The Bone Orchard: A Novel (Mike Bowditch Mysteries) (32 page)

On one of the trees near the road someone had tacked a
FOR SALE BY OWNER
sign. A phone number was scrawled on it with a permanent marker. It was unclear to me in the darkness if the sign was old or new. Had Marta Jepson put it up herself, or had someone else?

I parked along the road and shined my flashlight on the dirt driveway leading to the house. At the Advanced Warden Academy, our instructors had taught us the obscure art of decoding tire treads. We learned automotive forensic terms—
contact patch, noise treatment,
and
stress cycle.
In the field, we measured tire widths to determine wheel-base dimensions by recording the turning diameter of a vehicle’s rear wheels. By examining the wear and tear, we could tell whether the tires were old or new, whether they were factory originals or retreads. And we could ascertain how recently the tracks had been made by using simple meteorology. Mud is Mother Nature’s gift to game wardens.

Many vehicles had been to the Jepson house in the past week, but one had visited more recently than the others. Glancing at the set of tracks, I couldn’t swear that they belonged to a Nissan Xterra, only that the width indicated an SUV or a truck. What I could say for certain was that there was no standing water in the tread marks. This particular vehicle had left the property after the rain had stopped and the dirt had begun to harden again.

Kurt had been here. He’d come to this house, guessing that there was a connection between Martha Jepson and the person who had shot his sister. If so, he had almost certainly seen the
FOR SALE
sign nailed to that maple, and there was no doubt in my mind that he’d called the phone number.

I removed my cell from my pocket and checked the signal. Two bars. I keyed in the seller’s number.

A woman answered. “Hello?”

“Hello, I’m calling about the house for sale.”

“Can you repeat that? You’re not coming through.”

“I’m calling about the house in Lyndon.”

“OK?”

“I drove past and saw the sign. I was wondering if you’d mind showing it to me.”

“Now? It’s kind of late.”

Northern Maine didn’t exactly have the hottest real estate market in the nation. Aroostook County had seen its population decrease in the last census. There were simply too few good-paying jobs to be had north of Bangor, especially after the Air Force had closed Loring Air Base in the 1990s. Perfectly nice houses tended to stay on the market now for months, sometimes years. And those that did sell were rarely purchased by some random guy calling from a darkened roadside.

“I thought you might live nearby,” I said.

“No, we’re down in Presque Isle.”

That was where Ethan Smith lived. The man jokingly called “the Monster.”

“It doesn’t have to be tonight,” I said, not wanting to spook the young woman. “So I take it you’ve gotten other calls about the property?”

She was silent long enough that I thought the call might have been dropped. “You need to talk to my husband. It’s his mom’s house.”

His mom? I’d been under the impression that Marta Jepson had no immediate family.

“Is he there?” I asked.

“Hang on a second.”

While I waited, I weighed my options. If I obeyed the speed limit, I could be back in Presque Isle in half an hour. Travis, the tractor salesman, had told me that Ethan Smith lived on the Alder Brook Road, outside Mapleton. That should be easy enough to find.

But there was a problem: As soon as his wife told him that a man was on the phone asking about his mother’s house, Smith would realize I was on his trail. He’d already gotten one suspicious call from me earlier that evening, and now here was some stranger on the line claiming he was shopping for houses by the light of the crescent moon. Smith knew from Donato that I used to be a game warden. Five minutes from now, he’d be taking off for the nearest crossing into New Brunswick. Unless I found a way to convince the Canadian Border Services Agency to stop him, the customs agents would probably just wave him through the checkpoint. Maybe if I could get through to Soctomah, he could alert the CBSA.

My mind was racing through the options when the line went dead. I checked the signal. One bar. Had she hung up on me, or had I lost the signal?

I sprinted for the Cutlass and slid behind the wheel. I turned the sedan around in Jepson’s drive and floored the gas pedal. At that moment, I would have traded my soul for the V-6 engine in my old patrol truck.

I picked up a cell tower again when I hit the Caribou Road. Three bars showed on my screen. I braked hard and pulled onto the gravel shoulder. It was lucky I didn’t slide into a ditch.

I was scrolling through the recent numbers for Soctomah’s direct line when a realization came to me. The woman I’d spoken with had never said she was married to Ethan Smith. She only said that she and her husband lived in Presque Isle. Nearly ten thousand other people did, as well. I opened the browser on my cell and found a reverse White Pages site. I typed the number from the
FOR SALE
sign into the search bar.

Please, God, I thought, let it be a landline—one with a name and address attached to it.

The screen instantly showed a map of Presque Isle with a street address, but it wasn’t Alder Brook Road. The name associated with the number wasn’t Ethan Smith, either.

It was Jason Decoster.

37

The name of the first man Kathy had shot and killed was Jacques Decoster.

Jason Decoster had to be his son.

That meant Marta Jepson had been the abused woman whom Kathy had saved from being beaten to death so many years ago. She must have changed her last name after her husband died. And then, five days ago, she’d taken a mysterious fall down her basement stairs. The timing of her so-called accident—the day after Jimmy Gammon was shot, when Kathy’s face was everywhere in the news—couldn’t have been a coincidence.

A fat little boy had been at the house on the night Jacques Decoster died. Kathy had told me that the son had witnessed the event, seen her shoot a hole in his father’s chest. Jason had carried the horrible memory inside his heart, until one day he had turned on the TV, and there was the woman who had gunned down his father. It must have seemed like a ghost from his past had appeared with another man’s blood on her hands.

“Revenge can be a powerful motivator,” Billy Cronk had told me back at the prison.

But why would Jason Decoster kill his mom? You would have thought the child of a wife beater would side with his mother, but sons can have sentimental fantasies about their absent fathers, as I well knew. Maybe he blamed Marta for everything that had gone wrong in his life ever since. And seeing Kathy Frost on television might have been like throwing gasoline on coals that had been smoldering a very long time.

Erik Eklund hadn’t recognized Marta Jepson’s name, but Kurt knew who she was. Maybe Kathy had talked with her brother about the old woman. He’d told me how guilty his sister had felt about killing Jacques Decoster. When Kurt saw that clipping on the coffee table, that keen brain of his had made the connection: Jepson had died suspiciously just two days before his sister herself was attacked. What were the odds of something like that happening? Kurt was a gambler, and he would know.

And so Kurt Eklund had raced off to his own death. Because what other explanation could there be for the abandoned vehicle? Kurt had found Marta Jepson’s son, and he had paid the price for his own reckless desire for revenge.

That, at least, was how I imagined the events might have unfolded. I had no evidence to prove my theory, but it turned what seemed like random puzzle pieces into a completed picture inside my brain. I knew I was right, just as surely as Kurt had known as he drove to that fateful meeting with Decoster.

The question remained whether I could convince anyone else.

The problem I faced was time. The Canadian border was only miles away, and Jason Decoster could slip across it as easily as I had imagined Ethan Smith might. When this was over, I’d owe the MP an apology for suspecting him.

I tried Soctomah’s number and landed, as usual, in his voice mail.

“Lieutenant, it’s Mike Bowditch. I’m up in Aroostook County, and I think I know who shot Kathy Frost. If I’m right, it’s the son of the man she killed twenty-something years ago. His name is Jason Decoster, and he lives on the Lake Josephine Road in Presque Isle. His mother, Marta Jepson, fell down her basement steps five days ago. I think her son might have pushed her. There’s a good chance that he killed Kurt Eklund, too. Kurt was up here snooping around before he disappeared. I know this probably sounds crazy, but you need to alert the Canadians to stop Decoster if he tries to cross the border. I’m afraid I might have spooked him into running. Call me back, and I’ll try to explain this better.”

I hung up in despair. How could I expect Soctomah to take me seriously? For all I knew, the state police had already looked into Jason Decoster and dismissed him as a suspect for legitimate reasons. There wasn’t anyone else I could call who might believe me, and every minute I sat in my car, the odds increased that Decoster would get away.

There was no choice but to drive down to Presque Isle. I had the grim feeling I might be following in the same steps that had led Kurt Eklund to his death. My only hope was that Soctomah would get my message in time and that he would believe my ravings.

*   *   *

My GPS showed the Lake Josephine Road as being on the southeast side of Presque Isle. It seemed to run through an open expanse of what I assumed were potato fields, given the absence of intersecting roads on the map. The house was less than seven miles from the New Brunswick border if a man had an ATV and was willing to drive it cross-country.

I pushed the Cutlass as hard as it would go, clutching the wheel tightly with my bandaged hands, waiting for a return call from Soctomah that never came. I kept expecting to be stopped by a deputy or state trooper as I raced down Route 1 at seventy miles per hour.

As I neared Presque Isle, I was forced to hit the brakes suddenly when a huge bird rocketed across both lanes of traffic, just feet in front of my windshield. At first, I thought the dark, flapping thing was an owl—but it wasn’t. Some predator had frightened a hen turkey out of her roost.

Three decades ago, there were no wild turkeys at all in Maine. The species had been wiped out by hunters as thoroughly as the woodland caribou. Then wildlife biologists had brought a couple of dozen birds back from Vermont and let them loose in the woods of southernmost Maine. The turkeys bred and spread, until they were considered such an agricultural pest that farmers were given permits to shoot them almost on sight. The department estimated that there were now sixty thousand of them running wild in the state of Maine.

Kathy had been shot by a gun loaded with metal pellets designed to kill turkeys. I kept telling myself that I wasn’t superstitious, but how could I not view the freak appearance of this bird in my headlights as anything but an omen? I drove a little more cautiously the rest of the way.

In Presque Isle, I took a left at the stoplight on Academy Street and soon found myself leaving a suburban neighborhood of neo-colonial homes and ranch houses for the wide-open agricultural fields at the edge of town. There was a thin sliver of moon dangling like an ornament in the night sky. It wasn’t bright enough to obscure the wheeling constellations overhead: Hercules and Scorpius and Leo. There were no streetlights along the Lake Josephine Road, and it felt like I was driving across the High Plains.

The homes stood far apart from one another here, as if the people who owned them were standoffish and didn’t want anyone to know their business. I glanced at the GPS and saw that the address given for Decoster indicated the house should be coming up soon. I topped a small rise and found myself looking across a bowl-shaped expanse. On the far side of the bowl was a lighted building.

The lot had been carved out of the still-brown fields, with only a line of trees in the back to serve as a windbreak. The house itself—a featureless two-story structure, big enough for a large family—appeared to be new. In the yard were several young evergreens that might have been dropped into waiting holes that very morning. There was an attached garage, also lighted, with open doors revealing two big pickups parked inside, one of which had a raised suspension for mudding. There was a separate shed for the owner’s snowmobiles and ATVs.

I rolled slowly to a stop about a hundred feet down the road. There was no traffic out here in the middle of nowhere, and I saw no obvious way to approach the home on foot and unseen. The only option I could see was to sit and wait. Either Soctomah would call me back or Decoster would take off in his truck and I would give chase, hoping that the poky little Cutlass could keep up with his big V-8 engine. I thought longingly of my Walther PPK/S in a locker at the state police headquarters and of Deb Davies’s LadySmith revolver lying in toxic muck at the bottom of a quarry. I had never felt so frustrated.

Although the moon wasn’t that bright, I found that I could see quite a distance under the stars. From this vantage, I had a view of the backyard, which was outfitted with one of those elaborate wooden play sets that had replaced the metal jungle gyms of my childhood in backwoods Maine. For a moment, I thought I saw two bobbing lights flickering in the tree line, and then they were gone. They had looked like the headlights of an all-terrain vehicle.

I peered over the steering wheel to survey the road ahead. Several hundred yards in the distance there seemed to be another rise. If I parked beyond the ridge, I might be able to get down to the line of trees and move in secret to the spot where I’d glimpsed the four-wheeler.

I was reaching for the keys when the front door of the house opened and a woman stepped outside and stared intently in the direction of the Cutlass. She seemed to pose in the glow of the floodlights mounted above her head, as if she wanted me to see her watching the car. She was short, dark-haired, a little overweight. She was wearing a puffy pink jacket and acid-washed jeans tucked into farmer’s boots. Her hands were in her coat pockets. I had no doubt it was the woman I’d spoken to on the phone: Decoster’s wife.