The Bone Orchard: A Novel

The problem was, I didn’t.

* * *

In the dooryard, I paused to inspect my Bronco. I’d been telling myself that the damage might be fixable, but now I had to acknowledge the truth. It wouldn’t take my insurance agent more than ten seconds to declare the truck to be a total loss. As best I could recall, my auto coverage didn’t include a rider covering damage done by a shotgun-wielding assassin.

I rooted around the back of the Bronco for anything I might need on my trip: my hiker’s tent, portable stove, butane container, wilderness first-aid kit, and a hatchet that I’d never thought of using for self-defense.

I stopped for gas at the first station I came to. I would need a full tank and a refill to go where I planned on going. It felt strange to be headed north again—but in a different direction from Grand Lake Stream. Ahead of me lay a series of millpond villages and dairy farms, the pastoral heart of Maine. Eventually, the winding country road would intersect with I-95, south of Bangor, and then it would be a straight shot into the deep woods. The sun doesn’t set in May until after eight P.M., but I had miles to go, and I would need every minute of daylight once I reached the rest area outside Medway.

I’d been trying in vain to track down Kurt Eklund. Now I had a place to start looking.

Soctomah had asked if I considered Kathy’s brother to be a suicide risk. The honest answer was that I didn’t know, but it seemed unlikely to me that he would have killed himself quietly. Eklund wasn’t a wounded animal that would slink into a hole to die. He was too melodramatic for such a quiet end. Blow his head off in a public place? Yes. Throw himself off a bridge in front of a speeding truck? Sure. Wander off into the woods to slit his wrists? I didn’t think so.

If he had left the Xterra with the keys in the ignition and gas in the tank, he had done so for a reason. Given the twisted way his brain worked, the reason might not make any sense on the surface. But I had confidence I could decode whatever clues he might have left behind.

The larger question was where he had been going and why.

My best ideas usually found me when I wasn’t looking for them, so I decided to focus on my driving and the ever-changing scenery outside my window. Maine combines aspects of all the New England states: Portland’s affluent suburbs were Connecticut in miniature; the sand beaches of the southern coast were dead ringers for the Rhode Island seashore. The villages clustered along the swift-flowing rivers of central Maine—with their Civil War monuments dedicated to the union   dead—were right out of Norman Rockwell’s paintings of western Massachusetts. The open fields where enormous flocks of crows gathered at dusk reminded me of Vermont’s green dairy farms. And the massif around Katahdin, which I finally glimpsed after hours on the road, was as snowy as the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Katahdin came into view when I was still miles to the south on Interstate 95, rising higher and higher as I approached, until the highway doglegged to the east and I lost sight of it for a while. I passed the exit to the Golden Road and Baxter State Park and continued north until a blue sign appeared ahead: SCENIC VIEW OF MT. KATAHDIN. OPEN MAY–OCT. NO FACILITIES. I took a right and climbed a hillside to the lot.

The Wabanaki Indians, who had been the inhabitants of this land when the first Europeans bumped their boats against the shore, believed a capricious and vengeful deity lived on the peak of Mount Katahdin. His name was Pamola, and he had the body of a man, the horns of a moose, and the beak and wings of an eagle. Pamola was a violent thunder god who forbade humans from climbing his mountain. He was known to snatch away anyone who dared and imprison them in a place called Alomkik: a cold and windswept hell only slightly more hospitable than Maine’s contemporary Supermax.

The rest area was accessible only via the northbound lane of I-95. So Kurt had been heading north when he stopped here. But there was still gas in the tank.

There were several cars and trucks parked at the turnout, their noses facing to the west. The view, across an old rail fence, of Salmon Lake in the foreground and then the multiple jagged summits of Katahdin in the distance was worth stopping for. No police cruisers were to be seen. The cops had come and gone.

As promised, the state police had towed away Kathy’s Nissan. It was en route back to her house after a short detour to the forensics garage at the state police headquarters in Augusta. The circumstances of the Xterra’s abandonment were such that Soctomah, even if he wasn’t treating Kurt Eklund as a missing person in the legal sense of the word, would be curious enough to want his technicians to have a look inside the vehicle.

I climbed out of the Cutlass and felt a stiffness in my limbs that was an aftereffect of my morning swim at the quarry. The wind was blowing out of the southwest, carrying warm air across the evergreen forests and up from the electric blue waters of the Salmon River watershed. I took a deep breath and fancied I could actually smell the fish in the lake. After my days in the city, it felt good to be back in the North Woods again.

“Excuse me, mister,” said a woman behind me.

I turned around and saw a tattooed couple in their twenties.

“Can you take our picture?”

She offered me a smartphone the size of a paperback novel.

“Sure.”

The couple sat atop the rail fence with the mountain behind them. I took their picture with Mount Katahdin gleaming over their shoulders. The woman thanked me. Her boyfriend lit a cigarette and slouched back toward his Camaro.

“You didn’t see any police cars here when you arrived?” I asked the young woman.

“Why? Are you on the run?” she asked.

After they had left, I wandered around the parking lot, looking for something, although I wasn’t sure what. I knelt in the grass and poked a stick in the fine dust under the picnic tables, hoping to turn up the filter end of one of Kurt’s Swisher Sweets. A mourning cloak butterfly fluttered up from a patch of sunshine where it had been basking. I made loops through the adjacent trees, finding many paths that dead-ended behind walls of evergreens: places where men had anonymous sexual encounters with each other. I found nothing to indicate that Kurt Eklund had ever been at this place.

Eventually, I found myself back behind the steering wheel of the Cutlass, staring at Katahdin’s several peaks. From this vantage, none of the surrounding mountains could be seen. I thought of one of my favorite books from childhood, The Hobbit, and the Lonely Mountain, where lived the dragon Smaug.

As a boy enchanted with fantasy novels, I had dreamed of a life full of adventure. As a man, I had learned that placing yourself constantly in life-and-death situations was a mug’s game. Sooner or later, you were going to lose your bet.

Sitting in Kurt’s dirty car, gazing at that beautiful vista, I felt the chilling conviction that its owner had lost everything a man had to lose.





35



The farther north you go in Maine, the more disoriented you become. Start with the distances. Aroostook County, which juts into New Brunswick and Quebec, is the largest county east of the Mississippi—about the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. Glance at a map and the drive to Canada seems manageable, as if you could knock if off in no time—until you find yourself on the road for more hours than you ever dreamed.

Then there is the geographic and cultural dislocation. People who have never been to northern Maine think that everything just becomes wilder and wilder once you cross the forty-sixth parallel. They enter the big woods outside Bangor, spend hours traveling through seemingly endless forests of spruce and fir, and are stunned when the road finally spits them out into farm fields that are nearly as spacious as those of the Great Plains. Soon the unprepared travelers are cruising through tidy towns lined up with geometrical precision along Route 1: bustling communities that defy anyone’s idea of a remote borderland. Americans have trouble processing the idea that Canada exists at all, let alone that most of its population centers should be pressed up against its southern border (which just so happens to be our northern border). And so the concept that there should be split-level houses and wide lawns—those defining characteristics of suburbia—in a place as far from “civilization” as northernmost Maine seems unimaginable.

I’d made the trip on many occasions, and even I found the road stretching before me like a piece of rubber being pulled taut beneath my wheels. Miles were clicking on the odometer, but I seemed to be making no progress. I found myself being worn down by the never-ending journey. I’d hoped to reach New Sweden before dark, but more and more of the cars passing me in the opposite direction had their headlights on. I stopped for coffee at a truck stop in Houlton and drank three cups without feeling any effect on my central nervous system. I ordered a BLT, hoping that food might do the trick, but if anything, it just made me sleepier.

Route 1 took me through Presque Isle, the largest town in the county, with close to ten thousand inhabitants. Anywhere else, it might have been considered a hamlet, but there was a feeling of life on the streets that came from the steady flow of traffic between two (mostly) friendly nations. There were as many cars and trucks with New Brunswick plates as Maine tags. Leaving town, an eighteen-wheeler passed me with the McCain’s Potatoes logo splashed on the side. Jimmy Gammon’s and Angelo Donato’s buddy lived nearby: Ethan Smith, the man the MP’s Pashtun interpreter nicknamed “Monster.” He owned a potato farm somewhere in these rolling fields.