The Bone Orchard: A Novel

* * *

Something about that rest area was bothering me. I tried to imagine myself back there. I saw the rail fence, the glistening lake, and the mountain in the distance. I heard the rush of traffic moving on the highway below.

So had he driven here from the overlook, gotten drunk, and then turned around and headed south again? But if that was the case, why was Kathy’s Nissan found at a rest stop you could only access via the northbound lane? The only reason that would make sense was if someone had wanted it to appear that Kurt Eklund had never made it to New Sweden.

And at the root of that question was another: What had compelled him to return to Maine’s Swedish Colony?

The last time I’d seen him was through Kathy’s bathroom window. I’d looked outside and seen him speeding off in his sister’s SUV. I’d assumed he was racing away to confront James Gammon, because of his infuriating quote in the paper. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might’ve had another reason to be angry.

Kurt had been downstairs in Kathy’s woman cave when I’d gone upstairs to take a shower. Later, I’d had the gnawing feeling that something wasn’t quite right about the room. Now I realized what had been missing. I had left the article about Marta Jepson’s death on the coffee table. Kurt had taken it with him.





36



The dead woman had lived in the neighboring village of Lyndon. I had originally thought she might have been a friend of the family, maybe one of Kathy’s former teachers. But Erik Eklund had shot down that theory when he said he’d never heard of her.

Somehow Kurt knew who Marta Jepson was. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have snatched the article from Kathy’s coffee table. And he wouldn’t have raced off in his sister’s vehicle for reasons I still couldn’t comprehend. Why had he been in such a hurry? The old woman had fallen down a flight of stairs five nights earlier. According to the article in the Aroostook Republican, the authorities didn’t consider the death suspicious.

I needed to read the story again. I tried my iPhone, but there was only a single bar, and I couldn’t get the browser window to open. Northern Maine might not be the wooded wilderness people assume it is, but like the rest of the state, it has lousy cell coverage.

I turned off the lights and made sure to lock the back door. I didn’t want the Eklunds returning home to find that they had been robbed. Aroostook County was generally a safe place to live, but it was also a border region that had seen a spike in drug-related offenses as more and more illegal prescription medications had been smuggled into the state from Canada. Burglaries, home invasions, and drugstore stickups were on the rise here—as they were back in Washington County—as addicts resorted to desperate measures to pay for their habits.

I drove southeast along the Caribou Road. It had been named for an animal that hunters had eradicated from these parts generations ago. Human beings love to commemorate the things they destroy. Building memorials to the dead and naming places in their honor is our way of recasting the past in terms that don’t hold us accountable.

At the crossroads outside Lyndon, I pulled over and tried my phone again. This time, I was able to pull up the Web site for the local paper and read the article about Marta Jepson. I’d forgotten that the Aroostook sheriff had hedged in his statement about the old woman’s fall clearly having been an accident. There weren’t any follow-up stories suggesting police had discovered reasons to continue investigating her death. Nor was there a formal obituary discussing funeral arrangements, which seemed unusual. Did she have no family?

The article said that Marta Jepson had lived alone in a house on the Svensson Road. My phone’s GPS worked long enough for me to find it on a map. Then my car rounded a bend and the signal dropped. I turned north at the crossroads and began poking along, watching for a road sign.

I drove into Lyndon village, past the post office, and crossed the bridge above the flooded St. John River. The rain from the previous week was still gushing down out of the highlands, and in the starlight I saw whitewater where there were standing waves in the river. As I neared the town center, I saw two big-wheeled all-terrain vehicles race across the paved road, traveling west along the local rail trail. If I had been the district warden, I would have felt obliged to chase down the riders and ticket them for speeding.

Kathy had missed the ATV craze when she had worked this district; the vehicles hadn’t been widely popular two decades ago. Now four-wheelers were as common in rural Maine as cars. It wasn’t uncommon to see them parked outside the local churches on sunny Sunday mornings or outside the local roadhouses after dark on Saturdays. Most of the veteran wardens I knew waxed rhapsodic about the days before wheelers, when your primary duties were catching poachers and finding lost hunters.

In truth, the warden’s job had always been dangerous. According to her own father, Kathy’s year here had been the worst in her life (until now), or she never would have requested a transfer to the southern part of the state. Her new husband, Darren, had died in a car crash. And she’d had to fire her weapon at a man who intended to carve her into pieces.

Marta Jepson’s home was a ranch house situated under a stand of tall pines. There were no neighboring homes within a quarter of a mile. At first glance, it reminded me of the rental property in Sennebec I had shared with Sarah. Our place had also been set back from the road and shaded by evergreen boughs. The difference was that we had lived in a drafty lobsterman’s shack that spouted a new leak every time it rained. This was a neatly kept residence with flower boxes under the windows and a flagstone walk swept clean of pine needles.

On one of the trees near the road someone had tacked a FOR SALE BY OWNER sign. A phone number was scrawled on it with a permanent marker. It was unclear to me in the darkness if the sign was old or new. Had Marta Jepson put it up herself, or had someone else?

I parked along the road and shined my flashlight on the dirt driveway leading to the house. At the Advanced Warden Academy, our instructors had taught us the obscure art of decoding tire treads. We learned automotive forensic terms—contact patch, noise treatment, and stress cycle. In the field, we measured tire widths to determine wheel-base dimensions by recording the turning diameter of a vehicle’s rear wheels. By examining the wear and tear, we could tell whether the tires were old or new, whether they were factory originals or retreads. And we could ascertain how recently the tracks had been made by using simple meteorology. Mud is Mother Nature’s gift to game wardens.

Many vehicles had been to the Jepson house in the past week, but one had visited more recently than the others. Glancing at the set of tracks, I couldn’t swear that they belonged to a Nissan Xterra, only that the width indicated an SUV or a truck. What I could say for certain was that there was no standing water in the tread marks. This particular vehicle had left the property after the rain had stopped and the dirt had begun to harden again.

Kurt had been here. He’d come to this house, guessing that there was a connection between Martha Jepson and the person who had shot his sister. If so, he had almost certainly seen the FOR SALE sign nailed to that maple, and there was no doubt in my mind that he’d called the phone number.

I removed my cell from my pocket and checked the signal. Two bars. I keyed in the seller’s number.

A woman answered. “Hello?”

“Hello, I’m calling about the house for sale.”

“Can you repeat that? You’re not coming through.”

“I’m calling about the house in Lyndon.”

“OK?”

“I drove past and saw the sign. I was wondering if you’d mind showing it to me.”

“Now? It’s kind of late.”

Northern Maine didn’t exactly have the hottest real estate market in the nation. Aroostook County had seen its population decrease in the last census. There were simply too few good-paying jobs to be had north of Bangor, especially after the Air Force had closed Loring Air Base in the 1990s. Perfectly nice houses tended to stay on the market now for months, sometimes years. And those that did sell were rarely purchased by some random guy calling from a darkened roadside.

“I thought you might live nearby,” I said.

“No, we’re down in Presque Isle.”

That was where Ethan Smith lived. The man jokingly called “the Monster.”

“It doesn’t have to be tonight,” I said, not wanting to spook the young woman. “So I take it you’ve gotten other calls about the property?”

She was silent long enough that I thought the call might have been dropped. “You need to talk to my husband. It’s his mom’s house.”

His mom? I’d been under the impression that Marta Jepson had no immediate family.

“Is he there?” I asked.

“Hang on a second.”

While I waited, I weighed my options. If I obeyed the speed limit, I could be back in Presque Isle in half an hour. Travis, the tractor salesman, had told me that Ethan Smith lived on the Alder Brook Road, outside Mapleton. That should be easy enough to find.

But there was a problem: As soon as his wife told him that a man was on the phone asking about his mother’s house, Smith would realize I was on his trail. He’d already gotten one suspicious call from me earlier that evening, and now here was some stranger on the line claiming he was shopping for houses by the light of the crescent moon. Smith knew from Donato that I used to be a game warden. Five minutes from now, he’d be taking off for the nearest crossing into New Brunswick. Unless I found a way to convince the Canadian Border Services Agency to stop him, the customs agents would probably just wave him through the checkpoint. Maybe if I could get through to Soctomah, he could alert the CBSA.