Widowmaker (15 page)

“I let a woman named Carrie Michaud get the drop on me. She's this little ninety-pound drug addict, and I didn't take her seriously enough. She stabbed me in the back, but the blade didn't puncture my vest. She did manage to cut me in the arm before I subdued her. I only needed ten stitches.”

“You
only
needed ten stitches? And what do you mean, you subdued her? You didn't shoot her?”

“I didn't need to. I knocked her out.”

“If it had been me, I would have shot her!”

“Where are you?” The question slipped out before I realized how it might sound.

“Ashland. We got grounded by the snow. Where are you?”

“I'm not sure you want to know.”

“I am so going to kick your ass.”

“I'm at Widowmaker.”

She coughed some more. “What?”

“DeFord said I should take some sick days, but since I felt all right, I thought I would drive up to ask around about Adam. I told you I was coming here in my e-mail this morning.”

She fell silent for a moment before launching her second offensive. “Ever since that woman showed up at your house and told you about your brother, you've been on this downward spiral.”

“I wouldn't say that,” I argued, despite the black thoughts that had been plaguing me only minutes earlier.

“It's your dad, isn't it? You've let him back into your head again. Jesus, Mike, get a grip!”

“I can explain everything if you just calm down.”

“Don't talk to me like that. You should have called me from the hospital. If you don't understand how much that breaks my heart, there's nothing more to say. I'm not interested in being with someone who'd rather be lonely than be loved.”

Then the line went dead.

A moment later, the phone buzzed again.

This time it was a message. Just one word:
Asshole!

*   *   *

Before I had become a warden, and during my first years on the job, my thoughts had been so clouded with guilt and anger that I couldn't see anything clearly. At the time, I had believed my mind was perfectly sound. It was only later—after I had participated in my fourth or fifth critical incident stress debriefing—that I had realized I couldn't necessarily trust my own mental process; a sick psyche is, by its very nature, incapable of understanding it is sick. I remembered a question I had asked a counselor after she had diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress syndrome: “How can you think through your problems when your problems are your thoughts?”

If Stacey was right, I might be suffering some sort of psychological relapse brought on by that knife in my back. I needed to take a step back and make an attempt to assess my present difficulties with some objectivity.

I was miles from home—and my distance from Stacey at the moment couldn't be measured in mathematical units.

My superiors at the Warden Service had forbidden me to return to work until my wounds healed, but they would hardly have been pleased to learn how I had spent my so-called sick day.

Not to mention that Amber had taken off without so much as a note about where she was going.

And then there was the matter of the snow. Another inch had accumulated on my windshield since I had returned to the Scout, with only more to come. I flipped the switch and watched the hard rubber blades clear half-moons in the powder.

The easiest problem to deal with was Amber.

I keyed in her number and, of course, got her voice mail. “It's Mike,” I said, trying to keep the frustration I was feeling out of my voice. “I thought you were going to be waiting for me at the Sluiceway, so we could talk about Josh. What happened? If you've heard from Adam, I'd appreciate your calling me back, since I froze my ass off going up that frigging mountain.”

As soon as I hit disconnect, I felt a pang. Amber might have been a self-involved schemer, but I had no business taking out my self-disgust on her. For all I knew, she had received horrible news.

With everything that had happened at the Sluiceway, and then my disastrous conversation with Stacey, I had nearly lost track of the important details I had learned from Josh Davidson: about Adam's needing money, about his having a black eye, about his driving a truck no one knew he even owned.

Amber had told me to seek out Don Foss, though she doubted he would speak to me. I had to admit that every mention of the man had left me more intrigued.

Pulsifer had called him “a secular saint or a modern-day plantation boss.”

Shaylen Hawken had said he was “the last chance some of these men will ever have.”

And to Cabot and the Night Watchmen, he had been Adam's “personal savior,” in ironical quotation marks.

What else did I have to do tonight but go searching for this enigma of the North Woods?

On my way down the mountain and out of the resort, I passed an open maintenance hangar. A PistenBully was idling out front, and I saw someone who looked like Elderoy having a conversation with another man while two dogs played in the open lot. The men seemed to be watching the animals leap into the air and bite at the snowflakes.

As I drew closer, I saw that it was indeed Elderoy. The other, younger man I didn't recognize, but he was dressed in a Widowmaker snowsuit and leaning on a shovel. The dogs were large hounds of some sort; they had appeared black from a distance, but the coloring of their coats, even coated with frost, seemed to have more nuance than I had first thought.

I honked my horn and waved.

Elderoy glanced at my Scout, and we made eye contact, but he didn't reciprocate my gesture. We hadn't parted on the best of terms, it was true. He must also have muttered something to the snow shoveler, because the man gave me a look of such intense interest, I lifted my foot from the gas pedal. Then something even more curious happened: The man whistled. I couldn't hear the sound from the moving vehicle, but I saw the reaction of the hounds. Both dogs ceased to play and faced their master with absolute attention. It made my untrustworthy brain wonder what Elderoy had told the stranger about me.

*   *   *

The road down the mountain had begun to get slick. Cars lined up behind me. Most of the traffic was heading south on Route 16, back into Rangeley. I turned north onto the stretch of highway everyone called Moose Alley.

The road deserved its name. The slow-flowing Dead River ran along one side, slithering through a lowland of swamp maples and gray birches: a landscape custom-made for moose. In all seasons, there was something good for them to eat within a few feet of the unfenced road. During warm-weather months, moose loved to hang out in the open, where the breeze could push away some of the biting flies that followed them, and they could submerge themselves in refreshing pools while dining on catkins and water lilies. When the cold weather came, the animals would switch to a diet of evergreen needles and pinecones. They also enjoyed licking up the mineral-rich salt from the asphalt itself.

On average each year, four hundred Maine drivers collide with a moose. Most humans survive the encounters (albeit with totaled vehicles and broken bones); far fewer moose do. I kept my eyes open and both hands on the steering wheel, ready for what might come crashing out of nowhere.

I hadn't imagined Don Foss Logging would be hard to find. There was pretty much only one road through Kennebago, and I was on it, driving slowly enough that I should have been able to spot a business sign, even half-hidden behind the falling snow. But somehow I managed to miss it.

When I came to the crossroads in Bigelow half an hour later, I knew I had gone too far. I supposed I could have called Pulsifer for directions. He was the district warden, after all. When we'd spoken on the phone the day before, he had invited me to drop in the next time I was in town. Wouldn't he be surprised to see me pull up outside his farm.

Instead, I decided to drive into the village. Bigelow was a haven for snowmobilers who raced up and down the trails to Quebec, ran shopping errands on their sleds the way people elsewhere did in their cars, and lined the streets with their parked snow machines.

I stopped at the first business that looked open, a general store with a North Woods vibe.

Most of the crowd inside consisted of sledders in snowmobile suits that made them look fat, even if they weren't, and caused them to rustle and clomp when they walked to the registers with their bottles of sodas and bags of chips. At the lunch counter sat a couple of French-Canadian truckers coming from or going to the border crossing twenty-seven miles to the north, where my late grandfather had once worked. Beside them sat a couple of well-appointed skiers, lost on the road from Widowmaker to Sugarloaf.

To me, this scene felt like coming home. My grandparents, whom I'd never met, had lived nearby in Chain of Ponds, and I had spent an itinerant childhood living with my mom and dad in these same sorts of backwoods hamlets. The suburbs around Portland, where my mom and I later took up residence, and where I went to high school, and now worked, would always feel to me like a place of exile.

“Can you give me some directions?” I asked the very pregnant woman clearing plates behind the lunch counter.

“That depends.” She had an acne-spotted face but a pleasant way about her. “Where're you headed?”

“I'm looking for a logging company.”

“Cabot's? They're over in Rangeley.”

“No. Foss's.”

You might have thought I'd asked her to guide me to the nearest whorehouse. “Why are you asking me?”

“I thought if you worked here, you might know.”

“I never go out that way.”

“Which way?”

“Are you going to order something or not? I'm too busy to make chitchat.”

She spun away from the counter before I could place an actual order (the truth was, I was famished). I did a quick scan of the store, searching for someone else who could give directions to the local sex-offender sanctuary. Few faces looked promising. If the people who owned Widowmaker condos didn't appreciate having convicted rapists, pedophiles, and pornographers living among them, why should I have expected their poorer neighbors to be more welcoming?

Rather than taking a seat between the truckers and the skiers, I grabbed a bottle of Moxie from the cooler, a couple of slices of pizza from the heated cabinet near the register, and a pint of Jim Beam for later. Stacey had been nagging me to cut down on the gas-station breakfast sandwiches and fried chicken that made up so many of my meals while at work.

The door blew open again and a person hurried in from the cold.

I mistook him for a boy at first, he was so short. He was dressed in an oversized lumberman's coat, jeans, and pack boots. His shoulders were heaped with snow, and there was a layer of frost on a brown fur hat that looked like nothing so much as a sleeping mammal.

The small person hadn't taken three steps inside before the clerk behind the register—a bearded dude who had the lordly bearing of the store owner—shouted, “Out, Mink!”

The voice that issued from his small body was shockingly deep: “But it's snowing!”

“You know you're not allowed in here.”

“I need a ride home.”

“So hitchhike.”

“But no one's on the road. It's a freaking storm out there.”

“I'm not kidding around, Mink.”

The little man let out an audible huff. It reminded me of a sound an exasperated teenager might make. Before he ventured outside again, he paused at the door to deliver one last appeal. “If I freeze to death, it'll be on your conscience.”

“Out!”

“I'll probably get hit by a freaking snowplow.”

As the door slammed shut, the owner rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “That guy.”

When it came my turn to pay, I asked, “What's his story?”

“Buddy, you don't even want to know,” he replied with amusement.

“Tell me,” I said. “What did he do?'

My interest must have made the owner suspicious, because his tone hardened. “Forget about him. He's harmless.”

One of the things I have learned about Maine villages is that every one has its mascot (if not its idiot). He or she might be a a developmentally disabled boy who likes to greet you at the gas pump, or a brain-damaged logger who got hit by a falling tree. Some of these people are objects of great local affection and are treated with protectiveness. Others are regarded more as nuisances who might try your patience from time to time but who are ultimately, grudgingly accepted as members of the community.

Mink, whoever he was, seemed to fall into the latter category. Nothing about his speech suggested he was mentally or physically impaired in any way. But I had seen enough scenes like the one with the store owner to recognize the status the little man occupied among the good people of Bigelow.

The visibility was getting worse by the minute. It wasn't the storm of the century; we were just being dumped on. Welcome to winter in the Maine mountains, I thought. At least the skiers and sledders would be celebrating.

I intercepted Mink a hundred yards down the road. He had his collar up against the wind and his bare hands dug into his pockets and was trudging determined in the direction of the crossroads. I rolled the window down as I pulled up beside him.

“Need a lift?”

He scrambled into the Scout so fast, I barely had a chance to clear the junk from the passenger seat.

“It's colder than the North Pole out there.” There was not the faintest trace of a Maine accent in his speech.

“Where are you headed?”

“Kennebago Settlement.”

“That's a long walk! Especially in this weather.”

“Usually, it's not such a slog, you know. My mom has a place in Bigelow. I like to check in on the old bird every couple of days. She makes me dinner.”

Seen up close, his features appeared more unusual than when I'd briefly glimpsed them inside the store. Beneath his fur hat—which might well have been mink—he had jet-black hair that looked dyed, a nose that had been broken more than once, and a nasty scar on his chin. His fragrance was also distinctive. He smelled like he'd just emerged from a vat of cologne.