Who else? The caretaker, Stanley Snow, had keys to the house. Add his name to the list.
The philosophical principle called Occam’s razor argues that the simplest explanation is almost always the right explanation. By that reasoning, the murderer had to be Westergaard. Why else would he go missing if he hadn’t killed her?
The eerie similarity of this homicide to the Jefferts case defied my ability to understand. What was the point in Westergaard making the murder look like a replay of the Donnatelli slaying, especially if he was going on the lam? Occam was no help with that question.
When I got out of the shower, I heard the growl of a vacuum cleaner. The Reverend Deborah Davies was, incredibly, vacuuming my living room carpet.
“What are you doing?” I asked, buttoning up my uniform shirt.
“I tracked some mud in.”
This was a fib. Her boots were spotless. “Do you always come into someone’s house and start cleaning?”
“I’m a neat freak.” She wrapped the cord in perfect loops. “But I’ve come to terms with my addiction and admitted I have a problem. That’s the first of the twelve steps. Just eleven more to go.”
“I thought you were writing a sermon.”
“Finished! Do you want to hear it?”
“Not particularly.”
“I’m going to talk about Dante’s Inferno.”
“Sounds uplifting.”
She laughed a little too raucously. “Did you ever read The Divine Comedy?”
“I was supposed to read it in college.”
“It’s actually pretty funny in places. Dante used his poem to settle a bunch of personal scores. He devised all sorts of elaborate tortures for his enemies in Hell.” She eyed the cardboard box on the coffee table. “Are you going to eat that last doughnut? I get the feeling you don’t really want it.”
“Go ahead.”
More and more, I was coming to the conclusion that Deborah Davies was one of the oddest ducks in the pond. But Ora had told me how helpful she’d been with Charley after their plane crash. I just couldn’t square the idea of a cleric with this chirpy little woman. In my life, I’d known plenty of Roman Catholic priests. Some of them were cold fish, some were a little creepy even, but none was a Bible-quoting, hyperactive goofball.
Outside, the air smelled of snow. The sky had a pewter cast, which erased the shadows from under the trees, and the mud had grown tacky with the falling temperature. I noticed that the reverend’s personal vehicle was a lemon yellow Volkswagen Bug. It glowed from the end of my driveway like a miniature sun.
Davies raised a quizzical eyebrow. “What’s the matter?”
“My patrol truck is still at the jail. The technicians were going to vacuum it for fibers.” One happy consequence of the situation dawned on me. “It looks like we’ll have to do that ride-along some other day.”
The reverend removed an iPhone from her pocket. “Why don’t you call the jail? Maybe the tech people are done with your truck. I can give you a lift over there.”
The next thing I knew, Davies had connected me with the sheriff’s secretary, who informed me that, yes, the state police were done collecting fibers and I could now retrieve my truck from the jail garage. I looked at the chaplain’s Volkswagen, imagining the sad picture of me riding in the passenger seat of that ludicrous vehicle. Her vanity license plate read REVDD.
“Don’t be such a sissy,” Davies said, once again exhibiting her uncanny ability to read my mind. “Hop in.”
I obeyed.
Fastening my seat belt, I had a premonition of the reverend using the circumstance as a trap to investigate the inner corners of my emotional state. My intuition proved correct.
“Michael,” she began. “I deal with lots of people in pain. That’s my area of expertise. You know the one thing that never works? Bottling up your emotions.”
I squared around. “Look, Reverend. I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but you’re not going to get anywhere with me. I’m kind of an atheist.”
“‘Kind of an atheist’?” She gave me a dazzling flash of teeth. “That’s like being kind of pregnant. Are you an agnostic?”
“I don’t believe in God,” I said flatly.
She seemed to ignore this comment. “Remember what I was telling you about my sermon on Dante. In the Inferno, he condemns suicides to the seventh circle of Hell. In the poem, he transforms people who have killed themselves into thorny trees that bleed when a branch is broken off. It’s a horrible image of souls condemned to suffer forever, unable to move or defend themselves from torment because of the offenses they’ve committed against their own bodies.”
“Why exactly are you telling me this?”
“Even an atheist has to admit it’s a powerful metaphor. I think you feel responsible for more than you let on, Michael. Your father especially. No one should carry that amount of guilt.”
I cracked the window so the wind would drown her out. “Who says I feel guilty?”
Davies reassessed her approach. We drove along for five minutes through a brown-and-gray wasteland. Some flakes of light snow began to fall, salting the windshield. She flicked on the wipers, but the crystals blew off on their own.
Finally, she spoke again: “Monhegan Island is part of your district, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Located ten miles off the Maine coast, Monhegan is the glacier-scraped top of a submerged mountain; nothing but sheer cliffs and twisted spruces soaked in perpetual fog, alone in a howling ocean. In 1614, Captain John Smith claimed the island for the English Crown. Today, Monhegan is home to fifty or so year-round residents who make their livings lobstering through the bitter winter months and then catering to tourists all summer.
The reverend continued: “I don’t suppose you go out there much?”
“There’s no real reason to. There’s nothing to hunt except sea ducks and a few pheasants. I leave it to the Marine Patrol.”
“Something you said made me think of a story,” Davies explained. “You weren’t around for this, but in 1997, the islanders hired a sharpshooter to kill every deer on that island.”
“I know this story.”
Back in the 1950s, the locals had arranged to ship some white-tailed deer to Monhegan, the idea being to provide meat and sport to the local populace. At the time, the island’s only resident wild mammal was the Norway rat.
For many years, the deer were considered local attractions. They foraged in the village and nibbled apples from the hands of small children. But over time, the pets became pests. Islanders were forced to fence their vegetable gardens with barriers at least six feet tall. Entire species of wildflowers were eaten to extinction. And in-breeding among the deer began to produce deformed antlers and stunted growth: real freak-show specimens. The last straw was when the deer and the rats began passing ticks back and forth. The ticks carried Lyme disease, and by the 1990s an epidemic of the illness plagued the island.
“What you don’t know,” said Deb Davies, “is that I was the island chaplain-every year there’s a different volunteer who gets to spend the summer out there-when the town debated the issue of what to do about the deer.”
“That must have been pleasant.”
“The island was totally divided over the issue. On the one hand, you had people concerned about the public health risk and the general nuisance factor. On the other hand, you had people who couldn’t imagine Monhegan without its deer. The town meetings were so contentious. But in the end, the discussion kept coming back to all the people who’d gotten Lyme disease. Still, it was a close vote, and I’m not sure folks out there have entirely forgiven one another for what was said. There was some talk at first of just capturing the deer and transporting them to the mainland, but they were dealing with more than a hundred animals, and the cost was just astronomical. So the islanders asked the state to find a sharpshooter.”
“I know the man they hired,” I said. “He’s a biologist from Connecticut who specializes in controlling nuisance animals-‘the world’s best deer killer.’”