The paper mill had closed since my last visit. After announcing the community’s apocalypse in a press release, its absentee owners had made noises about trying to find a new buyer even as they sold off everything of value, right down to the secretaries’ desks. This I had heard from Dani, whose father had lost his job and, then, his will to live in the shutdown.
Now Pennacook had fresh air, a nocturnal view of the constellations, and a sky-high unemployment rate that perfectly correlated with the spike in drug overdoses and suicides.
“It’s like the whole town just curled up into a fetal position,” said Dani. “I never knew that a place could give up and waste away just like a person.”
In the clinic parking lot, Warden Gary Pulsifer climbed out of his idling patrol truck to meet me.
His breath drifted sideways on the breeze. “How did it go in there?”
“Not good. The doc tried to hedge at first, but when I pressed her, she admitted he is going to die.”
Pulsifer had a scrappy build and a pointed face. He was pushing fifty, which made him old for a warden, and his fox-colored hair had recently turned white around the temples, which made him appear even older.
“I’m sorry, Mike. I know that dog meant something to you.”
“He’s not a dog.”
“Wolf dog then.”
“Genetically speaking, he’s a lot more wolf than he is dog.”
“How do you know about his genes? Did you run his DNA through a doggy database?”
Pulsifer had one of the highest IQs in the Warden Service, and like most intelligent people, his brilliance was the wellspring of his problems. Because of his intellectual superiority, other wardens accused Pulsifer of mocking them even when he hadn’t said a word—his default expression was a knowing smile that resembled a smirk.
“His first owner had him tattooed with identification information,” I explained. “There are records of his lineage out West.”
Shadow had come from Montana originally, and he carried the blood of Yellowstone wolves in his veins. He had been brought into the world by a man who specialized in crossbreeding wolf hybrids to eliminate as much of the domestic dog in them as possible. Later, the animal had passed into a cross-continental network that dealt in contraband until, improbably, he had found himself the property of two methamphetamine addicts in Maine. I had rescued him from their drug den three years earlier.
Pulsifer tucked his hands inside the heavy ballistic vest he wore over his shirt. The armor was covered with an olive-green fabric the same color as his uniform. From a distance, you couldn’t tell he was bulletproof.
“When the woman who found him described the animal to me, I knew it wasn’t a German shepherd or black morph coyote. It had to be your wolf dog. Sorry, I mean wolf.”
“Shadow isn’t my wolf.”
“He escaped from your custody, correct?” Pulsifer’s smile was thin and superior.
“You could say that.”
“Then he’s your responsibility. N’est-ce pas?”
I couldn’t argue with him there.
Since Shadow had bolted for the wild, three years earlier, the semi-tame wolf had been glimpsed wandering through the high timber between the Rangeley Lakes and the surrounding mountains. Occasionally he had been spotted in the company of a she-wolf, whose place of origin and current whereabouts were both unknown. Having seen the violence done to her male companion, I found myself deeply concerned for her. Wild wolves had been expurgated from the state of Maine in the late nineteenth century, but a few wanderers from Canada appeared from time to time. I was grateful that Shadow had been neutered before he came to me, or I might have been personally liable for the reintroduction of Canis lupus to the Northeast.
“Do you want to get some breakfast at the Boom Chain?” Pulsifer said. “I’m paying.”
My gaze rose to the hillside across the lot, behind which loomed the unseen mountains. “I’d prefer we go visit the woman who found Shadow.”
“Because who doesn’t love the cops knocking at their door at five-thirty A.M.?”
He had a point. “I guess I could use some breakfast. But since when do you ever pick up a tab?”
“Didn’t you just turn thirty? Consider it a birthday present.”
“My birthday was in February, Gary.”
I had blundered into his carefully laid trap. “Well, mine’s coming up at the end of the month. So I guess it’s your turn to buy.”
Fifteen minutes later, we were seated in the corner booth of the Boom Chain Restaurant under a pair of antique snowshoes and a stuffed coyote head mounted on the wall as decorations. We were the first, and so far only, customers of the morning.
A waitress appeared with a scorched-bottomed coffeepot. She had streaks of gray in her loose-flowing hair, an unzipped gray hoodie over her uniform dress, and a crooked smile of which she seemed utterly unashamed. I liked her immediately.
“Whatcha doing down here in Oxford County, Gary Pulsifer?”
“I heard the most beautiful waitress in Pennacook was working at the Boom and thought I’d come take a peek.” He made a show of scanning the empty tables. “You haven’t seen her around, have you?”
She rolled her eyes at me as she filled our cups. “Mister, don’t you believe a word that comes out of this man’s mouth. I ain’t never seen his tongue—and I don’t want to neither—but I’ll bet you it’s forked.”
She took our orders: poached eggs and hash for Pulsifer, pancakes and a molasses doughnut for me.
I waited until she’d vanished through the swinging door. “You have a way with women.”
Pulsifer extended a wanton arm along the top of the booth. He seemed to be unusually loose and relaxed: comfortable in a way I had never seen him before. “It’s the burden I was born to bear.”
“What about this woman
