by Paul Doiron
McQuarrie wore the expression of a man who has just received a call from his oncologist. His broad shoulders seemed bent, and his chin kept sinking against his barrel chest. He had a wad of chewing tobacco in his cheek, which made me think of a chipmunk carrying a nut.
Bard gave me a twitchy, uncertain smile. “Bowditch, you can back me up here.”
I stared hard into his gray eyes; they reminded me at that moment of dirty nickels. But I didn’t say a word.
“Let me just tell you what happened from the beginning,” Bard said to McQuarrie.
The sergeant spat brown saliva onto the ground. “Stop talking, Jeremy.”
“But I’ve got nothing to hide.”
A vein began to pulse in my neck. “Listen to the sergeant, Bard.”
In a hoarser-than-usual voice, McQuarrie said, “You’ll have plenty of chances to tell it to the state cops and the AG’s office. They’re going to want a detailed statement on how this happened. I suggest you bring your lawyer to the interviews. In the meantime, my advice is to keep your trap shut.”
From his back on the gurney, Bard gave us a defiant glare. “They’re going to pay me while I’m suspended, though. I’m still going to get paid, right?”
“You’ll get your money,” I said.
Then I walked off to watch the activity around the camper.
Lieutenant Zanadakis had done a U-turn on his way to Machias and arrived shortly after the Passamaquoddy police. The deputy sheriff who had been directing traffic at Briar’s crash scene had sped over, only to be given the same thankless job here. Wardens Bayley and Sullivan stood talking beside their patrol trucks at the periphery of the action. Every few minutes, another cruiser would arrive. The sheriff, I’d heard, was on her way, along with the district attorney and the medical examiner. The attorney general would be sending one of his people, too.
I kept thinking about my last conversation with Chubby, how he’d called me in a panic, hoping I could persuade Bard to stop harassing him. It was hard for me to have much sympathy for a con man and drug dealer who had entertained half-naked kids in the privacy of his camper. LeClair probably deserved his violent end. The boy didn’t, though. The image of his blood-soaked body was seared into my brain in a way that made me think I’d carry it around forever. The fact that Marky was a Passamaquoddy lent this shooting an awkward political dimension, given the tensions that always existed between the tribe and the state of Maine. I had a feeling that powerful forces would demand a sacrificial animal be thrown onto the pyre. Jeremy Bard was about to get his ass roasted.
“And I thought this was going to be a good day,” Mack said in my ear. “First, Bilodeau gets those ballistic results. Then we arrest KKK without anyone firing a single shot. You’d think at my age I’d know better.”
“Maybe this is just one of those cursed investigations,” I said. “No matter what we do, it all turns to shit.”
“Do you believe in curses, kid?”
“I’m starting to.”
Mack let out a sigh that smelled of Skoal wintergreen. “So what do you think really happened here? Give it to me straight.”
“There are black dents in the door of the Airstream,” I said. “You can’t see them because the door is open, but I noticed the scuff marks before when I approached the camper. I bet the dents match the bottom of Bard’s boot. I think he came here trying to provoke Chub into doing something crazy. You heard the way Rivard laid into him this morning. Bard wanted to be the hero. He caught Chubby fondling a half-naked kid and spooked LeClair into opening fire. We’ll probably never know how it unfolded.”
“You don’t expect him to tell the truth?”
“Do you?”
I’d always had a cynical streak in me. It was just one of the emotional scars my father had inflicted on my character during my childhood. But my frequent bouts of pessimism had always been counterbalanced by a naive idealism: a belief that justice could be brought to the affairs of mankind, not in every case, but often enough to be worth the trouble. A sense of righteousness had led me to join the Warden Service. Now it seemed as if every sentence I uttered came barbed with sarcasm. And I didn’t like what I heard.
Once again, the state police would need to get a formal statement from me: the second in less than twenty-four hours. The deaths of Chubby LeClair and Marky Parker had pushed Briar out of my thoughts for a short while, but when I closed my eyes, I found myself returned instantly to the bend in the road where her car had gone airborne. Her broken body was another image I realized I would never exorcise from my haunted head.
* * *
The sky was growing dark and the trees had taken on silhouettes that reminded me of deformed men by the time Zanadakis finally gave me permission to leave. I’d already told my story three times: once to the detective, once to an assistant attorney general, and once to Sheriff Rhine. I’d probably need to tell the tale a fourth time when the Warden Service conducted its own internal affairs investigation into Jeremy Bard’s actions on this cold day in October.
On the drive home, I checked my messages and found a text from my former sergeant, Kathy Frost: “I heard the news today. Oh boy.”
I wasn’t sure what news she meant: Briar’s death, Karl Khristian’s arrest, or the shootings in Plantation No. 21. Probably all of the above. I missed Kathy’s wicked sense of humor. Her jokes had brought me back from many dark places in my rookie years, and it was probably no coincidence that my misgivings about the Warden Service had escalated after I’d been transferred from her squad. That was one of the reasons I’d been avoiding her. I didn’t want reminders of a time when I’d worked for supervisors I liked and respected. Better not to think about those days.
There was nothing at all on the phone from my stepfather—no texts, no e-mails, no voice mail. I needed to see my mom. I decided I would try Neil again after I’d microwaved a couple of burritos back at the hacienda.
Whatever plans I was making flew away like so many scared birds when I pulled up to my cabin and my headlights showed Billy Cronk sitting on my porch steps. He was wearing his camouflage hunting jacket, blue jeans, and heavy boots, and his golden hair was loose about his shoulders. He leaned forward, with his shoulders hunched, resting his forearms on his knees in a contemplative pose. On the pine needles at his feet, five pint-size Budweiser cans lay scattered.
I hadn’t left the porch light on, so when I shut off the truck, he disappeared back into the shadows. I reached for the SureFire I wore on my belt and shined it at his tanned face.
“What the hell, Billy?”
He squinted into the light. “I saved one for you.” He raised the last beer in the six-pack as if it were a peace offering.
“Thanks but no thanks. What are you doing here?”
“I came to apologize for being a turd the other day.”
I glanced around my dooryard, realizing for the first time that the only other vehicle present besides my patrol truck was the Bronco. “Wait a minute. Where’s your pickup?”
“I walked here.”
“You live seven miles away!”
“Needed to think about a few things.”
I snapped off the light, plunging us both into darkness. “But you decided to stop for beers?”
“Figured you could use a few pops. But I’ve been waiting here awhile. Expected you to be home sooner.” He spoke in his usual decibel range, without slurring his words. I’d seen Billy drink prodigious quantities of alcohol on occasion, but he never displayed a hint of intoxication. When I didn’t accept the can from him, he popped the top and took a sip. “I heard about Briar.”
I reached down to collect the five empty cans. I arranged them in a row along the edge of the porch. “What did you hear?”
“She ran her sports car into a tree. Folks say someone was chasing her.”
I think he expected me to sit down next to him, but I remained on my feet. “Folks are right.”
“That fucking sucks.”
“Yes, it does.”
I gave up and sat down beside him on the plank steps. “Is that why you decided to get wasted tonight?”
“It takes more than a few beers for that to happen,” he said. “It’s a shame about Briar. She was a crazy girl. She came on to me the first night we met at the lodge, but I didn’t do nothing, on account of Aimee. After that, she was kind of bitchy, to tell the truth. She bossed me around worse than her mom. I don’t think she was used to men telling her to keep her pants on.” He took a long drink of beer. “Do you know who it was who chased her?”
“Bilodeau thinks it was your buddy Karl Khristian.”
“Yeah, I heard you guys arrested him.”
I was always amazed at how quickly news traveled in the Maine woods. People might live miles apart, but when a barn went up in flames or a car skidded off the road, everyone seemed to know about it within a matter of minutes.
I rubbed my bare hands together against the cold. “It looks like your hunch about KKK was right.”
“Looks like it,” he said. “So I guess that means there’s no more reward.”
The thought of Betty Morse’s twenty thousand dollars hadn’t crossed my mind since my last conversation with Billy, but it was clear that my friend had been thinking of little else.
“There’s ballistic evidence linking Khristian to the shooting at Morse’s house, but I don’t think Bilodeau has anything yet linking him to those moose. Technically, I suppose that means there’s still a reward.”
He finished the beer and crushed the can in his big hand. Then he flung it away into the darkness.
I jumped after it. The half-frozen leaves crackled beneath my feet. “Come on, Billy, this is my yard.”
“Oh fuck,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mike. I’m not thinking straight these days. My head feels like it’s full of spiders.”
I held on to the crushed can. “When I feel that way, it usually means I have a guilty conscience.”
He rose slowly to his feet and towered over me. In the moonlight, his face had the hardness of welded metal. “What do you mean?”
I wasn’t sure what I meant, other than that my friend was continuing to behave in odd ways, and I wanted to let him know that I’d taken notice. “If you walked here, you probably didn’t hear the news that Chubby LeClair killed himself.”
His response was to grunt. “Fucking child molester.”
I waited for him to say more. When he didn’t, I continued. “There was a Passamaquoddy kid named Marky Parker with him in his camper. The boy is dead, too.”
“Did Chub kill him?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “There was a shoot-out at the camper, and the boy was injured.”
“What kind of shoot-out?”
“Jeremy Bard says Chubby fired at him from the Airstream. The boy was probably caught in the cross fire.”
“Bard?” Billy gathered his pale hair in one big fist and twisted it into a knot. “Now that’s interesting.”
“What do you mean?”
He smiled at me; I could actually see his teeth shining in the moonlight. “Did anyone ever tell you that you’re a suspicious motherfucker?”
I leaned forward, trying to catch his eyes. “What do you know, Billy?”
He turned his shoulder and took a step away from me. “I know it’s time for me to go home to my wife and family.”
“Let me give you a ride,” I said.
“No thanks. I can find my way.”
“It’s seven miles,” I couldn’t help repeating.
“Yeah, but it’s a beautiful night.”
“I’m going to call Aimee and tell her where you are.” My tone sounded more threatening than I’d intended.
He paused at the edge of the clearing. I could barely make out his looming shape in the blackness beneath the evergreens. “If you do, you’ll only worry her. She’s used to me going off like this when there’s something on my mind. She calls them my ‘walkabouts.’ Says it’s an Australian word for walking and thinking. I’m sorry I drank the last beer, Mike.”
And with that, Billy Cronk melted as quietly as a deer into the forest.
36
Whoever had built my cabin had used logs from the same spruce and fir trees that stood as sentinels around it. Sometimes I fancied that I lived in a house of bones. Tonight was one of those occasions.
Cluster flies buzzed along the dusty sills. I would open the window to let one swarm out and then discover that another swarm had appeared on the inside of the glass the next morning. I had no clue where the big gray insects came from or how they got in, but their incessant buzzing was like static inside my brain.
I dumped the empty beer cans into a milk crate I used for recycling and sat down at the table with a glass of milk. Of all the mysteries in my life at the moment, Billy Cronk had to be the most frustrating. I’d convinced myself that the hardened face he showed the world was just a mask he’d forged during tours of duty in distant war zones. I would watch him play with his ragamuffin kids or stare adoringly at his sweet wife, and I would decide that he really was a kind and gentle man, someone with whom I could be friends. Then he would look at me with those frost-colored eyes, and I would have a vision of him manning an observation post in Afghanistan, firing M240 machine-gun rounds into the bodies of advancing Taliban fighters, and I would begin to distrust my instincts.
Time after time in my life, I’d come to the conclusion that human beings are essentially unknowable. I’d been betrayed enough that I should have stopped trying to figure other people out and accept them for the enigmas they were. And yet, some stubborn, foolish part of me refused to go through life that way. I wanted to believe in Billy. More than that, I needed to.
After I’d eaten my usual unhealthy dinner—burritos that went mushy in the microwave and were made palatable only with a slathering of Tabasco—I checked in on my mother’s progress.
“Hello, Michael,” my stepfather said when I reached him on his cell.
“Hey, Neil,” I said. “I just wanted to check in and see how she was doing.”
“Fine, fine.” He sounded distracted. “She’s sleeping again.”
Despite the autumnal darkness, it was still pretty early. My mom seemed to be sleeping a great deal, but for all I knew, fatigue was a side effect of the chemotherapy. I figured having your bloodstream filled with tumor-killing chemicals must be exhausting.
“Is everything all right down there?” I asked.
“Well, this is new territory for the both of us. We haven’t been sure what to expect and—I’m actually waiting to speak with the oncologist now.”
He said this in an offhand way, but the muscles in my stomach tightened. “What’s wrong?”
“Just trying to sort out the side effects.”
“What side effects?”
“She has a bit of a temperature, but nothing alarming. The doctor told us that mild fever was to be expected.” He paused, as if something had caught his attention. “I have another call, and it may be the oncologist. Can I call you right back?”
“Sure,” I said. “Absolutely.”
I sat at the table for half an hour, waiting for my cell to ring again, but it never did. After a while, I got up and cleaned my greasy dish in the sink and lay down on the bed in my full uniform. I fell asleep in minutes.
* * *
When I awoke, the room seemed overly bright. Sunlight was poking in through the south-facing window of the cabin, but not hard enough to account for the intense illumination before me. It took a moment to realize I’d left the overhead lights blazing. And a new swarm of cluster flies was bouncing off the windowpanes.
I shaved in the shower and found the last clean undershirt in my bureau. One of these days, I’d need to drive into Machias with my Bronco loaded with bags of laundry. I could only get by for so long hand-washing underwear and T-shirts in the sink and hanging them on the line I’d strung between the pines. The owner of the Wash-O-Mat didn’t like cops. He didn’t have the guts to bar me from his establishment, but
he treated my every visit as if it were an incitement, which to some degree it was. Living in a small community, you didn’t have the luxury of avoiding your enemies.
Or your friends.
Unless McQuarrie had need of me this morning—and there were no messages from him saying that he did—I decided to make my first stop of the day Billy Cronk’s house. I wanted to see whether he’d ever returned from his “walkabout.” Our conversation had left me unsettled, and while I could have checked in with him over the phone, I preferred to see his expression when I asked him again what information he was hiding from me.
“He’s come and gone,” said Aimee Cronk. She stood in the doorway of her home with the youngest of their straw-haired children tucked under her arm. The baby was red-faced from bawling, but his mother paid the noise no attention.
A chill wind was blowing at my back. There had been a coating of hoarfrost on my truck thick enough that I’d needed to scrape the windshield before setting out. “Gone where?”
With her free hand, she readjusted the scrunchie holding her ginger-red hair in place. “He told me this is the day he finds a job again.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“Skillen’s.”
“The mill just laid off a bunch of guys. Why would Billy think they were hiring?”
“Why does he think any of the things he thinks?” She phrased the sentence less like a question with an answer and more like a declaration of her husband’s essential naïveté.
Once again, I found myself envying Billy. No matter how often he fell ass-first into trouble, he still had a loyal wife at home who could see into his heart as if it were sculpted out of glass. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to be known like that by another person.
“I heard about that Morse girl,” Aimee said. “Billy said you liked her. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re going to go looking for him today, ain’t you?”
This unschooled woman’s ability to make deductions was far better than that of half the law officers I knew.
“I thought I might.”
