The Bone Orchard: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (26 page)

“I’m glad you found such meaningful work,” I said, trying to conceal my misgivings. “It was always so important for you to have a sense of purpose.”

“You, too,” she said. “Are you missing it? The job, I mean.”

“It’s not the worst thing to wander in the wilderness for a while.”

She reached across the table and touched the injured side of my face. “You seem so lost, Mike.”

“It’s a bad time is all.”

“I wish there was something I could do for you.”

The suggestion wasn’t so subtle that I missed it. And I couldn’t deny that I still desired her. She was the most gorgeous woman I’d ever been with. But I could hear the alcohol in her voice. I removed her hand and gave it a squeeze. “You and I had our time together. I’ll always be grateful for that.”

She lowered her chin and looked up at me through her lashes. “You’ve always been so damned chivalrous. I’d forgotten how sexy it is.”

“You’re mistaking cluelessness for chivalry. There’s a reason I’m not seeing anyone.”

She stared steadily into my eyes for a long time. “Can you excuse me for a few minutes?”

“Sure.”

I watched her beautiful backside as she crossed the room, feeling less like a noble knight than a self-flagellating monk. What had I just passed up? And for what reason?

I let my gaze wander back to the window. A flock of herring gulls was gathered on one of the rooftops below, lined up along the edge, looking down expectantly at the street. Among them was a great black-backed gull. It was the largest species of gull in the world and a natural bully. When one of the smaller birds found a baguette someone must have tossed into a Dumpster, the big gull attacked until the other gull was forced to drop its prize.

The natural world had always been so much easier for me to comprehend than my fellow human beings. Amid all the bricks and concrete, the crowds and the cars, I found comfort in watching gulls, knowing I could understand their motivations. The great black-backed gull acted with aggression because it was hungry and because it was large enough to take what it wanted. There were no hidden reasons for its behavior. If only people were so easy to decipher.

Sarah was gone for ten minutes. I was beginning to wonder if she’d walked out on me for some unknowable reason, when my phone rang.

“Hello?”

“I’m in room two twenty-seven,” she said, and hung up.

30

I knocked on the door. My stomach had been doing flip-flops in the elevator. A voice had told me to hit the button for the ground floor and make a dash through the lobby. And yet here I was, staring at the peephole of room 227.

Sarah opened the door. She was wearing one of the hotel’s plush robes and she was barefoot. Her lips were parted in a smile.

I remained in the hall, as if paralyzed from the waist down. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“It’s not obvious?”

I stepped through the door. It closed behind me on account of its own weight.

She reached under my sweater and pressed her palm over my heart. “I decided I like the beard.”

“What about Jon?” I asked.

“He doesn’t have one.”

“You know what I mean.”

She tightened her fingers in my chest hair. I grabbed the back of her neck and pulled her head up until our eyes were locked together. Then I brought my mouth down to hers and we began to kiss, not lovingly, but with lips parted, using our tongues. I reached inside her robe, found her breast, and I squeezed the hardened nipple. I let her neck go and wrapped my other arm around the small of her back. Her robe was open and her flat stomach was pressed against my groin. I wanted her to feel how much I wanted her.

She began pulling at the hem of my sweater, trying to work it and my T-shirt up over my head at the same time, but my arms got tangled in the sleeves.

“Wait a second,” I said. “Let me.”

I managed to get my shirt and sweater off with a minimal amount of fumbling. She dropped to her knees and reached for my belt. I found myself looking down at the uneven part in her blond hair. This was happening fast, and I was trying hard not to think about it, preferring just to let my body do what it wanted to do. She took the tip of my cock in her mouth but wouldn’t take any more of it at first. I wanted her to slide the rest down her throat as far as it could go, but she remembered how much I enjoyed being teased. When she finally did, it was almost more than I could stand.

“Wait,” I said. “Wait.”

I was worried about coming too fast.

“Lie down on the bed,” I said.

She glanced up and gave me a wicked smile that would have scandalized the parents of the students at Coracle. Then she let the terry-cloth robe slide from her shoulders and stood up, naked, in front of me. She took a step backward and flopped back on the bed with her arms and legs open. The sight of her bare body wasn’t helping me regain control of myself. She had recently had a wax.

She was lying there, waiting for me to work my feet out of my pants, when a phone rang. It wasn’t mine.

Sarah glanced at the nightstand. Her phone wiggled across the tabletop as it rang. The ringtone was a snippet of a pop song I didn’t recognize, something a teenaged girl might listen to.

After thirty seconds or so, the phone stopped ringing. The call had gone to voice mail.

The interruption had made us lose our rhythm.

Sarah returned to work on me, and I reached both hands down to hold her head, but something had been lost. My mind had started working again. The ringtone had sounded customized, signifying that the call was coming from a specific person.

After a few awkward silent seconds, the phone rang again. It was the same bubbly little song.

Sarah looked up at me. “Sorry. I should get that.”

She rose from her knees, reached for her robe, and knotted the belt around her waist.

I stood awkwardly in place. My pants were down around my knees.

“Hi, Abbie,” Sarah said. “What’s going on? Is everything OK?”

I could perceive a high-pitched female voice coming through the receiver but couldn’t make out the words.

Sarah saw me watching and turned away.

“Why were you using the washing machine?” she asked.

She waited for an answer. I bent over and pulled up my pants.

A guilty feeling had come over me that I was being unfaithful to Stacey. It was a ridiculous notion, because we had never been romantic. But emotions are not reasonable. They simply are what they are.

“It’s probably just the circuit breaker,” Sarah said in a motherly tone of voice. “The circuit breaker goes off when you have too many appliances running at the same time. All you need to do is reset the switch. There’s a panel in the basement near the furnace—”

She was speaking with Jon Hogarth’s daughter, I realized. Sarah hadn’t mentioned anything about where she was living or with whom, but I saw the situation clearly in my head.

“No, you didn’t actually
break
anything,” Sarah told the girl. “It’s just a name for the electrical box.”

In the bar, I had intuited her lack of fulfillment. Whatever her relationship was with Hogarth, it wasn’t a romance. I had formed a negative image of the man as a late middle-aged Svengali, and the stereotype had allowed me to shove my conscience aside for a few minutes.

Sarah walked toward the opposite end of the room, trying to explain to Abbie Hogarth how to reset the switch on the circuit breaker. There was a faint chill in the hotel room, as if the heat hadn’t been on before she rented it. I retrieved my T-shirt and sweater from the floor.

I knew nothing about Sarah’s relationship with Jon Hogarth. I only knew that I didn’t want to be complicit in someone else’s betrayal. As the son of a man who had wrecked more than a few marriages, I could say that much about myself.

Sarah kept her back to me until she was finished with the call. She seemed surprised to find me fully dressed again. “That was awkward,” she said.

“Was it his daughter?”

“How did you—” She clutched her robe around her throat. “Her name is Abigail. She’s twelve.”

I dug my hands into my pockets. “I can’t do this.”

“Because of Abbie?”

“I heard the way you talked to her,” I said. “It’s like you’re her big sister. You’re part of her life.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with the way I feel about you. I wish you wouldn’t judge me without hearing my side of things.”

“I’m not judging you.”

“If you leave like this, it’s the same thing as judging me.”

I removed my wallet from my pocket. “I’ll pay for the room.”

“That just makes it worse! It makes me feel like a prostitute.” She plopped down on the bed and leaned her head forward, so her hair was covering her face. “Are you seriously going to run off?”

“Do you want to talk about what’s going on between you and Jon?”

She shook her head. “No. Fine. Leave.”

“I’ll stay if you do.”

“How chivalrous of you.” When she glanced up, her eyes flashed with anger. “You’re right. This was a mistake. I had too much to drink. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“You weren’t thinking,” I said. “Neither of us was.”

“Don’t be so sure about that.”

She gathered up her clothes and went into the bathroom. I hung around to say good-bye, until it became obvious that she wasn’t coming out until I left, so that is what I did.

*   *   *

It hadn’t been my intention to make Sarah feel ashamed of herself. I only knew that I had needed to stop myself before I had a reason to regret my actions. I had so much practice in my life doing the wrong things; I hadn’t realized I could feel just as lousy when I did something right for a change.

The traffic was heavy leaving Portland, and there was night construction along Route 1 that forced me to stop periodically.

I had given in to temptation with Sarah because I was lonely and because things had ended badly with us the first time. Like everyone, I fantasized about rewriting my past. To have had sex with her one more time—after she’d been the one to reject me and the family I’d hoped to have with her—would have recast our relationship in terms that made me feel less self-pitying. But mostly I had been acting out of a pent-up frustration with the wayward man I’d become.

“I can do whatever I want now,” I had told Sarah. “I’m a civilian.” In fact, I had never felt more powerless.

The moon had climbed above the Camden Hills and was lighting up the eastern slopes of the blueberry barrens when I turned off the Ridge Road and began my cautious approach to Kathy’s house. The windows were all dark, and I didn’t see the Xterra parked among the assorted boats and motorized vehicles. I could call the VFW Hall in Sennebec and ask if Kurt Eklund had showed up, but my gut told me that he hadn’t raced off in such a hurry just to play Texas Hold ’Em.

I searched under the seat until I found Deb Davies’s pink LadySmith revolver, then tucked the gun into my pants at the small of my back.

When I stepped out of the car and closed the door, I heard a toad trilling nearby. The air was crisp but dry and the aroma of a blooming shadbush was drifting down the hill. I hadn’t remembered seeing one of the shrubs, but the sweet smell of serviceberry was unmistakable. There were still shreds of police tape hanging from bushes around the property, and in the light of the moon, they looked like festive decorations from a recent party.

As I approached the front door, I noticed a piece of paper that had been affixed with a heavy-duty staple gun at eye level. I tore the paper loose and held it up in the moonlight to read it.
NOTICE OF PROPERTY LIEN
, it said. For an instant, I thought it might be a legitimate legal document. The fine print was so small as to be almost unreadable. Then I remembered Kurt’s comments about the crackpot neighbor. When I peered closely, I located
LITTLEFIELD
in block letters hallway down the page, listed as the lien holder. His first name, evidently, was Lawrence.

He must have downloaded the bogus form off of the Web and trudged across the barrens to post it in the event Kathy expired without a will. He wanted dibs on his damn right-of-way, and so, like a modern-day Martin Luther, he had decided to nail his grievances to her door. I fought against the impulse to pay the man a surprise visit. I wondered how much he might enjoy eating this piece of paper.

I entered the unlocked house and made my way from room to room, turning on lights as I went, searching for signs that Littlefield or someone else had been inside, but everything seemed to be in the same shape as when I’d rushed off that morning. The newspapers were spread across the kitchen table and, upstairs in the bathroom, my still-damp towel was wadded in a ball where I’d dropped it on the floor.

I returned to the living room and sat down on the sectional sofa, stretching my legs across the coffee table. In the process, I nearly dislodged the mug I’d filled with rum after I’d tucked Kurt into bed. I played with the idea of pouring myself a nightcap, but the two double bourbons I’d consumed at the Top of the East—followed by the sexual fiasco that had followed—had soured my stomach.

A fleeting impression came to me that something about the room was different, but I couldn’t identify a single item that had been moved. I let my gaze wander up the wall to the big-screen TV hanging there and saw my silhouette reflected in the obsidian-dark glass. It felt as if I was looking not at myself but at the featureless shadow of the man I was searching for. The synapses in my brain were as tangled as a ball of rubber bands. After a while, I gave up trying to unravel them.

31

Stacey’s father, Charley, had once told me, “Don’t mistake action for progress,” but I had reached the emotional state where the distinction no longer mattered. I needed to take action even if it led me nowhere.

The next morning, I took a quick look around the house, but Kurt had not returned during the night. I took a hot shower and dug out the last clean underwear and socks I had from my duffel. When I left the bathroom, I found a voice mail on my phone from Jeff Jordan at Weatherby’s, telling me he had a fishing party arriving the next day and to call him back if I wanted the guiding job. I deleted the message. Instead, I sat down at Kathy’s desk and opened the binder that listed the names, home addresses, and phone and pager numbers of every game warden in the state. I flipped through until I found Danielle Tate’s information. She lived twenty minutes south of Appleton, in the old German township of Waldoboro. I tucked Deb Davies’s revolver into the back of my pants and set off.