“What did I do? Did I do something wrong?” She had a jittery way of speaking, as if there was too much caffeine and nicotine in her bloodstream.
The law actually didn’t require her to show me any identification, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. I wanted to know who this strange woman was parked outside my house.
After a moment of hesitation, she reached for her pocketbook and pulled out a wallet. She looked even more attractive in the picture on her driver’s license than she did in the flesh. Her name was Amber M. Langstrom, she was forty-eight years old, and she lived in Bigelow, which was a ski town up north, not far from where I had spent the first nine years of my life, back before my parents divorced.
“I saw you parked out here,” I said, turning the light back on her, “and I wanted to see if you were all right.”
“I just pulled over to make a call,” she said.
“It’s a dangerous place for that. This is kind of a narrow road—especially with these snowbanks—and a car coming around the bend wouldn’t have much time to avoid hitting you.”
She shut one eye. “Can you turn off that light, please? I can’t quite—”
I pointed the beam at the ground. “Is that better?’
“Yes. Thank you.” She blinked a few times to clear the spots away and then brought her face close to the window. She seemed to be squinting to read the name tag on my uniform.
“It says Bowditch,” I told her.
Her lips parted and she gave the faintest nod. Then she laughed for no reason I could understand.
“Are you sure everything is all right?” I asked.
“Well, actually—”
“Yes?”
“The real reason I stopped is I’m lost and—this is so embarrassing—I’ve been driving around looking for a place to pee. There are no gas stations or McDonald’s anywhere.” She leaned her forearms against the wheel and smiled wide enough for me to see she was missing a molar. “I don’t suppose—I don’t suppose you live in that house?”
I felt my hand twitch in the direction of the .357 on my hip.
“If it’s not too much trouble, I just wondered—could I use your bathroom?” she asked, with an extra tremble in her voice. “This is so embarrassing, but I drank too much soda, and I really, really, really have to pee.”
“Can you excuse me a minute?” I said.
I retreated back to her rear bumper and took out my cell phone. I hit the auto dial for the state police dispatcher and recited the plate number and driver’s license information.
The answer came back: “No outstanding warrants. No convictions. Record’s clean.”
“Thanks.”
“Is everything all right there, Mike?” the dispatcher asked.
“I’ll let you know.”
I could see Amber watching me in her side mirror as I approached her open window.
I brought the flashlight beam back to her face. “What are you really doing here, Ms. Langstrom?”
“Your first name is Mike, right? Mike Bowditch?” She smiled quickly, then bit down on her lower lip. The expression was supposed to be friendly, flirtatious. She had a small tattoo of a butterfly, the size of a gem, at the base of her throat.
A breeze lifted the hairs on my scalp. I kept my right hand by my hip.
She smiled harder. “I have a confession to make. I’ve been sitting here trying to get up the courage to knock on your door, and then you just—you just came out of nowhere like a ghost or something. The thing is, I needed to see you, and the Warden Service wouldn’t tell me where you lived. I asked Gary Pulsifer, and he said it was somewhere near Sebago, but he wouldn’t give me your home address. I had to ask around at some of the bars near the lake.”
Pulsifer was the longtime district warden for the Rangeley Lakes region. He and I had a complicated acquaintance that was sometimes cordial, other times close to adversarial. Gary was known in the service for having a uniquely perverse sense of humor. But I had a hard time believing he would have sicced a stalker on me, even one as attractive as Amber Langstrom.
“Why have you been looking for me?” I asked.
“Can we go inside?” she said. “It’s freezing out here, and it’s kind of—well, it’s kind of a long story. And I wasn’t lying about having to pee.”
I gazed into her eyes, but I didn’t know what I should be looking for. If she was truly dangerous—truly a threat to my life—what would be the tip-off?
“Not until you tell me what you’re doing here,” I said.
“It’s about your father.”
The breeze lifted the hairs on my scalp again. “My father?”
“It’s about Jack.”
I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting her to say, but it wasn’t that.
“My father is dead.”
“I know,” Amber said, and her voice trembled again. “That’s why I’m here.”