Beneath the kitchen window, my flashlight showed tracks: a man’s snowshoes. They were traditionaclass="underline" trapper-style, oblong-shaped, fashioned of northern white ash in all likelihood. The man who owned them was a traditionalist. No modern aluminum and plastic Tubbs for George Magoon. There was good information in these tracks. Now I knew something about my prankster that I hadn’t known before.
I foundered in the snow, following the tracks through the balsam and white spruce. My ears began to tingle, and I thought of Prester Sewall wandering desperately in search of help the night before. The snowshoe trail looped around toward the main drag. Whoever had walked here hadn’t been heavy, I decided. The prints of a big man would have been deeper. That ruled out Billy Cronk.
Eventually the tracks emerged from the birch and beech saplings that made up the second-growth timber. They ascended the high snowbank the plow had muscled out of the road. Then they scrambled down the other side of the drift to the salt-white asphalt. I walked up and down the roadside, scanning for distinctive tire prints with my flashlight, but there were too many marks to distinguish anything useful. Something silver and red glittered up ahead. I reached down to pick it up. It was a round metal tin that had been flattened under the wheels of passing traffic. Someone who had passed by this way chewed Red Man tobacco.
19
In Machias, I ended up at a 24/7 gas station, where I purchased a bottle of bleach, two hand-soap dispensers, and four liters of Clamato juice. The clerk behind the register pinched her nose as she took my money.
“Adieu, Pepe Le Pew,” she said, to the delight of the tipsy customers behind me in line.
No one would describe midwinter in a remote coastal town with no ski or snowmobiling industries to speak of-almost no industries whatsoever-as peak tourist season. Most motel owners had declared their unconditional surrender, switched off their neon signs, locked their doors and boarded up their plate-glass windows, and departed for warmer climes until after the spring thaw. The few holdouts had begun renting out rooms at weekly rates, becoming flophouses for the shiftless, the addicted, and those criminally minded people who intentionally avoided living with fixed addresses.
After despairing of ever seeing another bed, I found a shabby little motor court with a lighted VACANCY sign on the road to Lubec. The Blueberry Bunch Motel consisted of six peeling cabins arranged in a horseshoe shape around a semicircular driveway. Only one of the cabins had an occupant; the others looked dark and forlorn. But when I pressed the luminous doorbell outside the office, a light went on in the house next door, and presently an old woman came hurrying down the walk.
She stood about four and a half feet tall and looked to be a hundred years old. She had big glasses that covered much of her wrinkled face, tightly curled hair that reminded me of sheep’s wool, and a generous nose. She wore a fuchsia sweater, which she might have knitted herself, flannel pants, and boots she’d probably purchased in the kids’ section at L.L. Bean.
“Can I help you, Officer?” She had an accent I couldn’t place. Baltimore, maybe?
“Yes, ma’am. I need a room for the night, if you have one.”
When she laughed, I saw that her gums were receding from her long yellow teeth. “Young man,” she said, “I can’t give rooms away this time of year.”
She unlocked the door and let me into the office. She stepped up onto a wooden box behind the registration desk, opened a book on the counter, and asked me to sign my name. Bleary-eyed, I filled in the information and handed her my credit card.
“I can give you the government rate,” she said.
“Thanks, but I’m not here on government business.”
“I won’t tell if you won’t.”
She handed me a key attached to an enormous piece of blue plastic on which someone had painted the number 6 with silver glitter nail polish. “That’s the bridal suite,” she said with a wink. “Would you like me to show it you?”
“I’m sure it will be fine.”
“I’m not going to ask you about the skunk,” she said. “But I take it you didn’t get the better end of your dispute.”
From the driveway, the cabin looked no bigger than a garden shed, but inside, once the hesitant light decided to flicker on, I saw that it was more spacious than I’d imagined. Most of the room was taken up by a full-size bed with a synthetic oak headboard and a coverlet woven out of blue polyester fabric. A small television no bigger than a toaster sat atop a pressed-wood bureau. The view through the front curtains was of the parking lot.
Inside the bathroom was a stained tub with a long pipe that rose to a rusty showerhead. The first thing I did was to strip down to my underwear. I dumped the clothes I’d brought with me into the tub and then doused them all with Clamato juice. Bent over the tub, I worked the tomato juice into the fibers. I let the clothes soak in the bloodred liquid and lay down on the bed. That was when it dawned on me that I would have no way to dry my wet clothing. I could hang a shirt over the creaking radiator, but how long would that take?
After a while, I got up and returned to the bathroom and ran cold water over my clothes. When the last of the juice had swirled down the drain, I pumped hand soap over the laundry to get a good lather going. I rubbed the foam into the fabric and kept rubbing until my shoulders ached. I rinsed the clothes until the water ran clear and free of bubbles. Then I wrung the last drops from every sleeve and pants leg. Done at last, I pressed my green uniform shirt to my nose and sniffed.
It smelled like someone had soaked a gym sock in a Bloody Mary.
In high school, I’d dated a girl who had been born without a sense of smell. I wondered if she was still single.
I went around the bedroom, hanging shirts on hangers from every nail I could find. I draped wet pants over curtain rods and the desk chair. I arranged socks and underwear on the shelf above the radiator.
It was after 3:00 A.M. by the time I finished with my washing. I turned off the bedside lamp and pulled the cold sheet and thin wool blanket across my chest. Falling asleep, I listened to the dripping sound my wet clothes made in the darkness, and I dreamed that I was camping alone in the rain forest and that outside it was raining.
The cell phone’s melodic ringtone pulled me up out of my coma. When I opened my dry eyes, I saw cold sunlight streaming into a tiny room decorated with haphazard items from my wardrobe. I knocked my BlackBerry off the nightstand and then nearly fell out of bed reaching to retrieve it from the floor.
My mouth was gummy, lips, teeth, and tongue. “Hello?”
“Warden Bowditch, I think you’ve got some splaining to do.”
“Sheriff Rhine?”
“My deputy has been telling me how you showed up at the hospital last night on the arm of Jamie Sewall.”
That prick Dunbar-I should have figured he would throw me under the bus. “I was just giving her a ride,” I said in a sleep-thickened voice. “She lost her van keys in the parking lot.”
“And somehow this entailed accompanying her into the hospital?”
“I didn’t anticipate her brother would be conscious.”
“I think I’m beginning to understand why your superiors transferred you Down East. You should expect a call soon from Lieutenant Zanadakis. He’s going to be as curious as I am to hear why you neglected to inform us of your relationship with the Sewall family.”
After I got off the phone, I went into the bathroom to relieve my bladder and take a shower. My uniform was still musky and damp when I put it on. I decided to pack all of my still-wet clothes into the duffel bag. It appeared that I would be spending my morning at the local Laundromat.
First, I had a stop to make on the other side of town.
Outside, the sunlight bounced off the snowbanks, scalding my eyes. Winter was a season of such sharp contrasts. There were overcast days when the whole world faded to shades of gray. But when the sun was shining, the landscape became as gaudy as an old Technicolor circus movie.