ascending a steep hill and a breeze whispers through the leaves. Glancing farther back now, I see a sight that should terrify me, but it doesn’t. It’s a shambling corpse whose face has been blown to smithereens. Where are we all headed? I look up the hill and there is my father’s cabin at Rum Pond. Smoke is rising from the chimney. The door opens before me, and I step inside. But it is my own house I am entering, and no one is there.
There was a knock at the door. A shaft of sunlight streamed through the window. I flopped over and found Sarah’s side of the bed empty. I had been so exhausted that I’d slept through her leaving for school.
She’d sounded so strange the night before. The shock of the murder had affected her almost personally. And she hadn’t even seen the corpse.
The knocking at the door continued with greater emphasis. From the bed, my view of the driveway was blocked. If I wanted to discover who was bothering me, I’d have to get up.
I slipped on some jeans and shambled out to greet my visitor.
On my steps, in the freezing cold, stood a stocky gray-haired woman. She wore the standard uniform of a game warden, with one noteworthy exception-around her throat was a white clerical collar. Along with the Reverend Kate Braestrup, Deborah Davies was one of the Maine Warden Service’s two female chaplains. An ordained Methodist minister, her job was to counsel the parents of children lost in the woods, the families of victims of careless hunters, and wardens like myself who had suffered some trauma in the line of duty. She wore her hair cut fashionably short and spiky, and the red frames of her eyeglasses made her look like a refugee from a New York ad agency. In her hands, uplifted, she bore a doughnut box and a cup of coffee.
“‘Then the Lord said to Moses,’” she intoned, “‘Behold, I will rain down bread from heaven for you.’”
“No thanks,” I replied. “I’ve already eaten.”
Her smile didn’t falter. “You’re not going to make me eat another doughnut, are you? I’ve already had two honey-dipped and one chocolate-glazed. Show some compassion for an overweight woman with weak willpower, will you?”
Without really thinking about it, I accepted the greasy box and the cup. We regarded each other across the threshold.
“I thought I’d invite myself on a ride-along,” she said with a flash of teeth.
“Today’s really not the best day, Reverend.”
“Lieutenant Malcomb said I needed to drag my keister over here and park it in your passenger seat.”
So this was an order from on high, then: Comply or else. “I’m not even sure if I’m going out on patrol. I’m supposed to go over to the jail to watch some video taken of the Ashley Kim crime scene. I’m assuming that’s why you’re here. To talk with me about last night.”
She shrugged, never losing that megawatt smile of hers for an instant. “I can keep you company either way.”
“I haven’t even showered yet.”
She removed a Rite in the Rain notebook from her pocket. “I’ll work on my Sunday sermon while I wait.”
Resisting Deb Davies was obviously futile. “Come on in,” I said, stepping aside.
In the shower, I stood under the stream of hot water and thought about the blood-spattered diorama I’d discovered at the Westergaard house the night before.
I wondered if they’d nabbed the professor yet. It was only a matter of time until they did. “It’s always the boyfriend,” Skip Morrison had said.
So why had Charley seemed unconvinced? He always cautioned me against jumping to conclusions. But who else could have killed Ashley Kim? I supposed the Driskos needed to be considered suspects, especially if the DNA evidence came back linking the deer blood on their truck to the sample I’d taken from the road. Those bastards seemed capable of murder-although the timing didn’t make sense. I’d visited their trailer before Ashley Kim was murdered. It scarcely seemed possible that they could have been hiding her somewhere without giving themselves away.
Then there was the anonymous caller who had initially reported the collision. He, too, had been at the scene. But I doubted Menario was investing time or manpower in tracking down the Good Samaritan.
Who else? The caretaker, Stanley Snow, had keys to the house. Add his name to the list.
The philosophical principle called Occam’s razor argues that the simplest explanation is almost always the right explanation. By that reasoning, the murderer had to be Westergaard. Why else would he go missing if he hadn’t killed her?
The eerie similarity of this homicide to the Jefferts case defied my ability to understand. What was the point in Westergaard making the murder look like a replay of the Donnatelli slaying, especially if he was going on the lam? Occam was no help with that question.
When I got out of the shower, I heard the growl of a vacuum cleaner. The Reverend Deborah Davies was, incredibly, vacuuming my living room carpet.
“What are you doing?” I asked, buttoning up my uniform shirt.
“I tracked some mud in.”
This was a fib. Her boots were spotless. “Do you always come into someone’s house and start cleaning?”
“I’m a neat freak.” She wrapped the cord in perfect loops. “But I’ve come to terms with my addiction and admitted I have a problem. That’s the first of the twelve steps. Just eleven more to go.”
“I thought you were writing a sermon.”
“Finished! Do you want to hear it?”
“Not particularly.”
“I’m going to talk about Dante’s Inferno.”
“Sounds uplifting.”
She laughed a little too raucously. “Did you ever read The Divine Comedy?”
“I was supposed to read it in college.”
“It’s actually pretty funny in places. Dante used his poem to settle a bunch of personal scores. He devised all sorts of elaborate tortures for his enemies in Hell.” She eyed the cardboard box on the coffee table. “Are you going to eat that last doughnut? I get the feeling you don’t really want it.”
“Go ahead.”
More and more, I was coming to the conclusion that Deborah Davies was one of the oddest ducks in the pond. But Ora had told me how helpful she’d been with Charley after their plane crash. I just couldn’t square the idea of a cleric with this chirpy little woman. In my life, I’d known plenty of Roman Catholic priests. Some of them were cold fish, some were a little creepy even, but none was a Bible-quoting, hyperactive goofball.
Outside, the air smelled of snow. The sky had a pewter cast, which erased the shadows from under the trees, and the mud had grown tacky with the falling temperature. I noticed that the reverend’s personal vehicle was a lemon yellow Volkswagen Bug. It glowed from the end of my driveway like a miniature sun.
Davies raised a quizzical eyebrow. “What’s the matter?”
“My patrol truck is still at the jail. The technicians were going to vacuum it for fibers.” One happy consequence of the situation dawned on me. “It looks like we’ll have to do that ride-along some other day.”
The reverend removed an iPhone from her pocket. “Why don’t you call the jail? Maybe the tech people are done with your truck. I can give you a lift over there.”
The next thing I knew, Davies had connected me with the sheriff’s secretary, who informed me that, yes, the state police were done collecting fibers and I could now retrieve my truck from the jail garage. I looked at the chaplain’s Volkswagen, imagining the sad picture of me riding in the passenger seat of that ludicrous vehicle. Her vanity license plate read REVDD.
“Don’t be such a sissy,” Davies said, once again exhibiting her uncanny ability to read my mind. “Hop in.”
I obeyed.
Fastening my seat belt, I had a premonition of the reverend using the circumstance as a trap to investigate the inner corners of my emotional state. My intuition proved correct.
“Michael,” she began. “I deal with lots of people in pain. That’s my area of expertise. You know the one thing that never works? Bottling up your emotions.”
