The Bone Orchard: A Novel

I found a tractor-supply company just as it was closing up shop for the day. The lot was jam-packed with brightly painted machines; backhoes, tillers, bulldozers, and garden-variety farm tractors like giant versions of the ones I’d played with as a kid. A bell sounded as I came through the door, and a middle-aged man wearing a short-sleeve dress shirt and green Dickies sought me out. He had a flat-top hair cut, a name tag with TRAVIS on it, and the same excellent posture as Erik Eklund.

He gave me a big smile, as if I was an old friend he hadn’t seen in years. “Can I help you?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m trying to find someone who lives near here, but I don’t have his address. He’s a potato farmer named Ethan Smith.”

If I had asked that question most other places, even in Maine, I would have received a scowl, but Travis, the tractor salesman, treated it as an innocent inquiry and not suspicious in the least. “Oh, sure. I know Ethan. He lives out on the Alder Brook Road, outside Mapleton. Are you a friend of his?”

The lie came easily. “Yes.”

“From the National Guard, I bet.”

“How did you know?”

“I’m ex–Air Force myself. Came up here with the wife to work at Loring and liked Limestone so much, we decided to stay and raise a family. If you want to hang on a minute, I’ll get you directions.”

People in Aroostook County were so damned nice. I felt guilty for misleading such a helpful man. He disappeared for a few minutes, leaving me to wander around the brightly lighted showroom. I hadn’t planned on showing up unannounced at Smith’s doorstep, but I was bothered by Destiny’s inability to say for certain whether he was the Neanderthal who had shown up at the diner, asking about Kathy.

Travis returned, still smiling, holding a wireless phone. He handed it to me. “I decided it would just be easier if you spoke with Ethan directly and he told you how to get there.”

I had no choice but to accept the phone. “Thanks.”

I held the speaker to my ear. There was no dial tone. Someone was already on the line.

“Hello?”

“Who is this?” The man sounded like a bullmastiff that had been taught human speech.

“Is this Ethan Smith?”

“Who is this?”

I turned my back on Travis and took a few steps toward the nearest display of rototillers. “A friend of Jimmy Gammon.”

“I know who you are. Donato told me about you. What the hell are you doing in Presque Isle?”

“Heading north.”

“I think you mean south. You’re turning around and getting the hell out of here before I come kick your ass.”

“I’m just looking to have a conversation.”

“That’s the last thing you want, a*shole. Take my word for it.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve received a call from a guy named Kurt Eklund recently?”

There was a click, and he was gone.

When I turned around, the tractor salesman was scowling. Travis was a polite and friendly fellow, but not above eavesdropping. “We’re closing up here, and I think you should go.”

I handed him back his phone and thanked him for his assistance, but he didn’t say another word as he locked the door behind my back.

* * *

Except for a few wisps of clouds, the night sky above New Sweden was almost completely clear. Jupiter hung above the treetops to the northwest, bright white and unblinking. The planet seemed like a hopeful beacon until it slowly began to descend and then disappeared from view below the horizon.

Deer had come out to the edges of the fields to nibble the first green shoots poking up through the soil. Their eyes were luminescent in my headlights, and they were very shy. Kathy had told me that when she was a rookie warden in the county, her district had been “Night Hunter Central.” If that was still true, the local deer had a right to be jumpy after dark.

I passed a cheery blue-and-yellow sign by the side of the road. It lit up in the glow of my high beams:



It was illustrated with the U.S. and Swedish flags. I truly felt like I had crossed into a foreign land.

I didn’t need a helpful tractor salesman to find the Eklund place. As I neared the village of New Sweden, I passed a mailbox with that name on the side. There were probably more than a few Eklunds in town, but this house was located across from the volunteer fire department’s building, and Kathy had told me her father had been the fire chief for many years.

The house was white, with clapboard siding, blue shutters and trim, and a blue metal roof that looked like a recent addition. In a part of the world that averages nine or ten feet of snow a winter, it pays to have a roof that snow and ice can slide off. The windows were dark, with the shades pulled, and there were no vehicles in the driveway. I parked along the road and reached for the small flashlight I’d packed in my duffel.

It wouldn’t have surprised me if the Eklunds’ neighbors were peeking through their curtains, trying to decide whether to call the police. People in these villages tended to watch out for one another’s properties, and everyone in New Sweden would have known that the Eklunds were in Portland, at the hospital bedside of their beloved Katarina. Even if they recognized Kurt’s Oldsmobile, they probably knew better than to trust him.

I pulled on the navy blue windbreaker Soctomah had loaned me. I wondered how I would explain to a responding officer why I was roaming around a house that didn’t belong to me, wearing a jacket with POLICE on the back. I decided I would deal with that problem if and when it presented itself. No one answered the bell, but that didn’t mean anything. For all I knew, Kurt was passed out inside, just as I had found him at Kathy’s house. The door was locked, and there was no key under the Valkommen mat. I stepped quickly around the side of the building.

I felt a pang of disappointment when I found the back door intact. I’d had the notion that Kurt might have punched out a pane of glass to let himself in. Despite the evidence of my own eyes, I was growing more and more certain that he had visited the house. I almost left without doing the obvious thing and trying the doorknob. To my surprise, it turned. Someone had left the house unlocked.

Instead of switching on the lights, I pushed the button on my SureFire and moved the beam around the room. The Eklunds’ house had been laid out in the same plan as their daughter’s: The back door admitted you to a mudroom, which opened onto the kitchen. The first thing I noticed was the subtropical warmth. The oil furnace was laboring away in the basement. I didn’t imagine for a second that Erik and Alice Eklund would have left their house with the thermostat cranked.

There was also an odor in the air that didn’t belong. It was smoky and cloying—the smell I’d come to associate with the Cutlass: Swisher Sweets cigarillos. I switched on the overhead kitchen lights.

“Kurt? It’s Mike Bowditch.” I didn’t want him mistaking me for an intruder and rushing me in the dark.

There was no answer.

The kitchen showed no sign of having recently been used. There were no plates or cups in the old porcelain sink. The chairs were tucked carefully beneath the breakfast table.

“Kurt?”

I passed through the formal dining room. Wooden display cabinets held wineglasses and china plates. On the wall hung a framed family photograph taken decades earlier. Erik and Alice looked to be in their thirties; both blond, they were fit and ruddy-cheeked, as if they had just returned from a day spent cross-country skiing. The adult Eklunds were dressed in matching Nordic sweaters. Kurt appeared to be twelve or thirteen and was wearing a flower-patterned shirt and bell-bottom pants. His hair was feathered around his shoulders. It was heartbreaking to see him with two functional eyes and a complexion not yet ruined by alcohol. Kathy was just an anonymous-looking baby.

The front parlor in the Eklund’s house was still a sitting room where the family entertained visitors. There was no television or reclining furniture, only rocking chairs and a stiff-backed love seat. The coffee table was a mess. There were three empty liquor bottles: one of vodka, one of aquavit, and one of coffee brandy, which Kurt had no doubt bought on the road. He’d used a tea saucer as an ashtray but must have dropped one of his smokes on the love seat, because it showed a black spot where the fabric had burned.

I raised my voice. “Kurt? Where are you?”

Again, there was no answer.

I found his old room down the hall from his parents’. The bed had been slept in. He hadn’t bothered to flush the toilet after using it. I checked every room, including the basement, but there was no trace of him. After five fruitless minutes, I returned to the parlor and sat down on the love seat, imagining him there, boozing it up and nearly setting the house on fire.

I’d had a suspicion that he might have come here to loot the place, looking for items he could pawn for cash. I’d thought he’d been looking to settle his gambling debts. But there were no indications that he’d rifled his mother’s chest of drawers again. So why had Kurt returned home to New Sweden?

Kurt was on a mission, and my gut told me it had to do with Kathy. Maybe he had some suspicion about who had shot her—something he hadn’t shared with me. But if he was set on coming back to Aroostook County, why had he abandoned his sister’s SUV at a scenic turnout a hundred-plus miles away?