The Bone Orchard: A Novel

Lyla Gammon seated herself on the sofa across from me, her artificial smile still fixed in place as if with glue. Neither she nor her husband moved to touch the kettle. Instead, they both watched me drink from my cup. He was open in his disdain. Her expression, I found harder to decode. There was the barely contained anguish, the forced friendliness, but also a certain dullness in her eyes that suggested prescription medication.

After two minutes of silent observation, I was ready to thank them for their hospitality and excuse myself. I was prepared to leave without ever learning why they’d invited me inside, when Lyla blurted, “Tell us about Jimmy!”

I set my china cup down on the saucer. “We knew each other for only a short period of time.”

“Yes, but you knew him beforehand.”

“Beforehand?”

“You knew him when he was still Jimmy. The men from his unit, they all call him Jim. But that wasn’t his name. What is it that you remember about Jimmy?” She seemed sort of moony.

I was having trouble guessing what she was after. I noticed that her husband reached for her hand.

“Well,” I said. “I remember how much he loved his dog.”

I must have glanced around for some sign of the spaniel. “Winnie is staying with friends,” she said. “We think it’s easier for him for the time being.”

Easier for the dog?

“I guess what I remember most about Jimmy was his smile,” I said. “Everything seemed to make him so happy. I’m not a particularly joyful person myself.”

Lyla Gammon jerked her head around toward her husband. “That’s exactly the word I have been looking for. Joyful. Jimmy was a joyful person.” She turned those shrunken pupils on me. “It means so much for us to hear from his friends. It helps us to hold on to him, you see. Even beforehand, we felt like he was slipping away from us.”

James Gammon tightened his grip on her hand. “Lyla, I’m not sure this is helpful.”

“No, but it is.” Her dreamy gaze was still focused on mine. “You didn’t see him after he came back from from the war, did you, Michael?”

“I hadn’t heard that he was home. If I had, I would have visited. I’m very sorry that I never got to see him again.”

“Don’t be! It’s better that you didn’t come here. People keep saying that he died in the barn, but he didn’t. Jimmy died over there in Afghanistan.”

“Lyla, that’s enough,” James Gammon said.

“Well, he did,” she said. “I don’t know who the person was who came back, but it wasn’t Jimmy.”

Her husband abruptly rose to his feet, pulling his wife up along with him by the strength of his grip.

“You need to go now,” he said to me. “I knew this was a f*cking mistake.”

“You have my sympathies.” It was all I could think to say.

I thought they might escort me out, but they remained frozen where they were, like two actors onstage before the curtain falls.

I closed the door quietly and descended the porch steps without giving a glance behind me. When I climbed inside the Cutlass, I received another blast of stale booze and cigars. The starter gave me problems again. I had a panicky thought that I might be forced to wait inside the house until roadside assistance could tow away Kurt Eklund’s hunk of junk.

To my relief, the engine finally decided it was ready to start. I threw my right arm over the passenger seat and began backing out. Then a blur of motion registered in my peripheral vision. Lyla Gammon had thrown open the front door and was walking, almost jogging, toward my car. She had something in one of her hands—a small piece of paper.

Her husband was trailing fast behind her, but not fast enough. I put my foot on the brake and tried rolling down the window, having forgotten that the electric motor was busted. Lyla flattened a photograph against the glass so that I could see it. She held it there with the palm of her hand.

The image showed the face of a disfigured man. It seemed to have been taken while he was asleep. The skin had melted away like wax from a red candle. His nose and one of his ears were missing. He had no lips, either, just a slash where you’d expect to see a mouth. There was hair on only one side of his crimson skull.

Lyla Gammon’s voice was distorted, muffled, coming through the window. “This is not my son,” she said. “You can see it’s not him.”

I was glad when her husband caught up to her and wrestled her body away from the idling car. When the two of them were clear of the Cutlass, I threw the gearshift into reverse and gave the engine some gas. Lyla was still clutching the photograph in her hand the last time I saw her.





25



I’d been on the road for five minutes, maybe more, when it occurred to me that I should have warned the Gammons about Kurt. Just because he hadn’t arrived at the estate yet didn’t mean he wasn’t on his way. The police needed to send a cruiser to watch the place.

I reached in my back pocket for my cell phone and saw that I’d missed two calls. One was from Soctomah. He hadn’t left a message, which seemed typical. I didn’t recognize the other number, but it was a Maine area code. This caller had left a voice mail.

The mountain road was narrow, with no shoulder, but there was a boat launch down the hill from the Gammon farm, on the south shore of Megunticook Lake. I used to stop at the ramp when I was the district warden, checking licenses and registrations. I’d chat with the local kids fishing for yellow perch and bluegills in the weedy water, trying to teach them how important it was to follow the rules when no one was watching you. The boys weren’t interested in my lectures on ethical behavior. What they wanted to know about were the guns I carried and whether I’d ever shot anyone with them.

I pushed the button to listen to the message from my unknown caller. The female voice caused my breath to catch in my throat.

“Mike? It’s Sarah. I heard about Kathy, and I feel absolutely devastated. You must be a wreck about it. Is she going to be all right? Can I visit her at the hospital? You know I’m back in Maine now. I’m living down in Portland, and—well, it’s a long story. I got a phone call from Maddie Lawson the other day. She said you were working as a fishing guide somewhere up north! I hadn’t heard that you’d left the Warden Service. I guess we both have gone through some pretty big changes. You don’t have to call me back—it’s fine if you don’t—but I just wanted you to know I’m thinking about you. God, this must seem like the most random phone call ever.”

Maddie had warned me that she planned on calling my ex-girlfriend. And Sarah knew how close I was with Kathy. If anyone could understand the agony I was going through in the aftermath of the shooting, it was the woman I considered my first love.

But our relationship had ended a long time ago by mutual consent. Sarah had resented my decision to take a low-paying job as a game warden when I was just out of college—a choice she could never understand, having come from a wealthy and ambitious family in Connecticut. She’d also seen the darkest and most self-destructive parts of my personality and had come to view me as fundamentally unsalvageable. At the time, I didn’t disagree with her assessment. I was curious to hear what “big changes” she’d been through, but the last thing I needed at the moment was another distraction.

Better not to think of her, I decided. I’d call Sarah back after the state police caught the bastard. When all of this was behind me.

The thought of Eklund driving around pissed off and drunk scared me. My best bet was to enlist the state police. I punched in the number for Lieutenant Soctomah and got the detective on the first ring this time.

“It’s Bowditch,” I said.

“I got your message earlier. So you’ve taken up residence in the Frost house?”

“Her brother is living there, Kurt Eklund. The guy’s a total mess. Alcoholic, unstable, probably has PTSD. I thought someone should watch out for him while Kathy’s in the hospital. How is she doing? What have you heard?”

“She’s in a coma.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to the news.

“When there’s that much trauma to the body and that much blood loss, it’s always a risk,” he said. “The docs have no idea when she might come out of it. There’s also the likelihood of brain damage.”

“You don’t believe in sugarcoating things, do you?”

“Would you prefer that I did? It won’t change the situation.”

He was right, of course. I realized that the time had also come for me to make my confession. I told him that Kurt had gotten away from me while I was in the shower.

“So if you were watching Eklund,” he said, “how did he manage to give you the slip?”

“I forgot to lock up the keys to Kathy’s Nissan. I looked out the window and saw him racing down the hill. I was afraid he might have been headed to the Gammon house.”

“Why?”

“He was pissed about the quote in the paper, where Gammon called Kathy a murderer. I went over there to check, but there was no sign of him.”

“You what?”

“Jimmy Gammon was sort of a friend of mine.”

“You forgot to mention that detail earlier.”