The windows had begun to fill with an indigo light as the sun crept closer to the eastern horizon. Lauren put a plate of pancakes in front of me. “The syrup’s from our sugar house. We try to grow what we eat here. It’s a lot of work, but Gary says it helps him with his recovery.”
Pulsifer had never told me he attended Alcoholics Anonymous. If he had, I definitely wouldn’t have offered him bourbon. Even worse, I realized, Lauren’s cheerful manner meant that she didn’t know Gary had gotten drunk the night before. Somehow he had managed to hide it from her. I felt assailed by guilt—for tempting Pulsifer into breaking his pledge, and for my silent complicity in concealing his slip from his wife.
“Gary says you’re dating one of the Stevens girls,” she said.
“Stacey,” I said.
Her eyes crinkled at the corners. “The pretty one.”
It should have registered with me that Lauren would have known Charley and Ora Stevens and their daughters. For years, the Stevenses had owned a camp just across Flagstaff Pond. And Charley and Gary must have worked plenty of cases together before my old mentor retired from the Warden Service.
Lauren hovered with a dishrag behind her children, watchful of messes. “How are Charley and Ora doing?” she asked. “We miss them so much here. So many good people left the area when Wendigo canceled their leases. That company is as close as you can come to pure evil. Gary says they bulldozed every decent deer yard between Eustis and the Kennebec River. Their plan is to take all the good wood and then develop the waterfront properties for real estate. Maybe sell it to some billionaire to create his own North Woods Kingdom. Don’t you hate it when your predictions come true?”
“Only the bad ones,” I said.
She had an unconvincing laugh. “I guess it’s been a long time since I was an optimist.”
“What’s an optimist?” the boy, Jacob, asked.
“It’s someone who thinks good thoughts,” Lauren said.
I ate quietly while Lauren did her mother thing, and we all waited for Gary. The kids seemed well behaved—loud as most kids, but well behaved. Eventually, she cleared them out of the kitchen with instructions to finish getting ready for school. Almost anyplace else, twenty inches of fresh snow would have meant canceled classes, but not in Maine, where natives consider anything less than four feet to be a dusting.
She removed my empty plate and poured coffee for the both of us. Then she sat down heavily across from me. It was as if she hadn’t wanted her children to see how bone-tired she was.
“The older I get, the more I seem to hate change,” she said. “Don’t you find that’s true? Even when it’s good change, like with Gary. I have a hard time trusting things will be better in the future. I keep waiting for the sky to fall.”
I thought of that empty bottle of bourbon in my duffel. “Stacey says I’m the same way.”
She gave me another of her wrinkly smiles. “I remember her when she was a little girl. What a tomboy! And just as fearless as her dad.”
“She still is,” I said.
“They’re such a wonderful family. Charley helped Gary out of so many scrapes. He could have let my husband self-destruct.” She caught herself, as if she had suddenly remembered I was a relative stranger in her house. “You’re easy to talk to, Mike. You have a comfortable way about you. And those blue eyes don’t hurt, either. They must be your secret weapon with women.”
“I wish that were true.”
“I’m sure people must tell you that you have your father’s eyes,” she said. “I knew him, of course. Everyone around here did. And Gary was obsessed with him because he was so blatant about all the deer and moose he was poaching. He used to come home so, so angry. I know it was one reason he drank. Gary’s sponsor says alcoholics drink because they have a spiritual disease. But I blame your father for a lot of the bad times we had. I am sorry, but that’s just how I feel.”
A door opened down the hall and a gust of cold air rushed into the kitchen before the door shut again and the finger paintings stopped flapping on the walls. Flotsam and Jetsam barreled into the room, their coats matted with snow, their nails clicking on the floorboards. I heard Pulsifer stomping his boots.
Lauren flushed, as if with embarrassment, and stood up from the table, as if she feared being caught with me in a compromising position. Living on an isolated farm in the woods, cooped up with four kids and a husband with a history of alcohol abuse, she probably had no one to talk to about her own problems. We both knew that she had confided far more than she had intended in me.
“Charley Stevens used to be the district warden here before he became a warden pilot,” she began, as if in the middle of a conversation. “I remember when I was in elementary school he came to talk to my class and brought a three-legged raccoon with him on a leash. They probably wouldn’t allow that now.”
“I highly doubt it,” I said.
“Highly doubt what?” Pulsifer was wearing his winter uniform: black parka and snowmobile pants.