The Bone Orchard: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (16 page)

“He says he lives here,” I said.

“Not according to the DMV. They have his address as New Sweden.”

“We could ask him about it, but he happens to be drunk off his ass.”

“If he lives here, where was he when his sister was shot?”

“Off on a bender.” I gestured at the floor. “When he got home, he tore through the police tape and trampled through her blood on the way to find the liquor.”

Morrison folded his arms and shook his head at the sadness of it all. “So what’s the plan, then? I could take him back to the jail until he sobers up. Call it a B and E for now.”

“She might have given him permission to stay here,” I said. “I already feel bad about hitting him with the news about Kathy.”

“The last thing we need is for him to get behind the wheel tonight.”

That was true enough and a real possibility. “I can stay with him.”

Morrison smiled. “Baby-sitting duty, huh?”

“I think Kathy would want me to look after him.”

“Anything you want me to do?”

“If you happen to swing past the Square Deal, I left a duffel bag in room six.” I gave him the key, reached into my back pocket for my scrawny wallet, and pulled out three twenty-dollar bills, leaving me with one. “Give this to Dot while you’re at it. Tell her she can keep the change.”

“You know Dot’s not going to take your money.”

“Give it to her just the same.”

I followed Morrison outside and found Deb Davies standing in the wet weeds beside the cruiser. She’d opened an umbrella against the drizzle. It was child-size, with pink flowers and cats and the words
Hello Kitty
written all over it. Something about the sight of her with that little girl’s umbrella made me laugh in spite of myself.

I explained to her about Kathy’s brother and his condition. I told her that I intended to stay with him until he sobered up.

“Maybe I should talk with him.” Her face was blue from the pulsing pursuit lights.

“He’s pretty drunk.”

“It’s not the first time I’ve counseled someone who is intoxicated.”

I reached into my pocket for the revolver. “Before I forget…”

“If you’re going to stay here tonight, I’d prefer you keep it.”

I shrugged and put the gun back in the jacket. We turned and headed together for the door.

“You know I could arrest you for impersonating a police officer,” Skip Morrison said when he saw the logo on the back of the windbreaker. When he smiled, he showed a set of teeth that would have made a horse feel inadequate.

“Someone could do the same to you,” I said.

“Stop the presses! Mike Bowditch told an actual joke. You really have changed, dude. I’ll be back with your bag.”

Inside the house, Davies paused in the entryway, staring at the trail of tacky blood and the smeared pattern where Kathy’s body had been before the paramedics spirited her away. The sight seemed to send a shiver through her body. She gripped the handrail and physically pulled herself up the first riser the way you might use a sapling to help climb a hill. I followed her up the stairs.

Kurt Eklund was still sitting on the bed, where I had left him, leaning back on his outstretched arms to keep himself upright. His head was tilted back and his good eye was squeezed shut. In this posture, he resembled a sunbather taking in the rays.

“Kurt? I’m Reverend Davies. I’m a chaplain with the Warden Service.”

He opened his good eye. It was still pink and painful-looking. “Reverend?” His tone was suspicious.

Davies plucked at her spiky gray hair to lift it up. The drizzle had flattened her do. “Your sister has been badly wounded. Someone shot her last night. She’s in very serious condition at Maine Medical Center, but the doctors have managed to stabilize her.”

“Is she going to die?”

“She is out of surgery. Your parents are with her now.”

How had I missed seeing the Eklunds at the hospital? I had always wanted to meet them. Kathy’s parents were Swedes from the northernmost part of Maine: a flat farmland that had been colonized by Scandinavians who considered the climate to be balmy compared to the Nordic wastes from which they’d emigrated. Her father had been a minister before he retired.

Kurt Eklund pushed himself up suddenly from the bed, using his long, strong arms to give himself some leverage. He wobbled on his knees and reached out for the bureau. He nearly fell on his face.

“I’m gonna go see her,” he said.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said.

He staggered forward, his shoulders bent like Methuselah’s. “I’m gonna go see her.”

“You need a good night’s sleep first, Kurt,” said Davies. “In the morning, I can go with you if you’d like.”

She touched his arm, but he shook it off.

“I’m fine! Just let me go.”

I stepped between Kurt Eklund and the door and prepared to tackle him onto the bed if necessary.

“I can’t do that, Kurt,” I said.

He raised his head, and I saw tears streaming down his discolored cheeks, one from his open eye, the other leaking out from under the concave patch. “Where’s Pluto?”

“He was shot, too,” I said.

He tried to sniff up the liquid that was running from his nose. “Can I see him?”

As always, Deb Davies was more compassionate than I was. “The state police are investigating the shooting. They’ve taken Pluto’s body to help find evidence to catch the person who did this. When they’re done, you will have a chance to say good-bye to him.”

Eklund reached his rough hand out and set it on my shoulder. The sudden weight caught me by surprise. There was no aggression in the motion, only a physical need for support. I took hold of his arm to lighten the load. His biceps and triceps reminded me of a twisted ship’s rope.

“I’m sorry I’m such a mess,” he said.

How many times has he said those words to his sister? I wondered.

“I’m so, so, so sorry.” The tears were coming quickly now, and his lips were trembling.

“Let’s get you into bed,” Deb Davies said.

I wouldn’t have known what to do without the chaplain.

20

After Kurt had fallen back to sleep, Deb Davies and I went downstairs to confer. Over the years, Kathy had transformed the formal sitting room into what she called her “woman cave.” She had removed the rocking chairs and love seats and replaced them with a leather recliner, sectional couch, and wide-screen TV, on which she watched nothing but sports. She’d had me over for a Patriots game once, but she’d gotten so apoplectic, screaming at the television after every dropped pass and missed route, that I’d never dared return.

“You don’t have to stay,” I told Deb Davies.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ll grab my sleeping bag from the Bronco and camp out on the couch until he wakes up.” There wasn’t much else I could do for Kathy at the moment.

“You know,” she said, “there’s a good chance he won’t remember anything that happened tonight. His blood-alcohol level is over the moon. You might have to break the news to him all over again,” she said.

“Yippee.”

“What if he wakes up with withdrawal symptoms?” she asked.

“You mean like the DT’s?”

“If he’s been on a bender, he could have a seizure while he’s detoxing.”

“I’ll just have to watch over him.”

Davies removed her trendy blue glasses, massaged her eyes, and then rearranged herself. “I wonder where he was all this time.”

“I doubt he even knows.” I shifted positions and felt the revolver in the jacket pocket pressing against the arm of the sofa. “The state police will want to interview him.”

“That’s assuming he remembers anything.”

“You sure you don’t want your gun back?”

“Give it to me the next time you see me.”

“If he sobers up, I was thinking of driving him to Maine Med,” I said. “Unless you think that’s a bad idea.”

“I guess it depends on what he looks like in the morning. Watch him closely. He could have a seizure if he goes through alcohol withdrawal. The DT’s can be fatal.”

I showed Deb Davies to the door and then closed and locked it behind her. My recent experience as a caretaker prompted me to do a circuit of the house to check that all the windows and doors were securely fastened. I wondered what was happening back at Moosehorn Lodge now that it was essentially unguarded. The video cameras would have already recorded my extended, unexplained absence. My gig watching over Betty Morse’s estate was the least of my concerns at the moment.

On my way through the kitchen, I passed the open pantry and noticed Kathy’s shelf of liquor bottles. Her taste in booze always struck me as surprisingly girlie. She liked chocolate liqueurs, honey-sweet bourbons, cordials infused with melon and other artificial fruit flavors. I grabbed a bottle of rum and poured a splash into a coffee mug. It tasted like suntan lotion.

It said something about the frazzled state of my nerves that I took both the mug and the bottle back with me to the living room. I’d visited Kathy on a number of occasions, but I’d never gotten the full tour of the house.

She’d thrown exactly one get-together for her district wardens during my time under her command. We’d lighted a bonfire and dragged up lawn chairs and sawn-off stumps to sit on, and everyone passed around a gallon of Absolut in honor of the Swedish Midsommar. Kathy had always impressed me as a walking contradiction: a sociable hermit. She seemed extroverted and was capable of making small talk easily enough. But she seemed to consider no one in the Warden Service to be a close confidant, not even me. The Midsommar party was the only she’d ever held here.

I tried to respect her privacy now. I didn’t open any drawers or cabinets. My prurient curiosity had certain limits.

I half hoped to come across a picture of her first and only husband, Darren Frost, about whom I knew next to nothing, other than they’d split up ages ago. I didn’t know why they’d divorced or where he lived now or what he did for work. Kathy’s mysterious ex-husband had come to stand for everything I didn’t know about my friend. There were no photographs of him on any of the walls or shelves, of course. Who keeps pictures of their exes?

I found other photos, though: Kathy playing high school and college basketball; Kathy graduating from the University of Maine, with her hale-looking blond parents in attendance; Kathy in her warden’s uniform, receiving an award; many pictures of Pluto. But none of Darren Frost.

The alcohol began dissolving the adrenaline in my bloodstream, and I found myself growing tired. Rather than waiting for the local news to come on television, I sat down at the desk in Kathy’s study, planning to turn on her computer. The machine was gone, of course. Lieutenant Soctomah had taken the computer after I’d told him she’d received death threats. The computer forensics team would need to trace every e-mail she’d received. All that remained were dusty rectangles on the desk.

Her office was a mess. There were not one but three mugs of unfinished coffee, one with a grayish scrim floating on the surface. A leaning tower of hunting and fishing magazines was one good nudge from sliding onto the floor. Soctomah had left piles of paperwork untouched, concluding that Kathy’s various personnel reports and duty logs were not the best starting points for his investigation. The vengeful veteran theory still seemed to offer the most promise.

I wondered, though. The short interval between the Gammon shooting and the sniper attack suggested the two incidents were linked, but every warden I knew had enemies, and what better time to settle an old grudge then when the detectives might be misdirected? Had anyone interviewed Danielle Tate about whether Kathy had had a dustup with one of the local dirtbags recently?

I leaned back in the squeaky desk chair and extended my feet under the desk. My toe caught a wastepaper basket that was hidden under there, overturning its contents onto the hardwood floor. I bumped my head on the sliding drawer while picking up the wadded pieces of paper.

Most of it was junk mail, opened envelopes that had contained bills, magazine-renewal cards, catalog—the usual sorts of things. But there was a crumbled sheet of legal paper that caught my eye. It was a crudely drawn sketch of a rectangle. There were no words on the page, just three
X
’s, each with a dotted line extending outward from it. The drawing had been done in pencil and I saw that one of the lines had been erased and redone at a slightly different angle. It looked like a schematic rendering done by a child.

There was also a neatly folded piece of paper that I couldn’t keep from opening. It was a news story that Kathy had printed out from the computer. It was dated four days earlier:

POLICE BELIEVE LYNDON, ME, WOMAN

DIED FROM FALL DOWN STAIRS

HOULTON
,
ME
—Police say they believe a woman found dead in her Lyndon, ME, home Saturday died from a fall down her stairs.

The Major Crimes Unit suspended its investigation Sunday night after finding no evidence of a crime in the death of 67-year-old Marta Jepson.

A concerned neighbor found Jepson dead around 11:00
A.M.
Sunday at the bottom of a staircase in her home on Svensson Road. Police became suspicious because of trauma to her body, a broken lamp in the living room, and items possibly missing from the home, said Aroostook County sheriff Alvin Cyr. The Sheriff’s Department called the state police Major Crimes Unit to investigate.

Authorities said Jepson died of head injuries consistent with a fall. Cyr said Jepson’s house was locked when police were called to check on her.

Jepson had last spoken to a friend by phone about 5:00
P.M.
Friday, Cyr said. She apparently lived alone in her house and was home when she spoke to her friend by phone.

Cyr said investigators have found no evidence of a crime or that anyone was in her home at the time of her death. If police get additional information about her death or autopsy results indicate she did not die of an accident, police will resume an investigation at that point, Cyr said.

I wasn’t sure what to make of the story. The town of New Sweden, where Kathy had grown up, was just down the road from Lyndon. It was possible that the dead woman was someone she had known, perhaps the mother of a friend. Jepson sounded like a Scandinavian name.