It was hard for me to meet Ora’s green gaze without thinking of their daughter.
“Have you heard from Stacey lately?”
“Last week,” said her mother. “Her work has been hard. Two panthers were hit by cars in Florida in the past month. They put up signs and fences and other barriers, but it’s simply a math problem: too many people want to live where the cats do.”
“At least she’s met someone,” said Charley.
Ora gripped his hand as a signal to shut up.
Maybe he had meant those words to sting. Maybe he hadn’t. I knew he was still heartbroken that their beloved daughter and their surrogate son had broken up.
But I was with Dani Tate now, and the Stevenses knew it, even if their absent daughter haunted this otherwise celebratory scene.
Dani’s nonattendance had a more prosaic explanation. This was one of the days of the month that she spent at the Cumberland County Courthouse testifying in criminal cases in which she had been the arresting officer. The Department of Public Safety didn’t give troopers days off for housewarming parties.
“What’s Kathy’s ETA?” Charley asked after a long pause.
“She should be here anytime now.”
“What’s this I’ve heard about her finding someone, too?” asked Ora, ever curious.
“He’s a mystery man is all I can tell you. But I think he’s someone she met doing one of her K9 rescue-and-recovery seminars. The one thing we can be confident about is he isn’t a cat man.”
“I’ll pry the details out of her,” Ora said. “Don’t you worry.”
“She means it,” said Charley.
“I know she does.”
I had turned to Kathy Frost to help me map out the dimensions of the pen. The enclosure was made of ten-foot-high steel posts and a chain-link fence that stretched between them. The wire apron extended five feet into the ground. We’d been forced to dig a trench around the entire enclosure and fill it with cement to keep my new lodger from digging his way out his first night in residence.
“I hope those foxes you mentioned aren’t denned up in there, too,” said Charley.
“I tracked them. They’re holed up down by the river. But I doubt they’ll stick around when they get wind of the new tenant.”
“What about your human neighbors?”
“I went around telling them they might soon hear howling. I said they shouldn’t be alarmed. But I watched a lot of faces go white.”
“It’s good you don’t have anyone living right nearby,” said Ora.
“For now,” I said.
The Stevenses weren’t going to settle for an enigmatic comment.
“That shack down the road, the one with the family plot in the front yard that no one would buy,” I said. “I bought it.”
“Bless your heart, Mike Bowditch,” said Ora, who was so emotionally intelligent she needed no further explanation.
Her husband, however, required a more forthright response. “You’re giving that dump to the Cronks?”
“In exchange for their fixing it up, I’ll credit them as making payments toward the principal. Aimee is uncomfortable with anything that feels like a handout, but I’m trying to make it as fair as I can. It’ll be nice having them nearby. The Cronklets are eager to help me with Shadow.”
Ora winked at me. “As long as they don’t get eaten.”
“You bought that house?” said Charley Stevens in amazement that may or may not have been mock. “I seem to remember a time, not so long ago, when you made a church mouse look wealthy.”
“At the rate I’m spending my inheritance I’ll be a mouse again soon enough.”
“Can you two men excuse me for a moment?” said Ora.
“Do you need a hand, Boss?” said Charley.
“Thank you, but I should be all right.”
After she’d wheeled herself through the sliding door, leaving her husband and me alone on the porch, the old man leaned against the rail.
“So Billy’s in the free and clear.”
“That’s what his lawyer tells us. He won’t even be considered a felon for the purposes of voting or owning a firearm.”
“I didn’t want to vote for the damned Penguin in his reelection bid, but now I have to, I guess.”
“That’s what I said!”
“Ora accuses us of being cut from the same black cloth.”
A clanging came from the yard where Billy was testing the double set of doors. He’d joked about how, as a former prisoner, he should get into the fencing business, given what he’d learned on the inside.
I glanced at the sliding door in case Ora was coming out. “No one must be happier about what happened to Donato and his coconspirators than Dawn Richie. Now everyone knows how corrupt things were inside the prison. The state will be desperate to settle her lawsuit.”
“She’ll have a long wait before she sees any money, I wager,” said Charley. “And who knows what might yet happen to upset her best-laid plans.”
“Getting stabbed has worked out pretty well for her so far. First she arranged to secure a transfer for herself and Rancic out of Machiasport before the governor closed it. Then she started rumors about exposing Donato, causing him to miscalculate and overreact.”
“I was convinced Rancic was Donato’s stooge,” said Charley.
“Me, too. Instead he was just another of Richie’s puppy dogs. Loyal to the end.”
“We’ll see about that.”
From that comment I could tell he was itching to tell me a secret. “What have you heard, Charley?”
“The DEA has taken an interest in the recent goings-on at the prison.”
Unlike the local authorities, the Feds could not be ignored, slighted, or shrugged off. Their arrival on the scene offered the first faint glimmer that Dawn Richie and Novak Rancic might yet get their comeuppance. First though, the agents would need to find a wedge to drive between them. Richie seemed unlikely to succumb, but Rancic was a cocky bastard, quick to action, and a man could always hope.
A hundred feet away, Billy had paused to wipe off the perspiration and quench his thirst with a pint of Foster’s
