though.
13
Lucas Sewall was still seated in the same chair, head bowed, skinny legs drawn up beneath him, lost in his own imaginings.
“Lucas?”
The boy continued to scribble. He was left-handed, so he held the ballpoint pen upside down. His pale little hand was stained with blue ink.
“Lucas?”
The boy stopped and jerked his head up, as if I’d tossed a bucket of cold water on his head. His hair was thin and chestnut-colored like his mom’s, and he had the same cleft in his chin. His head seemed two sizes too large for his scrawny body. He was wearing a hooded gray sweatshirt with abundant ink stains, and blue Dickies tucked into snow boots. A puffy orange vest was slung across the next seat. I had no clue whatsoever how old he was.
I’d been nine when my mom left my dad and we began our gypsy period, moving from apartment to rented house, just the two of us, always on the move.
I towered over the boy. “I’m Warden Bowditch. Your mom asked me to see how you were doing.”
“Are you a ranger?”
“No, I’m a game warden. Rangers work in parks, helping people camp or watching for forest fires. Wardens are like police officers in the woods.”
“Is Prester dead?”
“No,” I said. “But he’s very sick. Your mom is visiting with him now.”
His eyes darted to my holster. “What kind of gun is that?”
“It’s a semiautomatic pistol.”
“Can I see it?”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea. Guns are very dangerous. You should never play with them.”
“Did you ever shoot anybody?”
Unfortunately, yes, I wanted to say. Two people, in fact, and both occurrences haunted me in the predawn hours. But I kept my mouth shut. “What are you writing?”
He closed the front cover and tucked the pen over his outsize ear. There was blue ink on his earlobe. “Stories.”
“What kind of stories?”
“Do you have a dollar and a quarter for a can of Coke?”
“Maybe we should ask your mom if it’s all right.”
“She don’t mind if I have a Coke if I’m in the hospital. I’m dying of thirst!”
For some reason, I gave Lucas the money. He seemed so pathetic, I couldn’t deny him the treat. He leapt in the direction of the nearest soda machine. There was something toadlike about the boy.
Kids had always scared the hell out of me. I had grown up as an only child, more or less. My stepfather had a daughter who was ten years older than I was. She’d been in college when my mom and I went to live in their McMansion, and she’d treated me like an unwelcome interloper until she finally moved away to California after graduation. So young children had never been part of my experience growing up, and the only ones I seemed to encounter these days were those who got lost in the woods and needed rescuing.
Lucas had left the notebook on the chair. It was a spiral-bound one with a canary-yellow cover.
“Don’t touch that!”
The boy jumped past me, doing another of his froggish leaps, and grabbed the notebook. He tucked it to his chest. I had a brief mental image of Gollum clutching the Ring of Power.
“I wasn’t going to read anything,” I said.
He eyed me with mistrust as he settled back in the chair. “What happened to Prester anyhow?”
“He got lost in the blizzard. He was very lucky to find help when he did.”
“What about Randall?”
“Randall Cates?”
“Him and Prester said they was going to hunt coyotes. Not last night, but the night before. Then they didn’t come home. Ma was pissed.”
“Did they say where they were going hunting?”
“Nah, but that was just a lie anyhow. Randall was going to sell drugs, like usual.”
I’d begun to wonder if Lucas was older than I’d first guessed. He stared at me through those thick glasses of his with such obvious intelligence. “How do you know that Randall Cates was dealing drugs, Lucas?”
He gave me a broad smile. “I’m a detective.”
The automatic door opened across the room. It was Jamie Sewall and the anorexic male nurse we’d met earlier. She shuffled along uneasily until she caught sight of her son. Then she stopped, took a deep breath, as if trying to collect herself for the boy’s sake. But her smile wasn’t fooling anybody.
“What do you know, Edgar Allan Poe?” she said to Lucas. “I see you met the warden.”
“We were just getting acquainted,” I said.
Without a word of reply, the boy flipped open his notebook and began writing again.
Jamie looked at me. “He does that all the time. Lucas is going to be a best-selling writer like Stephen King. Isn’t that true, Lucas?”
He raised his eyes at us and clenched his lips together, then returned to his scribbling.
“So how are you doing?” I asked.
“I need a cigarette.”
The confession disappointed me, but I was in no position to judge her bad habits. “There’s no smoking here,” I said.
She shook her head. “I don’t smoke anymore. I just meant that I’m a wreck and am craving a smoke like you wouldn’t believe.” She ran both hands through her hair, pushing it back from her face. “This place gives me the heebie-jeebies. If I sit around here, I’m going to go crazy. Maybe I should just go home. They’ve got Prester pumped full of so many chemicals, he’s not waking up till next week.”
“Did you speak with the sheriff?” I asked.
“Yeah, I spoke with that sheriff,” she said sharply. “I don’t understand what the problem is. Prester’s the one who’s injured, and you’re all acting like he’s some sort of dangerous criminal.”
I realized that the boy was watching us closely.
“The police are just trying to determine what happened in the woods.”
“I guess that makes sense.” She was fidgeting, swaying back and forth. She reached for her son’s orange vest. “This place is going to make me crazy. Come on, Lucas. Tammi’s probably worried sick.”
“Are you sure you’re going to be OK?” I asked.
She looked hard into my eyes. “I can take care of myself.”
That was my signal to give them some distance, so I did. I stepped back and watched them bundle up against the cold. As they left the room, the boy looked back at me over his shoulder. Then his mother gave his arm a gentle pull, and they were gone.
It had been ages since I thought of that period in my own childhood: between the time my mom left my dad and the time she married Neil. We’d been so poor. My mother had waitressed in a rough bar down on the Portland waterfront and worked as a temp in offices, hoping to meet a rich lawyer. And, what do you know, she actually did.
I decided to return to the med-surg unit. When I got there, Sheriff Rhine was on her way out. “Where’s Little Miss Hot Pants?” she asked.
“She took her son and went home.”
“That one is a piece of work. She knows exactly what her brother and boyfriend were up to in the Heath, but she’ll never cop to it.”
“She told me that she and Cates broke up last year.”
