“So why is she still working as a prison guard risking her life every day and making forty grand a year?”
“I’ve been asking myself that very same question.”
I let the possibilities tumble around my skull.
“Mike?”
“I’m still here. Charley, if it’s not too much to ask, I wonder if you could make one more inquiry for me.”
“You want to know if any other guards from Machiasport got hired at the Maine State Prison along with Dawn Richie?”
I nearly slapped the steering wheel in delight. “How did you know that’s what I was going to ask?”
“Ora says you and I suffer from the same mental affliction. OCD—obsessive curiosity disorder. I’ll make a few more calls and see what I can find.”
I warned the old man that I was likely to be out of range when he phoned back, so we set a time later in the day for me to drive closer to civilization and attempt a call.
As I headed into the woods, again, I weighed the information Charley had given me. Trevor Dow had called Sergeant Richie a “rat” before he slashed her, as if she had exposed a conspiracy—maybe a smuggling operation that included both guards and inmates. Perhaps her decision to turn informant wasn’t motivated by high-mindedness but by a desire to take over the drug trade inside the prison walls. It was one way of getting rid of the competition.
I remembered Dawn Richie’s sangfroid at the hospital and grew increasingly anxious. She had seemed to shrug off being slashed across the face and watching her fellow CO die violently in front of her. The coldness of her reaction had bothered me at the time, but I had chalked it up to the shock of what had happened. Now I began to wonder if the woman might be a sociopath. Billy Cronk was getting out of there just in time.
The gate to the cabin was open when I drove up. Nonetheless, I got out, searched for the keys Ronette had promised to leave me, and found them in the agreed-upon hiding place. Then I continued on to the camp at the edge of the half-frozen pond.
The whine of a saw pierced the air with the loud insistence of a cicada. When it stopped, I heard nails being hammered into wood.
I had been correct in inferring that a loaded pickup had scraped the roots snaking across the road. But I had undercounted the number of trucks. Two identical white Ford F-250s were parked in the dooryard outside the cabin. They both bore the same name on their mud-spattered doors: HUNTER MOUNTAIN BUILDERS.
Sawdust lay upon the dead leaves and patches of trodden mud like a beige snowfall. A door made of brighter yellow wood leaned against the logs, waiting to be hinged into place. The shutters were all raised, and new windows, tacky with fingerprints, gleamed in the former voids.
One of the carpenters—a burly, bearded man—looked up from his portable table saw. I recognized him as Ronette’s husband, Peter. Now it was clear why she’d told me I shouldn’t worry about needing to repair the cabin myself. She had recruited—or more likely dragooned—Pete Landry and his crew into making the building habitable for me.
“Ronnie was hoping to surprise you!” he said, wiping his dirty hands against his Carhartt coveralls.
He wasn’t any taller than his wife, but the bones in his wrists were thick as two-by-fours. I clenched my teeth when we shook hands. I bet he could have crushed a walnut in that big brown palm.
“Who’s paying for this, Pete?”
“Aren’t you?”
He had such an effective deadpan that my heart seized up. Then he swatted me on the back.
“Just joshing with you. Ronette said she can arrange for me and the boys to use this place as a hunting camp next fall. You know how she is: always looking for a win-win. The cabin gets fixed up and she gets me out of the house for a couple of weeks. And if it helps you find that she-wolf…”
I might have cautioned Ronette against sharing the details of my private obsession with Peter, but it would have been presumptuous. Who was I to tell her what she could say to her husband? But I suspected that the two men working for Peter now also knew about the other wolf. I had no reason to expect them to be discreet with the information.
He introduced me to his employees, then took me by the arm and guided me around the exterior of the cabin, pointing with pride at the work they’d already done and explaining what they still needed to do. Next, he escorted me inside through the frame where the door would soon be hung. I didn’t recognize the place as the same vandalized structure I’d seen the day before.
“You can thank Ronnie for cleaning things up. She and her mom were over here at the crack of dawn. Frenchwomen are human dynamos. But you already know that, being half-frog yourself.”
The last thing my Franco-American mother had been was a cleaning dynamo. My only memories of her lifting a broom were from my early childhood when we had dwelled in cabins smaller, draftier, and dirtier than this one. She didn’t so much clean a room back then as attack it with fury at her miserable life situation.
“I stopped in your uncle’s place a couple of weeks back, before the end of ice-fishing season,” Pete said. “Same old Denis. He acted like I was inconveniencing him by wanting to buy some shiners.”
I had forgotten that Peter Landry and I had once been distantly related. Denis had been married to Pete’s aunt, a coal-eyed, jet-haired woman infamous for her frequent public infidelities. For years my uncle had worn his suffering on his sleeve—he thought he was the only man who would put up with her affairs—only to have her leave him for another sucker.
“You know he sells crossbows and
