The Bone Orchard: A Novel

I stuck the keys in my pants pocket and was turning back to the house, when I looked down the drive and noticed that Kathy had a plastic mailbox where she received the morning newspaper. I wandered down the hill to see if the deliveryman had arrived. When I opened the box, I discovered the previous two editions.

The older copy had nothing about Kathy’s shooting, since it had happened only hours after the paper went to press. It did have a story on the front page about Jimmy Gammon, though.

TRAGEDY FOLLOWED GUARDSMAN FROM AFGHANISTAN HOME TO MAINE

They’d found a different picture of Jimmy for this one. It showed him posing like a bodybuilder with snow-covered mountains in the distance. The caption identified the other men in the picture as Sgt. Angelo Donato, of Thomaston, and Spc. Ethan Smith, of Presque Isle.

Donato, I recognized from the televised clip I’d seen on the news. He was wearing a crew cut but hadn’t yet grown the debonair goatee he had sported recently on TV. Smith was a hulking dude who looked like he could bench-press a dairy cow.

This morning’s edition had the story about Kathy.

GAME WARDEN SERGEANT SERIOUSLY INJURED IN SHOOTING

The editors had used the formal portrait of Kathy provided by the Warden Service. She was dressed in the unique dress uniform Maine game wardens wear: a red wool jacket, black leather bandolier, and olive green fedora. The retro outfit had the effect of making her look older and more mannish than she did in person.

Halfway up the driveway, I heard a car approaching along the road and then the single bleat of a pursuit siren going off. It was a silver-and-blue Knox County sheriff’s cruiser. The Charger rolled to a stop, and Skip Morrison hung his head out the window.

“Special delivery for Bowditch.”

He reached across his body and held out the duffel bag of clean clothes he’d retrieved from my room at the Square Deal.

I took the bag from him. “Thanks, man.”

“How’s life on the farm?”

“Eklund’s inside getting hammered again. But I took his keys, so it’s not like he’s going anywhere.”

Morrison pointed at my blasted Bronco. “What about you? You need a lift today?”

“Not unless you’re headed down to Portland.”

“We only provide taxi service to Knox County.”

“Oh, well.” I hefted the duffel. “Thanks for getting this, Skip. I owe you one.”

“I’ve got something else for you, too.” In his hand appeared the three twenty-dollar bills I’d given him to pay my motel tab. “I told you Dot wouldn’t take your money, dude.”





23



When I returned to the kitchen, I found Kurt stuffing paper napkins under one of the legs of the table in an attempt to rebalance it. He sat down in his squeaky chair and pressed his scabrous elbows on the surface. Nothing moved. He smiled at me with his long, almost equine teeth.

“Success,” he said.

I put the newspapers down on the tabletop.

“In case you’re interested in reading what happened to your sister,” I said, making no effort to be courteous.

He poured the rest of the amaretto into his coffee cup. “You really think I don’t want to see her?”

“Based on the evidence in front of me, that would be an accurate conclusion.”

“What if I told you I was bad luck? Not just bad luck but the worst luck. Cursed, snake-bit, and fundamentally f*cked is what I am.”

At certain dark hours, I occasionally viewed my life as the proverbial sequence of unfortunate events. But I didn’t ascribe my misadventures to any occult forces. Most of the scrapes I’d gotten into had been the result of happenstance or my own piss-poor judgment. Then again, I wasn’t an active alcoholic on the lam from his own conscience, so I had no need of supernatural explanations.

“You think that if you go visit Kathy, your bad luck is going to rub off on her?” I said.

He scratched at a flaky red elbow with fingernails overdue for a trim. “The best thing I can do for her is to stay away. It’s no coincidence all this shit happened after I moved in.”

Had this been what Kurt meant when he’d said the shooting was all his fault? Did he really think that by coming to live with his sister, he had infected her with some sort of bad juju?

“I’d say that sounds like another lame excuse,” I said.

“Hang out with me long enough and see what happens. Don’t be surprised if your car crashes off a bridge or you fall down a well.”

“Maybe your luck would improve if you eased up on the sauce,” I said.

“I’d been sober seven months when the docs told me I had cirrhosis. That’s another reason I hate hospitals.”

A rotting liver would explain the orange-yellow complexion.

“That must have been a tough diagnosis,” I said. “You could still ease up.”

“If you had six months to live, what would you do with it?”

“Is that how long they gave you?”

“Six months to a year.”

I leaned against the soapstone sink and listened to the breeze blowing through the cracked window behind me. “I don’t know what I would do in your situation.”

“Then maybe you can cut me some f*cking slack.”

He glanced at the newspaper in front of him, smoothing the pages out across the tabletop, and began to read the story about his sister.

Every time I thought I’d gotten a handle on who Kurt Eklund was, he’d do or say something to slip from my grasp. He was a miserable mess of a person who deserved understanding or, at least, compassion. No, he was a cruel and manipulative a*shole with no regard for others. I couldn’t imagine how Kathy and her family had dealt with this mercurial man over the years, but I understood why she had barely mentioned him.

A phone began to ring somewhere down the hall. The tone sounded like my cell. I reached into my pocket, but it wasn’t there.

I followed the noise into the woman cave. My mobile had fallen into a dusty crack between the sofa cushions.

“Hello?”

“Where the heck are you? Billy said you blew him off.”

“Aimee?”

With everything that had happened since I’d arrived on the Midcoast, I had completely forgotten about my scheduled visit with Billy Cronk at the Maine State Prison.

“He’s wicked depressed about it,” she said.

“I’m so sorry. I feel horrible.”

She hesitated a few seconds, then said, “It has something to do with the game warden who got shot the other night.”

Aimee Cronk—armchair psychiatrist, amateur detective, unschooled mind reader. Her insights into human behavior were uncanny at times.

“Kathy Frost used to be my sergeant. I’ve been at the hospital a lot.”

“Jeezum. Is she going to be all right?”

“The doctors don’t know. She lost a lot of blood and hasn’t regained consciousness, the last I heard.”

“Do the cops know who did it?” she asked.

“I’m not exactly on their speed dial these days.”

“I bet you’ve got an idea or two.” Like many Mainers, she added an r to the end of idea to make up for the r’s she dropped at the end of words like supper.

“It’s what got me into trouble before, poking my nose into places it didn’t belong.”

“What if they don’t ever catch the person who shot your friend? Then how are you going to feel?”

“I’m worried I’d just screw up the investigation.”

“If it was me, I’d be more worried that the person who shot my friend might get away with it. You’re not just going to stand by and let that happen.”

Aimee was right that I was fighting the urge to visit Soctomah’s office and plant myself there until something happened.

“I need to schedule another visit with Billy,” I said.

I wondered if he had gotten around to confessing to his wife that he’d been transferred to the Supermax. It was only a matter of time until Aimee connected the dots. In the Special Management Unit, a prisoner received a single phone call a week. What the hell had Billy done to get thrown into solitary confinement? Given that my blue-eyed, blond friend looked like Adolf Hitler’s wet dream, I worried that the local chapter of the Aryan Brotherhood might have made a concerted effort to recruit him. It has been well established by history that Nazis refuse to take no for an answer.

As if I didn’t already have enough mysteries hanging over me.

“Take care of yourself, Mike,” she said. “I hope your friend gets better.”

“Tell Billy I’ll be in touch with him soon.”

“He ain’t going nowhere.”

After we’d hung up, I tried Soctomah’s number and got his voice mail. I told him I was staying at Kathy’s house with her brother, knowing he would find that piece of information too tantalizing to ignore, and I left him a detailed message about our tense conversation with Littlefield. I asked that he call me back, making it sound as if it were an expectation rather than a request.

By the time I’d returned to the kitchen, Kurt had cracked open a bottle of crème de menthe and leafed his way through both newspapers. When he looked up at me with his single good eye, it looked red-rimmed and fierce.

“Listen to this quote,” he said. “‘Of course we were saddened to hear that Warden Frost had been wounded, but we resist the idea that the incident is any way connected to the unprovoked murder of our son. The unsubstantiated accusation that any United States veteran—let alone a member of the 488th MP unit—might have had a hand in the shooting is offensive to us as parents and citizens. Jimmy’s friends and family will not allow this sad turn of events to affect the attorney general’s investigation into the unwarranted use of deadly force that ended his life. Our son deserves justice as much—or more so—than the woman who killed him.’”