“It’s kind of like a halfway house, too. The probation officer sends people there who don’t have anywhere else to go. All I know is that Adam hates the place. He said the man who runs it is a lying sack of shit who doesn’t care about the safety of his workers. A man died there a month ago when a tree fell on him!”
I could guess the rest. “How long has Adam been missing?”
“Two weeks,” she said. “He was supposed to check in with his parole officer, but he never did. She got a judge to put out a warrant for him.”
In Maine, game wardens are trained alongside state troopers and have all the same arrest powers, but searching for fugitive sex offenders didn’t normally fall within our purview—not unless they ran off into the woods. “And you haven’t heard from him?”
Her voice had a sharp new edge. “If I had, I wouldn’t be here, because at least then I’d know he was safe somewhere. His fucking PO thinks he ran off, but she’s not going to go chasing him. She says he’ll show up eventually, and then the cops will just arrest him again. Only this time, he’ll be going to prison for ten years!”
“Your son is an adult, and he is going to have to live with the consequences of his actions.”
“You don’t understand. I’m afraid something happened to him!”
An image came into my mind of a friend, a veteran of the war in Iraq, who hadn’t been able to escape his own demons after he returned home from the VA hospital.
“Was Adam suicidal?” I asked carefully.
“I don’t know. I never used to think his father was.”
Her answer raised so many questions, I had to resist diverting the conversation down a new path. “What about the people at the halfway house?” I asked. “Maybe Adam said something to them before he vanished.”
“The asshole who runs the place wouldn’t talk to me. He said he has a rule against violating his workers’ privacy. But I’m Adam’s mother!”
“I’m not a private detective, Amber.”
She seemed stunned by my refusal. “What about Jack? You helped him. Everyone says you tried to prove his innocence.”
“That was different. I’m sorry, but I just can’t help you.”
If I had known her at all, or been in any mood to explain, I might have confessed how embarrassed I was, humiliated even, by my past self. As a first-year warden, I had been reckless and headstrong. My insubordinate actions had nearly gotten me fired. I had no business getting a second chance in the Warden Service, but sometimes life rewards the undeserving. These days, I took every opportunity to distance myself from that Mike Bowditch. I treated him as a disreputable stranger—not even a blood relative—just someone who happened to share my name.
“You don’t understand,” she said yet again.
“I hope your son is all right and that he comes home soon.”
She inhaled, then let out a long breath, as if preparing to jump off a cliff into deep water. Her eyes filled again wth tears. “Adam is your brother!”
I thought I had misheard her. “What did you say?”
She leaned across the table. “Jack and I had an affair—I was married to A.J. at the time—and I got pregnant.”
I felt as if I had been punched in the sternum. “That’s impossible.”
“He is!”
How old was Adam? Twenty-one? I did the math. Twenty-one years ago, I had been seven, going on eight, and my parents had still been married. Soon after, I would come down with pneumonia when my father dragged me through the woods checking his trapline; my devoutly Catholic mother would get an abortion but pass it off as a miscarriage; she would pack her station wagon with little more than a few changes of clothing, and we would take off in the night while my father was out drinking, without even leaving a note, never to return. Twenty-one years ago my world hadn’t yet fallen irretrievably apart.
Amber’s face became fuzzier and fuzzier as she spoke: “I’d thought about telling you when Jack died—and then again after I heard your mom had passed away. I thought you should know you weren’t alone in the word, that you had a little brother. But then Adam went to jail and everything spun out of control.”
I found myself taking the photograph from her hand and sitting down hard in the armchair opposite her. I stared at Adam Langstrom’s face, searching for a resemblance I hadn’t noticed at first glance. He had the same brown hair and sky-blue eyes as my dad and me. Maybe the jawline looked faintly familiar. But the similarities were all superficial.
“How do you know?” The words came out as a croak. “How do you know that my dad is the father?”
“I know.”
It felt as if every muscle in my body had gone taut. “Why should I believe you? You just dropped this on me after I refused to help find your son.”
“What do you want from me?”
“A letter from him. A picture of you together. Anything.”
“Your dad didn’t write letters,” she said, as if I should have known better than to ask. “And A.J. burned the only picture of Jack and me together when he found it.”
I rose stiffly to my feet. “I’m sorry, but you need to leave.”