Had Amber known this would happen? That curiosity would get the better of me once I’d started asking questions? At the very least, she must have understood that any conversation I had with stonewalling Shaylene Hawken was bound to leave me feeling angry and frustrated.
I glanced again out the window at the alabaster sky above the ragged treetops. I hadn’t been back up to my father’s old stomping grounds in ages, not since the manhunt. I could drive up to Widowmaker and be back home before the snow started to fall. As long as I understood where the lines were drawn and made certain not to cross them, I was at no risk of getting myself into trouble. No risk at all.
*
I kept my personal vehicle, an International Harvester Scout II, in the garage, out of the elements. I had always had an affinity for vintage four-wheel-drive vehicles. Maybe it was because I spent so much of my working life driving a state-of-the-art GMC Sierra that was loaded with more technology than I knew what to do with. My first antique had been a Jeep Willys that ran like a dream until rust ate it down to the bones. Then I had owned a cherry Ford Bronco, which I had watched being blown apart by shotgun rounds. Looking for a replacement, I had been torn between a Dodge Power Wagon and the International Harvester. I had gone with the hardtop Scout and had never had cause to regret my decision. The gas mileage was abysmal, but my trusted four-by-four took me everywhere I wanted to go.
In the winter, I packed the back with tire chains, a come-along, and a pull rope—as much to help motorists who might have slid off the road as to help myself. (I have always been an incorrigible Good Samaritan. My life would have been easier if I had been even remotely corrigible.) I kept a pair of snowshoes in there, too, as well as a wool blanket, a five-gallon jug of gasoline, and a first-aid kit.
As I backed out of the driveway, I reached into my glove compartment for a pair of sunglasses. I also carried one of my off-duty pieces in there: a Walther PPK/S that jammed on hollow-point bullets, no matter how well I cleaned the barrel. I kept it for softheaded, sentimental reasons. It was the first handgun I had ever owned.
I debated whether to call the shelter to check up on Shadow. Joanie Swette had mentioned doing a blood test. I supposed that it was probably more reliable in terms of determining genetics, especially when the stakes were so high for an animal. But they wouldn’t have the results for a while.
The GPS on my phone said it would take more than two hours to get to Widowmaker.
The resort was located north of Rangeley, a lake town not far from the New Hampshire border. I decided to take the cross-country route, following the frozen Androscoggin River through Lewiston, Maine’s second-largest city, and past the mill towns of Livermore Falls and Jay, where the air smelled like rotten eggs and every snowbank seemed to have a crust of asphalt grit.
I had lived briefly along the Androscoggin as a small boy when my dad had a job at the old Atlantic Pulp and Paper mill, and I could still remember my mother’s warnings. Below the dams, the plunging river was coffee-brown and frothy, but then it would slip beneath a sheet of seemingly solid ice for miles.
“You can’t trust it,” she’d said. “Not ever, Michael. Do you understand me?”
Her warnings had given me the idea that the river was an evil serpentine thing, a winding white dragon, slithering through the snow. The impression would be strongest at night, when I heard the ice forming and shifting. The grumbling sound made me think of sleepless monsters, and then in the morning I would see jagged new patterns in the surface, cracks and ridges that hadn’t been there the night before. The term my mother used for those nocturnal noises was river talk, but to me it sounded much more like the growls of something that would swallow me whole if I didn’t take care.
Then I would watch my father trudge out to the middle of the frozen river with a six-pack and his ice-fishing gear and sit there safely for hours pulling brown trout through holes, one after the other, while he got a buzz started for the coming night at the bars. When he returned with a bucket of trout, I knew for certain he must be the bravest man in the world. Who else could ride the back of that white dragon all day and return home alive?
*
The road to Rangeley took me through the college town of Farmington, where Shaylene Hawken had her office, and then northwest through the impoverished Sandy River Valley. Bleak little towns with names like Strong, Avon, and Madrid were strung like tarnished beads along the highway. Hunchbacked mountains blotted out the light for long stretches, and moose warning signs flashed amber at every curve in the road.
Surrounded on both sides by hills, the isolated shacks and trailers down in the river bottom must have seen the sun for only a few hours each day. I found myself imagining the domestic dramas that might be playing out inside those benighted homesteads—the drugs being injected, the alcohol being consumed, the blows and the screaming, the guns being placed speculatively against temples.