The Bone Orchard: A Novel

He looked like he’d lost fifteen pounds since I’d last seen him. He badly needed a shave, and the smell of cigarettes emanated from his green uniform. The Maine Medical Center complex—from the hospital building to the parking garage—was off-limits to smokers. I wasn’t sure where he’d been sneaking off to satisfy his craving.

Out of habit, I stood at attention. “Major.”

“Tate told me you were here.” His voice was rough and raspy, as if his vocal cords had been scarred by some corrosive chemical.

“Oh, yeah? What else did she tell you?”

“That you were meddling with Soctomah’s investigation. She said you were grilling her about Kathy’s recent cases.”

“Curiosity wasn’t a crime the last time I looked.”

He frowned at me. “Don’t be a wiseass, Bowditch. You have no idea what I’ve been dealing with over the past few days.”

“Colonel Harkavy?”

He stared at me with bleary eyes that didn’t give away his thoughts. “Where’d you hear about it?”

I had no intention of narcing on the Warden Service’s chaplain. “The grapevine.”

“Don’t believe everything you hear through the grapevine.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t believe everything Dani Tate tells you, either.”

“She’s not the one with the lengthy history of insubordination.”

I could hardly take issue with that statement. “Can you get me in to see Kathy?”

“I don’t make those decisions,” he said. “The doctors do.”

“Have other people been allowed to see her?”

“Some.”

“Her parents?”

“Yes.”

“What about other wardens?”

“She’s in serious condition, Bowditch. If someone sneezes, she could come down with an infection.”

“Look, Major,” I said. “You know what happened at Kathy’s house. The last thing I remember is sticking my hands into her wounds to stop the bleeding. I’d rather not carry that image around in my head as the last time I saw her.”

He blinked his tired eyes at me. “Let me see what I can do.”

I sat back down again at the table and waited.

He returned about fifteen minutes later with a brown-skinned, black-eyed woman in doctor’s scrubs. She had three surgical masks dangling from her hand.

“Come this way,” she said in an accent that had a Caribbean cadence.

The doctor guided us through a series of doors into the nerve center of the Special Care Unit. Men and women were seated at a central desk, monitoring computer screens while machines beeped and buzzed. The door to Kathy’s room was wide enough for a bed to be wheeled in and out should the patient require emergency surgery.

The doctor gave us our masks and then slid open the door. “Hands in pockets, please.”

Kathy lay on her back in a pale sleeveless shift. There was a mask clasped to her nose and mouth. She had a monitor attached to her wrist and an IV unit pumping fluids into the crook of her uninjured arm. The doctors had been forced to shave her head above her left ear in order to suture a wound I hadn’t noticed the night she was shot. A pellet must have grazed the skin above her ear. Except for her many freckles, her skin had turned a bleached-bone color, as if all of the blood the doctors had pumped back into her heart hadn’t yet made its way to the surface.

“Did they get all the pellets out?” I asked the doctor.

“She will need other operations to remove them.”

“Are there any near her heart or arteries?” I asked.

A foreign object embedded in the body can move over time for a variety of reasons, and I knew that a tungsten alloy shotgun pellet would be subject to magnetic fields. Walking through a metal detector could kill a person with a ball bearing close to a major blood vessel.

“No,” said the doctor. “But she suffered hemorrhagic shock from the loss of blood. We don’t know how that affected her brain.”

“So she might have brain damage?”

“It is too early to say.”

I remembered the wounds to her torso. I’d stuck my dirty hands in them. “What are the chances of her suffering an infection?”

“Sepsis remains a concern.”

I couldn’t really see Kathy’s face with the mask over her nose and mouth; she might have been anyone underneath that contraption. I wanted to pull the thing off and give her a kiss on the cheek. I had a premonition that this would be my one and only chance to say good-bye.

“Hands in pockets, please,” said the doctor again.

I was unaware of having removed them.





28



The major returned to his vigil outside Kathy’s room while the doctor escorted me from the Special Care Unit back to the cafeteria. She studied me with coal black eyes, the irises as dark as the pupils. She was older than I’d first guessed. There were wrinkles etched in parallel lines across her forehead.

“Have you studied emergency medicine?” she asked me in her charming accent.

“Just wilderness first aid,” I said.

“You must have been a good student.”

“I realized someone’s life might depend on my knowing all I could.”

“Someone’s did,” she said.

She had intended the kind words to make me feel better, but I couldn’t shake the feelings of rage I’d experienced seeing Kathy in such a fragile and unrecognizable condition. I went into the washroom and splashed cold water on my face and rubbed it fiercely along the back of my neck until I felt it running down my spine. I had hoped the shock might cool the blood pulsing in my temples.

I studied my dripping face in the mirror above the sink. The cuts on my head would heal in time. I peeled up a few strands of wet hair to inspect the old scar on my forehead, remembering the night I’d gotten it. I had been twenty-two years old, meeting my father in his favorite North Woods roadhouse after a long estrangement. I’d wanted to introduce him to Sarah—to show off my beautiful girlfriend and tell him that I had decided to become a game warden. He’d laughed at my plan, which he recognized, even then, as a cheap bid for his attention. Later that night, a biker had cracked a beer bottle across my skull in a fight. My old man had nearly cut the man’s throat in retribution.

My mom had always worried that I would inherit my dad’s predisposition for violence. She seemed to think it was attached to the Y chromosome in certain unfortunate individuals. I might be carrying some genetic abnormality, but it didn’t give me “license” (that was the word she used). My mother had raised me to be a good Catholic and believed that God would grant men the strength to transcend “their animal selves” if we asked for His help. If she were still alive, she would have said that I owed it to Kathy to master my emotions and not lash out merely because I was feeling dull-headed and impotent.

I could start by finding Kurt, I decided.

Deb Davies had told me that the Eklunds had driven from northern Maine to be with their daughter. When parents have a sick child in the hospital, even an adult child, they don’t pack up their car and go home. They stay as close as possible, because you never know. The Warden Service would have arranged to get them a hotel room in the neighborhood.

Kathy’s parents were somewhere in or near the hospital.

In the hallway, I found a posted map showing all the usual visitor destinations in a hospital: the cafeteria, the gift shop, the florist. The chapel was located at the south end of the building, near the central courtyard. I made my way through the maze of corridors.

I’d expected to find pews in the chapel, but there were only chairs, arranged at the edges of a rectangular space. A red Muslim prayer rug was folded over a stand in the corner, and at the far end of the room was a lectern with a heavy Bible. There were several people seated in the room, all of them gray-haired: two women and a single gentleman. The man was tall and lanky, with a full head of white hair, and he was sitting next to the lectern, while the others held back, as if daunted by the elevated dais and the power it represented. As a retired minister, Kathy’s father would feel no timidity in approaching God.

I was surprised to find myself genuflecting before the lectern. My mother’s Catholicism had deep roots.

The old man had his head bowed and his hands clasped. I couldn’t get a good look at him, but he must have sensed that I was watching him. When he raised his eyes, I saw an older version of Kurt Eklund’s face, but one free of the ravages of alcohol.

“Pardon me,” I said in a whisper. “Are you Kathy Frost’s father?”

“I am.”

“You don’t know me, Reverend, but I am a friend of your daughter’s. My name is Mike Bowditch.”

He straightened his shoulders as if they had been hunched so long that the muscles had cramped. “I know who you are, Mr. Bowditch. Kathy has told us about you.” He extended his liver-spotted hand to me. His grip was strong for a man in his eighties. “I also know what you did for my daughter the night she was shot. Alice and I owe you a debt we can never repay.”

I glanced behind me, wondering whether I’d missed seeing his wife when I entered the chapel.

“Alice is resting,” he explained.

“There’s something I’d like to speak with you about, Reverend,” I said in a hushed tone.