by Paul Doiron
“Don’t believe everything you hear through the grapevine.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t believe everything Dani Tate tells you, either.”
“She’s not the one with the lengthy history of insubordination.”
I could hardly take issue with that statement. “Can you get me in to see Kathy?”
“I don’t make those decisions,” he said. “The doctors do.”
“Have other people been allowed to see her?”
“Some.”
“Her parents?”
“Yes.”
“What about other wardens?”
“She’s in serious condition, Bowditch. If someone sneezes, she could come down with an infection.”
“Look, Major,” I said. “You know what happened at Kathy’s house. The last thing I remember is sticking my hands into her wounds to stop the bleeding. I’d rather not carry that image around in my head as the last time I saw her.”
He blinked his tired eyes at me. “Let me see what I can do.”
I sat back down again at the table and waited.
He returned about fifteen minutes later with a brown-skinned, black-eyed woman in doctor’s scrubs. She had three surgical masks dangling from her hand.
“Come this way,” she said in an accent that had a Caribbean cadence.
The doctor guided us through a series of doors into the nerve center of the Special Care Unit. Men and women were seated at a central desk, monitoring computer screens while machines beeped and buzzed. The door to Kathy’s room was wide enough for a bed to be wheeled in and out should the patient require emergency surgery.
The doctor gave us our masks and then slid open the door. “Hands in pockets, please.”
Kathy lay on her back in a pale sleeveless shift. There was a mask clasped to her nose and mouth. She had a monitor attached to her wrist and an IV unit pumping fluids into the crook of her uninjured arm. The doctors had been forced to shave her head above her left ear in order to suture a wound I hadn’t noticed the night she was shot. A pellet must have grazed the skin above her ear. Except for her many freckles, her skin had turned a bleached-bone color, as if all of the blood the doctors had pumped back into her heart hadn’t yet made its way to the surface.
“Did they get all the pellets out?” I asked the doctor.
“She will need other operations to remove them.”
“Are there any near her heart or arteries?” I asked.
A foreign object embedded in the body can move over time for a variety of reasons, and I knew that a tungsten alloy shotgun pellet would be subject to magnetic fields. Walking through a metal detector could kill a person with a ball bearing close to a major blood vessel.
“No,” said the doctor. “But she suffered hemorrhagic shock from the loss of blood. We don’t know how that affected her brain.”
“So she might have brain damage?”
“It is too early to say.”
I remembered the wounds to her torso. I’d stuck my dirty hands in them. “What are the chances of her suffering an infection?”
“Sepsis remains a concern.”
I couldn’t really see Kathy’s face with the mask over her nose and mouth; she might have been anyone underneath that contraption. I wanted to pull the thing off and give her a kiss on the cheek. I had a premonition that this would be my one and only chance to say good-bye.
“Hands in pockets, please,” said the doctor again.
I was unaware of having removed them.
28
The major returned to his vigil outside Kathy’s room while the doctor escorted me from the Special Care Unit back to the cafeteria. She studied me with coal black eyes, the irises as dark as the pupils. She was older than I’d first guessed. There were wrinkles etched in parallel lines across her forehead.
“Have you studied emergency medicine?” she asked me in her charming accent.
“Just wilderness first aid,” I said.
“You must have been a good student.”
“I realized someone’s life might depend on my knowing all I could.”
“Someone’s did,” she said.
She had intended the kind words to make me feel better, but I couldn’t shake the feelings of rage I’d experienced seeing Kathy in such a fragile and unrecognizable condition. I went into the washroom and splashed cold water on my face and rubbed it fiercely along the back of my neck until I felt it running down my spine. I had hoped the shock might cool the blood pulsing in my temples.
I studied my dripping face in the mirror above the sink. The cuts on my head would heal in time. I peeled up a few strands of wet hair to inspect the old scar on my forehead, remembering the night I’d gotten it. I had been twenty-two years old, meeting my father in his favorite North Woods roadhouse after a long estrangement. I’d wanted to introduce him to Sarah—to show off my beautiful girlfriend and tell him that I had decided to become a game warden. He’d laughed at my plan, which he recognized, even then, as a cheap bid for his attention. Later that night, a biker had cracked a beer bottle across my skull in a fight. My old man had nearly cut the man’s throat in retribution.
My mom had always worried that I would inherit my dad’s predisposition for violence. She seemed to think it was attached to the Y chromosome in certain unfortunate individuals. I might be carrying some genetic abnormality, but it didn’t give me “license” (that was the word she used). My mother had raised me to be a good Catholic and believed that God would grant men the strength to transcend “their animal selves” if we asked for His help. If she were still alive, she would have said that I owed it to Kathy to master my emotions and not lash out merely because I was feeling dull-headed and impotent.
I could start by finding Kurt, I decided.
Deb Davies had told me that the Eklunds had driven from northern Maine to be with their daughter. When parents have a sick child in the hospital, even an adult child, they don’t pack up their car and go home. They stay as close as possible, because you never know. The Warden Service would have arranged to get them a hotel room in the neighborhood.
Kathy’s parents were somewhere in or near the hospital.
In the hallway, I found a posted map showing all the usual visitor destinations in a hospital: the cafeteria, the gift shop, the florist. The chapel was located at the south end of the building, near the central courtyard. I made my way through the maze of corridors.
I’d expected to find pews in the chapel, but there were only chairs, arranged at the edges of a rectangular space. A red Muslim prayer rug was folded over a stand in the corner, and at the far end of the room was a lectern with a heavy Bible. There were several people seated in the room, all of them gray-haired: two women and a single gentleman. The man was tall and lanky, with a full head of white hair, and he was sitting next to the lectern, while the others held back, as if daunted by the elevated dais and the power it represented. As a retired minister, Kathy’s father would feel no timidity in approaching God.
I was surprised to find myself genuflecting before the lectern. My mother’s Catholicism had deep roots.
The old man had his head bowed and his hands clasped. I couldn’t get a good look at him, but he must have sensed that I was watching him. When he raised his eyes, I saw an older version of Kurt Eklund’s face, but one free of the ravages of alcohol.
“Pardon me,” I said in a whisper. “Are you Kathy Frost’s father?”
“I am.”
“You don’t know me, Reverend, but I am a friend of your daughter’s. My name is Mike Bowditch.”
He straightened his shoulders as if they had been hunched so long that the muscles had cramped. “I know who you are, Mr. Bowditch. Kathy has told us about you.” He extended his liver-spotted hand to me. His grip was strong for a man in his eighties. “I also know what you did for my daughter the night she was shot. Alice and I owe you a debt we can never repay.”
I glanced behind me, wondering whether I’d missed seeing his wife when I entered the ch
apel.
“Alice is resting,” he explained.
“There’s something I’d like to speak with you about, Reverend,” I said in a hushed tone.
“Erik.” He stood up, using the top of the next chair for assistance. “Let’s talk outside.”
I watched him push open the chapel door with his long arms. As he did, the commotion from the hospital flooded into the quiet room the way water rushes through a crack in a dam. A praying woman, clutching rosary beads between her thumbs, looked at us with an annoyed expression.
Erik Eklund pointed a knobby finger at the big window that faced the courtyard. “Would you mind? I could use some fresh air.”
The courtyard was a well-kept green space with beds of multicolored tulips and concrete sidewalks designed with wheelchairs and walkers in mind. A red-eyed vireo was singing from the branches of a cherry tree whose blossoms had mostly fallen and lay scattered like unmelted snowflakes on the newly cut grass.
The old man reached into his back pocket and removed a farmer’s bandanna, which he opened and spread on the nearest bench. The seat was damp from the fog and rain that had bedeviled the state for the past week. I didn’t see what difference a handkerchief would make in keeping his backside dry, but lacking one of my own, I had no choice but to settle down beside him on the wet cedar.
“How did you know where to find me?” He spoke with the same flat, almost Midwestern accent as his children.
“Kathy told me you used to be a minister, so it made sense to look for you in the chapel.”
When he grinned, he resembled his daughter more than his son. He had pale eyelashes, crusted from lack of sleep. “Our daughter told us you were a good investigator, Mr. Bowditch.”
“Please call me Mike.”
“You are searching for information about who might have done this to her?”
“How did you know?”
“Because you are a good investigator,” he said. “I have no special insights. Kathy spoke with us on the phone every Sunday, but she didn’t discuss her cases. She’s dealt with many dangerous men over the years. Some she sent to prison. There are many who might wish to do her harm.”
“Did she mention the death threats she received after the incident involving Jimmy Gammon?”
He cleared his throat. “She wouldn’t have wanted us to worry. Kathy always felt protective of us, even when she was a little girl.”
“Did you know that Kurt was living with her?”
“Yes, she told us.” A breeze rustled the leaves of the cherry tree over our heads. “We couldn’t have him in the house anymore. It was too painful for Alice. He was stealing money from her purse. And then her jewelry box went missing. We assumed it was to take to a pawnshop. My son claimed not to know anything about it.”
“He had gambling debts,” I said.
“Our phone would sometimes ring, and there would be a man on the other end, asking for him. Kurt would pretend not to be home. He seemed frightened.”
“He never mentioned the name of someone he owed money to? Someone who might have wanted to hurt him?”
“You have to understand that my son is an alcoholic,” Erik Eklund said. “He lies about so many things. Alice and I stopped trying to determine what was true and false a long time ago. We did our best to love him. But it was hard when he hated himself so much.”
The man had a calmness about him that made me feel as if I’d known him forever. “He told me that he didn’t want to see Kathy because of all the bad luck he’s had in his life. It was like he was carrying around an infection and was afraid she might catch it.”
“Did he tell you the story of how he was wounded?”
“No.”
“He told us he was injured by a mortar,” Erik said. “Alice and I flew with Kathy to Fort Knox to visit him when he was in the hospital there. He was in complete despair because of his eye, but he said he was lucky, because two of his friends had been killed in the same explosion.”
I could feel the dampness of the bench seeping through my pants. “That’s not what happened, though.”
“The doctors told us he was running away from a firefight, and he ran into a broken branch. That is how Kurt lost his eye. That was more than thirty years ago, and he has never confessed the truth to us.”
“Thirty years is a long time to keep repeating a lie.”
“We never cared if he was a hero. We were only glad that he was alive.” He sighed. “The war didn’t make him an alcoholic, but his actions seemed to justify some bad opinion he already had of himself. No one has ever been able to convince him he is worthy of God’s love. I have tried many times. Have you read the Pauline Epistles?”
He must have interpreted the expression on my face as a no.
“There is a verse in Ephesians: ‘Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.’”
“I haven’t known many people who were capable of that kind of forgiveness,” I said. “I’m having trouble putting away my own bitterness and wrath and anger.”
“You need to have faith.”
“In God or the state police?”
He smiled, as if the distinction were meaningless. “I should look in on Alice. She wanted me to wake her after two hours.” The top of his head brushed the lower branches of the cherry tree, sending more petals floating down onto his shoulders.
“Kurt took off with Kathy’s SUV,” I said. “No one knows where he went.”
“With any luck, the police will find him already in a jail somewhere. At least he would be safe there.”
“Do you mind me asking one more question?”
“Go ahead.”
“Does the name Marta Jepson mean anything to you?”
He closed his eyes, as if to peer back through a lifetime of memories. “There are a number of Jepsons in Aroostook County,” he said. “But I don’t recall a woman with that first name.”
“She died in her home last week in Lyndon. I found an article about her on Kathy’s desk.”
“Oh, yes. I remember reading the story. I was surprised I didn’t know her, since she lived so close to us. I will ask Alice about her if it would help.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I wish Kathy and I had talked more. Maybe there would be fewer mysteries now.”
“My daughter has always been a private person.”
“I’ve known her for three years, and she barely even mentioned her ex-husband.”
“Darren? He was such a kind man. You remind me of him a little.”
“Why did they get divorced?”
“They didn’t,” he said. “Darren was killed in a car accident. His car went off the road during a snowstorm during the first year Kathy became a warden. She always said it was the worst year of her life. I think she was glad to be transferred south. But her mother and I have missed having her in our lives.”
We shook hands again, and I watched him cross the courtyard, an upright and dignified man who was facing the possibility of losing both of his children in a span of days. Erik Eklund had resigned himself to the knowledge that eventually he would receive a phone call telling him that his son was dead in a car wreck or had blown his brains out after a drinking binge. Kathy’s death would be another matter; it would devastate the old man.
Why hadn’t she told me about Darren? At the very least, the revelation helped to explain why she had devoted herself to her career at the expense of a social life. Kathy had never struck me as someone haunted by the past. But what made me think I was the only person who heard ghosts?
The afternoon was fading, and the events of the day had left my nerves feeling overtightened. I wandered back through the hospital building to the parking garage, pausing to watch the anonymous cars passing below on Congress Street. We live alone in a world surrounded by strangers, I thought.
The lights in the parking garage were so dim, they migh
t have been designed to give muggers better shadows in which to hide. I found Kurt Eklund’s Oldsmobile where I had left it near the top floor, undisturbed, because what thief in his right mind would choose such a vehicle to rob? When I opened the door again, I considered making my next stop the nearest car wash: anyplace where I could dispose of the accumulated trash and run a vacuum nozzle across the seats and carpets.
My cell phone rang as I was negotiating the twisting ramps to the ground floor. I pulled it from my pocket and peeked at the screen. There was no name associated with the number, but I recognized it immediately as belonging to Sarah.
29
I pulled over to the side of the street and took a deep breath.
“Hi, Sarah.”
“Mike! I thought I was going to have to leave you another embarrassing voice mail.”
The sound of her pretty voice after all these years made my heartbeat quicken.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you before. I’ve been at the hospital with Kathy.”
“How is she doing? When I read the news, I wanted to throw up.”
“She’s in a coma. She lost a lot of blood when she was shot. The doctors still don’t know if it caused brain damage. I guess they won’t know until she wakes up.”
“Oh, Mike, you must be a wreck.”
“It’s easier when I’m the one in the hospital bed and not someone I care about.”
I didn’t mean to divert the conversation from Kathy, but Sarah interpreted the remark in a way I hadn’t intended. “I was so sorry to hear about your mom. Did you get my card?”
I hadn’t followed up any of the condolences I had received. Social niceties had never been my strong suit, as Sarah knew better than anyone. “Thank you, yes. I haven’t been back down here since she died.”
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Are you in Portland?”
“I just left the hospital. I’m parked on Congress Street.”
“I’m downtown, too!”
“Maddie told me you were living here.”
“Are you free? Do you want to get together?”
She didn’t mean “free” in the sense of having no romantic attachments, but that was where my mind immediately went. I had abandoned my sentimental ideas about Sarah Harris a long time ago, but the thought of seeing her again intrigued me. And it wasn’t as if Stacey cared what I did, text or no text.
