The Bone Orchard: A Novel

“Knock on a bunch of doors around here that I should’ve tried a few days ago.”

I reached into the duffel at my feet and handed him back the windbreaker he had loaned me. In return, he gave me back my Walther. I hefted the pistol in my palm, feeling its familiar weight, and tucked it in the back of my pants.

* * *

The plane was a propeller-driven Cessna 182. I stood aside while an evidence technician and a deputy medical examiner manhandled the body bag from the wheeled gurney into the space behind the rear seats. The plane was small, and it was a tight squeeze. Because of the weight of the load (four bodies, three living), the tech stayed behind while the coroner and I clambered into the available seats. The pilot put me up front. It didn’t bother me, having some distance from the dead man.

The 182 had a bigger engine than the 172 Skyhawk that Stacey Stevens flew. I hadn’t thought of her in a few days, but now I found myself wishing that she was the one flying this plane and not some middle-aged dude with a cheek stuffed full of Black Jack chewing gum. I hadn’t been this lonely in days.

At first, the pilot tried to make conversation over the intercom, but the deputy medical examiner—a graying woman with tightly bound hair and even a tighter face—was in less of a talkative mood than I was.

At least Kurt had died in a heroic attempt to find his sister’s assailant. All of his adult life, he’d been searching for some opportunity to atone for one bad night in Vietnam. It might have been a foolish quest—but so what? The only difference between his efforts and mine was that he was lying cold in the rear of the plane and my heart was bruised but still beating.

Mostly, I found myself worrying about Kathy. I had witnessed the effects of brain injuries in too many people to count. Nearly every family I’d met in the boonies had a brother who’d crashed his snowmobile into a tree or an uncle who’d wrapped his Mustang around a telephone pole. Some of these invalids were near vegetables. The others were even scarier. They reminded me of zombies: shambling, unreasoning creatures who were no longer recognizable as the self-directed human beings they once had been.

Jimmy Gammon had suffered a traumatic injury when the IED had exploded in that pile of garbage. His mother had no longer been able to identify his personality as belonging to her son. I was terrified of finding Kathy similarly altered beyond recognition.

Flying from Houlton to Augusta, we covered most of the state of Maine. The land turned greener and greener beneath us, from a pale, almost yellowish tone that reminded me of the pea soup my French-Canadian relatives used to serve us when I was a kid to a deep, almost jungle-green color down south. There were still a few threadbare hillsides and valleys that the sun hadn’t yet warmed—where you could see winter hanging around in the shadows—but those chilly corners would be gone in a matter of weeks.

We passed from the potato fields of Aroostook County over the commercial timberland east of Baxter State Park. It was a clear day and the summit of Katahdin was bright white with unmelted snow, which caught the glare of the rising run. Then we were flying over fields again: hardscrabble farms carved out of the second-growth forest and great fenced pastures full of white dairy cows. My window faced west, not east, so I had no view of Appleton Ridge or the Camden Hills. Mine was an inland perspective.

I did see a great many turkeys bobbing along at the weedy edges of the cow and sheep farms. Hunters, too, although they were inevitably set up in blinds far from the nearest flocks. The season would be over in a few days, and, as usual, most of the big toms would survive to service their harems. Next year, there would be even more poults.

We landed at the Augusta State Airport, where we were met by another emergency vehicle, this one owned by the state medical examiner’s office. Men were waiting to remove Kurt Eklund’s body from the plane. I started to unhook my headset, but the pilot reached over and gripped my left wrist.

“This is just a pit stop,” he said over the intercom. “You and I are headed for Portland.”

It always amazed me how quickly a small plane could get up and down. We weren’t more than ten minutes on the tarmac in Augusta, and then we were zipping along the runway again, my stomach pressed against my spine. The next thing I knew, I was looking up at a cloud as the nose of the Cessna pointed skyward.

“This won’t take more than fifteen minutes,” the pilot assured me. “Are you feeling airsick?”

“I have a pretty strong stomach.”

“That’s what they all say!”

He waggled the wings to be funny, but my mood was too heavy for him to lift.

We landed at the Portland International Jetport exactly fifteen minutes later and taxied to one of the private hangars on the east side of the terminal. I saw a teal-blue GMC Sierra parked in the lot. I recognized it as one of the Warden Service’s unmarked patrol trucks.

Major Malcomb was waiting for me inside the hangar. The cavernous space smelled of petroleum products, and a radio was blasting classic country for the mechanics’ listening pleasure. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard Hank Williams.

“Thank you for flying with us,” the pilot said as I handed him my headset. “We hope you enjoy your stay in Portland or wherever your final destination may take you.”

I felt a little sorry for him. He had tried so hard to coax a smile out of me.

The only luggage I was carrying was my waxed canvas duffel. I’d packed it with all the personal items I thought were worth keeping—my tent, my Snow & Nealley kindling ax. I’d left the rest in the trunk of Kurt Eklund’s Cutlass.

The more you know, the less you carry. That was a saying they used in wilderness-survival schools, but it applied to more than just bushcraft.

Malcomb grabbed the bag away from me before I had a chance to resist. He tossed it into the backseat, beside the locked case in which he kept his AR-15 rifle. He’d done a lot of vacuuming, but the stale smell of cigarettes lingered. Regulations said he wasn’t permitted to smoke inside the state-owned vehicle, but who was there to punish him now?

“How was your flight?” His throat sounded as cracked as a waterless arroyo.

“Faster than driving.”

He spun the wheel in the direction of outer Congress Street and pressed the accelerator. I’d seen Maine Med standing like a citadel on the Western Promenade as the plane had turned and banked over the city.

“I heard she’s awake,” I said. “Soctomah said you were going to break the news to the family. How did it go?”

“It didn’t come as much of a shock.”

“Kurt told me he had cirrhosis. I’m guessing they’d given him up for dead a long time ago.”

He’d put on his mirrored sunglasses, but I felt him glancing at me out of the corner of his eye. “How old are you again, Bowditch?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“That’s what I thought. Parents don’t give up on their kids until they see them in a casket. Doesn’t matter how old the kids are.”

I leaned back against the seat, feeling properly chastened. “How did Kathy react when you told her about Pluto?”

“I think you know the answer to that question.”

The major seemed unaccountably hostile. I hadn’t expected a hero’s welcome, but when Soctomah told me that wardens had paid for my hotel room, I’d experienced a brief period of forgiveness, as if I might be welcomed back into the fold.

We crossed the Stroudwater bridge, headed toward downtown Portland. A snowy egret was standing in the tidal muck, one leg tucked beneath its tail feathers. I saw its bright yellow foot. I unrolled the automatic window and let the salt air clear away some of the tobacco reek.

Malcomb pushed a button on his door and my window rolled back up.

“I suppose you heard the latest about the colonel,” he said.

“No.”

“Harkavy announced his resignation last night.”

Colonel Duane Harkavy had been both my commanding officer and my personal nemesis for as long as I could remember. In my mind, he’d represented everything wrong with the Warden Service—the resistance to new ideas, the cronyism that rewarded political savvy over experience in the field, the sexism toward female officers. I had a hard time imagining the department without him. I should have been hopeful about the future, but Malcomb’s sourness suggested he wasn’t planning on throwing his hat in the ring.

“Does that make you the acting colonel?” I asked.

“Until the commissioner replaces me, it does.”

We paused at a stoplight. Malcomb wasn’t upset because he had inherited the job; he was upset because he would never be allowed to keep it. His new boss, the current commissioner, was an incompetent bureaucrat who didn’t give a shit about protecting the state’s natural resources. She was just a shill appointed by a governor who cared even less about Maine’s environment.

“You did a good job up there,” Malcomb said out of the blue.

“Thanks.”

“I don’t think I could have stopped myself from shooting the guy, but you did the right thing.”

“I’m still not convinced.”

His eyes never left the road as we crossed the busy intersection at St. John Street. “I read Tate’s report about that incident at the quarry, too.”