That explained the movers. She must have known days ago that even if her husband was found alive, she could never live in this house again.
“It must be difficult.”
“Let me tell you what’s difficult.” Her voice climbed in pitch. “My family’s been coming here for a hundred years, and still I’ve got illiterate clammers calling me a ‘summer person’ or, worse, a ‘Masshole.’ As far as I’m concerned, I have a far deeper connection to this place than people like you. And through no fault of my own, I am losing that connection forever. Being forced out of your favorite place in the world is a tragedy I hope you never have to experience, Warden Bowditch.”
Her predicament brought to mind the situation Charley and Ora were going through in Flagstaff. I didn’t much care for Jill Westergaard, but her speech did engage my sympathies. “Stanley Snow told me you were selling the house.”
“ Stanley did?”
“We ran into each other last night at the Harpoon Bar.”
“The Harpoon?” She brought her hand to her mouth reflexively. When she took it away, I saw that she had smeared her lipstick at the corner of her mouth. “That wasn’t very discreet of him. What else did my caretaker tell you?”
“Only that you were upset.”
“You’re damn right I’m upset!” She flung her hands wide and accidentally knocked the mug from the railing onto the rocks below. “Who wouldn’t be upset?”
It had been a mistake to come here, I realized. I was only making her more emotional. “Maybe it would be better if I left.”
She grabbed my good arm with sudden fierceness. “Who are you? What’s your involvement?”
“Excuse me?”
“First you break into my house and find Ashley, and then a week later you discover Hans’s dead body in the forest. That’s not a coincidence. You’re involved in this somehow.”
I wasn’t certain if I’d just been labeled a murder suspect. “I’ve just been doing my job,” I explained.
“As a game warden?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a lie,” she said hoarsely. “Stanley told me about you. He says you’re a guilt-driven man obsessed with what happened to Ashley Kim. I want to know why.”
Was this the real reason she’d summoned me to her house? I’d assumed that her apology, however unwarranted, was genuine-that she’d only wanted to confess how deluded she’d been before. Now I began to wonder whether this calculating woman had played me for a sucker.
I didn’t know how to defuse the situation except with candor. “I found Ashley’s car on the night she disappeared, and I suspected something had happened to her.”
She laughed at me. “So is this some kind of mission for you? Are you trying to atone for your incompetence?”
“I need to go now. You have my sympathies, Mrs. Westergaard.”
“I don’t care if you have a guilty conscience,” she said. “You’d better stop sticking your nose into my life!”
Her threatening words chased me out of the house and up the streaming driveway to the top of the hill. It was obvious that Jill Westergaard knew how to push my buttons. The question was why she kept doing it.
Back at my Jeep, I did my best to scrape the mud off my boots with a fallen spruce branch. I replayed the conversation in my head but recalled nothing that helped explain this enigmatic woman. Ora Stevens had told me that people grieved in different ways. Maybe Jill Westergaard needed a scapegoat.
I did a U-turn and headed back to civilization. When I got home, I would abide by Sarah’s wishes and make my promised call to Kathy Frost. As I pulled onto the Parker Point Road, I passed a white pickup going the other way. Glancing in my rearview mirror, I saw its brake lights flash, as if the driver had recognized my vehicle, too. Then Stanley Snow’s truck shot forward again at a high rate of speed.
34
The fire on the Drisko property was first reported by an exhausted lineman from Central Maine Power. The electrical worker was suspended thirty feet up in the air in his bucket, repairing a balky pole-mounted transformer-a casualty of the previous week’s ice storm-when he spotted a wisp of smoke rising from a distant wooded ridge. At first, the lineman wondered if it was just someone burning brush in his yard, but as the cloud began to boil up in an oily mass, he quickly got on the radio to his dispatcher, who called in the fire to the Knox County Regional Communications Center, which, in turn, sent word out across the airwaves to the state police, the Seal Cove Volunteer Fire Department, and every other available first responder. That was how I learned about the inferno.
“Attention all units, Seal Cove,” came the call on my scanner. “Structure fire, Five Town Farm Road, time out, nine thirty-five.”
From Parker Point, I didn’t have far to drive.
I was one of the first men on the scene.
Two pickup trucks with spinning red balls clapped to their dashboards had pulled up outside the Driskos’ fence. Flames were shooting through the roof of the trailer and dense smoke poured from the vents and front door.
One of the volunteers was already fully outfitted in all his gear but was struggling to pull a scuba-type tank over his shoulders. The other man, who still had his fire pants around his ankles, kept looking down the drive, waiting for real help. I knew that most local firemen gathered at the station and rode with the town trucks, but all of the volunteers I knew kept their personal turnout gear-boots, pants, coats, gloves, and helmets-bagged in their vehicles.
The first fireman had pulled on his helmet and was plodding heavily toward the building as I leaped from my truck.
“Wait!” I shouted after him. “They have a pit bull!”
The fireman didn’t hear me. He just forged through the gap in the barbed fence. No dog rushed out to attack the intruder. Vicky wasn’t tied to her usual post. Maybe she was out back. I listened for barking, but the only sound was the crackling of the fire.
I stumbled forward to get a better view. Heat radiated down the slope, making my eyes water and smart. Peering through the smoke, I discerned the flatbed pickup, the beat-up Monte Carlo, the two ATVs.
Christ, I thought, both of the Driskos are inside there.
“Aren’t you going in?” I shouted at the other volunteer, who was still struggling awkwardly into his coat.
“I’m not certified,” he said over his shoulder.
I was startled to realize the man I was addressing was Hank Varnum. Then I remembered he lived around the corner. That’s why he originally thought the Driskos were the ones harassing him.
“You can’t let him go in there alone, Hank.”
The lanky grocer then did something nonsensical. He tugged on his Lincolnesque whiskers. “I can’t go in,” he said. “I have a beard.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The mask won’t fit on my face because of the beard. You can’t get a tight seal.”
“Who’s the guy who just went in there?”
Varnum held up a dog tag. The standard practice among volunteer firefighters is to leave a name tag, usually kept attached to the helmet, with someone outside the structure before going in. That way, the incident commander will know who’s inside the burning building.
“It’s Guffey,” he said.
“Dane Guffey?”
“We always go inside in teams of two,” said Varnum. “But Dane wouldn’t wait. He was here when I showed up.”
“I think both of the Driskos might be in there,” I said.
“Oh, damn.” He grabbed the radio from his truck and shouted into it: “Dispatch, this is Unit Fifty-one. I am ten twenty-three at Five Town Farm Road at nine forty-nine.” He coughed into his fist. “We have possible multiple ten forty-eights.”
I glared at the burning mobile home. Should I try following Guffey inside? I wondered. I figured if I crawled on my hands and knees, maybe I could help him. But the heat, even from fifty feet away, was too intense. And without a breathing apparatus, the carbon monoxide would knock me out in seconds.