The Bone Orchard: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (17 page)

The woman had died on Saturday, the day after the Gammon shooting. Was there any significance in the timing? Probably not. She was an older woman who had lived alone. She had fallen down and died.

I took the article back to Kathy’s woman cave and reread it, hoping it would open a door in my mind. I set the piece of paper on the coffee table to look at again later.

The rum might have been oily to the taste, but there was nothing wrong with its sedative properties. The nerve endings throughout my body seemed to be going numb, and my breathing was becoming shallow and more regular. My injured face and scalp stung a little less.

My mind had been lurching from crisis to crisis for more than twenty-four hours. That sort of intense focus takes a toll. I couldn’t imagine how men and women in combat managed to stay sane. I’d heard that soldiers were prescribed amphetamines. When you are under extreme stress, the first thing to go is your ability to regain perspective after traumatic events. Our brains are the tools we rely on to make sense of the world, but what happens when your brain is broken?

If you’re Jimmy Gammon, you decide to die. The first emotion I had experienced when I heard the news of his death was anger at what he had forced the wardens to do. Perhaps if I’d visited him after he came back from Bagram and seen for myself the extent of his injuries, it would have been easier to reconcile myself to his suicide. People had described Jimmy’s wounds as disfiguring; they’d said his pain was constant and unbearable. I was fairly certain that the grinning guy with whom I’d gone pheasant hunting hadn’t existed for a long time. He had died years before his body bled to death in that barn.

*   *   *

I was half-drunk myself when I finally stretched out on the sectional sofa in Kathy’s woman cave. I’d fetched the sleeping bag from my Bronco and rested my head on a throw pillow. Kurt was snoring so loudly, I could hear him downstairs.

I gave a thought to what Deb Davies had said: that Kurt might awaken with no memory of the previous night and might regard me as an unknown intruder. I removed her pink revolver from my jacket and tucked it under the pillow.

Over the years, the sofa fabric had become impregnated with the smell of Kathy’s dog. I found myself blinking back tears. The horror that Kathy must have experienced in those few seconds between the time Pluto was gunned down and she was shot herself must have seemed like a nightmare come true.

When I closed my eyes, I saw a mutt lying at the bottom of a brackish swimming pool. The grotesque image grew more and more vivid as I tried to fall asleep, and I felt my wakeful mind returning to a time and place I’d almost forgotten. It was a memory that had the blurred edges of a dream.

21

On my first day as a game warden, I was called upon to shoot a rabid dog. The animal had just bitten a little girl in the face. Her name was Kaylee. The dog’s name was Goofus.

I was twenty-four years old, a recent graduate of Colby College and the Maine Criminal Justice Academy. I’d just spent the previous eight weeks being taught the arcane tradecraft of my new career. I’d learned how to vanish into alder swamps to catch deer poachers, follow clues left by panicked people lost in the snow, disarm the trip wires used by marijuana growers to guard backwoods plantations. By most standards, I’d become an accomplished woodsman. In those early days of my occupation, I believed these specialized skills would automatically admit me to an ancient order of wardens—a brotherhood of trackers, detectives, and scouts. This arrogant assumption was the first of many misconceptions I would have about my job.

My reeducation began with Goofus.

It was true that being a game warden was an odd job relative to other law-enforcement specialties—we dealt with moose poachers and pirate rafters and other strange specimens of humanity. But in Maine, you never knew when you might wander into a firefight between two rival gangs of backwoods heroin dealers. That was the reason we wore bulletproof vests.

Sarah had arisen early that first day to mark the occasion. She was a gorgeous short-haired blond who was getting a master’s in education while teaching at a private school to supplement our meager incomes. She had misgivings about my new profession—secretly she hoped it was just a phase I would pass through—but she was being a good sport about it. She photographed me as I buckled on my gun belt and laced-up my L.L.Bean boots. I’d dreamed of being a Maine game warden for years. This was supposed to be the most exciting day of my life.

Kathy arrived to pick me up at dawn. She’d brought us both tall cups of coffee from the store at the base of Appleton Ridge. Sarah made us pose in front of Kathy’s green patrol truck.

“Say ‘yoga,’” Sarah said.

“Why not ‘cheese’?” Kathy asked.

“‘Yoga’ makes your mouth smile more naturally.”

Kathy and I set off on patrol. It was supposed to be a day of checking fishing licenses and boating registrations—nothing too serious.

Around ten o’clock, the radio crackled and Kathy’s call numbers were recited. The dispatcher reported a 10-42. A possibly rabid dog had attacked a young girl playing in a trailer park nearby. The EMTs were on the scene. In my mind, the call properly belonged with an animal control officer, but we were the nearest unit. I was depressed to begin my new career as a glorified dogcatcher.

Kathy turned the wheel in the direction of the hamlet of double-wides. Some of the mobile homes were neat little residences with welcome mats and window boxes of chrysanthemums. Others looked liked derelict boxcars with plywood doors and barrels out front filled with empty beer bottles. The older people tended to live in the nice trailers; their sons and daughters inhabited the others, along with their chosen fuck buddies and assorted offspring.

As we entered the park, a skinny shirtless guy with a billy-goat beard waved us down. “It’s at the pool, man! Cujo!”

The ambulance was parked near a chained-in rectangle of ragweed, under a bright and cloudless summer sky. Along the horizon stood the serrated treetops. It was the municipal center of the trailer park. There was a crowded cluster of bodies, young and old, but mostly young, inside a mesh fence that the local boys had nearly succeeded at kicking in. The mob had brought with it stones and bottles to throw.

I hopped out of the truck and nearly collided with a shiny-faced paramedic emerging from the rear of the ambulance.

“How is she?” I asked the EMT.

His expression was grim. “Depends on the plastic surgeon. We’re gonna haul ass getting her to the hospital if it’s all right by you.”

“Go for it.”

“By the way, some guy shot it for you with a crossbow.”

“Is it dead?”

“No,” he said. “Unfortunately.”

Kathy appeared beside me. She had brought her shotgun from the truck. It was the old Mossberg 500—subsequently replaced by the combat-tested Mossberg 590A1 as the Warden Service has become more heavily militarized. She handed me the heavy weapon.

We shouldered through the mob. “Game wardens!” Kathy shouted.

When she wanted, she could make her voice as deep as man’s, although it wasn’t naturally that way.

The Red Sea parted. I angled my way through the pool gate and across the cracked tile of the patio, feeling the surging kids around my thighs. A heavy, sweaty man in cutoff cargo pants and an odiferous wifebeater T-shirt was trying to aim a crossbow into the pool bottom.

“Hey, Robin Hood,” said Kathy. “Drop the bow.”

He let fly another arrow.

“I said knock it off!”

I found myself staring into a concrete hole in the ground. A shallow green pond had formed at the bottom. Beer bottles and cans floated in the water, along with grass clippings and a yellow dusting of pine pollen. You could practically hear the sound of hatching mosquitoes rising in swarms from the stagnant reservoir.

As the crowd grew quiet, the dog’s whining seemed to grow louder. Occasionally, it let out a yap and snarled up at us before turning in circles, trying to snap at the crossbow quarrel buried in its bloody haunches. Its brownish fur was coated with some sort of lather, maybe from having licked its ribs with its foaming mouth. The animal was starving, fleck-mouthed. No question it was rabid. I guessed it to be a rottweiler-Lab mix, although it no longer resembled anyone’s pet.

The people of the park had been hurling stones and bottles down on its head before the flabby-armed joker thought to bring out the crossbow.

“Shoot it!” one of the adult women said.

“Would everyone back away!” I said. “It’s for your own safety!”

Kathy leaned close to me and I smelled the Avon Skin So Soft that she used as her own personal bug repellent. “Do you want me to do this?”

“I’ve got to do it sometime.”

“Doesn’t have to be today, Grasshopper.”

I hefted the twelve-gauge. “What have you got in this? A slug or buckshot?”

“Buckshot.”

I fired directly at the poor suffering dog’s head. My hands didn’t flinch. It was, in fact, a fantastic shot. The dog’s brains flew out, and it dropped dead.

The sound of the explosion deafened me for a moment; I should have inserted the foam earplugs I carried in my chest pocket.

When my ears cleared, I heard clapping. I looked around and saw that several of the youngish adults—overweight girls pushing strollers; whip-thin men with pants falling down—putting their hands together. Then the children imitated them. I was receiving applause.

I slung the shotgun over my shoulder. Somehow, I kept my feet as I slid down the slick sides of the pool. The water wasn’t much more than a yard deep. I removed a pair of latex gloves from a pouch in my belt and snapped them on like a doctor preparing for surgery. Then I carefully lifted the dead animal in my arms—its bones might have been as hollow as a bird’s—and waded through the muck to the steps at the shallow end.

I heard the jangling of dog tags on its collar and saw one shaped something like a bone with the name
GOOFUS
stamped into the blue metal. There was a phone number and address on it. I would need to call the owners and tell them what I’d been forced to do their family pet. How did the dog contract rabies? I wondered. Any mammal could carry the virus.

“Hey, Sergeant, can you bring me a tarp?” I shouted.

But Kathy was already there with one of the same body bags the state provided us for human corpses. I placed Goofus atop the plastic liner and zipped it up.

“Hydrophobia,” I mumbled, shaking off my algae-green arms.

“That’s the Latin name for rabies,” Kathy said. “Fear of water.”

“So we both studied Latin,” I said. “
Cave canem
.”

“‘Beware of the dog.’ For whatever it’s worth, the first month I was a warden, I had to shoot a person.”

“What happened?”

She took a deep breath and looked me in the eyes. “This guy, Decoster, was beating his wife. She’d called the police about him a bunch of times before, but somehow he always talked himself out of being arrested. I guess he was drinking buddies with the local cops. But here I was, a rookie and a
woman.
I didn’t know this asshole, and I wasn’t going to give him another free pass on beating up his wife. He went apeshit when I tried to put him into cuffs. He grabbed a knife from the table and turned on me. I’d never been that scared in my life.”

I steadied myself against the Mossberg. “Jesus.”

“Afterward, the woman was a crying mess. She kept saying she didn’t mean for me to kill him. And there’s this fat little kid bawling his eyes out in the corner. Jason didn’t know what the hell was going on. I thought I’d fucked up big time. Sometimes I still wonder if I did.” Kathy reached down and touched the plastic bag, almost as if she was petting the dead dog inside of it. “I know you must be feeling like shit right now, Mike, but if this is as bad as it gets for a while, consider yourself fortunate.”

I appreciated the confession, but more because my new sergeant had opened up to me than because it soothed my guilt.

*   *   *

The alcohol dropped me down a well but didn’t keep me asleep very long. I awoke after a few hours, dry-mouthed and unsure where I was because the room was so dark. I flopped onto my back and lay with my eyes open until the blackness of the room faded and I could make out the fuzzy shapes of the big-screen TV and the head of the eight-point buck Kathy had shot the first morning she’d ever gone bow hunting.

After a while, I heard floorboards creaking overhead; Kurt was awake and roaming around. The footsteps continued down the hall until they came to the top of the stairs. I reached for the gun under my pillow and sat up. There was no lamp within easy reach of the sofa, or I would have turned on a light.

The footsteps stopped midway down the stairs, and I thought I heard an in-drawn breath. The next sound was heavier. I had the impression Kurt Eklund had just collapsed on the staircase.

The next thing I knew, he was sobbing.

I swung my legs off the sofa and rose to my feet, tucking the revolver into my pants at the small of my back. I padded across the thick carpet until I came to the foyer and poked my head around the corner.

Kurt was indeed seated on one of the steps. He was holding onto a baluster as if for support and staring down at the dark stain on the floor.

I snapped on the overhead light.

“Kurt?”

He blinked down at me, half-blinded by both the sudden illumination and his own streaming tears. His hair was the color of a golden retriever, I realized.

“That’s her blood?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Then it wasn’t just a nightmare.”

“No.”

“Is she going to be OK?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

He let loose of the baluster and buried his wet face in his hands. “It’s all my fault.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant, but it seemed the wrong moment to press him to clarify himself. “Do you remember who I am?”

“A warden?”

“You can call me Mike.” I was shocked that he had any memory of our conversation, given his off-the-charts blood-alcohol level. “Why don’t you go back to bed, Kurt. Get some sleep. In the morning, I’ll drive you down to Portland to see her.”