As for Detective Menario himself, I had no idea. He’d promised the sheriff that he was continuing the investigation. With Westergaard dead, that meant reviewing other suspects. But how doggedly would he follow up with them?
The almost illegible note I had scribbled with Dane Guffey’s address sat on my dusty dashboard. The fact that he had resigned as a Knox County deputy shortly after the Jefferts trial seemed significant. Something had driven the man to become a virtual hermit.
My right hand had begun to throb again, and I heard again the siren song of the painkillers in my pocket. The instructions said not to take more than six pills in twenty-four hours, but I had lost count during the long day. Despite what I’d told Sarah, the chemicals were still screwing with my head.
Fuck the pain, I thought.
I started the engine and set a course for the seedy corner of Seal Cove: the unlighted crossroads where Dane Guffey’s street intersected with the Driskos’.
I promised myself that it would be a quick detour. I would stop briefly at Guffey’s house and ask him a few blunt questions. Most likely, he would slam the door in my face, and then it would be straight back home to Sarah.
It’s astonishing the lies we tell ourselves.
On the drive down the peninsula, a barred owl swept across the hood of my Jeep. It swooped down out of the black trees, its body thick, its wing beats heavy, and then disappeared into the darkness across the road. The occurrence happened so suddenly that, for a moment, it seemed like another of my recent hallucinations. To the ancient Greeks, owls were symbols of wisdom, but I doubted this interpretation applied to my own unwise quest.
When Morrison had given me the address I knew exactly which house belonged to the Guffeys; I’d been past the dump many times, wondering who lived there and whether it might be abandoned. So many of the old ones in town had been given over to ghosts. Theirs was an ugly two-story building that had been painted white many decades ago and then left to mold and rot in the salty sea fogs that invaded the peninsula at night. The windows were all shaded, but one room on the first floor emitted a sickly yellow glow.
As I crossed the lawn to the front door, I noticed the shadow of a big barn behind the house. Was that where Dane did his wood carving? The temperature had dipped below freezing; I knew because the grass crackled under my boots.
On the door, there was an ancient cast-iron knocker that should have had Jacob Marley’s face carved into it. With my good hand, I used it to announce my presence. The sound echoed off into the darkness.
I waited a long time for someone to answer.
Eventually, I heard a faint shuffling, as if someone was descending a flight of stairs. Then a light snapped on above my head. The door opened a crack but was impeded from further progress by a chain. Looking through the illuminated slit, I found myself facing an old man wearing a drab bathrobe.
I could see only one side of him, but I recognized at once that he had Parkinson’s disease. The single eye that examined me was nearly all pupil, and his entire body was shaking like a streaker at the North Pole. He had a shiny dome for a head and a set of oversized yellow teeth that might have been dentures.
“Mr. Guffey? Is Dane at home?” I saw my breath shimmering in the cold air.
“No-o-o-o.”
“Do you know where he is?”
The man made a gurgling noise.
I tried another question: “Do you know when Dane will be back?”
“No-o-o-o.”
“I’m Mike Bowditch, the district game warden.” I fumbled in my pocket for one of my business cards. It was a white rectangle that bore the seal of the State of Maine. “When your son gets home, can you have him call me at the bottom number? That’s my cell phone.” Why am I speaking to this man as if he were a child? I wondered. Parkinson’s doesn’t affect the brain. “Please tell him it’s important.”
I tried to hand the card to Mr. Guffey, but it slipped through his quivering fingers and drifted like a leaf to the floor. It was still lying there when he closed the door on me. In the silence that followed, I heard a bolt shoot home.
The pain in my fingers and wrist was excruciating. The temptation to pop another Vicodin whispered to me from the back of my skull. What’s the purpose of needless suffering? it hissed.
I turned on the ignition and reached across my body to shift gears while bracing the wheel with my splint. As I pulled onto the paved road, my headlights lit up the dirt drive that led to the home of Dave and Donnie Drisko. Since my journey to the Guffey house had been such a bust, I felt a sudden urge to check in with my two game thieves.
If I hadn’t recognized it before, I should have realized then that my thinking was seriously impaired.
During my convalescence, I figured, the Driskos needed to know they were being watched. Already I was certain that word had gotten around that the local warden was out of commission. A surprise visit, I reasoned, might give them a healthful shock.
Stupidly, I headed up the rocky road, past the homes of a couple unfortunate neighbors who probably lived in fear of the local hell-raisers. If I had a house near the Driskos, every window would be barred, and I’d keep a bazooka in the umbrella stand. I crept quietly forward until my lights just touched the edge of their property line.
I unlocked my glove compartment and found the pistol I kept there. It was a Walther PPKS. 380 that I’d purchased on my eighteenth birthday because-hilariously, in retrospect-I’d wanted to be like James Bond. Today, it served as my off-duty carry weapon. Every so often, Sarah and I would be traveling somewhere, and she’d want something from the glove compartment-tissues, maybe, or a mint. When she’d see the pistol, she’d give a shriek, as if it were a big spider.
I ejected the magazine and checked the chamber. With a set of five butter fingers encased in a bulky splint, even this simple task became a difficult and painful act. There was no way I could accurately discharge the weapon with my right hand, and as a lefty, I’d never been able to hit the broad side of an aircraft carrier. With the Driskos, though, you could never be too careful.
The moon was nearly full, but the pale disk was shrouded by clouds and it cast a pellucid light on the road. I’d taken only two steps or so before the Driskos’ pit bull began growling from the other side of the fence. Some dogs bark viciously, as if they very much wish to bite you. Vicky sounded like she wanted to dismember me limb from limb. I half-imagined her breaking through the fence, leaving a dog-shaped opening like you see in old cartoons.
A heavy padlock hung on a chain wrapped around the handles. Because the gate was locked from the outside, it meant that my friends, the Driskos, were not at home. I had a feeling the swinging singles might be out on the town.
It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce where Dave and Donnie might be at this hour. The Harpoon Bar was a quick jaunt down the road.
When I got back to the Jeep, there was a new message on my cell phone. The unfamiliar voice belonged to a man, and from his first words I could tell he was apopleptic: “This is a message for Warden Bowditch. This is Nick Donnatelli-Nikki’s father. I’ve heard you’re one of the bastards trying to set Erland Jefferts free. The man is a psychopath! He raped and murdered my baby in cold blood. It’s bad enough for my family to be subjected to seven years of harassment by lunatics. But you’re a law-enforcement officer, for God’s sake! Who the hell do you think you are?”
I pushed the erase button. Someone must have contacted him. Maybe Danica Marshall thought a phone call from the grieving father would appeal to my conscience and dissuade me from my quixotic quest.
I should have returned Mr. Donnatelli’s phone call, if only to explain my intentions: I was on a mission to discover the truth, not just for Ashley Kim’s sake but for his own daughter’s, too. It was the only way for justice to be served and for both women to rest in peace. He needed to know my heart was just.