by Paul Doiron
“Where did you find this piece of paper?” Soctomah sounded angry.
“In the wastebasket under Kathy’s desk.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about it sooner?” The forensic techs who had searched the house had failed to identify the paper in the trash as potential evidence and that was why the lieutenant was upset. I couldn’t remember what I’d done with the clipping. Had I left it on Kathy’s desk?
“I thought you knew about it. It doesn’t seem like you’re making much progress with the investigation.”
“With all due respect, you don’t have a clue what we’re doing.”
“I haven’t heard that you’ve identified any suspects.”
“You need to trust that we’re going to find the son of a bitch.”
That was easy for him to say. “What are you going to do with Kathy’s vehicle?”
“We’ll have it towed back to her house. If we find any sign of Eklund, we’ll let you know.”
After he’d hung up, I took a look in Kathy’s office. The story about Martha Jepson wasn’t there. I dug out the wastebasket and found only that weird doodle. I couldn’t make heads or tails out of the sketch. It looked like a toddler’s drawing of stick men.
I went downstairs to the basement and stood over the dryer, feeling its heat rising against my bare chest, until my clothes were done. Then I got dressed and packed the extra clothes in my duffel.
Before I left the house, I paused for a few minutes at Kathy’s locked gun safe, trying to imagine what the combination might be. The numbers wouldn’t be simple to guess, and she was too crafty to leave a slip of paper lying around. I’d gotten used to carrying a firearm again over the past few days and felt naked without one.
Soctomah had said that I needed to trust him to find the shooter.
The problem was, I didn’t.
* * *
In the dooryard, I paused to inspect my Bronco. I’d been telling myself that the damage might be fixable, but now I had to acknowledge the truth. It wouldn’t take my insurance agent more than ten seconds to declare the truck to be a total loss. As best I could recall, my auto coverage didn’t include a rider covering damage done by a shotgun-wielding assassin.
I rooted around the back of the Bronco for anything I might need on my trip: my hiker’s tent, portable stove, butane container, wilderness first-aid kit, and a hatchet that I’d never thought of using for self-defense.
I stopped for gas at the first station I came to. I would need a full tank and a refill to go where I planned on going. It felt strange to be headed north again—but in a different direction from Grand Lake Stream. Ahead of me lay a series of millpond villages and dairy farms, the pastoral heart of Maine. Eventually, the winding country road would intersect with I-95, south of Bangor, and then it would be a straight shot into the deep woods. The sun doesn’t set in May until after eight P.M., but I had miles to go, and I would need every minute of daylight once I reached the rest area outside Medway.
I’d been trying in vain to track down Kurt Eklund. Now I had a place to start looking.
Soctomah had asked if I considered Kathy’s brother to be a suicide risk. The honest answer was that I didn’t know, but it seemed unlikely to me that he would have killed himself quietly. Eklund wasn’t a wounded animal that would slink into a hole to die. He was too melodramatic for such a quiet end. Blow his head off in a public place? Yes. Throw himself off a bridge in front of a speeding truck? Sure. Wander off into the woods to slit his wrists? I didn’t think so.
If he had left the Xterra with the keys in the ignition and gas in the tank, he had done so for a reason. Given the twisted way his brain worked, the reason might not make any sense on the surface. But I had confidence I could decode whatever clues he might have left behind.
The larger question was where he had been going and why.
My best ideas usually found me when I wasn’t looking for them, so I decided to focus on my driving and the ever-changing scenery outside my window. Maine combines aspects of all the New England states: Portland’s affluent suburbs were Connecticut in miniature; the sand beaches of the southern coast were dead ringers for the Rhode Island seashore. The villages clustered along the swift-flowing rivers of central Maine—with their Civil War monuments dedicated to the Union dead—were right out of Norman Rockwell’s paintings of western Massachusetts. The open fields where enormous flocks of crows gathered at dusk reminded me of Vermont’s green dairy farms. And the massif around Katahdin, which I finally glimpsed after hours on the road, was as snowy as the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
Katahdin came into view when I was still miles to the south on Interstate 95, rising higher and higher as I approached, until the highway doglegged to the east and I lost sight of it for a while. I passed the exit to the Golden Road and Baxter State Park and continued north until a blue sign appeared ahead: SCENIC VIEW OF MT. KATAHDIN. OPEN MAY–OCT. NO FACILITIES. I took a right and climbed a hillside to the lot.
The Wabanaki Indians, who had been the inhabitants of this land when the first Europeans bumped their boats against the shore, believed a capricious and vengeful deity lived on the peak of Mount Katahdin. His name was Pamola, and he had the body of a man, the horns of a moose, and the beak and wings of an eagle. Pamola was a violent thunder god who forbade humans from climbing his mountain. He was known to snatch away anyone who dared and imprison them in a place called Alomkik: a cold and windswept hell only slightly more hospitable than Maine’s contemporary Supermax.
The rest area was accessible only via the northbound lane of I-95. So Kurt had been heading north when he stopped here. But there was still gas in the tank.
There were several cars and trucks parked at the turnout, their noses facing to the west. The view, across an old rail fence, of Salmon Lake in the foreground and then the multiple jagged summits of Katahdin in the distance was worth stopping for. No police cruisers were to be seen. The cops had come and gone.
As promised, the state police had towed away Kathy’s Nissan. It was en route back to her house after a short detour to the forensics garage at the state police headquarters in Augusta. The circumstances of the Xterra’s abandonment were such that Soctomah, even if he wasn’t treating Kurt Eklund as a missing person in the legal sense of the word, would be curious enough to want his technicians to have a look inside the vehicle.
I climbed out of the Cutlass and felt a stiffness in my limbs that was an aftereffect of my morning swim at the quarry. The wind was blowing out of the southwest, carrying warm air across the evergreen forests and up from the electric blue waters of the Salmon River watershed. I took a deep breath and fancied I could actually smell the fish in the lake. After my days in the city, it felt good to be back in the North Woods again.
“Excuse me, mister,” said a woman behind me.
I turned around and saw a tattooed couple in their twenties.
“Can you take our picture?”
She offered me a smartphone the size of a paperback novel.
“Sure.”
The couple sat atop the rail fence with the mountain behind them. I took their picture with Mount Katahdin gleaming over their shoulders. The woman thanked me. Her boyfriend lit a cigarette and slouched back toward his Camaro.
“You didn’t see any police cars here when you arrived?” I asked the young woman.
“Why? Are you on the run?” she asked.
After they had left, I wandered around the parking lot, looking for something, although I wasn’t sure what. I knelt in the grass and poked a stick in the fine dust under the picnic tables, hoping to turn up the filter end of one of Kurt’s Swisher Sweets. A mourning cloak butterfly fluttered up from a patch of sunshine where it had been basking. I made loops through the adjacent trees, finding many paths that dead-ended behind walls of evergreens: places where men had anonymous sexual encounters with each other. I found nothing to indicate that Kurt Eklund had ever been at this place.
Eventually, I found myself back behind
the steering wheel of the Cutlass, staring at Katahdin’s several peaks. From this vantage, none of the surrounding mountains could be seen. I thought of one of my favorite books from childhood, The Hobbit, and the Lonely Mountain, where lived the dragon Smaug.
As a boy enchanted with fantasy novels, I had dreamed of a life full of adventure. As a man, I had learned that placing yourself constantly in life-and-death situations was a mug’s game. Sooner or later, you were going to lose your bet.
Sitting in Kurt’s dirty car, gazing at that beautiful vista, I felt the chilling conviction that its owner had lost everything a man had to lose.
35
The farther north you go in Maine, the more disoriented you become. Start with the distances. Aroostook County, which juts into New Brunswick and Quebec, is the largest county east of the Mississippi—about the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. Glance at a map and the drive to Canada seems manageable, as if you could knock if off in no time—until you find yourself on the road for more hours than you ever dreamed.
Then there is the geographic and cultural dislocation. People who have never been to northern Maine think that everything just becomes wilder and wilder once you cross the forty-sixth parallel. They enter the big woods outside Bangor, spend hours traveling through seemingly endless forests of spruce and fir, and are stunned when the road finally spits them out into farm fields that are nearly as spacious as those of the Great Plains. Soon the unprepared travelers are cruising through tidy towns lined up with geometrical precision along Route 1: bustling communities that defy anyone’s idea of a remote borderland. Americans have trouble processing the idea that Canada exists at all, let alone that most of its population centers should be pressed up against its southern border (which just so happens to be our northern border). And so the concept that there should be split-level houses and wide lawns—those defining characteristics of suburbia—in a place as far from “civilization” as northernmost Maine seems unimaginable.
I’d made the trip on many occasions, and even I found the road stretching before me like a piece of rubber being pulled taut beneath my wheels. Miles were clicking on the odometer, but I seemed to be making no progress. I found myself being worn down by the never-ending journey. I’d hoped to reach New Sweden before dark, but more and more of the cars passing me in the opposite direction had their headlights on. I stopped for coffee at a truck stop in Houlton and drank three cups without feeling any effect on my central nervous system. I ordered a BLT, hoping that food might do the trick, but if anything, it just made me sleepier.
Route 1 took me through Presque Isle, the largest town in the county, with close to ten thousand inhabitants. Anywhere else, it might have been considered a hamlet, but there was a feeling of life on the streets that came from the steady flow of traffic between two (mostly) friendly nations. There were as many cars and trucks with New Brunswick plates as Maine tags. Leaving town, an eighteen-wheeler passed me with the McCain’s Potatoes logo splashed on the side. Jimmy Gammon’s and Angelo Donato’s buddy lived nearby: Ethan Smith, the man the MP’s Pashtun interpreter nicknamed “Monster.” He owned a potato farm somewhere in these rolling fields.
I found a tractor-supply company just as it was closing up shop for the day. The lot was jam-packed with brightly painted machines; backhoes, tillers, bulldozers, and garden-variety farm tractors like giant versions of the ones I’d played with as a kid. A bell sounded as I came through the door, and a middle-aged man wearing a short-sleeve dress shirt and green Dickies sought me out. He had a flat-top hair cut, a name tag with TRAVIS on it, and the same excellent posture as Erik Eklund.
He gave me a big smile, as if I was an old friend he hadn’t seen in years. “Can I help you?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m trying to find someone who lives near here, but I don’t have his address. He’s a potato farmer named Ethan Smith.”
If I had asked that question most other places, even in Maine, I would have received a scowl, but Travis, the tractor salesman, treated it as an innocent inquiry and not suspicious in the least. “Oh, sure. I know Ethan. He lives out on the Alder Brook Road, outside Mapleton. Are you a friend of his?”
The lie came easily. “Yes.”
“From the National Guard, I bet.”
“How did you know?”
“I’m ex–Air Force myself. Came up here with the wife to work at Loring and liked Limestone so much, we decided to stay and raise a family. If you want to hang on a minute, I’ll get you directions.”
People in Aroostook County were so damned nice. I felt guilty for misleading such a helpful man. He disappeared for a few minutes, leaving me to wander around the brightly lighted showroom. I hadn’t planned on showing up unannounced at Smith’s doorstep, but I was bothered by Destiny’s inability to say for certain whether he was the Neanderthal who had shown up at the diner, asking about Kathy.
Travis returned, still smiling, holding a wireless phone. He handed it to me. “I decided it would just be easier if you spoke with Ethan directly and he told you how to get there.”
I had no choice but to accept the phone. “Thanks.”
I held the speaker to my ear. There was no dial tone. Someone was already on the line.
“Hello?”
“Who is this?” The man sounded like a bullmastiff that had been taught human speech.
“Is this Ethan Smith?”
“Who is this?”
I turned my back on Travis and took a few steps toward the nearest display of rototillers. “A friend of Jimmy Gammon.”
“I know who you are. Donato told me about you. What the hell are you doing in Presque Isle?”
“Heading north.”
“I think you mean south. You’re turning around and getting the hell out of here before I come kick your ass.”
“I’m just looking to have a conversation.”
“That’s the last thing you want, asshole. Take my word for it.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve received a call from a guy named Kurt Eklund recently?”
There was a click, and he was gone.
When I turned around, the tractor salesman was scowling. Travis was a polite and friendly fellow, but not above eavesdropping. “We’re closing up here, and I think you should go.”
I handed him back his phone and thanked him for his assistance, but he didn’t say another word as he locked the door behind my back.
* * *
Except for a few wisps of clouds, the night sky above New Sweden was almost completely clear. Jupiter hung above the treetops to the northwest, bright white and unblinking. The planet seemed like a hopeful beacon until it slowly began to descend and then disappeared from view below the horizon.
Deer had come out to the edges of the fields to nibble the first green shoots poking up through the soil. Their eyes were luminescent in my headlights, and they were very shy. Kathy had told me that when she was a rookie warden in the county, her district had been “Night Hunter Central.” If that was still true, the local deer had a right to be jumpy after dark.
I passed a cheery blue-and-yellow sign by the side of the road. It lit up in the glow of my high beams:
It was illustrated with the U.S. and Swedish flags. I truly felt like I had crossed into a foreign land.
I didn’t need a helpful tractor salesman to find the Eklund place. As I neared the village of New Sweden, I passed a mailbox with that name on the side. There were probably more than a few Eklunds in town, but this house was located across from the volunteer fire department’s building, and Kathy had told me her father had been the fire chief for many years.
The house was white, with clapboard siding, blue shutters and trim, and a blue metal roof that looked like a recent addition. In a part of the world that averages nine or ten feet of snow a winter, it pays to have a roof that snow and ice can slide off. The windows were dark, with the shades pulled, and there were no vehicles in the driveway. I parked along the road and reached for the small flashligh
t I’d packed in my duffel.
It wouldn’t have surprised me if the Eklunds’ neighbors were peeking through their curtains, trying to decide whether to call the police. People in these villages tended to watch out for one another’s properties, and everyone in New Sweden would have known that the Eklunds were in Portland, at the hospital bedside of their beloved Katarina. Even if they recognized Kurt’s Oldsmobile, they probably knew better than to trust him.
I pulled on the navy blue windbreaker Soctomah had loaned me. I wondered how I would explain to a responding officer why I was roaming around a house that didn’t belong to me, wearing a jacket with POLICE on the back. I decided I would deal with that problem if and when it presented itself. No one answered the bell, but that didn’t mean anything. For all I knew, Kurt was passed out inside, just as I had found him at Kathy’s house. The door was locked, and there was no key under the Valkommen mat. I stepped quickly around the side of the building.
I felt a pang of disappointment when I found the back door intact. I’d had the notion that Kurt might have punched out a pane of glass to let himself in. Despite the evidence of my own eyes, I was growing more and more certain that he had visited the house. I almost left without doing the obvious thing and trying the doorknob. To my surprise, it turned. Someone had left the house unlocked.
Instead of switching on the lights, I pushed the button on my SureFire and moved the beam around the room. The Eklunds’ house had been laid out in the same plan as their daughter’s: The back door admitted you to a mudroom, which opened onto the kitchen. The first thing I noticed was the subtropical warmth. The oil furnace was laboring away in the basement. I didn’t imagine for a second that Erik and Alice Eklund would have left their house with the thermostat cranked.
There was also an odor in the air that didn’t belong. It was smoky and cloying—the smell I’d come to associate with the Cutlass: Swisher Sweets cigarillos. I switched on the overhead kitchen lights.
