Her expression became one of elaborate disgust. “Your ass must be pretty jealous of all the shit that comes out of your mouth.”
“Excuse me?”
“If you’re scared of an old bat like me, you can’t be much of a warden.”
She might as well have been prodding me with a spear.
“You’re sixty-one years old, Mrs. Gowdie.”
Her chapped lips parted. “How the fuck did you know that?”
“Lucky guess.”
In my peripheral vision I saw Pulsifer staring at me, slack-jawed.
After a tense moment, Mary let out another of her guttural coughs. “Are you sure you’re Jack Bowditch’s boy? How come you don’t talk like him? You got his face and muscles, but there’s something off about your comportment.”
“I mostly grew up with my mother.”
“Down in Portland, I bet.”
“Scarborough actually.”
“I knew you was a flatlander,” she said as if she’d bested me in a parliamentary debate.
Having put me in my place, the big woman led us down a darkened hallway lined with photos of a Scottish terrier, through an ill-smelling kitchen where a Walmart boom box was playing a song by Elvis Presley, to a mudroom that hadn’t been mopped since the previous fall. The ancient door at the end stuck when Mary Gowdie tried to open it. She threw her brawny shoulder against the frame and nearly shattered the glass panes forcing it ajar.
Behind the house, the ground was dappled with snow and mud. The white-and-brown pattern brought to mind the coat of an Appaloosa. Mary had arranged a series of planks so she could hopscotch from the house to the woodshed without wading through the mire. The boards sank under my weight as I made my way to the roofed, unwalled structure.
The firewood was neatly stacked, and there must have been five or six cords of it. I removed my SureFire from my pocket, and I shone the flashlight at the wet wood chips covering the ground. Shadow’s blood was visible as tacky brown spots on the clumped sawdust. I crouched down on my heels like a baseball catcher and moved the beam around.
“When did you find him?”
“Last night, about ten, when I came out to get a load of wood for the stove. Thought he was a bear at first, he was so big and black. Scared the everlasting shit out of me, let me tell you.”
“Do you have livestock here?”
“Chickens.”
“How about pets?”
“Chickens.”
“What happened to that little dog of yours?” Pulsifer asked.
“None of your beeswax!”
She then explained that the henhouse and fenced yard were on the far side of the building. The chickens might have drawn Shadow to the property initially, since they would have made for easy meals, but it didn’t explain why the injured wolf had sought out this woodshed to die.
“So you hadn’t seen him around before?”
“I didn’t, but Zane did.”
“Who’s Zane?”
She had a craggy laugh. “Zane Wilson. Calls himself my apprentice. Came up here one day asking if I could teach him how to boil sap and make ’shine. He moved up to the valley with his girlfriend, both from Brooklyn. I thought we were done with those foolish people back in the seventies, but now there’s a new crop of wannabe hippies.”
“Did he happen to mention if the animal appeared to be injured?”
“Not to me, he didn’t.”
“Did he happen to say anything about seeing a second canine nearby? This one would have been gray.”
“He didn’t.”
“I’ll need his number.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Excuse me?”
“You won’t need it because Zane and Indigo don’t own a phone. Not to mention the kid should be here any second. Today I’m going to have him char the insides of my oak barrels. Heh, heh.”
I straightened up, careful not to knock my head against the ceiling timbers. “There’s been one particular question on my mind. Why did you call Warden Pulsifer and not your district warden, Ronette Landry?”
“Fuck her and her French family.”
“I’m half-French.” By which I meant Franco-American. My mother’s family had hailed from Canada.
“Good for you.”
“I am required to ask this, Mrs. Gowdie. I hope you won’t take offense, but it’s a routine question and not meant as an accusation. I need to know if you own a crossbow.”
“Who do you think I am, Maid Fucking Marian?”
“I had to ask.”
“If I’d shot that animal, why would I phone the fucking game warden to bring it to the animal hospital?”
Her argument was watertight. But I’d had no choice except to ask the obvious question. In criminal cases, unvoiced assumptions are what always sink you at trial.
When I failed to respond, she threw up her gnarled hands. “No, I don’t own a crossbow! I own a fucking AK-47, plus this little number.” From her coat she produced a blued Smith & Wesson Model 10 revolver. “And I’m a keen shot, I’ll have you know.”
“Probably best to put the gun away,” said Pulsifer.
“I’m just making a point to you numbskulls.” She shoved the heavy handgun back into her coat. “Now are we done? I’ve got real work to do—unlike certain state employees I could name.”
I always got a kick out of criminals who prided themselves on their work ethic. We watched her plod off to an outbuilding across the yard. It had a steel pipe for a chimney. I assumed the wood structure contained her still.
The wind had begun to blow from the northwest. Pulsifer tucked his hands under his ballistic vest for warmth.
“I’m surprised she didn’t kick us off her land,” I said.
“Give her a minute.”
“I’m going to follow these tracks.”
The snow had repeatedly melted to mud, then repeatedly refrozen every night. But the canine trail wasn’t hard to follow. It led across the mottled yard in the telltale pattern of a wolf—in a direct line or what trackers called registers—until it disappeared into the budding saplings and thornbushes at the edge of the clearing. I wasn’t dressed to go bushwhacking down the mountainside.
My supervisors would never allow me to pursue an official investigation into the shooting, however heinous. Under Maine law, the killing of a coyote was encouraged and the reckless
