The Bone Orchard: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (7 page)

“I have three bags of smelts in the freezer,” I said. “Do you want some?”

“I’ve been doing Weight Watchers, so I can’t be eating all that bacon fat.”

She paused, and I heard a child scream in the background. Visiting the Cronk house, filled with four kids all under the age of seven, always reinforced my conviction that small children are essentially insane little people.

“Is there any way you could come over here and give me a jump? I need one wicked bad.”

I thought I’d misheard her. “What do you need?”

“The Tahoe won’t start, and I ain’t sure if the battery’s dead or the alternator’s shot. What did you think I meant? That I wanted a quick lay or something?”

I ignored the question. “It could be your distributor cap is wet, with all this humid weather we’ve been having.”

“Whatever it is, I can’t afford to be stranded here in the boonies. I only got the Tahoe now that the bank’s repossessed Billy’s truck. I’m working lunch and dinner at the Bluebird Ranch and can’t miss another shift.”

“I’ll be right over,” I said. “If worse comes to worst, I’ll be your personal chauffeur today.”

“That’s the least you can do if you ain’t going to screw me.”

I nearly dropped the phone.

She laughed out loud. “I’m joking! Billy always said you was the most uptight individual he’d ever met. You’re a worse prude than my aunt Lillian, and she’s a Baptist.”

8

There was a dusky-looking Swainson’s thrush hopping around in the pine needles outside my cabin. It was hunting for ants and beetles. Like all thrushes, it had those big black eyes that looked like they’d been drawn by Walt Disney.

Sarah had taught me a lot about birds during our years together, first at Colby and then in that on-again-off-again period after I’d become a game warden. She enjoyed the outdoors, but only as a playground. Cabin living was never her thing. It hadn’t surprised me when she announced she was leaving our backwoods shack to take a prestigious fellowship in D.C. The prep-school girl from the Connecticut suburbs had never been cut out for a life that involved splitting and stacking wood for the stove.

Maddie had said that Sarah was back in Maine, working at some new school in Portland. I’d never believed that our destinies are predetermined. If you look back on your life, you might see what looks like a meaningful progression, but it’s no different from gazing at the moon and seeing a man’s face. Just because you perceive a pattern doesn’t mean it’s really there. I tried not to dwell too much on the circumstances that were drawing these people from my past into my life again.

The forest road crossed a number of quick-flowing streams whose beauty disguised the fact that they were the breeding grounds for blood-thirsty insects. Unlike mosquitoes—which seek out stagnant pools to lay their wriggling larvae—blackflies only breed in swift, clean water. As the day warmed, the voracious bugs would rise from the streambeds in clouds so thick I was afraid to take a deep breath for fear of inhaling them. Spring is a season of pure misery in the Maine woods.

When I arrived at the Cronk house, I checked my phone again for a message from Kathy, but there was nothing. It bothered me not having heard from her. I typed a text message and hit
SEND
.
Please let me know how you’re doing,
it read.

In the meantime, I had plenty of chores to keep me occupied. The Cronks lived in a too-small shack of a place in a clearing in the woods down around Whitney. Looking through my bug-smashed windshield, I noticed that the pile of firewood Billy had furiously cut before he went to prison was a quarter of its former size. There also seemed to be a crack in one of the upstairs windows that was new since my last visit. And a roof gutter was dangling free and needed to be reattached.

As I climbed out of the Bronco with my toolbox in hand, Aimee Cronk appeared in the doorway, holding their youngest child, a daughter, under her arm, while a snotty-nosed boy peeked at me from behind her leg. Billy called his blond brood of four “the Cronklets.” I could never keep them straight.

Aimee was a big woman, but shapely; she carried her weight in places men found attractive. She had just washed her hair, and loose red strands hung around her open, freckled face. Watching her husband head off to jail for close to the next decade or so would have crushed lots of women, but not Aimee Cronk. “I always figured it was more a question of when and not if,” she’d told me. “You can’t break the law as much as Billy did without it breaking
you
sooner or later.”

“There’s the man of the house,” she said.

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

She showed the gap between her front teeth when she smiled. “You’re still thinking about that joke, ain’t you?”

How did she know these things? I couldn’t imagine a single secret Billy had managed to keep hidden from his wife. It would have been like being married to Hercule Poirot.

“So I guess I should have a look at your engine,” I said.

She gestured with her free hand at the faded blue Tahoe parked beside the picnic table. “Keys are under the seat,” she said. “I got to get changed for work.”

A damp gust blew the smell of blossoming apple trees down the hill while I worked, and a chestnut-sided warbler harangued me from the roadside willows. In my ears, the call sounded like words:
Hey! Hey! Hey! What’s with you?

I poked around under the hood, checked the electrical wires for loose connections, found none, then tried using my jumper cables. I ran the engine for a solid fifteen minutes, but the Tahoe failed to start. I was despairing of fixing it and figured I’d have to remove the air-intake system in order to get at the distributor, when an odd thought occurred to me. I used a screwdriver to pry loose the battery port covers.

When I knocked at the front door again, I saw that Aimee had changed into her pale blue waitress uniform and was slipping barrettes into her newly dried hair. “What’s the bad news?” she asked.

“I don’t suppose you have any distilled water.”

“Billy might have a jug in his shed. What for?”

“Your battery has no water in it.”

“In all this wet weather?”

“The battery is sealed,” I said, rubbing my blackened hands together. “The good news is that if we refill it, we can probably get you on the road, but you should have your battery changed in Machias while you’re at work.”

She smiled. “Ain’t you the handy one, though.”

“Not like Billy,” I said.

Her smile went away like the sun behind a cloud. “So when are you gonna visit him in the penitentiary, anyway? He thinks you’re punishing him by not going down there.”

“I’m the one who testified for the prosecution!”

“It don’t matter,” she said. “Billy did what he did, and now he has too much time to think on things. I don’t want him obsessing over the past. It’s unhealthful. He can’t change it anyhow, and I need him to start writing letters to his kids and not getting into fights that add years to his sentence or other stupid shit like that. Just tell him whatever he wants to hear so he can start living for today again.” She removed a dirty Kleenex from her skirt pocket and rubbed my nose with it. “You’ve got grease all over your face.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Will you promise to go down there tomorrow? I know you filled out that visitor application, because I made you do it at dinner that time.”

She had put the sheet of paper in front of me at her kitchen table and refused to serve any of us until I’d completed the form.

“Aimee,” I said.

“Promise me you’ll go see him,” she said. “It’s more important than cutting firewood or any of this other shit. You’re his only real friend in the world, Mike.”

“What about his army buddies?” Billy had served in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The band of brothers? Don’t get me started on those misfits. Will you go see Billy tomorrow or won’t you? I need you to promise.”

The chestnut-sided warbler started up again in a rosebush across the yard.

“I promise,” I said.

“Good, because I’m late for work. Can you stay and watch the rug rats until my sister gets here?”

I looked past her into the monster’s lair. I had close to zero experience caring for small children. Even baby-sitting the Cronklets for fifteen minutes was a frightening prospect. “What do I do?”

“Just listen,” she said. “If they’re crying and fighting, everything’s OK. But if it goes quiet all of a sudden, then you know all hell has broken loose.”

*   *   *

The text arrived a few minutes before Aimee’s sister did. I had taken up my post in the doorway of the living room, holding the sleeping eighteen-month-old in my arms, terrified she would wake up while two of the kids threw Legos at each other or put them in their mouths. There was one Cronklet missing, I realized. The question was whether to hunt that one down or risk having the other two choke to death on pieces of plastic due to my negligence.

Like many parents, the Cronks viewed child care as a rudimentary human skill, while to me it seemed like managing a sophisticated series of no-win situations. When the two children on the floor in front of me suddenly rushed off in different directions, one toward a kitchen full of sharp knives, another down a darkened basement stairwell, I found myself paralyzed with indecision.

My cell phone vibrated in my jeans pocket and I managed to fish it out without waking the little girl. It was a text from Kathy:
I killed a guy. It sucks. Thanks for your concern.

When I was just out of the academy and Kathy was my field-training officer, she used to call me “Grasshopper,” after the old
Kung Fu
television show. It was the nickname the blind Shaolin monk gave to his naive young student. Even when I was no longer one of her district wardens, it had remained Kathy’s pet name for me. Its absence here affected me even more than the sarcasm in the text itself.

The Maine State Prison was located twenty minutes from the Gammons’ horse farm and not much farther from the hilltop where Kathy lived at the edge of a rolling field of blueberries. My promise to Aimee had committed me to revisiting at least one landmark from my past. I was still trying to decide about the others when Aimee’s sister burst through the door and rescued me from a house that had grown alarmingly quiet.

9

I spent the rest of that day reattaching the gutter and taking down a dead spruce that was threatening the Cronks’ roof. I used a chain saw to split the tree into lengths I could drag into the bushes. It was a white spruce: a species Mainers call “cat spruce” because the crushed needles have the ammonia odor of cat piss. Aimee wouldn’t want to put these fast-burning, smelly logs into her woodstove, not unless she was trying to clear the house of unwanted guests.

By the time I was done, I was coated in perspiration and sawdust. I’d applied a layer of bug repellent to every inch of exposed skin but had managed to sweat away the powerful chemicals, so my neck and ears were swollen with bites from the blackflies that follow you everywhere in the woods in May. I drank a gallon of rusty-tasting water from the hose, packed up my tools, and headed to Day’s General Store for a cheeseburger and a cup of coffee.

The store had been one of my regular stops when I was a game warden, and it wasn’t unusual to find other wardens, state troopers, and sheriff’s deputies sitting at the lunch counter. My friend Cody Devoe once explained to me why Day’s was popular among the law-enforcement crowd. “It’s the only place around where I know the guy in the kitchen doesn’t spit in my food,” he’d said.

The screen door snapped shut behind me on its too-tight spring as I stepped inside. Day’s was always dim—the fluorescent bulbs hadn’t been dusted in years—and the first odor to hit your nose was inevitably the oily starch of the deep fryer. I hated to contemplate the last time Bill Day had changed the grease in that contraption. Ratty taxidermy mounts—stuffed raccoons and fishers—stared down at you from the shelf above the register with glass eyes. The display of dead animals was Bill Day’s idea of interior decoration.

A state trooper was alone at one end of the counter, separated by two open stools from a redneck in the corner. I had to make up my mind where to sit. I chose the stool beside the cop.

His name was Belanger. We had worked together on a few occasions, but I couldn’t say that we were well acquainted. Like many troopers, he was an impressive physical specimen: a Greek statue in a powder-blue uniform. His eyes flicked sideways as I took a seat and then returned to watching the television mounted to the wall.

I had the feeling he didn’t know who I was. “Belanger? It’s Mike Bowditch.”

He put a paper napkin to his mouth and swallowed what he’d been chewing. “Didn’t recognize you under all that hair,” he said.

I rubbed my scruffy chin with my knuckles. “Sometimes I don’t recognize myself.”

“That’s a tough break you got,” he said.

“What’s a tough break?”

“I heard you were fired.”

“Actually, I resigned. I’m guiding up around Grand Lake Stream now.”

He nodded and took a sip of water. “Enjoying it?”

“Mostly,” I said. “You know, the grass is always greener.”

He nodded again and turned back to the TV. Now that I was no longer a cop, he had nothing to say to me.

The local news station was running a segment on the diluvial rain we had received. The weatherman was standing with an umbrella in a puddle while cars drove by, splashing his pants.

I studied Bill Day’s slope-shouldered back as he flipped burgers on the grill. He was a soft guy, bigger on the bottom than the top, and his body always gave me the impression of melting even when he wasn’t standing in front of a burner.

“Afternoon, Bill!” I said.

He glanced over his shoulder, his face red and streaming, and waved a metal spatula. “Hold your horses. Hold your horses.”

Day’s wasn’t known for its customer service.

I settled back on my stool. The television anchor was introducing a new story—the volume was too low to hear anything—but there was a picture of Jimmy Gammon floating beside the newscaster’s handsome head.