The Bone Orchard: A Novel

Rain spun in the light above the lodge entrance. Stacey was dressed in a green zip-neck shirt that clung to her small breasts. She had on blue jeans tucked into rubber-soled Bogs boots.

She crossed her arms and cocked her head. “What is it?”

“Did your parents get off on their trip all right?”

Charley was taking Ora on a flying vacation to Newfoundland to see the vast colonies of seabirds—gannets, puffins, and kittiwakes—that nested along the cliffs there. He was a retired warden pilot and a legend in the service. He had also been the closest thing I’d had in my life to a father figure.

“That’s what you wanted to talk with me about? My parents’ vacation? How much have you had to drink?”

Not enough, I thought. “I want to apologize.”

“Apologize? For what?”

“I know you blame me for what happened between you and Matt.”

The suggestion seemed to annoy her. “I don’t blame you. Why would I blame you? I was the one who got engaged to a scumbag.”

If she didn’t hold me responsible for ending her engagement, why did she always make herself scarce when I visited the home she shared with her parents on Little Wabassus Lake?

“Jeff told me Matt is running for the state legislature,” I said.

“He’ll probably win, too. Don’t criminals always win elections? Why are we having this urgent conversation again?”

“I want our relationship to be better.”

“We don’t have a relationship.”

“That’s what I mean. I’m friends with your parents. I’d like it if you and I could be friends, too.”

“What are you, sixteen?” She wiped her wet face with both hands. “Can I go back to my dinner now?”

I rubbed the water from my own face. “The women you’re with don’t seem to like me, for some reason.”

“Maybe they didn’t like having their dinner interrupted.”

“The one with the short hair and the ring in her nose—”

“Kendra.”

“She’s been glaring at me for the past hour.”

“Kendra never likes it when men look at me. It’s always pissed her off.”

“Why would it piss her off?”

“She and I used to date when I was in college. I’m surprised my dad never shared that juicy tidbit with you.”

She’d intended the words to land like a punch, and they did. “I guess he didn’t think it was any of my business.”

“It’s not any of your business. Are we finished, Matt? Because I’d like to go back inside.” She closed her eyes, shook her head, and took another stab at it. “I meant ‘Mike.’”

After she had returned to the dining room, I stood in the rain, feeling more like a fool than I had before. I wouldn’t have imagined that was possible.





6



The rain began to fall more heavily as I drove west out of the village on my way home. I flipped the wipers into high-speed mode. The rhythmic clacking made my head hurt. Drinking half a pint of whiskey might have had something to do with it.

Just as likely, I was suffering the side effects of my conversation with Stacey. When she’d first come to work for the department, I’d heard whispers about her sexual orientation, but I’d dismissed them as the self-serving stories men tell themselves to explain why attractive women show no interest in their crude advances. The gossip had ended after she’d gotten engaged to Matt Skillen. I expected the rumor mill would start churning again. Not that it was any of my business. Stacey had been right about that part.

I rounded a corner, where someone had set up a memorial to a girl killed in a car crash the previous year. It was a simple wreath of white flowers nailed against the shattered stump of an oak tree. Local jerks kept taking down the display, but the unidentified mourner kept arranging for replacements. Just as soon as one memorial was stolen, another took its place. The back-and-forth contest struck me as symbolic: the eternal struggle we undergo, trying to hold on to a memory when others have a stake in forgetfulness.

After a while, I turned down a darkened dirt road. The steady rain was carving new channels into the packed earth. I felt the emergent potholes through the worn shock absorbers of my Bronco.

A steel gate loomed in my headlights. It was a simple metal bar that pivoted on a pillar. With the engine idling, I pulled the hood of my jacket over my ears and climbed out into the mud and mist. Wood frogs were quacking in the darkness. I bent over to turn the combination lock, shining a flashlight on the dial, then pushed open the heavy, groaning gate. There were hidden night-vision cameras on me the whole time. Only I and a handful of other people—the owner and her new security team—knew about the surveillance equipment.

I drove down the shore of Sixth Machias Lake to the compound at the far end, passing through a stand of ancient hemlocks that the landscape architects had left standing when they built Moosehorn Lodge. The main building was an enormous log mansion constructed atop a fieldstone foundation. Motion-sensing lights snapped on as my vehicle approached, and I knew that more video cameras were recording my arrival, sending the images to a digital feed, which the security company could review at its leisure.

Although the buildings were all new, a forsaken air hung over the place. Everything was well maintained—there was no flaking paint or loose roof shingles—and yet even a casual observer could tell that no one had lived here for a while and maybe never would again. This place would always be haunted by bad memories.

It felt like returning to my own personal fortress of solitude. I pulled up in front of one of the guest cabins but kept the headlights focused on the door. Steam rose from the hood. I reached into the pocket of my jacket and took another pull from the whiskey bottle, warming myself before I started my nightly rounds. I turned off the ignition and listened to the engine ticking.

My arrangement with Elizabeth “Betty” Morse was this: In exchange for free rent and a thousand dollars a month, deposited electronically into my bank account in Machias, I was to lend a human presence to her property. I wasn’t officially the caretaker, because that title would have suggested Ms. Morse cared for this collection of buildings in any meaningful sense of the word. Her plans to create an ecological preserve on the estate hadn’t worked out as she’d hoped, and sometimes I wondered if she wouldn’t have been happier walking away from her Maine holdings with a multimillion-dollar insurance check.

The last I’d heard, she had turned her attention to a valley in northern Montana and was making a project of buying up her own private glacier. After the initial phone conversation we’d had—word had gotten to her that I had left the Warden Service, and she thought I might be right for the job—she had stopped answering my e-mails. Betty Morse was famous for her wandering attention. When you are worth nearly half a billion dollars, you can afford to follow your whims.

My responsibilities started at occupying one of the guest cabins and stopped at letting people in the area know that a former law-enforcement officer was in residence at Moosehorn Lodge. I didn’t feel right about taking her money for living rent-free in the most luxurious cabin in the world, so I made a point of poking around the grounds with a flashlight. I was sure that Mrs. Morse would have found my unwarranted devotion to duty endearing.

I spent fifteen minutes taking a tour of the property, which included a visit to the end of the dock, where I watched raindrops stipple the surface of the lake. There wasn’t another building on Sixth Machias. It always astonished me to gaze across such an enormous expanse of water without seeing so much as a single lighted window.

The irony of my living situation was not lost on me. Morse’s last caretaker had been my friend Billy Cronk, the one currently doing seven years in the Maine State Prison for manslaughter. Prior to working at Moosehorn, Billy had been a hunting and fishing guide—my other newly chosen profession.

When I’d told him over the phone that I’d accepted the job with his former employer, he’d said, “What are you, nuts?”

“I know she can be difficult.”

“That’s not what I meant. I’m just wondering why you think it’s a smart move, following in my footsteps. You planning on getting sent to prison, too? What the hell’s wrong with your head, Mike?”

“There’s nothing wrong with my head.”

“So why’d you quit being a cop? You were one of the best I ever met.”

“You have low standards,” I’d said, trying to make a joke out of it.

“I guess I do.”

I’d put off visiting Billy in prison for too long. Part of me was reluctant to revisit the Midcoast, where I’d once been a warden. The other part was afraid of seeing my friend in an orange jumpsuit, knowing I’d helped put him in it.

By the time I stepped inside my cabin, the front of my jeans was soaked through, and I needed another sip of Jim Beam to shake off the chill. I hoped that Mr. Mustache and his friend were getting thoroughly drenched out on Bump Island. I took another swig of whiskey, then another. When the bottle was empty, I went back outside to the Bronco and retrieved my Walther PPK/S from the locked glove compartment.

I found my gun-cleaning kit in one of the cardboard boxes I had piled in the corner. I took a yellowed newspaper from the wood box and spread the pages out across the granite bar that separated the kitchenette from the living area. The PPK series is an old-fashioned design, originally favored by the Nazis—a holdover from the days when firearms were made of steel and not high-tech polymers. It weighs more than it should. If you grip it the wrong way, the slide bites viciously into the webbing of your hand between your thumb and index finger every time you fire a shot. I disassembled the gun, poured bore solvent on a rag, then pushed an oiled patch inside the barrel to remove the carbon buildup.