The Bone Orchard: A Novel

Deputy Morrison identified himself as a police officer and shouted at me to stand clear. I have no memory of him doing so. Evidently, it took me quite a long time to respond. Not knowing whether I was the attacker, Morrison considered shooting me. He would have been justified if he had, given my gore-splattered appearance and refusal to comply with a direct order. For all he knew, I was a homicidal madman still at work snuffing out a human life.

But something stayed his hand. Deputy Morrison had been with the Knox County Sheriff’s Department for ten years, and he had been the first officer to respond to many horrific events: babies dropped to their deaths by drunken fathers, car crashes in which not one of the unbuckled teenagers packed inside the station wagon had survived, boyfriends standing like exhausted boxers over the women they had just beaten to death. He had seen violence in all its shapes and sizes. When he looked upon my gore-spattered body, he might have reasonably concluded that I was the assailant. Instead, he chose to interpret the uncertain evidence of his eyes and ears with caution and compassion. He heard my sobbing and decided that I was also a victim of whatever shocking thing had just happened.

Morrison let his arm fall by his side and padded carefully up the steps to avoid the blood.

“Sir?” he said in a soft voice. “Sir?”

I moved my head. One eye was squeezed shut to keep out the blood; the other was bright with tears.

“Sir, I am a police officer,” Morrison said. “There are paramedics out in the yard. We’re here to help you. You and Warden Frost. Will you let us do that?”

“She’s been shot,” I said, my voice scarcely more than a mumble. “She’s lost a lot of blood.”

“Is she still alive?”

“I think so.”

“Then let me call in the EMTs so they can take it from here.”

“I can’t take my hand away. I need to apply pressure to the wound.”

“OK,” Morrison said. “You keep doing that while I get the EMTs.”

He turned and waved in the paramedics, a man and a woman, dressed identically in white shirts, tan slacks, and blue jackets with medical-looking insignias on the front. They were both wearing latex gloves and carrying boxes with lifesaving equipment. The man gripped my arm by the wrist and replaced my hand—the one I was using to clamp the blood-soaked shirt to Kathy’s side—with his own.

“Sir?” the female EMT said. “Can you tell me your name?”

“Mike.”

“Were you shot, too, Mike?”

“Yeah. But I’m OK.”

“I don’t think you are,” she said.

* * *

There is a period when you awake from a particularly vivid dream and your mind is afloat between sleep and consciousness. You’re not sure what is real and what is imagined. You might have memories of the dream that are so detailed and persuasive, you can’t believe they were only mirages. In those same moments, the physical world that you are reentering can seem unsettling and out of focus, everything blurred around the edges, as if it is not to be fully trusted, either.

My experience of the hour after I discovered Kathy’s body was like that. I place greater faith in what Skip Morrison told me about that time period than I do in my own recollections.

The first trustworthy memory I have is of sitting alone in the back of the ambulance with a blanket wrapped around my naked and shivering shoulders, pressing an enormous cotton bandage against the side of my head because the EMTs were in the house, doing everything in their power to save the life of my former sergeant. I must have said something to Skip about the shots coming from the direction of the pine grove, because he was gone, too, standing guard outside the farmhouse until other units could respond.

The lights inside the ambulance were as bright as those on a movie set. I was sitting on a gray vinyl seat opposite the rectangular place where the stretcher would be secured for the ride to the hospital. But the stretcher was not there. The EMTs had rolled it off the vehicle and taken it into the house. The ambulance door was open, and the overhead lights were drawing swarms of moths and mayflies inside the vehicle.

One of them landed on my wet knee. It was an Ephemerella subvaria. I hadn’t realized that Hendricksons were hatching. Soon all the guides in Grand Lake Stream would be swapping out their fly boxes.

I was a fishing guide now, no longer a warden.

And Kathy had been shot. The idea was having trouble taking hold. I raised my free hand, red and tacky with blood, to my eyes, and still I couldn’t accept it as reality. Then I remembered the peculiar grayness of Kathy’s face, and I had to clench my teeth together to keep from vomiting. I expected the EMTs to return at any moment and tell me that my friend was dead.

“Bowditch?”

A man in a warden’s uniform was standing in the lighted aura of the ambulance door. Even through my tears, I saw the major’s oak leaf on his collar. He was in his late fifties and in extraordinary physical condition: flat-stomached, back straight as a fence post, with oversize forearms like Popeye the Sailor Man.

“How are you doing?”

“Some glass hit me when the guy shot out my windshield. How is Kathy?”

“A LifeFlight helicopter is on the way.”

When the first responders call in a medevac team, you know everything’s gone to shit. As a warden, I’d been required to train each year in emergency medicine. I knew that the EMTs would be doing everything possible to stabilize Kathy for the chopper ride. They would be applying clotting agents and pressure bandages to her wounds. They would have jammed an IV needle into her arm to replace some of the blood that she had lost. A woman’s body Kathy’s size holds eight pints of blood. If she’d lost 40 percent of that—three to four pints—she would probably die. How much had I seen spilling across the floor?

“I want to see her.”

I stood up and then found my head going empty. The next thing I knew, I was sitting down again.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said the major.

When I’d first become a game warden, Timothy Malcomb had been my division lieutenant, but he’d recently received a promotion after the retirement of the service’s second in command. His former job was still vacant. I’d been hoping that Kathy might apply for it. If anyone deserved to be rewarded for years of dedication, it was my former sergeant. But now she lay at the gates of death.

“Someone needs to call her parents,” I said. “They live in New Sweden, in Aroostook County.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

Malcomb was famous, or infamous, for his lack of expression. In my time, I’d heard him compared to a Roman statue, a cigar store Indian, and a wax museum replica. But in this awful moment, his agony was engraved upon his face. Like me, he cared deeply for Kathy Frost, although his relation to her was different from mine. He had been her mentor, just as she had been mine.

“Did you get a look at the shooter?” he asked.

“No,” I said, trying to gather my wits. “I think he was hiding in the blueberry bushes between the house and the trees. He would have had to come down from the top of the ridge to get a clear shot at the front of the house. He was probably hoping to get closer, but Kathy let Pluto out.” In my mind’s eye, I saw the hound lying dead in the grass and felt a surge of acid coming back up my throat. “Pluto must have been barking, and when Kathy came outside to check on him, the shooter fired from the bushes and caught her broadside.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t pursue her into the house.”

“He must have seen my headlights approaching,” I said. “From the hillside, you can see down to the bottom of the valley. He didn’t want any witnesses.”

“You saved her life, Bowditch.”

“For now.”

I heard car doors slamming and men’s voices shouting and, over it all, the unmistakable chittering of a distant helicopter. The noise got louder and louder, until I could make out the distinctive sounds of the two rotors over the airplanelike roar of its engine. The LifeFlight chopper was landing in the leafy blueberry barrens below the farmhouse. Without a word, the major stepped out of view around the ambulance door.

The bandage made a sticky sound as I peeled it away from my blood-matted head. There were red polka dots all over the batting, and a few hairs I’d torn loose. With my fingertips, I felt my injured cheek and removed a tiny shard of glass that had been driven into the flesh. Exposed to the open air, the wounds began to smart and bleed again.

Kathy’s blood had been dark red, not bright red. It had pumped from the wounds when she breathed, rather than spurted through my fingers. She was bleeding internally, but there was a chance that the shotgun pellets had missed the major organs and arteries and had severed veins instead.

I pushed myself to a standing position and grabbed the edge of the compartment over my head. My head went woozy, and I thought I might faint, but after wobbling like a toddler for the better part of a minute, I felt my head clear and strength returning to my legs. I threw the blanket off my shoulders and stepped carefully down onto the packed gravel of the driveway. A misty rain was starting to fall again.

The helicopter had landed on a flat patch of land to my right. The chopper was white and green, with gold swooshes along the side. The crew wore matching green jumpsuits. With all the rain and fog, it was a miracle LifeFlight had been given clearance to take off. Leaning against the side of the ambulance, I watched as a mob of paramedics, cops, and wardens carried the litter out of the house and across the field to the waiting helicopter.