The Bone Orchard: A Novel

At nine sharp, I made my way to the door, my shoulders hunched against the rain. To my dismay, the bathroom in the lobby had an OUT OF ORDER sign taped to the door. The guard behind the armored admissions desk was a stern-faced man with the elongated torso of a weasel. He wore reading glasses balanced at the tip of his pointed nose. His nameplate said TOLMAN.

“I’m here to see William Cronk.”

He looked me up and down, and I realized how sketchy I must appear to someone who judged a person’s moral character by the cleanliness of his clothes or the length of his hair. Tolman pushed a clipboard at me through a slot. There was a pen attached to it by a little chain. “You need to fill out a visitor application.”

“I already did. My name’s Michael Bowditch. I should be in your system.”

He grunted and swiveled his chair around to a computer terminal. “Spell your name, please.”

I did so, trying to ignore the swelling pressure in my bladder. What had made me drink an entire thermos of coffee?

After a minute, the guard stared at me over his reading glasses. “You’ll need to schedule an appointment.”

“I thought I could just walk in if my name was on the list.”

“That doesn’t apply to prisoners in the SMU.”

“Wait,” I said. “Billy’s in the Supermax?”

“He’s in the Special Management Unit.”

It was the same thing. “Since when?” I asked.

“I can’t disclose that information.”

“Why was he moved from Medium Custody?”

“I can’t disclose that information.”

I could only guess what my hot-tempered friend had done to earn a trip to solitary confinement. If his actions were deemed heinous enough by the Knox County district attorney, he might be facing a criminal charge that would result in a longer sentence. Aimee would be out for blood when she heard the news.

“I’d like to make an appointment to see him,” I said.

Tolman removed his glasses and set them on the desk. “You need to do that by phone.”

“But I’m right here.”

“We have rules here, and they apply to everyone.” He handed me a card with a phone number on it.

“Who’s going to answer this number when I call?”

He ran his tongue along his lower lip. “I will.”

“But you won’t just schedule the appointment for me now—in person?”

“We have rules,” he said again.

I removed the cell from the inside pocket of my rain jacket and used my thumb to tap in the number on the card. The phone on the desk beside Tolman rang loudly, and a light flashed on top of it. He let it ring for a long time.

Finally, he picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“I’d like to make an appointment to visit an inmate in the SMU.” I stared straight into his eyes.

“Don’t be a wiseass,” he said, actually speaking into the receiver, as if I were miles away.

“I’m just following the rules.”

A woman with two loud young children came bustling in through the door behind me, followed by an embarrassed-looking older couple, both dressed in dark colors, probably there to see their misbegotten son. Visiting hours were fully under way at the prison.

Tolman continued to speak into the phone, so his voice came to me in stereo. “Prisoners assigned to the Special Management Unit are permitted a single one-hour visit per week.”

I hung up my cell and addressed him over the desk. “Has Billy Cronk received his visitor this week?”

“No.” He placed the receiver back down on the cradle.

“Then can I please schedule an appointment to see him?”

“Visitors are required to give twenty-four notice.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

* * *

I drove halfway down the long wooded drive that connected the prison with Route 97 and then hopped out to relieve myself behind a tree. The Department of Corrections probably had hidden cameras in every bush within a mile of the jail, but I didn’t care. Let them arrest me for public urination.

I was deeply worried for Billy. I’d seen the inside of the Supermax and knew something of its horrors.

An inmate in the Special Management Unit spent twenty-three hours a day in solitary confinement, living in a room measuring six and a half feet by fourteen. For the remaining hour, he might be given exercise in a dog run outdoors (provided the weather was good, which it rarely was). The lights in his cell burned brightly twenty-four hours a day. All food in the unit was served cold. Guards slid the tray through a slot in a door that might have been contaminated by the blood, feces, and urine of other inmates. Prisoners had no access to computers, and all radios and televisions were prohibited. Instead of a toothbrush, the inmate was given a plastic nub to use on his fingertip. Billy would get to shower no more than three times per week.

There were men in the Maine State Prison who deserved death, in my opinion, but execution would have been a kindness compared to what inmates endured every day inside the Supermax. The facility existed not so much to protect society from dangerous individuals or even to punish them in the conventional sense of denying free men their liberty; instead, it had seemingly been designed to drive convicted criminals slowly insane. Billy Cronk had fought for his country in foreign lands with codes of justice Americans considered medieval. After he’d survived Iraq and Afghanistan, it enraged me to think that the first time he’d experienced torture was now, after he’d returned home.

I had felt anxious about seeing Billy before. Now I couldn’t imagine leaving the area without making sure my friend was OK.





11



I called my boss from the parking lot outside the Square Deal Diner and Motel.

“I’m not going to be available for a couple of days,” I told Jeff Jordan.

Technically speaking, Jeff wasn’t my employer. As a Registered Maine Guide, I was the sole proprietor of my own little business. Jeff hired out twenty or so local guides at a time, each of whom had a different skill set. Some were masterful entertainers who could spin stories to distract clients when the bass refused to bite. Others had a sixth sense for finding birds to shoot, even during “bad grouse” years, when the hens had been flooded off their nests. A few guides, like me, earned our two hundred dollars a day by taking on whatever was thrown at us—last-minute jobs, bored teenagers, or world-class a*sholes who wouldn’t be satisfied if they caught twenty salmon.

“I don’t have work for you anyway,” he said. “Two more parties canceled on me this morning. They saw the long-range forecast and backed out of their reservations. I swear, sometimes I think the Weather Channel is intent upon destroying my business.”

“What about the IRS?” I knew Jeff had no great love for the agency that had just audited him.

“They’re in cahoots with the Weather Channel.”

“I’ll let you know my availability when I’m back.”

“Stay dry.”

The parking lot of the Square Deal was as packed as ever. A celebrity chef on the Food Network had decided it exemplified all the best qualities of a classic New England diner, and now the place was routinely overrun with tourists. I noticed a specialty license plate from Maryland with the Ducks Unlimited logo.

I raised the hood of my raincoat over my ears and prepared myself to venture inside. When I’d been a game warden in the district, I had stopped at the Square Deal nearly every day. The owner, an apple-faced woman named Dot Libby, would set a molasses doughnut on a plate and pour a cup of coffee the second she saw my patrol truck pull up outside the window.

The last I’d heard, Dot was receiving chemotherapy for skin cancer. She could conceivably have passed away in the interim, and the news might have eluded me. It was sobering to realize that another person who had been a regular fixture in my life could have died without my knowing about it.

When I walked inside the door, it was as if I’d never left. The crowd at the Square Deal tended toward the gray-haired and the blue-collared: older couples who considered a meal at the diner to be an integral routine in their married life, plus a regular gang of lobstermen, clammers, builders, linemen, and road workers. I recognized several of the weathered faces at the counter, and there was Dot behind the register, ringing up a bill, looking thinner than I’d ever seen before, but not unhealthy.

“Well, as I live and breathe,” she said.

“Hi, Dot.”

She came around the register and gave me a big soft hug. She had round cheeks that were pimple-red with rosacea and wrinkles around her eyes from a lifetime of laughing. She gripped my shoulders and appraised me from arm’s length. “Look how hairy you are!”

“I need to get it cut.”

“What are you doing back in town?”

“Just passing through.” Under the circumstances, I decided not to mention my business with Billy at the Supermax. “I was hoping to get a room at the motel for the night. Do you have any vacancies?”

“We’ll always have a room for you, Mike.” She reached for the coffeepot and filled the ceramic mug in front of me. When she looked up again, there was an expression of concern in her eyes. “I was so sad to hear about your mom. Are you doing all right?”

The Square Deal had always been the hub of gossip around Sennebec, but I was surprised that word of my mother had reached Dot. I had been gone from the area for more than eighteen months. I figured Kathy must have told her.