Sarah was in the waiting room when I came through the automatic doors. She had a Parenting magazine open on her lap and the television was broadcasting an infomercial, but she wasn’t paying attention to either. Her eyes were soft and unfocused, and I knew that she had gone someplace deep inside herself.
I had to call her name to get her attention.
Without a word, she threw her arms around my shoulders and pressed her face against my chest. When she looked up at me, my shirt was wet where her cheek had been. “I should have listened to you,” she said.
“Let’s go home.”
Driving back to Sennebec in her little Subaru, neither of us spoke. The blower pushed hot air into our faces. Behind us in the east, the sky had turned a plum color, a harbinger of the false dawn.
“I don’t want to know the details,” Sarah said at last. “I’ll find out eventually. Everyone will be talking about it. But right now, tonight, I don’t want to know what that maniac did to her. OK?”
“OK.”
I thought that would be the end of the conversation, but she went on. “I feel responsible somehow. You kept saying you were worried about her, and I just thought it was you working too much again. It made me mad.” She sniffed back a sob. “If I had listened to you, maybe you would have found her sooner.”
I reached for her hand. “The state police will catch whoever did this.”
“Will they?” she said, wiping back a tear. “Because they don’t always.”
How far could Westergaard run before someone spotted him, before he had to use his credit cards? “They will.”
“You shouldn’t promise things like that.”
She was right. Menario’s investigation was beyond my power to influence, and Maine had its share of unsolved mysteries. There were too many cases, most involving women, where the police knew beyond a shadow of a doubt which dirtbag had committed the crime but lacked the evidence to make a charge stick. In horrific cases like Ashley Kim’s, was it any wonder that cops might push the limits to get a conviction? When your responsibility is bringing a monster to justice, who’s to say that the ends don’t justify the means? Not me.
“Charley came by to get Ora,” Sarah said absently. “A deputy dropped him off as I was leaving.”
“How did he seem?”
“Like he’d just come from a murder scene.”
Sarah had left every light burning in our house. I could see it from a long ways away, glowing like a beacon through the pine trees. Inside, though, the untended woodstove had grown cold, the rooms were drafty, and the brightness seemed like just another false promise of comfort.
There was a message on the answering machine from Lieutenant Malcomb, asking me to give him a call in the morning. He said he had volunteered my assistance to the state police to help in any way possible. But with my direct supervisor, Kathy Frost, still on vacation, we would need to coordinate certain bureaucratic details, since I had my own duties to perform in the district, and the cash-strapped Warden Service needed to be prudent with its overtime allowances. Even a murder investigation ultimately came down to money.
I peeled off my jail jumpsuit and tossed it in the trash. “How was Ora?”
“Worried. I can’t imagine what their marriage has been like for her.”
I let that one drift by on the breeze.
“I think she’s having problems with one of her daughters,” continued Sarah.
“It’s probably Stacey.” Charley had led me to believe that his younger girl was something of a wild child. The last I’d heard, she’d become a part-time whitewater-rafting guide out west, after graduating with a degree in biology from the University of Maine.
Sarah removed her wristwatch and set it in a box where she kept her jewelry in the closet. “When I asked Ora about her children, she changed the subject.”
In the bathroom, I inspected the bandage on my arm-the disinfectant had already stained the gauze-and I brushed my teeth. When I returned to the bedroom, I found Sarah standing, fully dressed, at the window. With the lights going, you couldn’t see outside; the glass was a mirror reflecting her stricken expression.
“Why don’t you pull the shades and get undressed,” I said.
“I was just thinking that the person who killed her is out there right now. He might be a few miles away.”
“Well, he’s not coming here.”
“Maine seems like such a safe place compared to New York, and then something like this happens, and it makes you rethink all your assumptions,” she said. “People live so far away from one another in this town. If somebody broke in while I was alone, nobody would hear me cry for help.”
“Come to bed.”
“You know, I’ve never fired a gun in my life.”
I turned off the lamp beside the bed. In the dark, I saw her silhouetted as she turned away from the window. “I’ve offered to teach you,” I said.
“I’m not that kind of person.”
She didn’t budge from where she was standing.
“Is there something else bothering you?” I asked.
“You mean beside a young woman being brutally raped and murdered?”
“Why don’t you come to bed. It’s too late to have a conversation.”
For some reason, what I’d said made her chuckle.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Too late is right.” She turned around, but in the darkness I couldn’t see her expression.
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind.”
When she was naked under the covers with me finally, I put my arms around her, but her whole body remained rigid. Then she started to shake. At first, I thought she was crying again, and then I realized it was laughter.
“What are you laughing at?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“Do you know what I saw on my way home this afternoon? A turkey vulture. Talk about an ill omen.”
Bird-watching was one of Sarah’s great joys in life. She kept a list of every species she had ever seen and recorded the date in the springtime when each of the migrant warblers returned from its southern vacation. The happiest I had ever seen her was one bright morning as we stood on a sunlit hillside listening to the first redstart of the season, a vivid black-and-orange bird singing from atop a distant tree.
“Vultures are some of the first birds to come back after the winter,” I said, repeating something she’d once told me. “So it was just a sign of spring.”
“Tell that to Ashley Kim,” she said, rolling away from me.
14
I almost never remember any of my dreams. Sarah says that my eyelids twitch like any normal person engaged in REM sleep, but as a matter of course, I awaken each morning with no nocturnal memories. A psychologist would probably say that this amnesia is a symptom of some deep repression, but it just happens to be the way I sleep-like a machine being turned off for six or seven hours a night.
When I do recall a dream, it always startles me. The temptation is to search for profound meanings, as if my subconscious is so accustomed to being gagged that it must be screaming at me from the depths of my brain.
Take this one: I am walking through a forest of birches, trees as white as bone. I’m not lost, but I have no idea where I am headed. After a while, I become aware of footsteps in the leaves behind me. I turn, and there is a young Penobscot Indian woman with braided hair following me, and I feel a shudder because I know that she is dead. But the expression on her face is passive. We walk on together for a while. I look over my shoulder again. Now a man with a black mustache and a red spot over his heart is part of our silent procession. The trail begins
