want my opinion.
“I would have trusted her.”
His lip curled. “That’s a load of crap. Wait until your woman starts fucking another man, and then come here and tell me how noble you acted when you found out.”
The thought that Hutchins believed we were blood brothers turned my stomach.
“Why didn’t you arrest me last night?” I asked.
“I felt sorry for you.”
“You felt sorry for me?”
“Look at you, man-you’re a fucking mess. We’re both fucking messes.”
My first impulse was to tell him he was wrong. But then I heard Sarah’s voice in my head, pleading with me to get help, and I remembered the contempt in Jill Westergaard’s voice as she accused me of being on a mission to atone for my guilty conscience; I thought of the Vicodin and the whiskey and all my troubled dreams, and the words choked in my throat. Hutchins was right: We were both fucking messes. It took staring into this ugly mirror to see how far I’d fallen.
He gulped down his beer like a man dying of thirst. “So what did Dane the Stain say about me?”
I wondered if he’d forgotten that earlier part of our dialogue. “He said you were at the Harpoon seven years ago, the night Nikki Donnatelli disappeared.”
“So what?”
“He suggested you might have had something to do with her death.”
“Dane thinks I killed that stuck-up waitress? That’s pretty hilarious.”
“I disagree. What do you mean, she was stuck-up.”
“She thought she was better than us natives. Jefferts said he got in her pants, but that was just another of Erland’s lies.”
“Tell me about Jefferts.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed and threw his empty can against the wall. I dropped my own beer on the floor and went reaching for my handgun. But then I saw that he was screaming at the basketball game on television. “These assholes can’t play defense.”
I looked down at the can on the ground, the puddled beer around my boots. Hutchins hadn’t seemed to notice the spillage.
“I guess it won’t be long before the newspapers start saying I murdered both those girls,” he muttered. “That’ll be interesting.”
I kept my hand on the butt of my pistol. “You might want to tell Menario yourself first.”
He swung his head around to look at me again. “Tell him what?”
“Tell Menario the truth about where you were the night of the accident.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“What if he interviews your wife about what happened?”
“You leave Katie out of it.”
Hutchins was a paranoid, self-pitying bully, but looking at him now, slumped in his stinking undershirt on his stinking sofa, I didn’t believe he had murdered anyone. “If you don’t tell Menario the truth about that night, I will.”
“Is that a threat?”
“More like a promise.”
He waved his hand like a tyrant king dismissing one of his vassals. “Get the hell out of here, Bowditch. Go home to your girlfriend. I’m sure she’s as pure as the driven snow.”
For the past few minutes, a revelation had been trying to bust through into my conscious thoughts. My gaze went to the chewed-up arm of the sofa again. “What happened to your dog?”
“The bitch took him,” said Hutchins. “Can you believe that? She took my damn dog.”
37
The day was dissolving into darkness by the time I escaped from Hutchins’s cave.
I had no doubt that, under the wrong circumstances, he could be a very dangerous man. The idea that this thug identified with me, that he thought we were kindred spirits, bound together by mutual bad luck, a hatred of women, and who knew what else, sickened me more than anything he’d actually said.
I pulled the Jeep over onto the shoulder of the Catawunkeg Road to think through Hutchins’s story. He had been at the bar when Nikki disappeared. He had been at the crash scene when Ashley disappeared. He was a police officer. Women would trust him.
He could have easily shown up at the crash scene while Ashley Kim was still there and offered her a ride to Westergaard’s house. The next day, he could have sneaked back to Parker Point to rape her and abduct the professor. I remembered how Hutchins had gone alone into the house after Charley and I had broken in and the countless minutes he’d spent inside. Had he been searching for incriminating evidence he might have left behind?
I’d begun to wonder if I’d just escaped a close encounter with the Grim Reaper.
But if Hutchins was a cold, calculating killer, how could I explain the drunken mess of a man I’d just found at his house? He’d permitted me to walk into his den, accuse him of murder, and then waltz out again, unharmed, when he could have shot me and dumped my body at the bottom of a flooded quarry.
Something didn’t add up. It was as if I were standing too close to a painting in a museum and could only see splashes of color, when what I really needed to do was take a step back. Only then would I see the larger design.
I needed to return to the intersection where my involvement in this all began, back to the accident scene on Parker Point.
As the temperature had warmed through the course of the afternoon, a fog had crawled up from the sea. Chilled by arctic currents washing down from Labrador, the Gulf of Maine remained unbearably cold all year long. When the sun heated the land, a mist would creep in from the coves and harbors.
I drove directly to the site of the accident. The rain had fallen and the snowplows had come along and scraped the deer blood from the road. I pulled my Jeep over to the approximate place I’d first parked and tried to re-create the scene in my head, but my memories already seemed to be dissolving. The angle of the wrecked car along the road, the location of the blood pool, the places where I’d set up my hazard markers-all the details were melting away into a gray haze.
What if Ashley Kim’s homicide was never solved? Sarah had reminded me of the sad litany of unsolved murders in Maine. Every day that went on without a break in the investigation suggested that Ashley Kim was herself dissolving into some sort of fog. Without the closure of an arrest and conviction, the woman would become a kind of ghost. In time, her name would cease to refer to a specific person-an intelligent young woman from Massachusetts who had found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time-and become a local watchword for fear. People in Seal Cove would tell their daughters about her in whispers.
How did that old legend of the vanishing hitchhiker go? A traveling salesman sees a young woman standing along a roadside at night. He stops to give her a ride. She provides him with a street address, then sits mutely while he drives her home. When the salesman arrives at the house, he goes around to the passenger door to let the pale girl out, only to discover she’s disappeared. He knocks on the door, and the man who answers tells him that his daughter died in a car accident one year earlier, at the very spot the salesman saw the apparition.
A car came rushing past me out of the fog. It didn’t have its headlights on, so it seemed to materialize out of nowhere and then disappeared just as fast. My heart clenched up before it began forcing blood back through my circulatory system.
Think, I told myself. Try to remember.
I felt a sudden need to hash over these mysteries with Charley. On my own, I seemed to be getting nowhere. At the very least, I needed to stop telling myself ghost stories.
