by Paul Doiron
She mouthed two words: “Charley. Help.”
He rushed forward and leapt up the stairs, taking them two at a time, as Ora turned sideways to let him pass. Shades covered the windows. One of the electrical lights in the living room had been knocked over during the fight, but amazingly the bulb continued to glow from the floor. It was the only light in the room.
The man and the woman were both stretched out in unnatural positions, arms crooked, with their legs tangled together. Neither of them moved. Their mingled blood continued to spread slowly across the hardwood, finding the cracks between the boards the way streams find the low places between hills. The husband, shirtless, was crisscrossed with many cuts—some shallow, others deep—but there was no doubt that the kitchen knife sticking from his neck was what had finally killed him.
Just one side of the wife’s face was visible, but Charley could see the mark where her husband’s strong fist had shattered her cheekbone. Her mangled left hand was pressed to her breast and had stained red the silk of her tunic.
He crouched down, extended his arm toward her jawline to feel for a pulse.
At the touch of his fingers Giang’s whole body gave a jerk. She moaned, and her head lolled on its thin neck toward Charley and Ora. Only then did he see the bloody socket where the crazed man had gouged out her eye.
* * *
“So you can understand why she doesn’t welcome visitors,” Charley said. It was fully dark now in my truck. The frogs had started up back at the pond behind us. “The way that poor beautiful woman was mutilated . . .”
“What exactly happened?”
“He attacked her in a rage after the call from Ora. He was raving, out of his head. Would have killed her without a doubt if she hadn’t gotten hold of that knife. By then he’d already bitten off the little finger of her left hand. We found it in the kitchen sink where he must have spit it out. You could see they’d fought through the whole downstairs. He must have gotten his thumb in her eye before he bled out. With that blow to the head, it was no wonder she lost consciousness.
“After she came to, she started screaming. We had to hold her down to keep her from scrabbling around looking for her missing eye. Ora found some rags to bandage her poor hand. And the ambulance arrived soon after I did. She kept telling the paramedics she wanted a rabies shot.”
I listened to the chorus of mink frogs singing from the vernal pool. “Why does she stay there?”
“She has no friends or family in the country. But mostly, I think, it’s because of her face. She was very proud of her beauty, Ora thinks.”
“But how can she live in that house after what happened?”
“She gets checks from the government, and Hussey must have had some life insurance. Her daughter married a lobsterman down in Jonesport and brings her most of what she needs. Ora and I deliver her things now and again. But as far as I know, Giang hasn’t been seen in public in years.”
In other words, she was still a prisoner in that godforsaken place. She’d slain the devil but was trapped in her own private hell.
Just then, the question that had been on my mind while I listened to his story, finally burst out. “So did Hussey have rabies or not?”
“Of course he didn’t,” my friend said.
“So why did he—?”
“Not every disease is carried by bats. I’ve met plenty of vets like him who brought the war back home. Even now they walk around with it pinned to their backs like Peter Pan’s shadow. John Hussey was a violent son of a gun who drank too much and took pills that ate away his brain tissue. Hell, maybe he even came to believe what his wife kept telling him. Maybe he thought he was rabid. Whatever the truth was, it was such a bloody, confused mess the attorney general decided to leave it alone. He never brought a charge against her.”
Charley opened his door, and I opened mine.
“You can’t come with me, son,” he said. “I can’t violate her privacy like that.”
“I’ll stay back in the shadows. She’ll never see me.”
“I gave my word, you understand.”
I nodded. But as he lifted the brown-wrapped package from the truck, I said, “So what’s in there, anyway?”
“New clothes. Ora orders outfits for her from a shop in California. Silk tunics and pants and shoes. Gifts to help her feel less . . .”
And with that he turned his back and began making his way down the dark road, carrying a load far heavier than the contents of the box.
I stood in the cooling night beside the truck, listening to the sounds of the forest. In those days I had trouble controlling my curiosity. I waited a few minutes and then began to walk softly, heel to toe, until I saw a glimmer of light shining through the boughs of the pines.
I pressed my body against a tree trunk and waited until the door finally opened.
I saw Charley emerge. He put on the cap he had taken off for the sake of politeness, and wished Giang Hussey a good night. In the doorway, the figure of a woman held up her hand to wave goodbye.
My breath caught in my throat.
Charley always walked at a good clip. I barely made it back to the truck before he did.
My friend came from the old school where men never wept. But I heard the catch in his throat when he said, “Let’s get out of this cussed bog. Coming here always makes me want to rush home to Ora.”
* * *
“Did Charley happen to mention what the paramedic told him?” Ora Stevens asked me later that night.
“Do you mean the paramedic who arrived at the Hussey’s house that night?”
We were sitting together beside the wood stove, drinking chamomile tea. Ora was in her wheelchair, as always, with a plaid blanket drawn up across her lap. Charley was out walking his hunting dog, Nimrod. His temporary absence from their cabin had given me a chance to ask Ora about her memories of that horrible afternoon.
Nearly thirty years had passed, and yet Ora Stevens was still a beauty. People in Hollywood would have assumed that she’d had plastic surgery, but I have come to agree with the sentiment that as we age, we all get the faces we deserve.
“The man who treated Giang said he’d been to the house six months earlier to bring John Hussey to the hospital. He’d said the homeowner had received a puncture wound he got from tripping on a sharp log in the forest. But it sure looked like a stab wound.”
I leaned forward in my rocking chair. “You think Giang had previously stabbed her husband?”
Ora folded her hands on her lap blanket. “And I bet Charley didn’t mention the book on rabies the police found under Lisa’s bed. Giang must have found it at the second-hand bookshop in Machias. The edges of the pages were folded at the list of symptoms.”
“She was really worried.”
Ora raised an eyebrow. “Maybe.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re too young to remember,” the old woman said. “But it was a different time back then in Down East Maine. There were still police officers who thought domestic violence was just a normal part of marriage. An abused woman—especially one from another country, surrounded by strangers—had no recourse if her husband threatened to kill her. Judges tended to look hard on females who came into their courts claiming self-defense. I’ve never blamed Giang for doing what she had to do. And the punishment she ended up suffering was worse than anything the law could have done to her.”
“Ora, what are you saying?”
“Giang was terrified what would happen to her if she killed him in self-defense. But she was desperate for a way out and thought she’d found it. She didn’t realize that John’s dead body would be tested for rabies.”
I leaned back in my rocking chair until I nearly tipped over. “You think she used the disease as an excuse to kill him.”
Ora smoothed the blanket on her lap. “I don’t think she reckoned on him fighting so hard to the end—what he did to her eye. Her face.”
“Have you shared your suspicions with Charley?”
<
br /> “There’s no point in it. It’s better that he believes what he believes. He’s a wily fox when it comes to catching bad men. But when it comes to women, he doesn’t want to suspect the worst.”
We heard the door on the screen porch creak open and then slam shut on its spring.
“Nimrod has done his duty!” Charley called.
“We’re in here, dear.” Then Ora beckoned me in close to whisper one last thing. “The crime scene investigators found no of skin or bone fragments in John’s mouth to indicate he’d bitten down on a human hand. Those hapless men didn’t even think to wonder why.”
My father had been a trapper and he would often tell stories of finding the gnawed-off paws of raccoons and coyotes in his sprung traps, so desperate had the animals been to escape.
I thought back to what I had seen myself at the Hussey house when I’d been lurking at the edge of the light. I remembered the shrouded figure in the doorway waving goodbye to Charley with her maimed hand. How far would a desperate woman have gone to escape the trap that was her life? Far enough to bite off her own finger?
Just then, Charley entered the room with the dog at his heels. “Did I miss anything?” he asked with an innocent smile.
About the Author
Author photograph courtesy of Mark Fleming
A native of Maine, bestselling author Paul Doiron attended Yale University, where he graduated with a degree in English. The Poacher’s Son, the first book in the Mike Bowditch series, won the Barry award, the Strand award for best first novel, and has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity awards in the same category. He is a Registered Maine Guide specializing in fly fishing and lives on a trout stream in coastal Maine with his wife, Kristen Lindquist.
Visit his website at www.pauldoiron.com.
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Also by Paul Doiron
Stay Hidden (July 2018)
Knife Creek
Widowmaker
The Precipice
The Bone Orchard
Massacre Pond
Bad Little Falls
Trespasser
The Poacher’s Son
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Also by Paul Doiron
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
RABID. Copyright © 2018 by Paul Doiron. All rights reserved. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Danielle Mazzella Di Bosco
Cover photographs: woods © iStock/Matjaz Slanic; paper © Lucky Team Studio/Shutterstock.com
ISBN 978-1-250-31417-8 (ebook)
First Edition: June 2018
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