“How about we call a wrecker for you then?” Pulsifer asked.
“No, thank you. I can handle it.”
Alcohol Mary appeared in the road near the top of the hill. Her coat was blowing open in the breeze revealing the faded dress beneath. “What’s going on there? What did you do to my apprentice?”
Pulsifer answered before I could. “Mr. Wilson had an accident.”
She dug her bare hands into her pockets and began marching toward us. “Accident? What kind of accident?” Then she spotted the skid marks where the Tacoma had left the road and launched into space. “Jeezum Crow, Zane! I’m not paying to haul your vehicle out of there. And you sure as shit ain’t leaving it. I’m not one of those hicks who likes having junked cars all over my property.”
“I’m sorry, Mary.”
“Christ Almighty. You knocked your head, too? You already couldn’t hear worth a damn.”
“My hearing aid broke, but I’m all right. The other’s OK.”
“I won’t be legally liable for your medical bills either, so you better not be planning on hiring some slick lawyer to sue me. I maintain this road in tip-top condition. You sue me, and I’ll sue you right back.”
“I’m not going to sue you, Mary.”
“So are you going to sit there bleeding all day or are you going to char those barrels we talked about?”
I doubted that Mary Gowdie was the first person to mistake his hearing difficulties and imperfect articulation as a lack of intelligence.
“I have one last question for him,” I said.
The woman put her hands on her hips. “You wardens are worse than the Spanish Inquisition!”
“Where did you say you saw the wolf, Zane?”
“Near the trees in back.”
I dug out a business card, one with my private cell number on it, and gave it to him. “If you start having doubts and think you might have been mistaken or remember anything else of importance, you can reach me day or night.”
He slid the card into his shirt pocket, where I was certain he would forget it. “I only saw it that one time at the edge of the field behind the house.”
Misdemeanors aside, he seemed like a nice enough guy. Naïve, maybe. But nice.
So why was he lying to me about Shadow?
17
Pulsifer and I shook hands, and I thanked him for what he’d done to save Shadow’s life, if only temporarily. He extended an invitation to visit him and his family on their farm, an hour to the north, and I sensed that it wasn’t merely a gesture of politeness. As I watched him drive off ahead of me, I remembered the words he’d spoken to Mary Gowdie when he’d rejected her temptation of a drink: People can change.
I wasn’t certain I shared that belief. But seeing a serene Gary Pulsifer had given me pause.
At the bottom of the hill, where the dirt road intersected the mountain pass connecting Pennacook and the Sandy River Valley, I had a choice to make. Turn right and return to the mill town on the Androscoggin where Shadow lay on his deathbed. Or turn left and begin collecting evidence that might lead me to the crossbowman and, with luck, the she-wolf.
I turned left.
The inquiry would have to be purely personal, done on my own time: Pulsifer had been correct that the Warden Service wouldn’t sanction one of its investigators wasting his duty hours on such a minor matter that probably wouldn’t even result in criminal charges. Fortunately, I still had a few days of vacation.
As it descended, Route 142 afforded me fleeting glimpses of the early-spring valley and the backsides of the ski mountains beyond. While winter reigned on the summits, at the lower elevations there were faint indications of life returning to the land. The evergreens, which became darker during the cold months, had a verdant brightness in their needles. Elsewhere the colors were softer and more muted: a landscape rendered in pastels. Ochers and khakis, dove grays and taupes. To newcomers, the hills and fields along the Sandy River must have appeared dead, or at least sleeping, but what I noticed was the arterial redness of the dogwoods and the first furry catkins peeking out from the branches of the aspens.
Adrenaline and caffeine had powered me through the night, but my body was beginning to crash. I wore my exhaustion like a lead-weighted coat.
I pulled over at a sideswipe in the snowbanks where the plows had cleared an arc to turn around and continue back up the mountainside. I had worried I would lose my cell signal once I reached the bottomlands, but I hadn’t. I tapped out a text to the district warden, Ronette Landry.
What are you up to?
The answer came at once.
Just rolling and patrolling. RU in the area?
I’m in Phillips. But I don’t want to drag you from work.
Please do! There aren’t a lot of anglers along the Sandy 2day. Want coffee?
You read my mind. Where?
There’s a place called The Bard. It’s in Avon.
You’re shitting me.
Coffee’s good even. Can meet you there in 15.
Ronette and I weren’t friends, but we had worked that hunting homicide on Maquoit Island together. In addition to being a patrol warden, she was a longtime member of the Maine Warden Service Evidence Recovery Team, an expert in DNA handling, blood-spatter analysis, and crime-scene photography. She did double duty as part of the Forensic Mapping Team, which utilizes high-tech data collectors to reconstruct crash scenes and determine bullet trajectories. As an investigator still wet behind the ears, I found myself intimidated by her breadth of knowledge.
While I had been texting Ronette, I had missed a call from Dr. Holman. Driving distracted, with one hand on the wheel, I hit the callback button and prepared myself for bad news.
“He’s still hanging in there.”
I swerved close to a snowbank. “Really?”
“His vitals are holding steady. He’s one tough son of a gun.” She cleared her throat in a way that reawakened the lepidoptera in my stomach. “I had one of my assistants do some reading about
