Widowmaker (38 page)

The divers laid the corpse on a black tarp that they could zip up to form a bag. Then they began changing hurriedly out of their wet suits. The hole they had made in the ice was already refreezing.

The lifeless thing that they brought up resembled none of the pictures of Adam I had seen. Not the cocksure kid in the photo Amber had left me; not the angry defendant scowling at the camera at his trial; not the damaged ex-con from the sex offender registry. His skin was white, with some blue-and-purple mottling. His hair looked like black kelp except where the bullet had torn away part of his skull. If I hadn't been told who this sodden, crooked-limbed creature was, I never would have recognized him.

“I believe my testicles have fully retracted,” said Puslifer through chattering teeth. “How about we get going?”

I was about to reply, when I heard shouting start up in the road behind us. The deputy was trying to block a woman from getting past him and rushing to the bridge. I recognized the lipstick red Jeep parked beyond the police cruiser.

Had her friend in the Rangeley police department told her where to go? The woman had a special gift for getting secrets out of men. Without a word to Pulsifer, I started back along the ice-hard road. My bruised knee was as stiff as if it were encased in a metal brace.

“Let me through!” Amber screamed. “He's my son! He's my son!”

“You can't, Amber,” said the deputy.

He was strong, but she drove her boot, hard, into the top of his foot. The man went down, cursing, as if hit by a maul.

I moved to intercept Amber as she surged forward.

She tried to dodge me, but I had played cornerback in high school and knew how to guess which way a running person will turn by watching their hips. I got my arms around her before she could take another step. She tried the same stomp move on me, but I was ready for it.

“Stop, Amber,” I said in her ear. Her hair smelled of marijuana.

“I want to see him.”

“You will.”

From a distance, it must have looked like we were dancing.

“I know you lied to me,” I said. “I know Adam isn't my brother.”

She ceased to struggle. She turned her anguished face to mine. She hadn't removed her makeup in a long time, and it was streaked and smeared from her tears. “What?”

“Adam couldn't have been my dad's son.”

“But he is.”

I could feel the cold metal of my father's dog tags against my chest. “My dad had O-negative blood. That's the same blood type I have. But Adam's records say he was AB-positive.”

“But I'm AB-positive.”

“A man with an O-negative blood type can't have a child who is AB. It doesn't matter what the mother's blood type is.”

She stared up at me with eyes redder than any I had ever seen. “It's not true. Adam was Jack's boy. He was.”

“I don't know how long you've known the truth,” I said. “But you knew you were lying the night you came to me for help. You were desperate and out of options, so you tried the same lie on me that you used on my dad a long time ago. Did he ever believe you?”

Her body grew heavy in my arms. “No. He knew Adam wasn't his.”

“Then how did you get his dog tags?”

“He left them in my house. They fell between the wall and the bed. We heard A.J. drive up and—”

“Whose son is Adam?” I asked.

She shook her head so that her dirty hair hid her face.

“No one's,” she said. “Not anymore.” And she began to sob.

 

37

Two weeks later, on my twenty-ninth birthday, Stacey and I fastened our skis on top of my Scout and we started off into the mountains.

It had been a bad time. Stacey was suffering, afflicted with grief, guilt, and anger, and there was nothing I could do but be present for her. I insisted that she stay with me until the services were over, since I lived so much closer to Augusta. Together, we attended the state-sponsored memorial for her dead colleagues, as well as two of the three private funerals. The body of the young intern who had been killed in the crash, Marti Menendez, had been flown back home to California for burial there.

Stacey didn't leave the house much otherwise, except to split wood. We had more than we would need for the winter, but I left her to her labors. She would open the garage door to let in the cold air and then she would go to work with an ax and a wedge, breaking logs down into smaller and smaller pieces. If she doesn't work through her anguish soon, I thought, I will have nothing to burn but toothpicks.

On the day before my birthday I left her alone to run an errand in Augusta. It took me most of the day, but when I arrived home, I found that she had cleaned the house from top to bottom. She had wrapped her thick brown hair in a kerchief, almost in imitation of a 1950s housewife.

“Consider it your birthday present,” she said. “I forgot to get you one. I'm sorry I've been so preoccupied.”

“I understand, and I have something to take your mind off things. We're going skiing for the weekend.”

“Mike, I don't know if I'm up to it.”

“You split two cords of wood yourself. I'd say you don't have to worry about your physical fitness.”

“That's not what I meant.”

“Do it for me.”

She agreed, but she couldn't manage to show excitement at the idea of going away together. The thought of having fun seemed an offense to her dead friends. I had known the feeling, and I could tell what was going on behind those sad green eyes of hers.

We hadn't made love since the accident. She hadn't been ready. In bed, we lay on our sides, me behind her, hugging her tightly, as I had done every night since she had returned home, sometimes whispering reassurances when she cried, sometimes remaining totally silent until she had fallen asleep.

That night, however, she put my hand on her breast. I appreciated the gesture but felt she was doing it out of guilt, because it was my birthday the next day.

“We don't have to,” I said.

“Just keep it there.” She leaned her head forward and pulled her hair up and away from her neck.

I understood the invitation and began kissing her behind her ears.

She let out a soft moan, and I felt her nipple grow hard in my hand. I began to massage her breast while I nuzzled her neck. She rolled over on her back, and I held myself propped on my arms above her. She traced with her finger the bright new scar on my forearm.

“We don't have to,” I said again.

“I'm tired of feeling nothing.”

I moved her hand down my body. “Is this something?”

It was the first time she'd laughed in weeks. “It's something, all right.”

*   *   *

The next day, we arrived at Widowmaker just before noon. Another front was moving in after the prolonged cold snap. Dark clouds were bunched up in the west, and the wind was blowing a mare's tail of snow off the summit.

“I still don't understand why you wanted to come here, of all places,” Stacey said. “Why not Sugarloaf?”

“I have my reasons.”

“You always do,” she said with a smile.

We took the shuttle from the day-use lot to the base lodge, since it was too early to get into our hotel room. I saw Russo's midnight-blue SUV parked outside the resort's security office. Not all the wicked are punished. If I was fortunate, I would enjoy my weekend without having another encounter with that soulless man. Stacey was waiting for me when I came out of the locker room. Her green eyes were bright and clear, and she looked sexy as hell in her tight outfit. Holding our skis over our shoulders, we tromped toward the nearest lift. There was a line to get on, and we found ourselves behind two teenage boys with snowboards.

“Did you hear they're tearing down the Ghost Lift?” one of them asked the other.

“No way!”

“I know. I always wanted to go inside there. It was supposed to be haunted.”

“Yeah, right.”

“No, I'm serious, dude. My bro went in with his friends, and he said they saw something—like a ball of light.”

“Was your brother high?”

“Dude, my bro is always high.”

The line crept forward, and finally it was our turn to get on the lift. We shuffled up to the blue line and waited for the chair to hit the backs of our thighs. We sat down fast and felt the rushing sensation of being whisked up into the air. I pulled the safety bar down across our chests.

I couldn't remember the names of the trails that Elderoy had pointed out. They all ran together in my head.

“When was the last time you went downhill skiing?” Stacey asked me as we passed over a bunny slope packed with children and newbie adults. “You sure you don't want to try something easy first?”

“It's a little late for that. Besides, you only live once.”

“You only die once, too.”

A snow squall began to rock us back and forth. We were about sixty feet above the mountainside—no surviving a fall of that height—and I imagined what it must have been like that horrible day that lift had broken and people went tumbling to the ground.

Stacey interrupted my morbid thoughts. “I saw on Facebook that Cabot Lumber is expanding,” she said.

“Makes sense. Cabot just lost a major competitor. I can introduce you to the Night Watchmen après ski if you want.”

“I don't want to meet any of the people you told me about. Let's have all our meals in our room.”

“Fine by me.” The cold stung my teeth when I smiled.

“I also saw on Facebook that Dyer was getting fan mail.”

“That's no surprise, either. He did what a lot of people dream of doing. Logan Dyer acted out a bunch of collective fantasies.”

“You said he wanted to be a hero.”

As we neared the top of the lift, I spotted the ski patrol shack where I had met Josh Davidson, Adam Langstrom's only friend in the world, according to his mom. I hadn't heard whether Amber had held a funeral for her son. If so, it must have been a lonely affair.

“Do you believe in conspiracies, Stace?”

“What, like Area 51?”

“I'm talking about in real life.”

“I think there's a lot about what goes on in the world I'm glad I don't know.”

“I wish I felt the same.”

We pushed the safety bar up. As we slid clear, Stacey turned in the direction of the nearest trail.

“Wait,” I said.

I reached down and unfastened my boots from my skis.

“I've got to go do something first,” I said.

“You should have taken a leak at the bottom.”

I propped my skis over my shoulder. “I'll be back in fifteen minutes.”

“Fifteen minutes! How much coffee did you drink this morning?”

I smiled and waved and began to hike up above the chairlift, heading in the direction of the old Ghost Lift. My father's dog tags bounced against my sternum. I had decided to keep them as my own amulet of protection. They had been with me the day Carrie Michaud's knife went astray, and I had no better explanation for my deliverance.

This close to the summit, the trees were all stunted or disfigured from the high winds and cold. It was a deceiving landscape. A white spruce might be eighty years old yet no taller than a Christmas tree.

I kept climbing until I saw the cairn of stones poking up from the snowdrifts, the spot that marked the summit. I paused in the lee of the wind and looked out at the white landscape at my feet. Over the past two weeks, when I had thought ahead to this moment of farewell, I had imagined having a clear view of the mountains—a panorama from Bigelow to Saddleback—but it was not to be.

The wind rose to a full-throated howl as I reached into my jacket for the tin I had brought with me from the funeral home in Augusta. It was hard to imagine that an entire human life could be contained in something so small. Without ceremony, I unscrewed the top and tossed my father's earthly remains into the air. The wind caught the sooty ashes and bits of bone and blew them out among the snowflakes, over the wild land he had once called home.

 

Author's Note

There is no Widowmaker Ski Resort, but East Kennebago mountain, where I have set so much of the action in this novel, is very real and remains largely forested and undeveloped (long may it remain so). Nor does a Fenris Unchained Wolf Refuge exist, although I drew inspiration from the former Loki Clan Rescue, which I had the good fortune to visit before its demise. That sanctuary, I should add, has been reborn as part of the New England Wolf Advocacy Rescue Center, whose work I support. As I noted in my first book in the Mike Bowditch saga,
The Poacher's Son,
the villages of Flagstaff and Dead River were razed in 1949 to make way for a reservoir (i.e., Flagstaff Lake) for the Central Maine Power Company; I have resurrected these ghost towns again, in memoriam. In fact, many of the locations in this novel are fictional and should not be confused with actual places. That goes for the characters as well.

I owe a debt of thanks to the following people who each helped, in his or her way, to bring this book to life:

My agent, Ann Rittenberg.

Everyone at Minotaur Books, in particular Charlie Spicer, Andrew Martin, Sarah Melnyk, Paul Hochman, April Osborn, David Rotstein (for another rocking cover), and my copy editor, Carol Edwards.

The Maine Warden Service, especially Cpl. John MacDonald, Wdn. Troy Thibodeau, and Wdn. Scott Stevens.

Detective Sgt. Bruce Coffin (Ret.), of the Portland Police Department.

Nancy Marshall, Maine's best publicist.

Steve Smith, Esq., for information about the laws and policies pertaining to the prosecution and punishment of sexual offenders in the state of Maine.

Dave Perry, for giving me a night tour of the Sugarloaf ski slopes via snow cat.

Lee Kantar, of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, for taking me along on a helicopter ride as part of the department's 2012 aerial survey of moose in the North Woods.