The Bone Orchard: A Novel

I was reaching for the keys when the front door of the house opened and a woman stepped outside and stared intently in the direction of the Cutlass. She seemed to pose in the glow of the floodlights mounted above her head, as if she wanted me to see her watching the car. She was short, dark-haired, a little overweight. She was wearing a puffy pink jacket and acid-washed jeans tucked into farmer’s boots. Her hands were in her coat pockets. I had no doubt it was the woman I’d spoken to on the phone: Decoster’s wife.

She took her hand out of her jacket, and I saw she was holding something. It was a phone. Was she calling the cops about the suspicious vehicle parked down the road from her house? Was she giving the license plate number to the dispatcher?

The woman nodded, then put the phone back in her pocket and started down the concrete steps, headed in my direction. She didn’t seem in any hurry to approach the car. In fact, she seemed to be almost literally dragging her feet. I couldn’t blame her for being cautious.

She hardly looked threatening, but I felt an urge to restart the car and hit the gas. Instead, I stuck my phone in my pocket and rolled down the back window, since the driver’s was still stuck. A chilly breeze blew the smell of newly turned earth into the car. I shivered and waited for the woman to come closer. She paused a while in my blind spot and then came near the vehicle, approaching it via the middle of the road, right where the snowplows had shaved the center line down to nothing. She stopped just behind the rear door. Eklund had managed to knock the side mirror a-kilter, so I couldn’t see her there. I was forced to turn my head.

“Are you OK, mister?” She had a tremor in her voice that hadn’t been there when I called about the house.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to make you nervous. I just pulled over to talk on my phone.”

“We didn’t know what you were doing out here.”

“Just taking a call.”

“You’re the guy who called about the house, ain’t you?”

In the faint starlight, I couldn’t make out her features clearly, but I could tell that she had a fat lip. One corner of her mouth was as purple as a crushed plum.

Like father, like son, I thought. I had been angry before, but now my heart was burning, as if it had been tossed onto a fire. The son of a bitch. The murdering, wife-beating son of a bitch.

“I’m the one who called,” I said.

She started to tremble. It was as if a cold wind had come up, causing her to shiver. But there was no wind.

“F*ck, f*ck, f*ck, f*ck.”

She seemed so scared. I wanted to help her. “It’s OK.”

She reached into the pocket of her jacket again, and this time she drew out a small black pistol. She pointed it at my head.

“No, it’s not.”





38



“Get out of the car,” she said. “I’m a good shot. Don’t think I won’t shoot you.”

I had let my anger make me stupid. Driving here unarmed. Allowing this woman to approach the car. And then dropping my guard while I indulged my sympathy for an abused wife. I would deserve whatever happened to me.

Her hands were shaking. That was not good. Being terrified made her more likely to pull the trigger. I needed to calm her nerves while I came up with an escape plan.

I raised my hands from the wheel so she could see them. “Easy.”

“Get out of the car.” Her words didn’t have any force behind them. She seemed to be acting on someone else’s orders.

“I need to reach down to open the door,” I said.

“No! I’ll do it.”

She lunged for the door handle with one hand, keeping the other gripped tightly on the pistol. I believed her when she said she was a good shot. She lifted the door latch and jumped back as if a firecracker had been thrown at her feet.

Keeping my bandaged hands raised, I slid my knees out from beneath the steering wheel, placed my feet firmly on the asphalt, and rose to a standing position with my back to the car.

“You don’t have to do this,” I said.

“Do what?”

“Follow Jason’s orders.”

Her sorrowful laugh told me all I needed to know about how she viewed this suggestion.

“Walk around the front of the car,” she said.

“Where are we going?”

“Walk out into the field and keep walking until I tell you to stop.”

I was bigger and stronger than she was. It occurred to me that my chances would be fair if I spun around and threw myself at her without warning. But I wasn’t yet willing to risk my life on one desperate gamble, not when I still had time to assess the situation without getting my head blown off.

I took a step onto the sandy shoulder and then another into the salt-killed weeds along the irrigation ditch.

“Stop!” she said.

I turned my head slowly and saw that she was staring at my back. I was wearing Soctomah’s windbreaker. I had forgotten that there was a word stenciled in white across the shoulders.

“You’re a cop?”

I felt that I had play now but wasn’t sure how to use it. “I am.”

“Where’s your gun?”

“I’m not wearing one.”

“Stop right there!”

I was hesitant to turn my neck to see what she was doing. I stood as motionless as a mannequin. There was a long moment when I wasn’t sure what was happening.

“He says he’s a cop,” she said into her cell phone.

The overloud mumble of a man’s voice carried through the speaker.

“Where’s your badge?” she asked, repeating the phrase like a parrot.

“Back in the car. Do you want me to get it for you?”

“He says it’s in the car.” She paused, listening to her husband’s instructions.

She directed her next words at me: “Just keep walking.”

The ATV lights snapped on again in the distance, directly in front of us. I took another step into the furrowed potato field, heading for the tree line.

“What’s your name, ma’am?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“The state police are on their way here now. They know what you and your husband did.”

“I didn’t do nothing!”

I could hear her footsteps behind me and judged that she was following at a distance of ten to fifteen feet. The soil had soaked up a lot of rain and was tacky beneath my boots.

“You helped your husband kill a man name Kurt Eklund. He went to Marta Jepson’s house because he suspected her death was connected to the shooting of a game warden named Kathy Frost, and he was grasping at straws. He saw the phone number on the ‘For Sale’ sign and called here, but he didn’t realize he was talking to the son of Jacques Decoster. You and Jason lured Kurt out here, and you killed him. Then you helped your husband dispose of the SUV.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We found the abandoned vehicle in the rest stop where you two left it. I’m guessing your husband drove down to Medway in the Nissan, with you following in one of your trucks. You turned around there and started north again to that parking lot. Then your husband jumped into your pickup and you headed back to Presque Isle. Jason wanted the police to think that Kurt Eklund never made it up to Aroostook County. That’s how we know you were his accomplice.”

I was trying to walk as slowly as possible to let my words settle in.

“Did you help to dispose of the body, too?” I asked.

“Shut up!”

“Kurt Eklund is buried in this field, isn’t he? After I called you, Jason got scared. That’s what he’s doing down there, digging up the body of the man you two killed.”

“I didn’t kill no one!”

She was so pumped full of adrenaline now that even the slightest flinch might cause her to pull the trigger. I was taking a big risk, getting her so worked up.

“But your husband did,” I said. “He killed Kurt Eklund. And he pushed his own mother down her stairs. Her death wasn’t an accident, was it?”

She remained silent

I decided that the time had come to take a gamble. I stopped in my tracks but kept my hands raised.

“Keep walking!” she said.

I needed to find what the self-defense instructors called a “break state”: a split second where her mind was diverted from pulling the trigger. “What kind of man murders his own mother?”

“She shouldn’t have called the cops on her husband. That’s what Jason always says to me.”

“He says that when he hits you?”

Her voice went soft. “Jason doesn’t know his own strength sometimes.”

I saw her shadow grow larger beside me on the ground. She was almost within reach. I pivoted toward her, keeping my hands raised.

“Don’t turn around!”

“How many children do you have?” I asked.

She didn’t answer, but the frown on her face told me the Decosters had a family.

“What do you think’s going to happen to your kids when the state police get here?”

She glanced at the house but kept the pistol barrel leveled at my chest.

“If you kill me—or if Jason does—you’re never going to see them again. Do you think they let cop killers see their babies in prison? You’re going to die inside the Supermax without even seeing their faces one last time.”

“Stop it!”

I heard an engine roar to life in the distance. Jason Decoster was getting nervous about his wife. I was running out of time.