and put on my drying jacket, steaming by the fire. I tucked the hem behind the grip of my sidearm so I could get at it quickly. “There’s only one way to find out.”

  40

  As I ventured out into the dripping darkness, I was surprised by the duck-like quacks of wood frogs along the shores of the pond. The day’s abrupt warmth must have awakened them from their winterlong sleep beneath the mud. Now a few males had begun their annual, awkward songfest. Soon, the bandit-masked frogs would be joined by thousands of lovesick spring peepers, and the nights would become earsplitting.

  The fog continued to drift among the trees, obscuring whatever starlight or moonlight might have been above the valley. I chose not to turn on my Maglite. Until I knew who was here and what was going on, I didn’t want to give away my position.

  The snow was melting fast. The first patches of bare ground showed as impressions around the trunks of the biggest beeches and pines.