what you can tell me at this point.”
Her conversation was brief and hard for me to follow without hearing the other end. Mostly it consisted of Kathy trying to convince someone to tell her what was going on and him refusing. Two minutes later she handed me back the phone with a defeated look on her face.
“The sheriff’s office won’t say what happened,” she said, “but it’s pretty clear the deputy wasn’t authorized to arrest your dad. I get the sense that he went out to Rum Pond on his own to ask some questions, and tempers flared.”
“So they’re not charging him with murder?”
“I don’t know, Mike. I don’t know what they’re charging him with.”
“My dad’s a prick,” I said, “but he’s not a cop killer.”
Kathy was silent. She crossed her freckled arms.
I reached into my pocket for my keys. “I’ve got to get up there.” I climbed into the truck and slammed the door shut. The noise was like a gunshot. “You’ve got to cover my shift for me.”
“Mike.” She sighed.
“Please, Kath,” I said. “If it were your father, what would you do?”
Kathy didn’t answer my question, but then again, why should she? Her father was a retired Presbyterian minister, and chief of the volunteer fire department. Not some saloon-brawling logger with a rap sheet of misdemeanors and the public persona of a Tasmanian devil. How could Kathy Frost understand what it was like to grow up with such a man?
It seemed like I’d spent my whole life either embarrassed by him or trying to win his approval. I even became a law officer because of him-to make amends, if that was possible, for the petty crimes he’d committed against society and against his own family. That night at the Dead River Inn, when I told him about my plans to join the Warden Service, was supposed to be my declaration of independence. I wanted him to see me-and himself-in a new way. But all he did was laugh.
So why was I rushing to his rescue now? I guess I was still waiting for the day when he decided he needed me.
That day was today, but instead of being pleased, I was pissed off. I didn’t for an instant think he was capable of cold-blooded murder. But was he capable of waking up with a hangover and punching out a sheriff’s deputy who got in his face? Yes, he was. Self-incrimination was my father’s stock and trade. And now, for all I knew, he had both the State Police Criminal Investigation Division and the Somerset County Sheriff’s Department believing he was a cop killer. Jack Bowditch: the State of Maine’s Public Enemy Number One.
The stupid prick.
I drove fast along a newly paved stretch of forest road. It was a miracle I didn’t run my truck headfirst into a telephone pole. On the dashboard, the speedometer was back up to seventy.
7
The last time I’d visited the Somerset County Jail had been the morning after the bar fight in Dead River. Now, here I was rushing to his rescue again. It hardly felt as if two years had passed.
The jail was a brick fortress, next door to the old courthouse in downtown Skowhegan. It was a spooky building that always brought to mind a story my dad told me as a kid. Years ago, a prisoner wrapped his hands in towels and scaled the razor-wire fence that surrounded the exercise yard. He thought he could escape by swimming across the flood-swollen Kennebec River. Big mistake. A week later searchers found his broken body stuck in the dam downstream.
Now my father was a prisoner in the same jail.
I opened the glass door leading to an office. Seated behind a high counter, a lone dispatcher was taking a call, jotting down a note on a pink message slip. A police radio chattered beside him.
“Ma’am, you did the right thing,” the dispatcher said without glancing up at me. He was a harried-looking guy with wire-frame glasses and auburn hair combed and sprayed over a bald spot. Behind him was a wall of wood- partitioned cubbyholes stuffed with more pink slips. “We’ll be glad to check it out for you. I’ll send someone down as soon as I can.”
On the counter was a clipboard holding the week’s pink incident reports, left out for reporters who covered the crime beat. I leafed through them, looking for the name Bowditch. I saw nothing, but I knew how paperwork lagged in these offices. Chances were that my father was still being booked downstairs in the jail, having his mugshot and fingerprints taken.
“No, I can’t say when exactly,” the dispatcher continued into the receiver. “A deputy will be there as soon as possible. No, I really can’t say when.” He put down the phone and gave me a blank, shell-shocked expression. “What an effing morning,” he said.
Before the dispatcher could respond, a busty woman in uniform-the redness in her eyes showed how much crying she’d done that day-appeared in the door behind me.
“Heard anything from Pete?” she said.
“I still can’t raise him,” said the dispatcher.
The woman seemed to notice me for the first time. “Can I help you?”
Her wrinkled lips were painted a metallic pink, the color of a Mary Kay Cadillac. Like the dispatcher, she was wearing a black ribbon pinned to her uniform shirt, a reminder of their murdered deputy.
“One of your deputies just brought in a prisoner,” I said.
The phone started ringing again, but the dispatcher didn’t answer it right away. The woman’s eyes directed themselves to the little name plate on my uniform.
“I believe it’s my father,” I said.
“Stay right here,” she said, and darted through the door. Through the glass wall I watched her enter the sheriff’s office.
The dispatcher answered the phone. “Sheriff’s office,” he said, keeping his eyes on me as if I might suddenly break and run
The raccoon-eyed woman returned. “It turns out the sheriff wants to see you, too,” she said to me.
Sheriff Joe Hatch sat across from me behind a dark-stained oak desk, his big-knuckled hands folded on the blotter. He had mustardbrown hair going white about the temples, a brush mustache, and the shoulders of a retired defensive tackle. Pinned to his lapel was that same black ribbon everyone else was wearing.
“I’m sorry about Deputy Brodeur,” I said.
He nodded.
“I was at the criminal justice academy with Bill,” I continued. “He was a good man.”
The metal springs in his chair creaked as he shifted his considerable weight. “What can I do for you, Warden?”
“One of your deputies just arrested my father-his name is Jack Bowditch-up near Rum Pond, and I heard he was being brought here.”
“Who told you this?”
“I got a call from Russell Pelletier. He owns Rum Pond Camps.”
I waited for him to respond, but he didn’t. One of my legs began twitching.
“Look, I don’t know what my father did-” I began.
“He assaulted an officer!”
“Russell Pelletier seems to think he’s a suspect in the Brodeur homicide.”
He smoothed his mustache. “The state police are running that investigation.”
This wasn’t going the way I’d imagined, not that I had much of a plan coming in. “I don’t know what happened to your deputy today-and I’m not making excuses for my father. I just feel like there’s the potential for a misunderstanding here, and I don’t want the CID investigation wasting time.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’d like to speak with my father, please.”
