The Bone Orchard: A Novel

“Thank you, but I’m fine,” I said in a tone that probably didn’t sound convincing.

She laid a hand on my forearm. “Just know that you are in my thoughts and prayers.”

“Thank you.”

“You know I’ve had cancer myself.”

“How are you doing?”

Dot shrugged. “The docs cut some things off my back—it looks like the craters on the moon—and now they’ve got me on all sorts of experimental medications. So far so good. ‘Any day aboveground is a good day,’ Earl used to say.”

There was a picture of her late husband on the wall. He had passed away a decade earlier, and had been underground a long time, but his weary hound-dog face remained a lugubrious presence at the restaurant.

I emptied two containers of cream into my coffee.

“It’s so nice to see you again, Mike,” Dot said. “We’ve been keeping tabs on you from afar.” She removed a molasses doughnut from the display case and set it on a small plate. “So what’s the story behind the beard? Are you working undercover?”

“Actually, I decided to leave the Warden Service. I’m working as a fishing guide up in Grand Lake Stream.

She appeared genuinely surprised. “I always thought you were in it for life.”

“I needed a change.”

She brought the nail of her little finger to her mouth and chewed on it. “Are you happy?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then.”

A road worker at the other end of the counter signaled for her attention, and she hurried off to attend to him. I spun around on the stool, looking for familiar faces. There was a new waitress, a thin young woman with frizzy hair and a pinched expression. Her name tag identified her as Destiny. Otherwise, the diner looked exactly the same as it had the last time I’d visited. When I thought of the hours I had spent here as a rookie warden talking up the locals, trying to gain a working knowledge of the area—finding out where the four-wheeler trails were or who might be tending a secret marijuana plot in the woods—I felt another knife stab of nostalgia.

Eventually, Dot returned. “I just realized you must be here on account of Kathy.”

“Everybody’s been talking about the shooting, I suppose,” I said.

“That’s the truth,” said the new waitress, Destiny, passing by with dirty plates balanced on her forearms. “There was a Neanderthal in here yesterday who couldn’t stop yakking about how cops can shoot anyone they please and call it self-defense.”

“We have lots of vets who come into the diner, and people know Kathy, of course,” said Dot. “What a horrible thing! It sounds like that poor soldier was in a lot of pain from his injuries. It’s too bad he couldn’t have found comfort without resorting to such desperate measures. He is in a better place now at least. God rest his soul. But I can’t imagine what Kathy and that new warden must be feeling.”

I noticed that Dot hadn’t used Dani Tate’s name. “Does she come in here much? The new warden?”

“From time to time,” Dot said. “But she’s real quiet. Not that you were a chatterbox, but she just sits at a booth, alone. Won’t even sit at the counter unless she’s here with Kathy or another officer.”

The job attracted plenty of loners, individuals who preferred their own company to that of other people. And yet one of the most important lessons I’d learned was that you couldn’t be antisocial and succeed as a warden. Too much of your success depended on creating relationships with potential informants. A good police officer of any kind needs to be a diplomat. Danielle Tate might not be a natural people person—I certainly wasn’t—but sooner or later she’d have to learn how to fake it.

“I guess I should throw my stuff in my room,” I said.

“Let me call Destiny over to work the register, and I’ll get your key,” Dot said.

I reached for my wallet to pay for the coffee and doughnut, but Dot rested a hand on my forearm again. “Mornings here haven’t been the same since you left us,” she said.

The sincerity in her voice took me aback. I had gone through life with the conviction that I could disappear at any moment and never be missed. What else had I been wrong about?

* * *

Dot handed me a key attached to a lozenge-shaped piece of plastic with the number 6 on it. The motel was located across the parking lot from the diner and consisted of a string of small cabins painted white, orange, and green.

I kept a bug-out bag in the Bronco in case I ever decided to spend the night in the woods. The hours before dawn were the best for fishing, and I’d slept in my truck on many occasions to get an early start on a stream. I pulled the waxed canvas duffel from the backseat and threw it on the bed.

It was still early in the day, but I didn’t know what to do with myself. I could have taken a drive around my old district, but I’d indulged my nostalgia enough for one day. I sat down in a chair in the curtained darkness, smelling the residual cigarette smoke in the carpet and listening to the hum of the combination heating and air-conditioning unit in the wall above my head.

When Sarah and I had lived in Sennebec, we rarely went out, at least as a couple. Over time, she’d made friends of her own, other women her age, whom she’d meet for a glass of wine in Rockland. At first, she’d invited me along on her girls’ nights, but I was usually too exhausted, and not that interested in any case, and eventually she stopped asking. It always bothered Sarah that I had no social life—that I’d based my entire identity around being a Maine game warden.

“You’re more than just your job, Mike,” she’d said to me during one of our final arguments.

“I know that,” I’d replied.

“You need to get a life!”

I wondered if Maddie Lawson had actually met Sarah for drinks in Portland after leaving Weatherby’s. If so, I could only imagine the surprise with which Sarah had received the news that I had belatedly followed her advice.

It had been a long time since I’d thought about Sarah. Even now I was having trouble seeing her clearly in my mind’s eye. The elements were all there—short blond hair, clear blue eyes, a killer smile—but they no longer came together to form a coherent memory. When I tried to imagine Sarah’s face, I kept seeing Stacey Stevens’s instead.





12



Somehow, despite having consumed a quart of coffee, I managed to fall asleep in the motel chair. It said something about the extent of my caffeine addiction that the stimulant had so little effect on me. The hum of the heater might have caused me to drift off, or maybe it was the steady rumble of tires on the wet pavement outside the window, but when I awoke, it was already late afternoon.

I got up and washed my face in the bathroom sink, and then I went back to the diner for the early bird special. I ordered the meat loaf and mashed potatoes. And another cup of coffee.

Dot had gone home, leaving the restaurant in the care of Destiny and an older woman, whom I also didn’t know. There were a few people I recognized in the booths and at the counter, and some of them even recognized me as their former warden. I tried making small talk with a plumber named Pulkinnen, who had repaired a frozen pipe for me once, but all he wanted to do was bemoan the sad state of affairs that had descended on midcoast Maine since I had departed for my posting Down East.

“The poachers are running wild around here, Mike.” He was a paunchy man with thinning sandy hair and a walrus mustache that was a darker shade of brown. He had slitted blue eyes and a broad face. He wore a pin shaped like the flag of Finland on the pocket of his blue coveralls. “Not a week goes by that I don’t hear shots in the woods after dark.”

“Have you tried talking with Warden Tate?”

He let out a whopper of a snort. “Oh, sure. She comes over when I call. She’s good about that. Writes everything down in a little notebook. But does she ever catch a poacher? No.”

“She’s still new at the job. You should cut her some slack.”

“The problem is, the poachers aren’t afraid of her. People around here knew you’d catch them if they went out night hunting. And so they went up-country or wherever to jack their deer.”

It was actually news to me that I’d been considered something of a badass. But I was glad Pulkinnen, at least, had a favorable opinion of me. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Can’t you make some calls to Augusta and tell them we need a better warden? Maybe you could get yourself transferred back here.”

“You should give Warden Tate a chance. Sometimes it takes a while to make a case the DA can take to court.”

He ran his tongue along the broom bottom of his mustache. “She won’t be around much longer anyway. Not after what happened over in Camden. I heard the dead guy’s father is a politically connected lawyer. He’s going to sue everyone involved.”

Pulkinnen’s characterization of James Gammon Sr. was in line with my own experience of the man. Even if the attorney general cleared the wardens of wrongdoing, there were ways for a vengeful attorney to inflict pain on Kathy Frost and Danielle Tate. He could hire investigators to drag skeletons out of the women’s closets, spread malicious rumors about them to his friends who ran media companies, make phone calls to bureaucrats in Augusta with the authority to derail their careers. He could do all these things and still bring a wrongful-death suit.