The Bone Orchard: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (31 page)

Travis returned, still smiling, holding a wireless phone. He handed it to me. “I decided it would just be easier if you spoke with Ethan directly and he told you how to get there.”

I had no choice but to accept the phone. “Thanks.”

I held the speaker to my ear. There was no dial tone. Someone was already on the line.

“Hello?”

“Who is this?” The man sounded like a bullmastiff that had been taught human speech.

“Is this Ethan Smith?”

“Who is this?”

I turned my back on Travis and took a few steps toward the nearest display of rototillers. “A friend of Jimmy Gammon.”

“I know who you are. Donato told me about you. What the hell are you doing in Presque Isle?”

“Heading north.”

“I think you mean south. You’re turning around and getting the hell out of here before I come kick your ass.”

“I’m just looking to have a conversation.”

“That’s the last thing you want, asshole. Take my word for it.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve received a call from a guy named Kurt Eklund recently?”

There was a click, and he was gone.

When I turned around, the tractor salesman was scowling. Travis was a polite and friendly fellow, but not above eavesdropping. “We’re closing up here, and I think you should go.”

I handed him back his phone and thanked him for his assistance, but he didn’t say another word as he locked the door behind my back.

*   *   *

Except for a few wisps of clouds, the night sky above New Sweden was almost completely clear. Jupiter hung above the treetops to the northwest, bright white and unblinking. The planet seemed like a hopeful beacon until it slowly began to descend and then disappeared from view below the horizon.

Deer had come out to the edges of the fields to nibble the first green shoots poking up through the soil. Their eyes were luminescent in my headlights, and they were very shy. Kathy had told me that when she was a rookie warden in the county, her district had been “Night Hunter Central.” If that was still true, the local deer had a right to be jumpy after dark.

I passed a cheery blue-and-yellow sign by the side of the road. It lit up in the glow of my high beams:

It was illustrated with the U.S. and Swedish flags. I truly felt like I had crossed into a foreign land.

I didn’t need a helpful tractor salesman to find the Eklund place. As I neared the village of New Sweden, I passed a mailbox with that name on the side. There were probably more than a few Eklunds in town, but this house was located across from the volunteer fire department’s building, and Kathy had told me her father had been the fire chief for many years.

The house was white, with clapboard siding, blue shutters and trim, and a blue metal roof that looked like a recent addition. In a part of the world that averages nine or ten feet of snow a winter, it pays to have a roof that snow and ice can slide off. The windows were dark, with the shades pulled, and there were no vehicles in the driveway. I parked along the road and reached for the small flashlight I’d packed in my duffel.

It wouldn’t have surprised me if the Eklunds’ neighbors were peeking through their curtains, trying to decide whether to call the police. People in these villages tended to watch out for one another’s properties, and everyone in New Sweden would have known that the Eklunds were in Portland, at the hospital bedside of their beloved Katarina. Even if they recognized Kurt’s Oldsmobile, they probably knew better than to trust him.

I pulled on the navy blue windbreaker Soctomah had loaned me. I wondered how I would explain to a responding officer why I was roaming around a house that didn’t belong to me, wearing a jacket with
POLICE
on the back. I decided I would deal with that problem if and when it presented itself. No one answered the bell, but that didn’t mean anything. For all I knew, Kurt was passed out inside, just as I had found him at Kathy’s house. The door was locked, and there was no key under the
Valkommen
mat. I stepped quickly around the side of the building.

I felt a pang of disappointment when I found the back door intact. I’d had the notion that Kurt might have punched out a pane of glass to let himself in. Despite the evidence of my own eyes, I was growing more and more certain that he had visited the house. I almost left without doing the obvious thing and trying the doorknob. To my surprise, it turned. Someone had left the house unlocked.

Instead of switching on the lights, I pushed the button on my SureFire and moved the beam around the room. The Eklunds’ house had been laid out in the same plan as their daughter’s: The back door admitted you to a mudroom, which opened onto the kitchen. The first thing I noticed was the subtropical warmth. The oil furnace was laboring away in the basement. I didn’t imagine for a second that Erik and Alice Eklund would have left their house with the thermostat cranked.

There was also an odor in the air that didn’t belong. It was smoky and cloying—the smell I’d come to associate with the Cutlass: Swisher Sweets cigarillos. I switched on the overhead kitchen lights.

“Kurt? It’s Mike Bowditch.” I didn’t want him mistaking me for an intruder and rushing me in the dark.

There was no answer.

The kitchen showed no sign of having recently been used. There were no plates or cups in the old porcelain sink. The chairs were tucked carefully beneath the breakfast table.

“Kurt?”

I passed through the formal dining room. Wooden display cabinets held wineglasses and china plates. On the wall hung a framed family photograph taken decades earlier. Erik and Alice looked to be in their thirties; both blond, they were fit and ruddy-cheeked, as if they had just returned from a day spent cross-country skiing. The adult Eklunds were dressed in matching Nordic sweaters. Kurt appeared to be twelve or thirteen and was wearing a flower-patterned shirt and bell-bottom pants. His hair was feathered around his shoulders. It was heartbreaking to see him with two functional eyes and a complexion not yet ruined by alcohol. Kathy was just an anonymous-looking baby.

The front parlor in the Eklund’s house was still a sitting room where the family entertained visitors. There was no television or reclining furniture, only rocking chairs and a stiff-backed love seat. The coffee table was a mess. There were three empty liquor bottles: one of vodka, one of aquavit, and one of coffee brandy, which Kurt had no doubt bought on the road. He’d used a tea saucer as an ashtray but must have dropped one of his smokes on the love seat, because it showed a black spot where the fabric had burned.

I raised my voice. “Kurt? Where are you?”

Again, there was no answer.

I found his old room down the hall from his parents’. The bed had been slept in. He hadn’t bothered to flush the toilet after using it. I checked every room, including the basement, but there was no trace of him. After five fruitless minutes, I returned to the parlor and sat down on the love seat, imagining him there, boozing it up and nearly setting the house on fire.

I’d had a suspicion that he might have come here to loot the place, looking for items he could pawn for cash. I’d thought he’d been looking to settle his gambling debts. But there were no indications that he’d rifled his mother’s chest of drawers again. So why had Kurt returned home to New Sweden?

Kurt was on a mission, and my gut told me it had to do with Kathy. Maybe he had some suspicion about who had shot her—something he hadn’t shared with me. But if he was set on coming back to Aroostook County, why had he abandoned his sister’s SUV at a scenic turnout a hundred-plus miles away?

*   *   *

Something about that rest area was bothering me. I tried to imagine myself back there. I saw the rail fence, the glistening lake, and the mountain in the distance. I heard the rush of traffic moving on the highway below.

So had he driven here from the overlook, gotten drunk, and then turned around and headed south again? But if that was the case, why was Kathy’s Nissan found at a rest stop you could only access via the
northbound
lane? The only reason that would make sense was if someone had wanted it to appear that Kurt Eklund had never made it to New Sweden.

And at the root of that question was another: What had compelled him to return to Maine’s Swedish Colony?

The last time I’d seen him was through Kathy’s bathroom window. I’d looked outside and seen him speeding off in his sister’s SUV. I’d assumed he was racing away to confront James Gammon, because of his infuriating quote in the paper. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might’ve had another reason to be angry.

Kurt had been downstairs in Kathy’s woman cave when I’d gone upstairs to take a shower. Later, I’d had the gnawing feeling that something wasn’t quite right about the room. Now I realized what had been missing. I had left the article about Marta Jepson’s death on the coffee table. Kurt had taken it with him.

36

The dead woman had lived in the neighboring village of Lyndon. I had originally thought she might have been a friend of the family, maybe one of Kathy’s former teachers. But Erik Eklund had shot down that theory when he said he’d never heard of her.

Somehow Kurt knew who Marta Jepson was. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have snatched the article from Kathy’s coffee table. And he wouldn’t have raced off in his sister’s vehicle for reasons I still couldn’t comprehend. Why had he been in such a hurry? The old woman had fallen down a flight of stairs five nights earlier. According to the article in the
Aroostook Republican,
the authorities didn’t consider the death suspicious.

I needed to read the story again. I tried my iPhone, but there was only a single bar, and I couldn’t get the browser window to open. Northern Maine might not be the wooded wilderness people assume it is, but like the rest of the state, it has lousy cell coverage.

I turned off the lights and made sure to lock the back door. I didn’t want the Eklunds returning home to find that they had been robbed. Aroostook County was generally a safe place to live, but it was also a border region that had seen a spike in drug-related offenses as more and more illegal prescription medications had been smuggled into the state from Canada. Burglaries, home invasions, and drugstore stickups were on the rise here—as they were back in Washington County—as addicts resorted to desperate measures to pay for their habits.

I drove southeast along the Caribou Road. It had been named for an animal that hunters had eradicated from these parts generations ago. Human beings love to commemorate the things they destroy. Building memorials to the dead and naming places in their honor is our way of recasting the past in terms that don’t hold us accountable.

At the crossroads outside Lyndon, I pulled over and tried my phone again. This time, I was able to pull up the Web site for the local paper and read the article about Marta Jepson. I’d forgotten that the Aroostook sheriff had hedged in his statement about the old woman’s fall clearly having been an accident. There weren’t any follow-up stories suggesting police had discovered reasons to continue investigating her death. Nor was there a formal obituary discussing funeral arrangements, which seemed unusual. Did she have no family?

The article said that Marta Jepson had lived alone in a house on the Svensson Road. My phone’s GPS worked long enough for me to find it on a map. Then my car rounded a bend and the signal dropped. I turned north at the crossroads and began poking along, watching for a road sign.

I drove into Lyndon village, past the post office, and crossed the bridge above the flooded St. John River. The rain from the previous week was still gushing down out of the highlands, and in the starlight I saw whitewater where there were standing waves in the river. As I neared the town center, I saw two big-wheeled all-terrain vehicles race across the paved road, traveling west along the local rail trail. If I had been the district warden, I would have felt obliged to chase down the riders and ticket them for speeding.

Kathy had missed the ATV craze when she had worked this district; the vehicles hadn’t been widely popular two decades ago. Now four-wheelers were as common in rural Maine as cars. It wasn’t uncommon to see them parked outside the local churches on sunny Sunday mornings or outside the local roadhouses after dark on Saturdays. Most of the veteran wardens I knew waxed rhapsodic about the days before wheelers, when your primary duties were catching poachers and finding lost hunters.

In truth, the warden’s job had always been dangerous. According to her own father, Kathy’s year here had been the worst in her life (until now), or she never would have requested a transfer to the southern part of the state. Her new husband, Darren, had died in a car crash. And she’d had to fire her weapon at a man who intended to carve her into pieces.

Marta Jepson’s home was a ranch house situated under a stand of tall pines. There were no neighboring homes within a quarter of a mile. At first glance, it reminded me of the rental property in Sennebec I had shared with Sarah. Our place had also been set back from the road and shaded by evergreen boughs. The difference was that we had lived in a drafty lobsterman’s shack that spouted a new leak every time it rained. This was a neatly kept residence with flower boxes under the windows and a flagstone walk swept clean of pine needles.