Widowmaker (2 page)

Which was why the mention of his name now was like the sudden emergence of a repressed memory.

“Come inside,” I told Amber Langstrom.

She gathered up her ski jacket and purse and climbed down out of the Jeep. She was shorter than she had looked behind the wheel and thin in the way many smokers are unnaturally thin. I watched her dance around a patch of black ice and thought that in bars, out of the light, she must have been frequently mistaken for a woman in her twenties.

She stomped her boots on the woven mat inside the door to loosen the snow from the treads.

“Bathroom's down the hall on the right,” I said.

“Thank you!”

I heard the lock click on the door and began to wonder why—despite all my training and better instincts—I had just let a stranger into my house. It had to be more than her having mentioned my dead father.

I have always had a foolhardy streak. I used to mistake it for bravery until it nearly got me killed for the umpteenth time. Then I saw it for what it was: a chronic addiction to adrenaline. My body craved danger the way a junkie does his next hit of heroin. I wondered how many of the dead cops in that video had suffered from the same weakness.

My girlfriend had only been gone a few days, and already the house was a mess: boot prints on the carpet, coats fallen from the rack in the hall, dirty plates on every tabletop. Stacey and I didn't live together—we hadn't yet taken that step in our relationship—but her irregular visits gave me the incentive to keep the place somewhat clean. I might have forgotten and left up my Christmas decorations all winter if she hadn't pointed out the brittle fir boughs over the mantelpiece.

“How can a man who is so curious that he notices everything not notice his house is a tinderbox?” Stacey had said, her long brown hair shaking as she laughed.

When Amber came out of the bathroom, I made sure to be standing to the side of the door with my hand resting on the butt of my SIG Sauer.

She gave me a nervous smile. “Oh, there you are.”

I hadn't yet had a chance to stoke the fire in the woodstove; the house felt unnaturally cold. I motioned to the living room. “Have a seat.”

Under the brightness of the overhead bulb, Amber had become middle-aged again. There were faint creases around her mouth and bags beneath her eyes. She was overdue for a visit to the hair salon. Her gray roots had begun to show. She sat with her knees pressed together, her jacket folded over her thighs, clutching her purse.

I remained standing with my back to the wall.

“You look so much like your dad,” she said, gazing up at me. “It's a little spooky.” She smiled briefly again and glanced around the room, taking in the cold woodstove, the fish mounts on the wall, the overloaded bookcases. “You have a lovely house. Do you live here alone?”

I made a vague throat-clearing noise and shifted my weight from one foot to the other.

She seemed to get the point. “So, I guess I should explain what I'm doing here.”

“I would appreciate it.”

She inhaled through her nose and exhaled through her mouth, as if performing a yoga exercise. “I knew your father. He used to come into the bar where I work. Well, he used to come in until he got banned for breaking a guy's arm. It was a different bar back then, the Red Stallion in Carrabassett. It's been closed a long time. I'm over at the Sluiceway now up Widowmaker.”

It was a ski resort near Rangeley. My father had worked there briefly, long ago, driving one of the snowcats.

“Anyway,” she continued, “I heard about what happened with Jack. I mean, who didn't hear about it? All that horrible stuff up at Rum Pond. It was just—just unbelievable.”

“My father was a bad man,” I said simply.

“No, he wasn't!” Without fully rising, she started to lift herself from the sofa, eyes widening with disbelief, then sat back down again. “Jack had a good heart. He was just so troubled.” Her bloodshot eyes filled with tears again. “You don't really believe that he was bad. Why did you try to help him if you thought he was some sort of monster?”

I had puzzled over that same question for years, but I had no intention of baring my own troubled psyche to this unhinged woman.

Her smoky perfume hung heavily in the air.

“Ms. Langstrom…”

“Amber.”

“I don't mean to be rude,” I said. “But you really need to tell me what you're doing here.”

“Of course. I'm sorry.” She opened her purse and removed a photograph, which she held out for me to take. “This is my son, Adam.”

It was a picture of a rugged-looking young man, probably no older than eighteen. He had the wavy brown hair of a Kennedy and piercing blue eyes set off by a skier's tan. The photo had been taken outside against a white mountain backdrop so beautiful, it looked fake.

“He's a handsome kid,” I said, not knowing what else to say. I tried to return the picture, but she refused to take it.

“He doesn't look like this anymore,” she said sadly. “He's been through so much. Anyway, the reason I'm here—” She took another yoga breath. “I'm hoping you can find him for me.”

“I don't understand.”

“Adam is missing.”

“Have you spoken to the police?”

“You don't understand,” she said. “The situation is—it's not that simple.”

I had a feeling that I would regret my next sentence. “Then explain it to me.”

“Three years ago, Adam was a senior at the Alpine Sports Academy outside Rangeley. Do you know it?”

“It's a high school for skiers,” I said, hoping to hurry her along, “like Carrabassett Valley Academy.”

“I wish he'd gone to CVA!” Her eyes welled up again and she dabbed at them with a wad of tissue from her purse. “But ASA offered him a scholarship. The school pays for a few local kids to go there—kids with athletic potential—everyone else is rich. And he did so well, too. I mean, his grades were never the best, but he was the best racer in his class. He had a shot at making the U.S. Ski Team and maybe even going to the Olympics.”

I was still struggling to understand what any of this had to do with me. “So what happened to him?”

“Senior year, he met a girl from Vail. Her name was Alexa Davidson. She was a freshman.”

From the way she spit out that last word, I suspected I knew what was coming next. “How old was she?”

“She was fourteen, although she looked and acted a lot older than that.”

“And how old was Adam?”

“He was seventeen for most of the semester.”

I set the photo on the table between us, facedown. “And then he turned eighteen. And someone found out he and Alexa were having sex?”

“The parents demanded that the school investigate. It would have been bad enough if they'd just expelled him, and taken away his dreams of skiing professionally, but the fucking headmaster decided to bring in the police.”

“And they arrested Adam for statutory rape,” I said.

“They totally set him up to make it look worse than it was.” Her hair fell around her face. She pushed the strands away violently. “I had to sell my condo to pay for the lawyer—thirty thousand dollars—and all he did was lose the case. Adam still ended up going to jail. They were both just kids!”

Not in the eyes of the law. “How long was he in jail?”

“Two years.”

“Where?”

“Bucks Harbor.”

It was a prison in easternmost Maine, not far from one of my old districts. It was a minimum-security facility—low- to medium-risk prisoners. Informally, it was known to be a warehouse for convicted sex offenders, although the Department of Corrections would deny up and down that it was a dumping ground for the lowest of the low.

I noticed she hadn't mentioned Adam's father. There was no ring on her finger, either.

“How long has he been out?” I asked.

“Three months,” she said with a sneer. “He's on supervised release, which means he has to register as a sex offender for the next ten years. He has to meet with a probation officer in Farmington every week and pay to go to counseling with a bunch of child rapists until he's ‘cured' or something.”

At least he hadn't been fitted with an electronic monitoring device, I thought.

She removed a pack of Capris from her vest and then seemed to realize she shouldn't light up in my house without asking permission. She stuffed the cigarettes in her pocket. When she looked up again, her eyes were full of fury.

“Do you know what the worst thing is, though?” she said. “They put his picture on the Internet! There's a Web site where you can look up who the sex offenders are in your town. So people see there's this new ‘predator' named Adam Langstrom living nearby, and they freak out about their kids, even though he is completely normal and would never, ever hurt a child. My landlord wouldn't allow him to stay with me because the fucking neighbors saw his picture on the Internet. Adam had to go live at this logging camp in the middle of nowhere.”

“A logging camp?”

“It's kind of like a halfway house, too. The probation officer sends people there who don't have anywhere else to go. All I know is that Adam hates the place. He said the man who runs it is a lying sack of shit who doesn't care about the safety of his workers. A man died there a month ago when a tree fell on him!”

I could guess the rest. “How long has Adam been missing?”

“Two weeks,” she said. “He was supposed to check in with his parole officer, but he never did. She got a judge to put out a warrant for him.”

In Maine, game wardens are trained alongside state troopers and have all the same arrest powers, but searching for fugitive sex offenders didn't normally fall within our purview—not unless they ran off into the woods. “And you haven't heard from him?”

Her voice had a sharp new edge. “If I had, I wouldn't be here, because at least then I'd know he was safe somewhere. His fucking PO thinks he ran off, but she's not going to go chasing him. She says he'll show up eventually, and then the cops will just arrest him again. Only this time, he'll be going to prison for ten years!”

“Your son is an adult, and he is going to have to live with the consequences of his actions.”

“You don't understand. I'm afraid something happened to him!”

An image came into my mind of a friend, a veteran of the war in Iraq, who hadn't been able to escape his own demons after he returned home from the VA hospital.

“Was Adam suicidal?” I asked carefully.

“I don't know. I never used to think his father was.”

Her answer raised so many questions, I had to resist diverting the conversation down a new path. “What about the people at the halfway house?” I asked. “Maybe Adam said something to them before he vanished.”

“The asshole who runs the place wouldn't talk to me. He said he has a rule against violating his workers' privacy. But I'm Adam's mother!”

“I'm not a private detective, Amber.”

She seemed stunned by my refusal. “What about Jack? You helped him. Everyone says you tried to prove his innocence.”

“That was different. I'm sorry, but I just can't help you.”

If I had known her at all, or been in any mood to explain, I might have confessed how embarrassed I was, humiliated even, by my past self. As a first-year warden, I had been reckless and headstrong. My insubordinate actions had nearly gotten me fired. I had no business getting a second chance in the Warden Service, but sometimes life rewards the undeserving. These days, I took every opportunity to distance myself from that Mike Bowditch. I treated him as a disreputable stranger—not even a blood relative—just someone who happened to share my name.

“You don't understand,” she said yet again.

“I hope your son is all right and that he comes home soon.”

She inhaled, then let out a long breath, as if preparing to jump off a cliff into deep water. Her eyes filled again wth tears. “Adam is your brother!”

I thought I had misheard her. “What did you say?”

She leaned across the table. “Jack and I had an affair—I was married to A.J. at the time—and I got pregnant.”

I felt as if I had been punched in the sternum. “That's impossible.”

“He is!”

How old was Adam? Twenty-one? I did the math. Twenty-one years ago, I had been seven, going on eight, and my parents had still been married. Soon after, I would come down with pneumonia when my father dragged me through the woods checking his trapline; my devoutly Catholic mother would get an abortion but pass it off as a miscarriage; she would pack her station wagon with little more than a few changes of clothing, and we would take off in the night while my father was out drinking, without even leaving a note, never to return. Twenty-one years ago my world hadn't yet fallen irretrievably apart.

Amber's face became fuzzier and fuzzier as she spoke: “I'd thought about telling you when Jack died—and then again after I heard your mom had passed away. I thought you should know you weren't alone in the word, that you had a little brother. But then Adam went to jail and everything spun out of control.”

I found myself taking the photograph from her hand and sitting down hard in the armchair opposite her. I stared at Adam Langstrom's face, searching for a resemblance I hadn't noticed at first glance. He had the same brown hair and sky-blue eyes as my dad and me. Maybe the jawline looked faintly familiar. But the similarities were all superficial.

“How do you know?” The words came out as a croak. “How do you know that my dad is the father?”

“I know.”

It felt as if every muscle in my body had gone taut. “Why should I believe you? You just dropped this on me after I refused to help find your son.”

“What do you want from me?”

“A letter from him. A picture of you together. Anything.”