5
The rental company had provided Hutchins with Ashley Kim’s home phone number in Cambridge. I drove half a mile down the road to a shuttered farm stand and dug my cell phone out of my Gore-Tex parka. After eight rings, one of those automated voices came on, instructing me to leave a message after the beep.
“This is Michael Bowditch with the Maine Warden Service, and I’m trying to reach Ashley Kim. I’m calling in regard to a car crash last night-that’s March fifteenth-on the Parker Point Road in Seal Cove, Maine. It’s imperative that I speak with Ms. Kim immediately. This is a law-enforcement investigation, and she is required by Maine law to provide a statement.” I left my cell number, feeling doubtful she’d return my call.
By all rights, Hank Varnum’s ATV vandals should have topped my to-do list. But instead, I found myself driving in the direction of Parker Point. It was a blustery, overcast day, and the wind was blowing a chop in the coves. Overhead, the tops of the spruces swayed in unison like churchgoers at an old-time tent revival.
The deer blood in the road had darkened overnight, turning a rusty red. The tire tracks from Ashley Kim’s wrecked Focus were sculpted into the frozen mud. I buttoned up my parka as I roamed through the huddled evergreens and wondered again why this incident was biting so persistently at the back of my brain. What exactly had happened here after all? There was no evidence to be found amid the trees. I closed my eyes and tried to envision the sequence of events.
Sometime around dusk, a woman had been driving too fast in a thick fog on the road to Parker Point. Suddenly, a deer sprang out of the trees and smashed into her hood. The deer died on impact, the air bags inflated, but the woman emerged from the collision uninjured. She had the presence of mind to call a tow company, which sent Stump Murphy to retrieve the wrecked car.
What happened next? She told Stump’s dispatcher that she already had a lift. Did she hitch a ride or call her friend on Parker Point to pick her up? How about a taxi? The nearest cab company was in Rockland, half an hour away, so probably not. Maybe she just decided to walk to whichever house she was headed.
Meanwhile, an anonymous driver arrived on the scene to offer assistance, but she refused his help. Our Good Samaritan did, however, stop at Smitty’s Garage, two miles down the road, to call the Knox County dispatcher. He reported the accident and told the sheriff’s department to send an officer. Unfortunately, the state trooper on duty (Hutchins) had inopportune car trouble. As a result, there was an hour delay before the responding officer (me) arrived on the scene. Sometime during the interim, an unknown person stole the dead deer. Or maybe the Good Samaritan was the game thief. Was Ashley Kim still present when the deer got snatched? Or had she already left by that time?
The logical conclusion was the one Hutchins had suggested: Ashley Kim had been drinking, she was worried about her blood-alcohol content, and so she skedaddled before the cops showed. She was probably sleeping it off in one of the swank cottages along the point. There were more than fifty properties out there. I could poke down every private drive, looking for a lighted window. That was assuming she was actually staying somewhere on the point.
My phone vibrated in my pocket.
“Hello?”
I’d been hoping it was Ashley Kim, but it was Sarah. “I wanted to remind you that we’re having dinner with Charley and Ora tonight,” she said. “Make sure you’re home by six, OK? I don’t want you showing up late, smelling like roadkill.”
“Will do.”
She paused awhile on her end of the phone. “I’m sorry about being cranky last night.”
“I thought I was the cranky one.”
“I’ve just got cabin fever. This weather is driving me nuts.”
“Spring is on the way.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” she said. “You know I love you, Mike.”
“I love you, too,” I said. “I’ll see you tonight.”
“Don’t be late!”
I was genuinely looking forward to our dinner with the Stevenses. The retired warden pilot and his wife were visiting the midcoast area for a gathering of Vietnam War veterans. The last time we’d spoken, he said his knee was still in a brace but his physical therapy was proceeding well for “an old geezer.” Over the phone, his spirits sounded sky-high, as usual: “Ora thinks I’m one hundred percent cured but just faking it to get rubdowns from the pretty young therapist.”
“Are you?” I asked.
“At my age, son, your circulatory system needs all the aid and assistance it can get.”
Sarah had taken it upon herself to arrange a dinner with the Stevenses at our house. After my talking about Charley and Ora so much over the winter, she wanted to meet them in person. I felt certain they’d enjoy one another’s company. So why was I anxious?
I crouched down on the salt-frosted asphalt and plucked a tuft of deer hair from the frozen blood. I rubbed the coarse, hollow fibers between my fingers and let them blow free in the wind. Knowing my district the way I did, I probably had a better chance of locating my missing deer than I did Ashley Kim.
The first place I’d start looking was at the home of Calvin Barter, a man I knew only by his nasty reputation. My predecessor in the district had told me that Barter was a petty drug dealer and notorious game thief who never passed up fresh roadkill. I’d heard that he had an uncanny way of appearing mere minutes after a police officer radioed in a deer/car collision-ready, willing, and able to carry away the meat. Coincidentally, he was also one of the men Hank Varnum had identified as a suspected ATV vandal. So I’d be killing two birds with one stone, so to speak.
Despite all the fancy summer houses along its coast, Maine is a desperately poor state. My sergeant, Kathy Frost-who’s not known for being politically correct-calls it “the fist of Appalachia shoved up the ass of Maritime Canada.” I could travel just a few miles inland and see poverty everywhere: run-down mobile homes swarming with toddlers or Typar-sided shacks with junked autos rusting in their dooryards. Down every dirt road loomed a falling- down farmhouse plastered with K EEP O UT signs, as if there was anything inside worth stealing. Some of those same buildings, however, contained well-guarded meth labs and vast indoor nurseries of marijuana plants, in which case those warnings were well heeded.
The Barters’ farmhouse was a rambling red brick affair with flaking white trim and rusted metal gutters. The dirt driveway up to the house led through an orchard of skeletal apple trees, and off to one side was a rolling hayfield in which various targets had been set up for rifle and archery practice. A ragged line of spruces ran along the back of the field, then crept in close behind the outbuildings.
A child was waiting for me in the drive. Her hair was a wild red tangle.
She couldn’t have been older than five. The temperature was twenty-eight degrees, but she was wearing dirty pink shorts and a yellow T-shirt emblazoned with a cartoon mouse. Her lips were stained purple, as if she had just finished eating a Popsicle.
The girl watched me with enormous pale eyes as I got out of my truck.
“Sweetheart,” I said in my softest voice. “Is your daddy home?”
The words that came out of her mouth sounded old beyond her years: “Yeah, but he’s passed out. Ma’s around back, though.”
I followed the girl around the house and through a maze of scratchy bushes. Along the way, we encountered a mute toddler dressed in a denim jumpsuit and seated in a circle of petrified mud. Two more kids, a boy and a girl, both a little older, met us around the corner of the barn. Every one of them had kinky red hair. They all fell in behind us, forming a procession of sorts.
At a henhouse, three more people stood waiting. One I took to be Mrs. Barter. She was about the size and shape of a rain barrel, and she was dressed in a flowered cotton sundress with a frayed hem. Her hair was mostly gathered up in a faded kerchief, but a single gray-and-red strand had escaped confinement and now hung across her forehead. She had a cigarette clenched between her thin lips and an expression that looked as if she was barely holding in a belly laugh. A freckle-faced girl stood beside her, clutching a baby swaddled up so tightly, I couldn’t be sure if it was a child or a doll. She had the beginnings of her mother’s build-just give her another five years-but was
