by Paul Doiron
“What do you think you’re doing, Littlefield?” Kurt said.
“Using my right of way.”
“Kathy told you to stay off her land.”
“She should post it, then.” The man, Littlefield, was dressed from cap to boots in camouflage, making it impossible to see anything except his rheumy eyes, which were visible above the leaf-patterned veil that covered the bottom of his face. He was a big guy under all those hunting clothes, but he had the cracked, high-pitched voice of a very old man.
“What’s going on here?” My tone was the same one I used to use as a warden to establish my command presence.
“Who are you supposed to be?” he asked. “Another of the lady warden’s brothers?”
“My name is Mike Bowditch. And I’d like to know what you’re doing here.”
“His name is Littlefield,” said Kurt. “He owns the farm on the other side of that stone wall.”
“And I own the right-of-way through these fields, too.”
“The hell you do,” said Eklund.
“I got the deed that says so!”
I was already steaming at the “lady warden” comment, but I tried to keep the emotion out of my voice. “Do you mind removing your hunting mask, Mr. Littlefield, so we can have a polite conversation?”
“I ain’t interested in having a conversation with either of you needle dicks. Stand aside and let me use my right-of-way.”
“You know the woman who owns this property was shot the other night,” I said.
“Of course I know. Cops trampled all over my place looking for clues.”
“She was shot by someone with a turkey gun.”
“You accusing me of something?”
“You don’t think it’s disrespectful to be hunting on her land under the circumstances?”
“I doubt she cares much one way or the other at the present time.”
Eklund stooped down and grabbed an apple-size rock from the weeds. “Fuck you!”
Littlefield lifted the barrel of his shotgun. “Easy there, Cyclops!”
My right hand went around my side and found the grip of Davies’s revolver where I’d tucked it into the back of my pants. “I suggest you move on, Mr. Littlefield.”
“That’s what I was doing before you clowns accosted me.”
“Don’t think I won’t throw this!” Kurt said.
“And don’t think I won’t defend myself if you do.”
“Go home, Mr. Littlefield,” I said.
“I don’t take orders from you, sonny. I do what I want on my land.”
Kurt shook his arm, the one holding the stone. “It’s not your fucking land!”
Littlefield chuckled. “Have another drink, alkie.”
He hoisted the bag of turkey decoys over his shoulder and set off across the barrens to the south, in the direction of the stone wall that marked the edge of Kathy’s property. Robert Frost had evidently been wrong about good fences making good neighbors.
Kurt and I watched him go, the camouflaged hunter becoming harder and harder to see as he receded across the green field.
“Can you tell me what the hell just happened?” I said.
Eklund smacked his lips again, as if to gather the saliva to form a string of sentences. “He claims the deed to his property gives him the right to ride his ATV and snowmobile across Kathy’s land. She’d told him to knock it off, but the bastard keeps doing it because he likes to provoke her. Kathy went to see a lawyer in Augusta about it, and there are problems with the title that should have come out when she bought the place. She’d probably win in court—although it would cost her a few grand, the lawyer said. Meanwhile, old Littlefield took out a lien on Kathy’s property just to be an even bigger dick than he already was.”
I should tell Soctomah about the territorial dispute, I decided. It sounded as if he’d already spoken with Littlefield, but this morning’s stunt with the turkey gun deserved to be reported. And at the very least, the detective would want to interview Kurt about his recent whereabouts, too. I wondered how the lieutenant would feel about my spontaneous decision to become the man’s bunk mate.
“I need a drink,” Kurt muttered, and headed back toward the house.
I had no idea what to do with the guy. His utter disinterest in seeing his sister continued to baffle me. Was he that afraid the doctors would take one whiff of his eighty-proof breath and lock him up in the detox ward? I wished Kathy had confided in me more about her troubled brother; I felt hobbled by a lack of insight.
At the very least, I wanted to visit her again at the hospital. I wandered over to my vintage Bronco, wincing as I ran my fingers over the punctures in the hood and side panel. The right front tire was flat. I tried the door and found it unlocked. The entire dashboard and front seat appeared blue from powdered windshield glass. The glove compartment was still open from when I’d grabbed my Walther.
Davies’s .38 Special packed more of a punch, but I missed my James Bond gun. The pistol had been my eighteenth-birthday present to myself. It had even saved my life once. Maybe if I asked Soctomah nicely, he’d have the technicians expedite their ballistics tests.
It was obvious I would not be taking my Bronco onto the roads of midcoast Maine this week, this month, or maybe ever again. I had doubts the damage could even be repaired, let alone quickly, or at a cost I could afford. In other words, I was effectively stranded up here on Appleton Ridge.
Kurt Eklund’s ash-gray Cutlass was parked in the shade of one of the big sugar maples. The car seemed even more battered than its owner. It was hard to find a place on it that Kurt hadn’t scratched, dented, or chipped. I popped the driver’s door and rummaged around beneath the seat, finding in the process an empty fifth of Five O’Clock vodka and three crushed cans of Milwaukee’s Best. The keys were there, too, just as Kurt had said. Weighing them in my hand, I felt reassured that he’d told me one truthful thing.
I stuck the keys in my pants pocket and was turning back to the house, when I looked down the drive and noticed that Kathy had a plastic mailbox where she received the morning newspaper. I wandered down the hill to see if the deliveryman had arrived. When I opened the box, I discovered the previous two editions.
The older copy had nothing about Kathy’s shooting, since it had happened only hours after the paper went to press. It did have a story on the front page about Jimmy Gammon, though.
TRAGEDY FOLLOWED GUARDSMAN FROM AFGHANISTAN HOME TO MAINE
They’d found a different picture of Jimmy for this one. It showed him posing like a bodybuilder with snow-covered mountains in the distance. The caption identified the other men in the picture as Sgt. Angelo Donato, of Thomaston, and Spc. Ethan Smith, of Presque Isle.
Donato, I recognized from the televised clip I’d seen on the news. He was wearing a crew cut but hadn’t yet grown the debonair goatee he had sported recently on TV. Smith was a hulking dude who looked like he could bench-press a dairy cow.
This morning’s edition had the story about Kathy.
GAME WARDEN SERGEANT SERIOUSLY INJURED IN SHOOTING
The editors had used the formal portrait of Kathy provided by the Warden Service. She was dressed in the unique dress uniform Maine game wardens wear: a red wool jacket, black leather bandolier, and olive green fedora. The retro outfit had the effect of making her look older and more mannish than she did in person.
Halfway up the driveway, I heard a car approaching along the road and then the single bleat of a pursuit siren going off. It was a silver-and-blue Knox County sheriff’s cruiser. The Charger rolled to a stop, and Skip Morrison hung his head out the window.
“Special delivery for Bowditch.”
He reached across his body and held out the duffel bag of clean clothes he’d retrieved from my room at the Square Deal.
I took the bag from him. “Thanks, man.”
“How’s life on the farm?”
“Eklund’s inside getting hammered again. But I took his keys, so it’s not like he’s going anywhere
.”
Morrison pointed at my blasted Bronco. “What about you? You need a lift today?”
“Not unless you’re headed down to Portland.”
“We only provide taxi service to Knox County.”
“Oh, well.” I hefted the duffel. “Thanks for getting this, Skip. I owe you one.”
“I’ve got something else for you, too.” In his hand appeared the three twenty-dollar bills I’d given him to pay my motel tab. “I told you Dot wouldn’t take your money, dude.”
23
When I returned to the kitchen, I found Kurt stuffing paper napkins under one of the legs of the table in an attempt to rebalance it. He sat down in his squeaky chair and pressed his scabrous elbows on the surface. Nothing moved. He smiled at me with his long, almost equine teeth.
“Success,” he said.
I put the newspapers down on the tabletop.
“In case you’re interested in reading what happened to your sister,” I said, making no effort to be courteous.
He poured the rest of the amaretto into his coffee cup. “You really think I don’t want to see her?”
“Based on the evidence in front of me, that would be an accurate conclusion.”
“What if I told you I was bad luck? Not just bad luck but the worst luck. Cursed, snake-bit, and fundamentally fucked is what I am.”
At certain dark hours, I occasionally viewed my life as the proverbial sequence of unfortunate events. But I didn’t ascribe my misadventures to any occult forces. Most of the scrapes I’d gotten into had been the result of happenstance or my own piss-poor judgment. Then again, I wasn’t an active alcoholic on the lam from his own conscience, so I had no need of supernatural explanations.
“You think that if you go visit Kathy, your bad luck is going to rub off on her?” I said.
He scratched at a flaky red elbow with fingernails overdue for a trim. “The best thing I can do for her is to stay away. It’s no coincidence all this shit happened after I moved in.”
Had this been what Kurt meant when he’d said the shooting was all his fault? Did he really think that by coming to live with his sister, he had infected her with some sort of bad juju?
“I’d say that sounds like another lame excuse,” I said.
“Hang out with me long enough and see what happens. Don’t be surprised if your car crashes off a bridge or you fall down a well.”
“Maybe your luck would improve if you eased up on the sauce,” I said.
“I’d been sober seven months when the docs told me I had cirrhosis. That’s another reason I hate hospitals.”
A rotting liver would explain the orange-yellow complexion.
“That must have been a tough diagnosis,” I said. “You could still ease up.”
“If you had six months to live, what would you do with it?”
“Is that how long they gave you?”
“Six months to a year.”
I leaned against the soapstone sink and listened to the breeze blowing through the cracked window behind me. “I don’t know what I would do in your situation.”
“Then maybe you can cut me some fucking slack.”
He glanced at the newspaper in front of him, smoothing the pages out across the tabletop, and began to read the story about his sister.
Every time I thought I’d gotten a handle on who Kurt Eklund was, he’d do or say something to slip from my grasp. He was a miserable mess of a person who deserved understanding or, at least, compassion. No, he was a cruel and manipulative asshole with no regard for others. I couldn’t imagine how Kathy and her family had dealt with this mercurial man over the years, but I understood why she had barely mentioned him.
A phone began to ring somewhere down the hall. The tone sounded like my cell. I reached into my pocket, but it wasn’t there.
I followed the noise into the woman cave. My mobile had fallen into a dusty crack between the sofa cushions.
“Hello?”
“Where the heck are you? Billy said you blew him off.”
“Aimee?”
With everything that had happened since I’d arrived on the Midcoast, I had completely forgotten about my scheduled visit with Billy Cronk at the Maine State Prison.
“He’s wicked depressed about it,” she said.
“I’m so sorry. I feel horrible.”
She hesitated a few seconds, then said, “It has something to do with the game warden who got shot the other night.”
Aimee Cronk—armchair psychiatrist, amateur detective, unschooled mind reader. Her insights into human behavior were uncanny at times.
“Kathy Frost used to be my sergeant. I’ve been at the hospital a lot.”
“Jeezum. Is she going to be all right?”
“The doctors don’t know. She lost a lot of blood and hasn’t regained consciousness, the last I heard.”
“Do the cops know who did it?” she asked.
“I’m not exactly on their speed dial these days.”
“I bet you’ve got an idea or two.” Like many Mainers, she added an r to the end of idea to make up for the r’s she dropped at the end of words like supper.
“It’s what got me into trouble before, poking my nose into places it didn’t belong.”
“What if they don’t ever catch the person who shot your friend? Then how are you going to feel?”
“I’m worried I’d just screw up the investigation.”
“If it was me, I’d be more worried that the person who shot my friend might get away with it. You’re not just going to stand by and let that happen.”
Aimee was right that I was fighting the urge to visit Soctomah’s office and plant myself there until something happened.
“I need to schedule another visit with Billy,” I said.
I wondered if he had gotten around to confessing to his wife that he’d been transferred to the Supermax. It was only a matter of time until Aimee connected the dots. In the Special Management Unit, a prisoner received a single phone call a week. What the hell had Billy done to get thrown into solitary confinement? Given that my blue-eyed, blond friend looked like Adolf Hitler’s wet dream, I worried that the local chapter of the Aryan Brotherhood might have made a concerted effort to recruit him. It has been well established by history that Nazis refuse to take no for an answer.
As if I didn’t already have enough mysteries hanging over me.
“Take care of yourself, Mike,” she said. “I hope your friend gets better.”
“Tell Billy I’ll be in touch with him soon.”
“He ain’t going nowhere.”
After we’d hung up, I tried Soctomah’s number and got his voice mail. I told him I was staying at Kathy’s house with her brother, knowing he would find that piece of information too tantalizing to ignore, and I left him a detailed message about our tense conversation with Littlefield. I asked that he call me back, making it sound as if it were an expectation rather than a request.
By the time I’d returned to the kitchen, Kurt had cracked open a bottle of crème de menthe and leafed his way through both newspapers. When he looked up at me with his single good eye, it looked red-rimmed and fierce.
“Listen to this quote,” he said. “‘Of course we were saddened to hear that Warden Frost had been wounded, but we resist the idea that the incident is any way connected to the unprovoked murder of our son. The unsubstantiated accusation that any United States veteran—let alone a member of the 488th MP unit—might have had a hand in the shooting is offensive to us as parents and citizens. Jimmy’s friends and family will not allow this sad turn of events to affect the attorney general’s investigation into the unwarranted use of deadly force that ended his life. Our son deserves justice as much—or more so—than the woman who killed him.’”
I felt a nerve jump in my neck. “That’s a quote from James Gammon Sr., I take it.”
“That’s libel! He can’t just throw around words like murder. Why would they even allow that to be printed? Kathy’s on her deathbed, for
fuck’s sake.”
“Gammon’s a powerful man,” I said. “He probably goes yachting with the newspaper’s owner.”
“Well, he’d better shut up about Kathy, or I’m going to pay him a visit. Kathy told me he has a mansion on McLean Hill.”
“I’d advise against it, Kurt.” I felt in my pocket for his car keys, just to be safe.
“What the fuck do I have to lose?”
It was a valid question, I had to admit.
I should never have allowed him to start drinking again. Kathy had warned me that her brother became more unstable the more alcohol he consumed. Worse, I’d inflamed his anger by sharing those newspapers with him. I began to wonder about the firearms Kathy owned, and hoped she kept them under lock and key. That was assuming Eklund didn’t have a pistol or rifle of his own stashed somewhere.
“If you’re so concerned about her, you should put away the crème de menthe and take a nap,” I said. “After you wake up, I’ll drive you down to the hospital to see her.”
“If she’s unconscious, what’s the point?”
“The point is that you’re her brother.”
“She wouldn’t want to see me.” He studied the newspaper in front of him. The picture showed Jimmy Gammon with his buddies, Donato and Smith. “I bet one of these assholes shot her. The father probably put them up to it. That’s how these conspiracies work.”
“Take it easy, Kurt.”
“And do you know what’s going to happen to them?” he said. “Nothing’s going to happen to them. Even if the cops figure it out, it’s going to be a cover-up. It says here that the father works with the Department of Defense. He’ll just pull some strings and get the report shredded. Don’t tell me it hasn’t happened before, either. Agent Orange, Abu Ghraib, Haditha! It’s all one goddamned lie after another.”
“You need to calm down,” I said.
“Don’t tell me to calm down. I lost my fucking eye! And no one in the army ever apologized for it. They just gave me a Walgreen’s eye patch and sent me home. ‘Put the past behind you,’ the shrink at Fort Knox told me. ‘That’s easy if you have two fucking eyes,’ I said.”
