The Bone Orchard: A Novel

She’d thrown exactly one get-together for her district wardens during my time under her command. We’d lighted a bonfire and dragged up lawn chairs and sawn-off stumps to sit on, and everyone passed around a gallon of Absolut in honor of the Swedish Midsommar. Kathy had always impressed me as a walking contradiction: a sociable hermit. She seemed extroverted and was capable of making small talk easily enough. But she seemed to consider no one in the Warden Service to be a close confidant, not even me. The Midsommar party was the only she’d ever held here.

I tried to respect her privacy now. I didn’t open any drawers or cabinets. My prurient curiosity had certain limits.

I half hoped to come across a picture of her first and only husband, Darren Frost, about whom I knew next to nothing, other than they’d split up ages ago. I didn’t know why they’d divorced or where he lived now or what he did for work. Kathy’s mysterious ex-husband had come to stand for everything I didn’t know about my friend. There were no photographs of him on any of the walls or shelves, of course. Who keeps pictures of their exes?

I found other photos, though: Kathy playing high school and college basketball; Kathy graduating from the University of Maine, with her hale-looking blond parents in attendance; Kathy in her warden’s uniform, receiving an award; many pictures of Pluto. But none of Darren Frost.

The alcohol began dissolving the adrenaline in my bloodstream, and I found myself growing tired. Rather than waiting for the local news to come on television, I sat down at the desk in Kathy’s study, planning to turn on her computer. The machine was gone, of course. Lieutenant Soctomah had taken the computer after I’d told him she’d received death threats. The computer forensics team would need to trace every e-mail she’d received. All that remained were dusty rectangles on the desk.

Her office was a mess. There were not one but three mugs of unfinished coffee, one with a grayish scrim floating on the surface. A leaning tower of hunting and fishing magazines was one good nudge from sliding onto the floor. Soctomah had left piles of paperwork untouched, concluding that Kathy’s various personnel reports and duty logs were not the best starting points for his investigation. The vengeful veteran theory still seemed to offer the most promise.

I wondered, though. The short interval between the Gammon shooting and the sniper attack suggested the two incidents were linked, but every warden I knew had enemies, and what better time to settle an old grudge then when the detectives might be misdirected? Had anyone interviewed Danielle Tate about whether Kathy had had a dustup with one of the local dirtbags recently?

I leaned back in the squeaky desk chair and extended my feet under the desk. My toe caught a wastepaper basket that was hidden under there, overturning its contents onto the hardwood floor. I bumped my head on the sliding drawer while picking up the wadded pieces of paper.

Most of it was junk mail, opened envelopes that had contained bills, magazine-renewal cards, catalog—the usual sorts of things. But there was a crumbled sheet of legal paper that caught my eye. It was a crudely drawn sketch of a rectangle. There were no words on the page, just three X’s, each with a dotted line extending outward from it. The drawing had been done in pencil and I saw that one of the lines had been erased and redone at a slightly different angle. It looked like a schematic rendering done by a child.

There was also a neatly folded piece of paper that I couldn’t keep from opening. It was a news story that Kathy had printed out from the computer. It was dated four days earlier:

POLICE BELIEVE LYNDON, ME, WOMAN

DIED FROM FALL DOWN STAIRS

HOULTON, ME—Police say they believe a woman found dead in her Lyndon, ME, home Saturday died from a fall down her stairs.

The Major Crimes Unit suspended its investigation Sunday night after finding no evidence of a crime in the death of 67-year-old Marta Jepson.

A concerned neighbor found Jepson dead around 11:00 A.M. Sunday at the bottom of a staircase in her home on Svensson Road. Police became suspicious because of trauma to her body, a broken lamp in the living room, and items possibly missing from the home, said Aroostook County sheriff Alvin Cyr. The Sheriff’s Department called the state police Major Crimes Unit to investigate.

Authorities said Jepson died of head injuries consistent with a fall. Cyr said Jepson’s house was locked when police were called to check on her.

Jepson had last spoken to a friend by phone about 5:00 P.M. Friday, Cyr said. She apparently lived alone in her house and was home when she spoke to her friend by phone.

Cyr said investigators have found no evidence of a crime or that anyone was in her home at the time of her death. If police get additional information about her death or autopsy results indicate she did not die of an accident, police will resume an investigation at that point, Cyr said.

I wasn’t sure what to make of the story. The town of New Sweden, where Kathy had grown up, was just down the road from Lyndon. It was possible that the dead woman was someone she had known, perhaps the mother of a friend. Jepson sounded like a Scandinavian name.

The woman had died on Saturday, the day after the Gammon shooting. Was there any significance in the timing? Probably not. She was an older woman who had lived alone. She had fallen down and died.

I took the article back to Kathy’s woman cave and reread it, hoping it would open a door in my mind. I set the piece of paper on the coffee table to look at again later.

The rum might have been oily to the taste, but there was nothing wrong with its sedative properties. The nerve endings throughout my body seemed to be going numb, and my breathing was becoming shallow and more regular. My injured face and scalp stung a little less.

My mind had been lurching from crisis to crisis for more than twenty-four hours. That sort of intense focus takes a toll. I couldn’t imagine how men and women in combat managed to stay sane. I’d heard that soldiers were prescribed amphetamines. When you are under extreme stress, the first thing to go is your ability to regain perspective after traumatic events. Our brains are the tools we rely on to make sense of the world, but what happens when your brain is broken?

If you’re Jimmy Gammon, you decide to die. The first emotion I had experienced when I heard the news of his death was anger at what he had forced the wardens to do. Perhaps if I’d visited him after he came back from Bagram and seen for myself the extent of his injuries, it would have been easier to reconcile myself to his suicide. People had described Jimmy’s wounds as disfiguring; they’d said his pain was constant and unbearable. I was fairly certain that the grinning guy with whom I’d gone pheasant hunting hadn’t existed for a long time. He had died years before his body bled to death in that barn.

* * *

I was half-drunk myself when I finally stretched out on the sectional sofa in Kathy’s woman cave. I’d fetched the sleeping bag from my Bronco and rested my head on a throw pillow. Kurt was snoring so loudly, I could hear him downstairs.

I gave a thought to what Deb Davies had said: that Kurt might awaken with no memory of the previous night and might regard me as an unknown intruder. I removed her pink revolver from my jacket and tucked it under the pillow.

Over the years, the sofa fabric had become impregnated with the smell of Kathy’s dog. I found myself blinking back tears. The horror that Kathy must have experienced in those few seconds between the time Pluto was gunned down and she was shot herself must have seemed like a nightmare come true.

When I closed my eyes, I saw a mutt lying at the bottom of a brackish swimming pool. The grotesque image grew more and more vivid as I tried to fall asleep, and I felt my wakeful mind returning to a time and place I’d almost forgotten. It was a memory that had the blurred edges of a dream.





21



On my first day as a game warden, I was called upon to shoot a rabid dog. The animal had just bitten a little girl in the face. Her name was Kaylee. The dog’s name was Goofus.

I was twenty-four years old, a recent graduate of Colby College and the Maine Criminal Justice Academy. I’d just spent the previous eight weeks being taught the arcane tradecraft of my new career. I’d learned how to vanish into alder swamps to catch deer poachers, follow clues left by panicked people lost in the snow, disarm the trip wires used by marijuana growers to guard backwoods plantations. By most standards, I’d become an accomplished woodsman. In those early days of my occupation, I believed these specialized skills would automatically admit me to an ancient order of wardens—a brotherhood of trackers, detectives, and scouts. This arrogant assumption was the first of many misconceptions I would have about my job.

My reeducation began with Goofus.

It was true that being a game warden was an odd job relative to other law-enforcement specialties—we dealt with moose poachers and pirate rafters and other strange specimens of humanity. But in Maine, you never knew when you might wander into a firefight between two rival gangs of backwoods heroin dealers. That was the reason we wore bulletproof vests.

Sarah had arisen early that first day to mark the occasion. She was a gorgeous short-haired blond who was getting a master’s in education while teaching at a private school to supplement our meager incomes. She had misgivings about my new profession—secretly she hoped it was just a phase I would pass through—but she was being a good sport about it. She photographed me as I buckled on my gun belt and laced-up my L.L.Bean boots. I’d dreamed of being a Maine game warden for years. This was supposed to be the most exciting day of my life.