“Go ahead.”
“It’s unclear whether he should be categorized as a wild animal or a feral dog. If he’s a wolf, doesn’t he legally belong to the state? That’s my understanding of how Maine laws apply to wild animals.”
“Yes, but Shadow was originally registered as a wolf dog. That makes him a domestic animal under the statute.”
She paused to consider the ramifications. “How do you know his name? What is it you’re not telling me?”
“I rescued Shadow from some drug addicts a few years ago. To the extent anyone can lay a claim to him, it’s me.”
“So what was he doing up on Number Six Mountain?”
“A few years ago, he got away from me in the woods near the Widowmaker Ski Resort and has been on the run ever since.”
“Did you make an effort to relocate him?”
“Yes.”
This was a complete lie. The truth was I hadn’t known what to do about the fugitive wolf dog, and it had been easier and more self-indulgent for me to fantasize about his becoming a modern-day White Fang.
“I’m surprised we never heard anything about this from the state,” Holman said. “If not from the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, then at least from the Animal Welfare people at the Ag Department.”
“We thought announcing that a de facto wolf was on the loose near Rangeley Lake would cause a mass panic. We worried it might endanger domestic dogs, as well as coyotes.”
In this case, the pronoun we consisted of just me, Gary Pulsifer, and a few coconspirators.
Holman paused to process my justification. “I feel like I should be in touch with someone at the Department of Agriculture, at least.”
“That’s really not necessary. As I said at the clinic before, I am willing to cover all of his medical bills. Put my name down as his owner.”
“You’re willing to swear he belongs to you then?”
“I am.”
“I’m serious about this because I could lose my license for knowingly violating the law.”
I took a deep breath. “I swear.”
18
Never having visited the United Kingdom, I couldn’t compare Stratford-upon-Avon to the rural Maine town that had borrowed the name of the English river. But I suspected that the high street of Shakespeare’s birthplace didn’t include a fireworks dealership, a marijuana grow shop, or an automotive graveyard. Maine’s Avon consisted of little more than farm fields and two high-speed roads that ran parallel—one to the north of the Sandy River and one to the south—without a single bridge to connect them. You had to drive to the next town to cross the stream.
I found the Bard of Avon coffeehouse across the highway from a masonry school and down the road from an airstrip named for Charles Lindbergh because the celebrity pilot had set down there once in the 1940s. From the outside, the building appeared to be nothing special: another box of painted cinder blocks. But it sported an artful-looking wooden sign with an image of Will Shakespeare hefting a steaming mug of joe.
Somehow Ronette had beaten me there. Her black patrol truck was identical in every way to Pulsifer’s except that it gleamed with a fresh coat of wax and wasn’t dented and scratched from having backed into stumps and sideswiped tree branches. It was, notably, the lone vehicle in the lot.
The interior of the Bard was like a trip back in time to the Age of Aquarius. Folk music keened from unseen speakers. The walls were papered over with leaflets, posters, and flyers for upcoming contra dances and candlelight vigils protesting wind farms, and advertisements for practitioners of Ayurvedic Yoga Therapy and Rolfing.
Ronette Landry rose from a dark-stained table to give me a hug. She wore her olive uniform under a black snowmobiling coat with a gold badge embroidered on the breast. Around her throat was a black balaclava she could pull up to cover the lower half of her face when the temperature dropped.
“Hey, stranger!”
“It’s great to see you, Ronette. Congratulations on winning Warden of the Year.”
She gave a polite shrug of the shoulders in lieu of a response.
“We missed you at the awards banquet,” I continued.
“Thanks, but we both know they gave it to me because I’m a woman.” The light dimmed in her copper-colored eyes. “The political climate being what it is.”
Ronette was a Franco who fit every physical stereotype. She had olive skin, brown-black hair, and a nose that couldn’t help but attract your attention. She was graying, but her complexion was flawless. Like many of the women in ma famille—my mom being the sad exception—she would probably live to be a hundred years old.
I recalled that Ronette had given family illness as the reason for not attending the annual ceremony. “How’s your great-grandmother?”
She sipped from a hand-turned clay mug. “I think it’s a matter of weeks now.”
“Is she in hospice?”
Ronette seemed taken aback by the question. “Oh, no. She’s at our home with my mom and mémère playing nursemaid. What could be worse than to die in a stranger’s bed, far from God?”
My own late mother, born Marie Cormier, had raised me as a good Catholic boy. I often forgot what it had been like, as a young child, to be part of a culture that put family first, or second, after the Church.
I remembered my grandparents, uncles, aunts, and numerous cousins with fondness, and it saddened me that my mom had estranged herself from them after she’d met my stepfather and married into money. She’d had no choice, she claimed. The same relatives who’d never wanted anything to do with her when she’d been hitched to my no-good father had suddenly reappeared in her life with begging bowls. They’d wanted her to invest in their self-storage businesses and their tanning salons, asked her to cosign on mortgages for houses they couldn’t afford, and pleaded for loans to buy speedboats and snowmobiles.
As I began to
