The Bone Orchard: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (8 page)

“Hey, Bill,” I said. “Can you turn up the TV?”

The cook refused to look up from his grill. “Remote’s on the counter.”

I glanced along the Formica and saw the remote control beside a ketchup bottle in front of the redneck.

“Can you turn that up?” I asked.

The man had a bird’s nest beard and a drawn face from a lifetime’s worth of booze and cigarettes. He was wearing an olive green sweatshirt, from which he had scissored the sleeves, revealing skinny arms patterned with tattoos. He peered at me from beneath the frayed brim of his baseball cap.

I pointed at the television. “Increase. The. Volume.”

With a grunt, he slid the remote down the counter, but it caromed off a napkin dispenser and landed on the floor behind me. I glared at the redneck, then hopped off the stool to retrieve it. By the time I got it aimed at the set and boosted the volume, the scene had changed to some sort of protest outside the headquarters of the Maine Warden Service in Augusta. There were a dozen or so people with signs, some bearing photos of Jimmy.

A female reporter had the microphone in the face of a fierce-looking young man with a crew cut and the shadowy suggestion of a goatee. He wore a navy suit and a striped tie, but the jacket seemed too tight; his shoulders looked ready to burst through the seams. Words along the bottom of the screen identified him as Sgt. Angelo Donato, Maine National Guard (Ret.).

“Jimmy Gammon was a hero,” he was saying. “What happened to him over there in Afghanistan I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. He had his share of problems, no doubt about it, but no way did he want to kill himself. Jimmy was one of the happiest guys I ever met. Those cops’ stories just don’t add up. And you know they’re going to get off with a slap on the wrist.” He stepped back and shouted “Justice for Jimmy!” to the people behind him.

The camera cut back to the studio, where the anchor began a new story: Domestic violence reports were up in Maine. I muted the sound and set the remote on the counter. Belanger arose from his stool and towered over me. He didn’t have the most expressive face in the world, but I sensed that the story about Jimmy Gammon had gotten to him. After a moment, his features hardened again into the stony expression he wore while on duty. He adjusted the chin strap on his blue Smokey the Bear–style hat. Then he reached into his wallet for a ten-dollar bill to leave beside his empty plate on the counter.

“Have a good day,” he said to me, as if I were a driver he’d just handed a ticket.

After the trooper left, I swiveled around on my stool to address the redneck on my right. The front of his sweatshirt proclaimed his manly virtues:
WOMEN WANT ME. FISH FEAR ME.

“What’s your problem?” I said.

He used his thumbnail to remove a piece of gristle from between his front teeth. “Huh?”

“The remote control. You couldn’t have just handed it to me?”

There was no white in his eyes at all, only pink. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

“Should I?”

The man flared his nostrils. “You pinched me for night hunting last year. You and that other warden had that robot set up by the side of the road, and you entrapped me into taking a shot at it, when I was just driving home, minding my own business. I got a five-hundred-dollar fine and lost my hunting license for a year on account of you.”

The memory came back to me as if illuminated by a magnesium flash. I’d been working night hunters with Cody Devoe. Poachers began to get itchy in September, with legal deer season so close. They started driving into fields of goldenrod, illuminating the edges of the trees, hoping to jacklight a buck. Wardens know where to wait for poachers by following tire tracks in the weeds. Cody and I been hiding in the puckerbrush, using a remote control to manipulate a mechanical decoy shaped like a deer. With the push of a button, we could move its extremely realistic head.

This loser had been half in the bag when he’d come cruising past. He’d stopped, backed up, and then stuck a .22 rifle out the window to take a shot at Robby the Robo-Deer. He’d missed the decoy by a country mile. When Cody and I had sprung from the bushes, shouting “Police!” he had stomped on the gas, running his Chevrolet Monte Carlo off the logging road and into a stump.

“We also arrested you for operating under the influence, I seem to recall.”

He slid off the stool and stood face-to-face with me. His breath stank of coffee, cigarettes, and incipient gum disease. “I heard you ain’t a warden no more.”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t kick your ass.”

“We’ll have to see about that some time.” He lowered his voice an octave to sound menacing.

“Why wait?”

“I know where you live, asshole.”

The local scofflaws had all heard that I’d left the Warden Service, but they probably didn’t know that I’d moved out of my rented cabin. I was hardly going to give this one driving directions to Moosehorn Lodge.

“Bring some beer when you come over,” I said.

After he left, I found myself alone at the lunch counter. Bill Day wiped a dishrag over his red skull, trying to soak up some of the beaded sweat. “What’ll you have?”

“Cheeseburger deluxe. And some coffee.”

While Bill filled my cup, I leaned my elbows on the edge of the counter and reflected on the two conversations I’d just had. The trooper had been frosty with me because I was no longer a law-enforcement officer. The poacher had been pissed because, in his twisted thinking, I would always be a game warden.

A man just couldn’t win.

The fry cook gave me a baffled expression. “What are you laughing at?”

“Nothing,” I said.

10

The next morning, I made an early start for the Midcoast. The drive to the Maine State Prison in Warren usually took a solid three hours, longer in the rain. Aimee had told me that Billy was being housed in the Medium Custody Unit and had “contact visit status,” meaning that he was permitted walk-in visits with anyone who had filled out the required form, as I had, and received prior approval.

I filled a thermos with coffee for the road and turned the dial to a classic-rock station in Bangor. In northern Maine, the listening choices broke down into roughly four categories (not counting the broadcasts from Canada): classic rock, country, Christian, and right-wing yelling. You only had to listen to the radio for ten minutes to guess that Maine was the whitest state in the nation.

I decided to take the northern route, skirting Elizabeth Morse’s extensive land holdings, by driving from Topsfield to Lincoln and then south along Interstate 95 through Bangor. It was a slippery ride. A wet white fog rose like steam from the asphalt, and the logging trucks, barreling down the highway at eighty miles per hour, threw behind them blinding curtains of water.

By the time I finally saw the Camden Hills, the knuckles in my hands were sore from gripping the steering wheel. I passed a series of familiar landmarks: the lobster pound at Lincolnville Beach, the terminal where the Islesboro ferry docked, the road up the side of Mount Battie. Everything looked just as I remembered it, and yet something seemed profoundly different.

Not much had changed in Camden’s picture-perfect downtown. Some of the boutiques and restaurants had been replaced by other boutiques and restaurants, and the nonfunctional smokestack at the mill-turned-condo complex still needed a fresh coat of paint. The same schooners were docked in the harbor, their masts rising into the mist. I had always been prone to nostalgia, but I hadn’t expected to feel such an overwhelming sense of homecoming.

I resisted the urge to take the turn that would have brought me to the rolling farm country where the Gammons lived. I had no idea what I would have said to them anyway. Jimmy’s parents had been generous and caring people. They had recognized that their son, for all his intelligence and good cheer, had trouble making close friends. They had hopes for me that I had probably dashed. The Gammons couldn’t have known that, for complicated reasons of my own, I wasn’t interested in forming close relationships when I was twenty-four. A stubborn desire to inflict loneliness on myself had kept me from forming a meaningful bond with Jimmy Gammon.

Leaving Camden for the considerably less picturesque quarry land to the south, I realized it wasn’t the Midcoast that had changed. It was me.

*   *   *

The road to the prison led me through the western reaches of the city of Rockland. A century earlier, miners had dug deep pits into the fields and forests to excavate limestone. There was still a working cement factory—an enormous industrial complex with smoking chimneys you could see from miles out to sea—in the middle of this pockmarked landscape. Dump trucks still carried smashed stone out of the gravel pits, but most of the old quarries had been abandoned. Decades of rain had filled the man-made chasms with water. And over the years, people had thrown trash into these deep, dark lakes—not just bags of dirty diapers and chicken bones but also broken refrigerators and derelict cars. The city itself used one of the quarries for its municipal dump.

The Old County Road threaded its way between the flooded pits. Occasionally, a vehicle would crash through the guardrails and plummet hundreds of feet into the black water below. Sometimes the driver would even survive. A sulfurous odor hung over the quarry land. Rounding one of the many sharp corners, it was as if you’d just missed seeing the devil disappear in a puff of smoke.

I passed through the pretty Colonial-era town of Thomaston and crossed the tidal St. George River into Warren. The river was high from the week of rain we’d received, but I could tell that the alewives were running because of the huge flocks of birds perched on rocks and in trees along the shore. In the spring, schools of sea-run fish return to the lakes and streams where they were spawned to reenact their primeval mating rituals. Most die before they can reproduce. Snake-necked cormorants dive for them. Ospreys plunge from the sky with talons outstretched to carry them back to their nests. Lobstermen net the fish by the truckload to use as bait. But still the alewives return.

So I wasn’t the only fool coming home.

I’d visited the Maine State Prison a few times while I was stationed in the area. It was an enormous cream-colored fortress, hidden from the major roads by thick stands of oaks and pines, but visible at night from a distance by the ocher glow that radiated into the sky above the brightly illuminated buildings. Nearer to the jail, the trees had been cleared so that the guards in the towers would have a clean shot at any fugitive who managed to get past the razor wire.

I parked in the paved guest lot and turned off the engine. Visiting hours began at nine o’clock, so I had to wait inside the Bronco for a while, listening to the rain tap-tapping against the truck’s steel roof. I desperately needed to piss, but this was hardly the place to sneak into the bushes. I wondered how many video cameras were already watching my suspicious, lonely vehicle.

One of Jimmy’s buddies from Afghanistan was a guard at the prison. Many of the guys with the 488th worked in law enforcement or corrections; it was why they’d joined the police corps. What was his name? Donato. He was the angry guy I’d seen on the television news. I wondered what I would say to him if we ran into each other inside. Offer condolences for the loss of our mutual friend? Or defend my other friend against his unfair accusations?

At nine sharp, I made my way to the door, my shoulders hunched against the rain. To my dismay, the bathroom in the lobby had an
OUT OF ORDER
sign taped to the door. The guard behind the armored admissions desk was a stern-faced man with the elongated torso of a weasel. He wore reading glasses balanced at the tip of his pointed nose. His nameplate said
TOLMAN.

“I’m here to see William Cronk.”

He looked me up and down, and I realized how sketchy I must appear to someone who judged a person’s moral character by the cleanliness of his clothes or the length of his hair. Tolman pushed a clipboard at me through a slot. There was a pen attached to it by a little chain. “You need to fill out a visitor application.”

“I already did. My name’s Michael Bowditch. I should be in your system.”

He grunted and swiveled his chair around to a computer terminal. “Spell your name, please.”

I did so, trying to ignore the swelling pressure in my bladder. What had made me drink an entire thermos of coffee?

After a minute, the guard stared at me over his reading glasses. “You’ll need to schedule an appointment.”

“I thought I could just walk in if my name was on the list.”

“That doesn’t apply to prisoners in the SMU.”

“Wait,” I said. “Billy’s in the Supermax?”

“He’s in the Special Management Unit.”

It was the same thing. “Since when?” I asked.

“I can’t disclose that information.”

“Why was he moved from Medium Custody?”

“I can’t disclose that information.”

I could only guess what my hot-tempered friend had done to earn a trip to solitary confinement. If his actions were deemed heinous enough by the Knox County district attorney, he might be facing a criminal charge that would result in a longer sentence. Aimee would be out for blood when she heard the news.

“I’d like to make an appointment to see him,” I said.

Tolman removed his glasses and set them on the desk. “You need to do that by phone.”

“But I’m right here.”

“We have rules here, and they apply to everyone.” He handed me a card with a phone number on it.

“Who’s going to answer this number when I call?”

He ran his tongue along his lower lip. “I will.”

“But you won’t just schedule the appointment for me now—in person?”

“We have rules,” he said again.

I removed the cell from the inside pocket of my rain jacket and used my thumb to tap in the number on the card. The phone on the desk beside Tolman rang loudly, and a light flashed on top of it. He let it ring for a long time.

Finally, he picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“I’d like to make an appointment to visit an inmate in the SMU.” I stared straight into his eyes.