In the dark, she made a sound that was almost like a laugh, but I knew it wasn’t a laugh. “One of them? All my kids have cuts and bruises. I could report my entire class if I was paranoid. But no, the principal just wanted to remind us what we should be looking for, so she handed out those forms again.”
When I’d first met Sarah, she was one of the least sarcastic people I’d ever met. “It doesn’t sound like you had the best day,” I said.
She yawned. “You never told me what happened with that car accident.”
“The driver wasn’t there when I arrived. I guess she caught a ride. In the meantime, somebody came by and swiped the deer.”
“Weird,” she said sleepily.
“The trooper who showed up was this asshhole, Hutchins, who transferred over from the turnpike. He said a rumor was going around that I’d quit the Warden Service.”
“You shouldn’t care what jerks say.”
“It just pisses me off.”
“Everything pisses you off. Sometimes I think that moral indignation is your natural condition.” She yawned again. “You might sleep better, you know, if you didn’t have a drink before bed.”
For a while, I’d dealt with my anger by throwing myself into my work, but everywhere I went my reputation preceded me. Seven months after my father’s manhunt, I was still receiving crank calls (some of them, no doubt, from my fellow cops), with suggestions about where I should insert the barrel of my SIG SAUER P226 before squeezing the trigger.
Of course, you can’t erase the past. You can only avoid making the same mistakes over again.
In my dissolving thoughts I saw the image of a young woman lying unconscious in the dirty snow. I realized that Hutchins never had any intention of searching the woods. But Ashley Kim had told the tow company she was uninjured and catching a ride. Besides, the thought of driving back to Parker Point-to do what exactly?-was insane. While I was fretting about this woman’s safety, she was probably at her friend’s house, recounting her brush with death over another glass of wine.
Don’t think about it, I told myself. Go to sleep.
Eventually, I did. But my sleep was a fitful one, and when I awoke in the morning, it was with the same gnawing uncertainty that had troubled my dreams.
4
Late March. Mud season in Maine. Not yet springtime but no longer winter, either-a slippery seasonal limbo. Weather even more freakish than usual. Rain, snow, ice, and sun, all within the span of an hour. A meteorologist’s worst nightmare.
The only constant is mud. Mud creeping up your boots, splattering your pant legs, finding its way onto clothes you never even wear outdoors. Your fingernails jammed black with it. The impossibility of ever feeling clean. The inside of your truck transformed each day into a pigpen. Mud splashed onto the windshield, then smeared back and forth by the wipers. The wheels gummed up with mire and packed with gravel into the axles. Every car on the road painted the same shit brown.
Wherever you look, a mottled, melting landscape. Snowbanks rotting along the roadsides and meltwater streams the color of urine. Everything that was hidden is now exposed. Beer cans, trash bags, emptied ashtrays. Fur and feathers from creatures unidentifiable, things long dead.
Winter’s aftermath. The dirtiest season.
March used to be a slow month for Maine game wardens. That was before all-terrain vehicles became popular. In the past, all you had to deal with were the last gasps of the winter yahoos: the foolhardy smelt fishermen venturing onto paper-thin river ice, the alcohol-fueled Evel Knievels trying, unsuccessfully, to turn their snowmobiles into Jet Skis crossing half-frozen ponds. Maybe a rabbit hunter would get lost in the woods, or you’d have to shoot a moose sick with brain worm. But traditionally, late March was a time for wardens to testify in court, catch up on paperwork, and take long overdue vacations.
Even now my sergeant, Kathy Frost, was trying her hand at tarpon fishing in the Florida Keys. A few days earlier, she’d sent me a postcard from the Hemingway house. I pictured her at Sloppy Joe’s, daiquiri in hand, drinking all the barflies under the table: a Maine warden, on her March vacation, showing all those warm-weather conchs how it’s done.
Those of us stuck in Maine had no such respite, not with ATVs tearing up the woods. As sales of four-wheelers skyrocketed, wardens were getting angry calls from people like Hank Varnum: landowners outraged by the damage done to their property by all-terrain vandals. This was only my second year on the job, but even I was noticing an uptick in complaints as the snow melted. What was worse, most of the local riders hadn’t started gassing up their machines yet.
So I awoke at dawn, resolved to track down Hank Varnum’s harassers. I showered, put on a uniform that would be filthy within five minutes of stepping outside, and left Sarah curled up beneath the covers. She’d had a restless night, tossing and turning, as if trying to wriggle free of a straitjacket.
Outside, the fog had lifted. The temperature had dipped before sunrise, and all the puddles were frozen solid. Winter wasn’t done with us yet. Some of the worst snowstorms in the state’s history were early-spring sucker punches. In Maine, you were a fool if you put away your snow shovel before Mother’s Day.
My plan was to stop at the Square Deal Diner for a coffee and doughnut and then return to Varnum’s property to have a look at the carnage by the light of day. After that, I figured I’d visit some of Hank’s neighbors and see what information I could shake loose. At the very least, the word would get out that I was searching for the vandals. Fear of being caught might temper their bad behavior-or it might have the opposite effect of inspiring them to greater acts of mayhem. You could never tell with these situations.
But as I drove into Sennebec Village, I discovered that I couldn’t get the name Ashley Kim out of my head. It was like a pestering fly that wouldn’t leave me alone.
Outside the diner, I saw the usual lineup of commercial vehicles. Reading the names painted on the sides of these trucks was like taking a survey of midcoast Maine’s winter economy. HATCHET MOUNTAIN BUILDERS. CASH AND SON PLUMBERS. SNOW BUSINESS: PLOWING AND COTTAGE CARETAKING. It often struck me that most of the people in my district depended for their livelihoods on a small number of very wealthy individuals, many of whom spent only a few weeks a year in Maine.
At the counter, Ruth Libby poured me a cup of coffee. “’Morning, Mike.”
“Hi, Ruth. Where’s your mom today?”
“Portland. She’s got a doctor’s appointment.”
“Nothing bad, I hope.”
“She wouldn’t tell me if it was.” Like her mother, Ruth was apple-cheeked and round of body. As the only waitress, she didn’t have time for small talk. She grabbed a molasses doughnut from the glass case and set it down on a little plate in front of me. But when she wandered back to refill my cup, I made a point of quietly asking her a question: “Does Curt Hutchins ever come in here? He’s the new trooper at Troop D.”
“No, Curt doesn’t come in here. But I know who he is. He was in my brother Bill’s class. All the girls had a crush on him.”
I sipped my coffee. “What else do you remember about him?”
She set down the coffeepot and gave me a sly look. “You keep asking questions like that, and people are going to start talking.”
I smiled and tried to study the room nonchalantly. It’s the cop’s lot in life that whenever you enter a restaurant in uniform, you give some people the creeps. I noticed one prematurely bald dude wincing at me over his newspaper, as if I’d carried the smell of dog shit into the diner with me.
I felt someone looming over me. “I want to apologize for last night,” Hank Varnum said, but his craggy expression was anything but apologetic. “I shouldn’t have gotten angry at you for what those punks did. I know you don’t have time to stake out every ATV trail in Knox County.”