The Bone Orchard: A Novel

I admired the sense of humor he had about himself.

“Most cowards I’ve met won’t admit to being afraid, so I doubt you really are one.”

“You haven’t seen him around spiders,” Maddie said.

“Some of them are poisonous! Have you ever heard of the brown recluse?”

The door opened behind me, and I heard fast-paced female voices raised in conversation. A group of four young women dressed in bright-colored Patagonia rainwear and muddy hiking boots hurried in out of the mist. As I stepped out of their way, I found myself unexpectedly face-to-face with the woman I considered the love of my life.

Stacey Stevens had long brown hair tied in a ponytail, light green eyes, and the lean body of an Olympic pole-vaulter. Her chin was probably a little too prominent, a genetic inheritance from her father, who had a jaw like the toe of a boot. The high cheekbones came from her stunningly attractive mother. I knew men who didn’t find Stacey particularly good-looking—“too bony,” they said—but to me, she was the most beautiful human being on the planet.

She’d been avoiding me for months, ever since I’d made public some unpleasant information about her then fiancé, Matt Skillen, while I was still a game warden. My discovery had precipitated the end of their relationship. Stacey seemed to be taking out her humiliation on me.

“Hello, Stacey,” I said.

“Oh, hello.” She continued with her friends into the dining room.

When I returned to my clients, I saw that Maddie was looking at me with a quizzical smile.





5



At dinner I took a chair that gave me a view of the table where Stacey was eating with her friends. She had positioned herself so that her back was to me. The seating arrangements seemed deliberate.

The women all looked to be in their late twenties and projected that aura of vitality that people who pursue lots of outdoor activities always seem to radiate. I had the sense that they might have been college classmates, maybe members of the same ski team. I’d seen a couple of Subaru wagons with Vermont plates and kayaks strapped to the roof racks out in front of one of the cabins. The lodge was often the launching spot for kayakers beginning a camping trip through the chain of lakes north and west of Grand Lake Stream—although most people wisely waited until the end of the blackfly season.

Their table was too far away for me to eavesdrop, but they seemed to be having a rowdy good time. Three of them were sharing bottles of wine. The fourth, who had ink-black hair and a nose ring, stuck to beer.

“What are these green things?” Mason asked as our plates arrived.

“Fiddleheads, silly,” said Maddie. “Haven’t you eaten them before?”

I speared one with a fork. “They’re ostrich ferns. We consider them a Maine delicacy.”

He bit his in half. “Tastes like spinach.”

As promised, Mason interrogated me on my former career as a law-enforcement officer with a terrierlike persistence. I kept trying to divert the conversation to anything else—fishing, politics, their banking jobs in New York. But Mason’s curiosity would not be denied. He waited until his girlfriend got up to use the bathroom and then launched a fusillade across the table.

“So here’s what I’m wondering.” His speech had grown a little sloppy from the wine. “How did you go to work each day knowing that someone might try to kill you?”

“Most days, no one tried to kill me.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t know that. There was no way of anticipating what you might encounter in the woods. Like those guys on the island. How would you have dealt with them? If you’d been all alone, I mean.”

“I would’ve told them to get the hell off the island before I busted them for trespassing.”

“But they were carrying guns,” Mason said.

“That’s not unusual,” I said. “Just about everyone a warden meets in the woods is armed.” I poured whiskey from the pint bottle onto the melting cubes in my water glass. “These days, you also have to assume that anyone might be carrying a concealed weapon.”

Mason leaned his elbows on the table, his fingers clasped, almost as if in prayer. “What if they’d threatened you?”

“I would have done everything in my power to keep the situation from escalating before I started acting tough,” I said. “But sometimes they don’t give you a choice. People react to your overall presence, so it’s important to show them you’re the alpha dog. You do that through your posture and the tone of your voice. You try to come across as someone not to be f*cked with.”

“So what would you have done if that guy with the mustache had pulled his pistol? Would you have tried to shoot it out of his hand?”

“That’s just something from the movies,” I said. “Cops don’t shoot to wound. You shoot to kill.”

“How do they train you for that?”

“Repetition. Role playing. But no matter how much you train, it doesn’t prepare you for having somebody point a gun at you in real life. You’re a human being, and you’re afraid.”

“So you would have killed him?” Mason asked.

“I would have done what I needed to do to protect myself.”

Mason leaned back in his chair, nodding, as if a problem that had been puzzling him all evening finally made sense. “That must have been what happened with those two cops,” he said.

“Which two cops?”

“The two cops who shot that crazy vet last night. There was a thing on the radio about it before dinner.”

The muscles in my neck and back tightened. “Where did this happen?”

“Somewhere south of here.”

“Did you get the names of the officers?”

“The police spokesman said they weren’t giving out that information yet. It sounded like a real shit show, though. To use a term from the hood.”

At that moment, Maddie returned. She sat down and fluffed out her napkin and laid it across her knees. “What did I miss?”

* * *

As the cute Latvian waitress cleared our dinner plates, Maddie began musing aloud about the possibility of buying a vacation home in Maine. I found myself unable to focus on the conversation.

There was a decent chance that I knew one or both of the cops involved in the shooting, either from the Criminal Justice Academy or from having worked a search or a drug bust with them. And Mason’s mention of a “crazy vet” had left the back of my neck tingling, for some reason. I was eager to ask Jeff Jordan if I could borrow his computer to find out what had happened, but politeness kept me in my chair.

Dessert was blueberry pie made with blueberries that Jeff’s kids had picked the previous summer.

One of Washington County’s few claims to fame—aside from being the easternmost county in the United States—was that it was the wild blueberry capital of the world. Grand Lake Stream sat on the edge of the big woods, but south and west of us there were miles of open fields where migrant workers from Latin American countries came each year to rake berries. They’d set up their gypsy camps for a few months and then move south again in the fall. The sight of the barrens in autumn, blazing like a red carpet thrown over the hills, always made me think of my first district. There were blueberry fields along the Midcoast, too.

I’d been living Down East for more than a year, but I still felt homesick for the fishing villages and hardscrabble farms where I’d learned to be a game warden. I’d done a lot of growing up since I first joined the service, but sometimes I experienced painful feelings of nostalgia when I remembered my youthful enthusiasm and naive desire to do good in the world. I missed that kid. Where the hell had he gone?

Without meaning to, I found myself staring at the back of Stacey’s head. I wasn’t sure why. My gaze just locked onto her as if pulled there by a magnetic force.

Her friend, the one with the nose ring, was watching me with a sour expression. She leaned across the table, nearly upsetting one of several beer bottles in front of her, and muttered something. Stacey half-turned her head in my direction, then thought better of it.

Stacey worked as a field biologist for my former employer, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. She was the only woman I’d ever met who loved the woods with the same intensity I did. Her parents, Charley and Ora Stevens, were among my best friends in the world. The rift between us was stupid and unnecessary, I decided, even if she was never going to reciprocate my feelings.

I excused myself from the table.

The friend with the nose ring gave me the evil eye when she saw me crossing the dining room. I stopped beside Stacey’s chair and said, “Good evening.”

I had the sense from their forced smiles that they all knew who I was.

“Sorry to interrupt your dinner,” I said. “Stacey, could I have a word with you?”

She narrowed her eyes. “What is it, Mike?”

“Maybe we could talk out on the porch.”

I wasn’t sure she would agree, but she did. The chair made a screeching noise as it slid back across the pine floorboards. Out on the porch, an older couple was playing gin rummy. I glanced around for a private alcove, but the library was also occupied by guests. Stacey just pushed past me, going through the front door and out into the lightly falling rain. I followed her outside. Neither of us was wearing a jacket.