The Bone Orchard: A Novel

Ever since I’d decided to visit the prison, I’d flirted with the idea of driving out to Kathy’s house. I needed to speak with her for my own peace of mind, and I suspected that, despite the text she’d sent me, she might appreciate having someone to confide in who’d been through an investigation involving use of force recently.

Sitting at the diner, listening to Pulkinnen’s dire prophecies, I decided to stop waiting for an invitation.

* * *

The rain let up while I was on the road. I didn’t realize it at first because there was so much standing water. The tires of the car in front of me kept splashing my windshield, forcing me to use my wipers.

Kathy lived on Appleton Ridge, in a drafty old farmhouse that looked down a hillside at a field of blueberries. At the top of the ridge was a grove of red pines. On the other side of it was an orchard where deer came at dawn and dusk to eat the fallen apples the pickers had left behind after the harvest. Kathy called it “the bone orchard” because there was a family cemetery hidden among the roots of the trees. The mossy gravestones were so weathered, you could no longer read the names of the dead.

I turned off the rural road and onto the long driveway that led to her front door. I drove past a row of elm trees shaped like umbrellas, slowing as I approached the house, until I saw there was a dim light in the window, and I knew that Kathy was home. Her teal-colored patrol truck was parked beside her personal vehicle, a Nissan Xterra SUV. The dooryard was crowded with a game warden’s many modes of transportation: two canoes, a sea kayak, a motorboat on its trailer, a snowmobile waiting out the warm weather beneath a tarp, and a still-shiny all-terrain vehicle that had replaced the machine one of her wardens had crashed. None of these things belonged to Kathy. If she lost her job, they would all go to the sergeant who replaced her.

A dog began to bay inside the house as I came to a stop beside her truck. Kathy was the head of the division K-9 team. Most of the wardens who worked with dogs used German shepherds or Labs, but Kathy’s longtime companion was a black-and-tan coonhound named Pluto. At age twelve, he was more gray and tan than black and tan, but Kathy occasionally brought him out of retirement to search for a missing child. Pluto’s nose was legendary in the annals of the Maine Warden Service. His specialty was finding the dead, not the living; Kathy had taken him to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to search for cadavers, and the experience had left her profoundly shaken. She often talked to me about finding another puppy to train, but she never seemed to get around to it. I doubted she would buy another dog until Pluto passed away.

Even before I could climb out of the Bronco, the front door opened and Pluto came waddling down the steps on his bad hips, yowling at the intruder. Kathy remained in the doorway. I could see her lanky outline but not much more than that.

We used to have a ritual that if either of us showed up at the other’s house, the visitor was required to bring coffee. I’d forgotten all about the tradition until now. There were so many things from those days that had slipped my memory.

“Hey,” I said.

The question of how she would receive my visit got a quick answer. “What are you supposed to be? The prodigal son?”

“I was in the neighborhood.”

“Right.”

I bent down to scratch Pluto’s head between his heavy-hanging ears, but the dog kept on baying. “Actually, I was visiting a friend at the prison.”

“Now, that I can believe. Nice beard, by the way.”

I straightened up and took a step toward the open door. “Aren’t you going to invite me inside?”

“Isn’t that what vampires say?” She stepped onto the stoop and closed the door behind her. In the failing light, her face looked ashen, and she was dressed in dark colors—black jeans and a black fleece vest over a gray turtleneck—which seemed in keeping with a person in mourning. Her posture was stiff. Her hands were balled into fists. I’d forgotten how tall she was. “Why are you here, Mike?”

“I was hoping we could talk.”

“About you or about me?”

“Both.”

“No offense, but I don’t think we have that kind of relationship anymore.”

“I felt I owed you that after my mom died. You helped me get through it.”

The muscles along her mouth relaxed and she closed her eyes. “You don’t owe me anything.”

“That’s bullshit, and you know it. I thought you might want to tell me what happened at the Gammons’.”

“You know I am not allowed to do that.”

“I’m not afraid of being called to give a deposition if it goes to a civil trial.”

She ran a hand through her bobbed hair. “Did you read the interview with the Gammons in the paper today?”

“I was on the road.”

“If I’d known the kid was the son of one of the most powerful lawyers in the country, I would have let him blow his own brains out.”

Kathy had a sarcastic side, but I knew she wasn’t a coldhearted person. “You don’t mean that.”

“All right,” she said. “I would have let the Camden cops take the call.”

“You don’t mean that, either.”

She folded her arms under her breasts. “Why is it you think you know what I mean?”

“Because I know you, Kathy. You wouldn’t have shot Jimmy Gammon unless you were certain that he was going to fire his gun at you or Tate.”

“Maybe I screwed up,” she said. “Have you thought of that? It was pretty dark in that barn.”

“You wouldn’t have screwed up. You’re too good an officer.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

“I know something about use-of-force investigations. I’ve been through two of them.”

“Now we’re even.”

I’d forgotten that Kathy had shot a man when she was my age. It had happened in her first district, way up north amid the potato and broccoli fields of Aroostook County, where she’d grown up. She’d confided only a few of the details to me, but I knew it had been a domestic violence call. A three-hundred-pound brute named Jacques Decoster had been beating his wife with the metal end of his belt while their son looked on in horror. Decoster had come after Kathy with a butcher’s knife before she unloaded a .357 slug in his chest. The review board had ruled that the shooting was justified.

“The AG is going to clear you,” I said.

“If you think that’s what’s bothering me, you should send your psychologist’s license back to the dime store,” she said. “Gammon survived a tour in Afghanistan. But instead of getting killed by the f*cking Taliban, it ends up being me who shoots him.”

“He wanted to die.”

“Oh, really? You’re one hundred percent sure of that?”

“I knew him, Kathy. I’ve been to his house.”

She bit her lip, and I sensed that this came as news to her. I had never had reason to mention Jimmy Gammon to my former sergeant before.

“Did you see what they did to his face over there? His skin looked like it had melted.”

“I knew him from before he went to war. I didn’t even know that he had been wounded.”

“Then you don’t know shit, Mike.”

“I know you shouldn’t blame yourself for his actions. If he wanted to end his life, he should have done it himself. No matter how f*cked-up he was, he had no right to put you in that position.”

“We’re not suppose to stand by and let people commit suicide,” she said. “Oh, that’s right. You’ve absolved yourself of those responsibilities.”

“That’s what this is about, isn’t it? You’re pissed at me for resigning?”

Her face darkened with blood. “Of course I am! Do you know what I went through to keep you from being fired? Not just once but constantly for three years?”

“I have some sense of it.”

“I don’t think you do,” she said. “Both Major Malcomb and I made promises to the colonel that you were worth saving. We went on bended knee to the commissioner when he was looking for ways to have you shitcanned. We said, ‘Bowditch doesn’t always make the best decisions, but the kid has the heart of a lion. You wait and see. He might seem like a f*ckup now, but someday he’s going to become a legendary warden.’”

I knew that they had often argued with the brass on my behalf, but I hadn’t realized what a fight it had been.

“I didn’t ask you to do that,” I said.

“You forced us to put our own reputations on the line. And then you went and quit. The colonel and the commissioner said to us, ‘We knew this guy couldn’t hack it.’ You made us look like fools, Mike.”

“Would it help if I said I was sorry?”

“What would help is explaining why you screwed me over like that. I was pulling strings to get you transferred back to Division B. The next thing I know, you’re calling to tell me you’re quitting.”

“I didn’t quit. I resigned.”

“Call it what you want. The fact remains it was a cowardly thing to do.”

“It wasn’t cowardly,” I said. “It was just the opposite.”

“Keep telling yourself that.” She brought two fingers to her mouth and whistled sharply.