Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(8)
I pushed the bottle away. “I’ve been down that road before, Stace. It didn’t end well.”
“You’re not the same person you were when all that shit happened at Rum Pond.”
“Exactly. I’m not that person anymore.”
“At least make some calls for the poor woman.”
“Who would I call?”
“Start with Gary Pulsifer,” she said. “Find out how he knows this Amber Langstrom. Then ask him what the hell he was thinking, sending her to look for you.”
Those were good questions. But I wanted to talk about something else, anything else.
I tried to picture Stacey on the other end of the line. In my imagination, her dark hair was wind-tousled and her lips and cheeks were rosy from the cold. Like her mother, she had uncanny green eyes that were both beautiful and unsettling, as if she were descended from some supernatural race of beings gifted with the powers of telepathy and clairvoyance. I smiled at the face I saw in my mind’s eye.
“So how are things going up there in Moose Vegas?” I asked.
“Winter just started. The moose still have full coats and haven’t been sucked dry yet by the ticks. Ask me again in April.”
“I’m not going to have to wait that long to see you, am I?”
“That depends on the moose.”
“You sound like you have a cold.”
“It’s just the sniffles.”
“So are you still too frozen for phone sex?”
She laughed that rowdy laugh of hers. “I’m thawing,” she said. “But I’d better lock my door if you’re going to start talking dirty.”
4
That night, in my dreams, I found myself back in the mountains and hardscrabble farmland of my childhood. I was a boy again, standing outside my father’s trapping shed, and there were patches of snow on the ground. I was watching him expertly cut the fur off the otters and muskrats he had caught in leg-hold traps, then throw the skinned carcasses into a fire he had lit in an oil drum. My father’s hands were bloody, but when he looked up at me, he was smiling and his face was kind. He waved me over to come help him—something he had never done in life—offering me the bloody knife to take. But as is often true in dreams, I found myself unable to move, and he began to get red in the face. He started cursing and brandishing the knife as he came toward me, and that was when I woke up.
I felt no more rested than when I’d gone to sleep. There was a dull pain behind my eyes from the bourbon the night before. I swallowed some ibuprofen and stood under the shower for fifteen minutes, letting the hot water scald my back.
When I picked up my uniform shirt from the floor, my dad’s dog tags fell out of the pocket. For some reason, I was seized by a sudden impulse to put them around my neck. Then the urge passed, and I was left wondering why I would have wanted to carry around a reminder of a man who had nearly ruined my life. I gripped the tags tightly in my hand and glanced around the bedroom for a place to hang them.
As I made my way down the stairs to the darkened kitchen, I made a conscious decision to focus on my work that day. I wasn’t going to think about Amber or her misbegotten son.
Standing at the counter, watching the black windows fade to blue, I ate half a box of Cheerios, then filled my travel mug with coffee for the road ahead. I was supposed to cover two districts that day: my own and the adjacent district to the northwest. The warden who normally patrolled that section, Tommy Volk, was in the middle of a knock-down, drag-out divorce and was taking a personal day to spend in court, battling with his soon-to-be second ex-wife. The joke around the division was that Volk already had a third ex-wife lined up.
Strange as it sounds, the love lives of game wardens were often the stuff of soap operas.
When I reported in with the dispatcher, he said, “I got a call from a lady who claims to have seen a timber wolf in her backyard.”
“There are no timber wolves in Maine.”
“Tell her that. She was pretty agitated. Said it was killing deer. She’s called twice now, in fact. I think she’s going to keep calling us every hour if you don’t go over there this morning.”
The woman’s name was Gail Evans, and she lived over on Pondicherry Pond, near Bridgton, which was part of Volk’s district and not a place I knew particularly well. Ms. Evans had probably seen an eastern coyote: an animal with which I had some unhappy history. It felt like a portent of a miserable day to come.
Outside, I found three inches of weightless snow on my truck and a scrim of frost on the windows that required five hard minutes of scraping to clear. The air was crisp enough to stiffen the hairs in my nostrils. I decided to replace my brimmed duty cap with a knit snowmobiling hat. I didn’t want to lose any earlobes.
The road around the west shore of Sebago revealed an expanding sheet of ice that still hadn’t yet hardened all the way across. Indigo waves continued to churn a mile out in the center. Some winters, Maine’s deepest lake never froze entirely. The open water made me think of the World War II bomber who had crashed out there during a training mission. The fuselage had never been recovered. The plane was still down there in the murk and the mud, a rusting tomb for its skeleton pilots.
Lord God, I was in a morbid mood.
Most of the morning traffic was moving in the opposite direction, heading into the distant city of Portland. Southernmost Maine was the only part of the state that was growing, gaining in population. Everywhere else, it seemed, the old mill towns and fishing ports were losing their young people. The last time I had visited the mountains of my childhood, I had counted abandoned houses and trailers until the number got too depressing.