“Did something happen to him?”
“He’s having one of his semiannual freak-outs.” As soon as I spoke the words, I regretted them. “This time, he might have some legitimate concerns though.”
“Are the wolves after him again?”
“No, it’s not that. Not this time. It’s hard to explain. Billy has always been his own worst enemy.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.” She sounded distracted. “I know you consider Billy Cronk a friend and all, but you always seem to end up in a dark place after you visit him. I’m sorry your vacation got cut short for no good reason.”
“Thanks for all the food, by the way.”
“You’ll be paying me back for it. Don’t worry. And you really do need to clean your house. I am happy to be your dietitian, but I draw the line at being your maid.”
I let out a laugh. “What were you doing in Ducktrap, though?”
She hesitated, and I realized she’d been lying about being in the neighborhood. She’d traveled two hours from her apartment for the sole purpose of restocking my refrigerator. It seemed an extravagant gesture, given the casualness of our relationship.
Suddenly, I heard a loud crunching noise on her end of the phone. Definitely metal on metal.
“God damn it! Can you hang on a second, Mike?”
She muted the call.
While I waited for her to return, I realized how desperately I needed to talk with someone—anyone—about Billy’s paranoid request. But sharing his secret, especially after he’d told me not to, would be an unforgivable violation of his trust. However bad I was feeling, I needed to keep the incident to myself.
When Dani returned to the phone, her voice had acquired a blunt edge. “I need to call you back. A car just tried to pull a U-turn to avoid the detour and smashed into a Jeep. That’s my life these days: one car crash after another.”
I knew the feeling.
4
Early the next morning, I saw two gray foxes cross my yard and disappear, single-file, into the cedars along the river. A late-breeding pair, I had to assume.
When I was young, before my mom had grown tired of my dad’s drinking and womanizing and had decided to escape the North Woods for a new life in suburbia, I had once awoken to strange noises coming from outside our cabin. My child’s brain conjured up two little dogs lost in the wilderness.
Deeply worried, I asked my father what poor animals were making those high-pitched cries, and he told me with a lewd grin that they were mating foxes. He said that the male and the female were inseparable during the spring.
“Once I caught a vixen in a leghold trap.” His voice had been rough from beer and Marlboros. “But instead of running off, the dog—that’s the male—stayed close to hand. Even when I came right up on them, he wouldn’t abandon his bitch. You should have heard the little bastard growl at me.”
Bastid was how he pronounced the word.
“What did you do?” I’d made the mistake of asking.
“I shot them both, of course.” Then he added, “Although it saddened me to do so.”
There was Jack Bowditch for you: a death dealer with a heart of gold.
My dad would have loved running a trapline on this wet, wooded property of mine, so rich with furbearers.
Like Billy Cronk, he had been a combat veteran—a Ranger in Vietnam—who had come home decorated with scars and medals. But my father’s crimes had never landed him in jail for more than a few weeks. The past was his personal prison.
At times I wonder if it is mine, as well. Sometimes it seems as if I have escaped. Then I will hear the baying of bloodhounds on my trail.
Standing there, thinking of those two war veterans, I decided to return to the fenced hilltop in Warren. I wasn’t sure Billy would consent to see me after our argument. But I owed it to him, and my conscience, to learn what had prompted his odd request that I investigate Sergeant Dawn Richie.
The sun had barely cleared the crowns of the trees. In my neighbor’s field Highland cattle had trod a muddy, manure-strewn path from the barn down to the creek. Steam rose from their nostrils as they stood stupidly in their pasture, their shaggy sides matted with ice.
Instead of the coastal route to the prison, I chose to take the country road that skirted the western slopes of the Camden Hills. The unlit shoulders of the mountains were cloaked in velvet shadows. Then, below Maiden’s Cliff, sunlight sparkled off the thinning ice on Megunticook Lake. The sudden, unexpected brightness made me grope for my sunglasses.
My phone vibrated in my pocket.
“Where are you?” asked Aimee Cronk.
“On my way back to the prison. I’m not happy with where I left things with Billy yesterday. I’m hoping he’ll tell me what’s really going on with him.”
“The prison? You need to get to the hospital!”
My studded tires skidded on the pavement. “The hospital?”
“Billy was stabbed! I don’t know the details. He’s being taken by ambulance to Pen Bay Medical Center. It sounds bad, Mike. I’m scared. Really, really scared.”
“I can be there in ten minutes.”
“I need to pick up the kids from school, and then it’s a three-hour-plus drive if the damned Tahoe doesn’t blow a head gasket. What if he dies before we get there?”
“He won’t.”
“How can you say that?”
“Because Billy is as tough as they come.”
“Oh, Mike.” Her voice broke. “You’re so naïve.”
I had installed a two-way radio in my personal vehicle in case I found myself nearby during an emergency and could provide assistance to first responders on the scene.
When I switched on the radio, a cacophony exploded from the speaker. The chatter was so fractured—so many units were responding at the same time—that I had to piece together the narrative. I gathered that five ambulances had either arrived at or were en route to the hospital from the prison. Whatever mayhem
