The Bone Orchard: A Novel

“Hey, Bowditch,” DiPietro whispered, waving me away from the major and the sergeant. A few other wardens joined us in a corner. “What happened out there? What did you see?”

I was no longer a warden and didn’t feel bound to obey the major’s order to refrain from voicing my opinions. “The guy was in the blueberry barrens above the house. I think he’d been waiting in that pine grove along the ridgetop, waiting for dark, and then he went down the hill. I don’t know if he was planning on setting up there, or if Pluto’s barking made him stop, but he had a clear shot at the steps when Kathy came out. And then when Kathy came out onto the steps, he shot her in the side. I don’t know how she managed to crawl back inside, but she did. That’s when I pulled up, and he took a couple of shots at my truck.”

“What happened?”

“Shattered the windshield. I had my Walther in the glove compartment and managed to squeeze off a few rounds.”

“You didn’t hit anything?” DiPietro asked.

“I never even saw muzzle flashes. But my shots must have been enough to spook him, because he took off. There was blood on the steps. I followed the trail into the house, and that’s when I found her.”

“How did she look? Tell the truth.”

The image of Kathy lying in the hallway with blood pooling away from her like spreading red wings flashed through my mind. “Not good.”

“Hey, Bowditch, I have a question.”

I turned around at the sound of the coarse female voice and found myself looking down into the fierce gray eyes of Danielle Tate.





17



Warden Dani Tate was wearing carpenter’s pants and a loose flannel shirt that made her body look like that of a short, stocky man. She hadn’t bothered to comb her straw-colored hair. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her in civilian clothes before.

Kathy Frost had been a trailblazer in the Maine Warden Service back when it was arguably the most chauvinistic agency in state government. Yet she still showed moments of vulnerability that I associated, rightly or wrongly, with being a woman. The same could not be said of Danielle Tate. She had a gruff voice, and she always stood with her legs braced as if to steady herself against a heavy wind. Maybe she was insecure about her gender and felt a need to overcompensate for it by projecting an outsized machismo. The other alternative was that Danielle Tate was a genuine hard-ass.

There were spots of red on her cheeks that looked like they’d be hot to the touch. “I want to know what you were doing at the sergeant’s house. Why were you even there in the first place?”

“I’d gone over there to apologize,” I said.

“For what?”

“For not being there the night of the Gammon shooting.”

“Because he wouldn’t have pulled a shotgun if you had been there instead of me?” she said. “You think I f*cked up somehow.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You’re not even a warden anymore, so I don’t know who you are to judge me.”

Kathy herself had said Jimmy Gammon would still be alive if I had been present that night. But just because Dani Tate wanted to throw a haymaker at me didn’t mean I needed to throw one back.

“I’m not judging you, Tate.”

“Go f*ck yourself.”

She turned her square shoulders and pushed past David DiPietro. She crossed the room, until she was standing toe-to-toe with Major Malcomb, interrogating him about Kathy’s condition. I had to hand it to Dani Tate. She might be five-four and a rookie, I thought but she doesn’t seem intimidated by anyone.

“So, Bowditch,” DiPietro said, “how’s civilian life treating you?”

Earlier, he and the others had been chummy, but as I looked around the little circle, I sensed a sudden chill. With everything that had happened, my former colleagues had momentarily forgotten that I had left their fraternity. Dani Tate had reminded them of that fact.

I tried to break the tension with a joke. “If I’m still getting shot at, it doesn’t feel any different from when I was a warden.”

None of them laughed. After a minute, they all wandered off, leaving me alone in the corner. I decided to go to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee.

* * *

I was dreaming about Stacey. We were picking blueberries in a field on a glorious summer day. She was wearing tight jeans and a sleeveless white T-shirt that clung to her breasts and abdomen, and she was laughing as I had never seen her laugh before. She would pick a blueberry and pop it in her mouth or send it flying playfully at my head. There were blue stains on her lips and fingers.

This isn’t real. This is just a dream, I thought.

At first I didn’t mind because it was such a happy, sexy dream, but after a while I found myself growing nervous. There were trees at the edges of the blueberry barrens. The thought came to me that someone dangerous might be watching us. I was afraid to look away from her in case I turned back and she was gone.

Somewhere in the distance behind me, I heard an echoing gunshot. Reflexively, I turned my head.

A hand was shaking me by the shoulder. “Michael?”

The Reverend Deb Davies was bending over the booth in the cafeteria where I’d fallen asleep.

“What time is it?”

“Three o’clock.”

I sat upright. “A.M. or P.M.?”

“P.M.”

I couldn’t remember falling asleep. I had gotten coffee and a plastic-wrapped sandwich, then wandered around for a while before checking in on Kathy’s condition with the wardens. The last I’d heard, she’d still been in surgery. I must have returned for another cup of coffee.

I barely dared to ask the question. “Kathy?”

“The doctors are calling her condition serious but stable. They’ve put her in the SCU.”

“Can I see her?”

“Not yet.” The chair opposite me was empty, and she sat down in it. Behind those blue-framed glasses her eyes looked puffy. “The major has sent the others home. He left Ouelette as the family liaison officer and to organize a series of rotating vigils, so there will always be wardens outside her door. Malcomb told me you got a ride down here in an ambulance. I thought I might give you a lift somewhere. Where would you like me to take you?”

My duffel bag of clean clothes was on the bed at the Square Deal Motel. My shot-up Bronco was, presumably, still in the dooryard outside Kathy’s farmhouse. Everything else I owned was stashed in cardboard boxes in Elizabeth Morse’s guest cabin.

“I’m going to wait here to see Kathy,” I said.

“She hasn’t regained consciousness. It might be days before she does.”

“Thanks, but I’d prefer to wait.”

“I think some people in this room might appreciate it if you took a shower.”

I couldn’t resist turning my nose to my armpit. The experience was not pleasant. “Are you sure you want me in your car?”

“God calls upon all of us to make sacrifices.”

“I don’t want to leave Kathy again.”

“That’s understandable, but you need to take care of yourself, too.”

I followed Deb Davies to the hospital garage, a cold, cavernous space that made me button up Soctomah’s windbreaker. It felt weird walking around in public with POLICE emblazoned on my back, looking as battered as I did. It must have seemed to the people we passed that a homeless man had beaten up a cop and stolen his jacket.

Portland is an ocean city, and there was a fog hanging in the air that carried with it the briny smell of the sea. The hospital complex sits atop a steep hill called the Western Promenade. On clear days, you can see the summit of Mount Washington, ninety miles away in New Hampshire. But on this afternoon, all I could see were the smeared lights of cars moving along the misty streets below.

Davies drove a lemon yellow Volkswagen Beetle with a vanity license plate reading REVDD. There was a flower vase inset in the dashboard. She had placed a cutting from a lilac bush in it, and the vehicle was filled with the blossom’s rich perfume.

She exited the garage and turned in the direction of the expressway. We passed a series of fast-food restaurants and tire dealerships whose neon signs were blurry and hard to read in the fog. She pressed the gas pedal hard to accelerate into the speeding northbound traffic. For a second, I worried that the Beetle would be flattened like a bug against the grille of the eighteen-wheeler that came racing up behind us. The trucker let us know what he thought of her driving by blasting his air horn.

“So where am I taking you?” Davies asked, as if she hadn’t nearly killed us both.

I needed a shower and a hot meal, but without a vehicle, I was effectively stranded. At the very least, I knew the Bronco required a new windshield. I hadn’t checked to see what other damage the shotgun pellets had inflicted on my prized possession.

“Kathy Frost’s house,” I said. “My truck is there.”

“So, I’m curious about your decision to leave the Warden Service,” Davies said, “but I don’t want to pry.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Why did you leave the Warden Service?”

I hadn’t had a real conversation with the chaplain in a couple of years. I’d forgotten she didn’t have the same boundaries as other people. My mother had raised me as a Catholic, and the priests I’d known had been characterized by their aloof disinterest in my spiritual condition. They had waited, sometimes with visible boredom, to hear my acts of contrition. Deb Davies’s pastoral approach seemed to be to aggressively pull confessions out of you.