The Bone Orchard: A Novel

It would have been easy to read too much into Kurt’s story not checking out. When I’d found him lying dead to the world in his sister’s bed, he’d been coming off a bender. It was just as likely he had no memory of what he had done over the previous days and had concocted an alibi to cover up the fact that he’d suffered a blackout. The question remained where he’d been during those crucial hours, however. The man had clearly pissed off more than a few people in his life.

My head was aching when I arrived at Kathy’s house and noticed that the formerly dented mailbox had been pushed over entirely and that letters and catalogs lay scattered about the road. Littlefield or some other local vandal had used Kathy’s hospitalization as an occasion for mischief. I stopped and picked up the dirty mail. It was just a collection of bills and leaflets, the usual stuff, except for an unstamped envelope with no address or name other than the word DYKE scrawled on the front. I tore it open.

Gammon was an AMERICAN hero and not some bull dyke who thinks wearing a gun makes her a man when really she’s just a scared p-ssy. I would throw a pillow over your ugly head and toss you down the stairs and whip you up with an electric cord until you start screaming like a bitch. I wouldn’t even bother to f*ck you first.

At least the penmanship was good. The anonymous writer seemed to have missed the news that the object of his hatred had already been attacked by someone using a weapon more lethal than an electrical cord. I tended to forget that most unsigned death threats didn’t come from Mensa members.

I tucked the letter in my pocket.

Kurt still hadn’t returned.

I took another shower to wash away the filth from the quarry and found a pair of sweatpants, too long in the legs, in the guest bedroom. I stripped off my damp clothes and gathered all the other shirts, pants, and socks I’d dirtied over the past days. While my clothes were washing, I microwaved some chicken and rice dish I found in the freezer. Kathy shopped at health-food stores that sold quinoa in plastic bins and had coolers filled with expensive organic vegetables that weren’t as bright and leafy as the ones in the supermarkets. She used to drag me into these co-ops at lunchtime.

“Better than variety store pizza,” she used to say.

“Says you.”

“Someday your arteries are going to thank me, Grasshopper.”

I sat in the living room, leaning over the coffee table, and scarfed down my unknown lunch. I had to admit it was tasty. She’d used a lot of curry to give it some zing. The large-screen television taunted me from the wall; I couldn’t figure out how to operate the remote control. After I’d finished eating, I stretched out my bare feet on the sofa, leaned back, and closed my eyes, trying to think.

Where had Kurt Eklund gone in such a hurry? Maybe he’d gathered up a few of Kathy’s more valuable possessions to pawn. I wouldn’t have put it past him.

I moved my eyes about the room, looking for empty places on shelves and tables where I could remember having seen some family heirloom. Earlier, I’d had the impression that the scene had been disturbed. I had the same feeling again, but I couldn’t put my finger on what was different about the room.

I nearly tripped over one of Pluto’s rawhide chews on my way to the kitchen. The house was full of reminders of the dead dog: rubber balls Kathy had stuffed with peanut butter, soft beds for him to sleep on in just about every room, dried puddles of drool, and hair everywhere. Coonhounds are heavy shedders. I hadn’t asked Malcomb what he’d done with Pluto’s body. Knowing the major, he’d probably arranged to stash the cadaver in the state police morgue so Kathy could give the dog a hero’s burial.

That, of course, was assuming Kathy would recover. The prospect of suffering brain damage had always scared me more than death. What if Kathy awoke and she was no longer Kathy? I found myself empathizing with Lyla Gammon. The military had given her back a head-injured person it claimed was Jimmy, but whoever that disfigured man had been, he hadn’t behaved like her son.

My cell phone was ringing on the coffee table. It was Lieutenant Soctomah. “Where are you?” he asked.

“Back at Kathy’s house. What’s going on?”

“You wanted me to call you if we found any trace of Kurt Eklund.”

“So where is he?”

“We’re not sure. A trooper found Sergeant Frost’s Nissan abandoned at a scenic turnout on I-Ninety-five. It’s the rest area at Mile two fifty-two. The keys were still in the ignition, but there was no sign of Eklund anywhere.”





34



Interstate 95 is Maine’s central artery. It runs more than three hundred miles from New Hampshire to the Canadian border, east of Houlton. Mile 252 was a long ways north of Appleton. Had Kurt Eklund been heading home to Aroostook County when he decided to ditch the vehicle?

“Is that the rest area north of Medway?” I asked Soctomah.

“It’s the one with the view of Mount Katahdin.”

I knew the place. There was a small parking lot on a hillside above the highway where travelers could snap pictures of the tallest and most majestic mountain in Maine.

“Was the vehicle unlocked?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Was it out of gas?”

“No.”

“So why did he abandon it?”

The detective paused and I heard a phone ring in the background, then a garbled voice. It sounded as if he was in a crowded office. “I was hoping you might have an idea. You were the last person to talk with him—as far as we can tell.”

Kurt had been drunk and distraught when he’d left Appleton. Somehow he’d managed to travel more than a hundred miles through the population centers of central Maine without crashing the SUV or being pulled over. It was a dirty secret among cops that some people—especially those with years of practice—could drive drunk without giving themselves away on the road.

“Have you searched the woods nearby?” I asked.

“You’re thinking suicide?”

“He told me he had cirrhosis,” I said. “He was definitely acting in a self-destructive manner. Or he might have just fallen down a hill while taking a leak.”

“I’ll have the wardens take a look around,” he said. “But the trooper said there was no evidence of a crime. Eklund never dropped a clue where he might be going?”

“His parents live in New Sweden, but they’re in Portland now with Kathy. Their house is still Kurt’s legal address. It could be he was headed back up there for some reason.”

“Unfortunately, we have no grounds to search for Eklund, since he’s not technically a missing person. He’s an adult who can go wherever he wants. It’s not our business unless we can connect his disappearance to a crime.”

In the legal sense, that was true. But I had a bad feeling about the abandoned Xterra.

“One of Jimmy Gammon’s buddies from the Four eighty-eighth is a potato farmer in Aroostook County,” I said. “Kurt saw his picture in the newspaper. Maybe you should try calling this Ethan Smith to see if Eklund contacted him.”

He paused, as if he were writing a note to himself. “Anything else?”

“I don’t know what other leads you’ve been following, but Kathy had printed out an article about a woman who died a few days ago named Marta Jepson. The newspaper said she fell down her basement stairs in Lyndon, near Caribou. Kathy must have known the woman.”

“Where did you find this piece of paper?” Soctomah sounded angry.

“In the wastebasket under Kathy’s desk.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about it sooner?” The forensic techs who had searched the house had failed to identify the paper in the trash as potential evidence and that was why the lieutenant was upset. I couldn’t remember what I’d done with the clipping. Had I left it on Kathy’s desk?

“I thought you knew about it. It doesn’t seem like you’re making much progress with the investigation.”

“With all due respect, you don’t have a clue what we’re doing.”

“I haven’t heard that you’ve identified any suspects.”

“You need to trust that we’re going to find the son of a bitch.”

That was easy for him to say. “What are you going to do with Kathy’s vehicle?”

“We’ll have it towed back to her house. If we find any sign of Eklund, we’ll let you know.”

After he’d hung up, I took a look in Kathy’s office. The story about Martha Jepson wasn’t there. I dug out the wastebasket and found only that weird doodle. I couldn’t make heads or tails out of the sketch. It looked like a toddler’s drawing of stick men.

I went downstairs to the basement and stood over the dryer, feeling its heat rising against my bare chest, until my clothes were done. Then I got dressed and packed the extra clothes in my duffel.

Before I left the house, I paused for a few minutes at Kathy’s locked gun safe, trying to imagine what the combination might be. The numbers wouldn’t be simple to guess, and she was too crafty to leave a slip of paper lying around. I’d gotten used to carrying a firearm again over the past few days and felt naked without one.

Soctomah had said that I needed to trust him to find the shooter.