The Bone Orchard: A Novel

Pluto spun around and trotted back to her. She turned her broad back to me and climbed the stairs to the door and opened it without ever looking in my direction.

“That’s it, then?” I called after her.

She paused without facing me and said, “Do you know who you look like with the beard and the long hair? Your old man. I’m sure he would be proud.”

She stepped inside the house and closed the door.





13



Kathy’s parting shot about my looking like my father hurt as much as she’d intended it to. My father had been a notorious poacher of deer, a wrecker of barrooms, and a seducer of other men’s women. Then, in the last weeks of his life, he’d become something worse. Even before the bitter end, he’d been the kind of violent and self-dealing man I’d pledged never to become.

It’s just a beard, I wanted to yell at the closed door. But what would be the point?

Even though we were approaching the longest days of the year, the low-hanging clouds made it seem later than it was. I stood beside the open door of my Bronco, staring at the house and trying to decide if I should knock. But the conversation was going to continue only when—and if—Kathy decided it should continue.

I climbed behind the wheel and restarted the engine. I reached my right arm across the passenger seat headrest so I could back out of the dooryard without hitting one of Kathy’s sugar maples. Then I headed back to the motel.

As I passed the dented mailbox at the end of the drive, I glanced into the rearview mirror and saw headlights in the pine grove at the top of the ridge. There was a road that entered the orchard from the other side, and Kathy had told me that she occasionally chased teenagers out of the parking lot after dark. Most of the local kids knew that there were better spots to toke up and get laid than in the backyard of a law-enforcement officer, but word must not have reached the dumbbells in that vehicle. Given the foul mood Kathy was in, I feared for the teens’ safety if she spotted those lights out her bedroom window.

An invisible mosquito had found its way inside the vehicle when I’d opened the door; I could hear it buzzing around my head. I waved my hand ineffectually in the air and waited for the mosquito to land and draw blood. It used to be that insect bites were just annoyances, the price you paid in Maine for the salt air and blooming lilacs, but that was before the creeping tropics unleashed their pestilences upon us: West Nile virus and eastern equine encephalitis. I knew wardens who’d never used bug dope in their lives—seasoned woodsmen who’d endured thousands of bites over their careers—who now slathered themselves in Deet. These days, you never knew what little thing might get you.

I’d been on the road for ten minutes when my cell phone vibrated in my pants pocket. Once again I had a momentary illusion that it was my mother calling from the afterlife. I reached into my jeans, trying not to swerve into a telephone pole, and looked at the lighted screen. It was Kathy’s number.

I pulled over to the side of the road and put the truck into park.

“I shouldn’t have called you a coward,” she said.

“It’s all right. I understand.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m not still mad at you. But this has been a pretty crappy week.”

“The crappiest.”

“You know I’ve been getting hate mail? Not just the usual anonymous stuff. I’ve gotten signed letters from guys who served in the Guard with Gammon, and from other vets, too. My e-mail address must have gotten posted to some military bulletin board. Do you know what that’s like, having people you admire hate your guts? My own brother Kurt is a Vietnam vet.”

“It must be hard.”

“Don’t patronize me, Mike. It was a rhetorical question. I just keep thinking…”

I waited. “What?”

“Dani Tate is a good kid. She’s going to make a decent warden when she grows up. I’ve never had a rookie who’s as gung ho about the job as she is.”

I felt that she was making an unflattering comparison. “What about me?”

“You thought about everything too much. It wasn’t enough for you just to enforce a f*cking rule; you had to second-guess the people who wrote it. Tate does what she’s told. I think she’s memorized every regulation in the book.”

I had met Dani Tate on only a handful of occasions, and she hadn’t left me with a strong impression, other than that she seemed a lot younger than me despite there being only four years between us in age.

“How is she doing?” I asked.

“The union   lawyer says we’re not supposed to communicate. They don’t want us getting our stories straight. She’s not the most talkative person in the world anyway. Being in a truck with her on patrol is like being with my dog, conversationally speaking.”

That had been my experience with Tate as well. When I’d tried to make small talk, I’d gotten a blank stare, which made me think she disapproved of me. At the time, I figured she’d heard about my misadventures and been brainwashed by the higher-ups into seeing me as unworthy to wear the red dress jacket of a Maine warden. Now I wondered if she’d just had nothing to say.

“The thing is, it should never have happened,” Kathy said.

“You can’t think that way.”

“No,” she said. “I mean it wouldn’t have gone down the way it did if you had been there. Not just because you knew Gammon. It just wouldn’t have happened at all. That’s why I’m so pissed at you right now. I needed you that night, and where the f*ck were you?”

House-sitting for a multimillionaire, studying for a law school exam I’d never take, nursing a bottle of cheap whiskey—none of the answers I had to offer was worth a damn. I was trying to collect a few sentences that didn’t sound pathetic, when somewhere in the background, Pluto let loose with both lungs.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Probably a raccoon outside. Give me a minute, and I’ll call you back.”

I sat in the Bronco, listening to the engine belts whir while traffic passed in both directions along the country road. A few minutes passed without the phone ringing, and I glanced at my watch. I turned off the engine to save gas. The mosquito made its presence known again around my ears. I decided to give Kathy another two minutes.

The headlights from the passing cars would light up the inside of the cab for several seconds and then everything would fade again into darkness.

The cell phone rested in my open hand. I brought up her number from the favorites menu and tapped the button. The phone rang for half a minute and then went to voice mail.

“Kathy? It’s Mike again. Give me a ring.”

The mosquito finally landed on my neck. I didn’t feel it at first, then reflexively I brought my hand up fast, dropping the phone to the floor. When I looked at my palm, there was a black stain on my life line that I knew was blood.

I had seen lights in the orchard above Kathy’s house and had assumed it was just teenagers parking. What if it wasn’t?

“You know I’ve been getting hate mail?” Kathy had said. “I’ve gotten signed letters from guys who served in the Guard with Gammon, and from other veterans, too.”

I had to unbuckle my shoulder belt to retrieve the cell phone from where it had landed on the floor mat. I left a message: “I’m headed back your way, Kathy. I’ll be there in ten minutes or so.”

I buckled myself in and restarted the engine, then pulled an abrupt U-turn in the road in front of a speeding pickup truck. He was going fast, but I was going faster.

* * *

The road to Kathy’s house zigzagged up the side of the ridge through the blueberry barrens. Tumbled stone walls ran along the edges of the asphalt. I tried not to crash into them as I cornered the Bronco.

As I turned into the driveway, I leaned forward against the shoulder belt and saw the lights of the farmhouse on the hillside above me. Seeing the homey glow made me relax for a few seconds. There was something reassuring about the sight of the illuminated windows. Then I realized that one of the bright shapes I was looking at was a wide-open door.

I eased my foot off the gas pedal. The truck slowed to a crawl as I approached Kathy’s dooryard. The high beams searched ahead of me into the gathering darkness.

There was a black shape lying on the flattened grass where I had parked my vehicle a few minutes earlier. At first, I thought it was a bunched-up blanket or discarded coat. I braked hard as the headlights brought the object into view.

It was Pluto. He was lying in a pool of blood.

I shoved the shift into park with my right hand and reached for the door handle with my left. That was when the windshield exploded.

Everything happened in an instant. Broken glass filled the air. I felt the airborne shards tear at the side of my face and neck. Simultaneously, I heard the crash of the shattering windshield and the bang of a gun. Reflexively, I ducked down behind the steering wheel and dash.

My cheekbone stung. I clapped a hand to the side of my face, and it came away red with blood and glistening with powdered glass. The entire passenger side of the Bronco was coated with blue shards. The windshield was entirely gone except for a webbed section directly in front of me.

The second blast tore the rest of the windshield away.

This time I heard the distinctive pinging of shotgun pellets. Atomized glass rained down on my right arm. I had pulled the flap of my raincoat over my head to protect myself, the way a frightened child hides under a blanket during a thunderstorm.