exposed slimy beds of dulce and kelp. On nights like this, the Vikings had believed that trolls crawled out of the sea to steal babies from cradles.
The fact that Jefferts and Snow were distantly related was no great shock; Erland had cousins all over Seal Cove. Most of them, however, had come to his defense before and after the trial. When looking through Ozzie Bell’s box of files, I’d read letters and petitions signed by dozens of family members. But not once had I encountered the name Stanley Snow in those documents.
Why?
I needed to call Charley. He was the only person I trusted to act upon the evidence I’d unearthed. With luck, he could persuade some of the higher-ups in the state police to put out an all-points bulletin for Stanley Snow. I tried my cell phone again, but it was still short-circuited.
I began pawing around inside my Jeep, looking for coins. I found a handful of useless pennies in the cup holder-not enough change to make another call.
Erland Jefferts came wandering into my head, unbidden. I remembered that Arthur Banks had signed the J- Team’s letter to the attorney general asking for a new trial. Half the town had. So why hadn’t Erland’s cousin and boyhood friend, Stanley Snow?
In the back of the Jeep, I found Ozzie’s forgotten files. I switched on the rear cargo light and began paging through the overstuffed folders. My fingers stopped on a document I’d only skimmed the previous week.
It was an inventory of items the state police had removed from Jefferts’s person and his truck on the morning he was arrested. The list went on for pages: a Swiss army knife with a broken saw blade; a green plastic trash bag; an unopened pack of Camel cigarettes, slightly crushed; a single twenty-dollar bill; four quarters, two dimes, and fifty-seven pennies; a pair of sunglasses tucked above the visor; a permanent black marker; a tangle of polypropylene rope; an empty pint of Allen’s Coffee Brandy; a sawed-off baseball bat; a single Magnum condom in its wrapper; needle-nose pliers; a crushed ATM receipt showing a balance of $168 in his checking account; six Bud Light bottle caps and an empty bottle; and, of course, one roll of rigging tape.
Something was missing.
I needed to speak with Charley. He had the clout to mobilize a search for Stanley Snow. The word of a legendary game warden still carried some weight in Maine. And maybe my friend could help me understand what it was in this box that I was failing to see.
I closed the cargo hatch, slid behind the wheel of the Jeep, and sped off for home.
When I pulled up to my front door, I noticed that my patrol truck was the only vehicle in the yard. At first, it puzzled me that Sarah wasn’t home; then I remembered her mentioning something about parent-teacher conferences. I glanced at my dashboard clock and saw that it was just past five. She would go ballistic when she learned about my day. I still needed to set up an appointment with the Warden Service’s psychologist, I realized. It was the least I could do.
I had some trouble with my keys at the door: I dropped them once, trying to get the right one into the lock, then dropped them again. Inside, the house was cold and dim. The birch logs in the woodstove had burned away to ashes, and a draft had discovered some previously unidentified crack in the cedar shingles. The faint odor of bad fish told me that the trash can in the kitchen needed to be emptied. The sensation of returning to an empty house made me think of the weeks after Sarah had moved out. These days, I often ended my patrols with a feeling of deja vu.
Awkwardly, I slid my coat off and hung it on a hook by the door.
I heard the floorboards creak and was just turning my head when a sharp pain exploded along my right biceps. I fell back against the wall, aware that I was being assaulted but unable to do more than raise my splinted hand against my attacker. The metal crowbar came down hard on my forearm. I howled in agony and kicked out with my legs, but the intruder leaped back.
I was left to squirm there for a moment, blinded by tears, before my assailant tapped me, almost delicately, on the forehead with a steel club. There was an instant of achingly hot light-like a flashbulb going off at point-blank range-and then I ceased to see.
I came to as my attacker was slinging my limp body onto the sofa. Whoever it was must have torn the splint off my wrist, because my first sight was of my own corpse-colored hand. My eyes were watery and had trouble focusing.
For a moment, I didn’t know where I was or what had happened. I was as disoriented as a surgery patient emerging from anesthetic. If a voice had whispered that I’d been in a car crash, I would have believed it.
I felt a boot kicking my shins and then heard a high-pitched voice say, “Sit up.”
As I did, a weight shifted inside my head like a bocce ball rolling around inside my cranium. Something was standing over me. At first, it was just a shadow. Then, as my pupils began to function once more, the shadow became a man.
He was a tall, balding man with darting eyes. He had bulbous cheekbones and a jutting jaw. He was wearing a dark peacoat, oil-stained work pants, and heavy rubber boots. In one gloved hand, he held a crowbar. In the other, he clutched a rectangular bottle of amber liquid, which he thrust into my face.
“Drink this,” said Stanley Snow.
I blinked and tried to speak, but my tongue wouldn’t obey. I cradled my useless right arm against my chest.
“Drink it!”
It was my own half-empty fifth of Jack Daniel’s. He must have found the whiskey in the cupboard. A fishy scent came wafting off his clothes, the stench of rotten bait.
I pulled the words up out of my larynx. “The cops know it’s you, Snow.”
The sound of his own name being uttered caused the Westergaards’ caretaker to catch his breath. Slowly, he took a seat in the chair across from me, but his posture remained as tight as a coiled spring. He set the whiskey bottle on the table between us. “Bullshit.”
“I called Menario.” My voice sounded as if I had gargled with drain opener.
“No, you didn’t.”
“I called him on the pay phone at Smitty’s. I told him you owned the Glory B. ”
Every muscle in his body became utterly still. “What else did you tell him?”
I understood that Stanley Snow was going to kill me, but I was too weak and in too much pain to defend myself. All I could do was try to gather my strength and wits.
“She knew you,” I croaked. “Ashley Kim.”
He leered at me with a gargoyle’s smile. “She thought she did.”
“She met you with the Westergaards last summer.”
“That slant-eyed slut.” He leaned forward and waved the crowbar in my face. I followed the motion warily, as if it were a swaying cobra that might suddenly strike. “She came up here to get fucked. She got fucked all right.”
My head and hand were beating to different drummers, but my thoughts were beginning to flow freely again. Hans Westergaard had told his caretaker to get the house ready. Had he mentioned-master to servant-that he was bringing his mistress? Snow had been lying in wait for Ashley to arrive.
“But why Westergaard?” I asked.
“He shouldn’t have cheated on Jill. He had no right to do that.”
“You killed Ashley for her?”
He snickered but didn’t answer my question. He just scratched his nose absently.
I needed to keep talking, keep stalling. “The police know it’s you, Snow.”
The crowbar stopped waving. “There’s nothing they can pin on me. It’s pretty easy to set up alibis. Just drop in on some diners and gas stations. Make sure people see you. Collect receipts. If you turn on the TV loud in your apartment, people will swear you were there all day.”
In my mind I saw his white pickup truck with the snowplow parked outside the Square Deal Diner. I saw his face sneering at me from the other end of the counter the morning after Ashley Kim disappeared. Even then, he’d already been readying his alibis.
“They’ll connect the dots.”
