My next stop was the bathroom. Nothing there but mildew.
The bedroom door was ajar. Gently I pushed it open and swept the flashlight beam around the walls.
The skunk was curled up on my unmade bed. Its fluffy black tail was draped like a sleep mask across its eyes. I saw the fur ripple as it breathed.
What to do? If I shot it, I feared the worst-a total, dying release of stench.
I edged into the room, feeling my heart pause when the floor creaked, and slid the closet door open on its cheap plastic wheels. On the shelf was a gray wool blanket. I spread it open in my arms, extending my wingspan to the widest possible extent. It would be like throwing a minnow net.
A skunk typically won’t spray if it can’t see. I’d caught many of them over the years in box traps. The trick was to creep up on the trap from the direction of the steel door and then quickly cover the cage with a sheet or blanket. A skunk can still empty its anal scent glands even when it cannot raise its tail, but it is unlikely to do so if it is blind. I reminded myself of these facts as I stepped toward the bed.
I came within a yard of the animal before it opened its eyes. The skunk cocked its tail as if an electric charge had shot through the hair fibers, and it let out a sharp, almost reptilian hiss. I dropped the blanket on top of it. As fast as I could, I gathered the animal into a ball. With the skunk hissing in my arms, I rushed out the front door, nearly tripping over my welcome mat, and threw the bundle from the top of the steps into a snowbank.
“Fire in the hole!” Rivard called, and ducked comically behind his truck.
I stepped back over the threshold and watched the skunk claw its way loose. It emerged, shaken but seemingly uninjured from the blanket, stomping its feet and shaking its fluffy tail: aggrieved and looking for someone to punish. I slammed the door and waited a minute before peeking out again. My last glimpse of the skunk was of its black-and-white derriere as it waddled off into the balsams at the edge of the yard.
Rivard contorted his face muscles to keep from grinning as I went down to meet him.
“Nice work,” he said.
“Go to hell. Everything I own is ruined.”
“That’s really bad luck.”
“It has nothing to do with luck. It’s that George Magoon bastard fucking around with me again.”
Rivard narrowed his eyes. “What makes you say that?”
“Who else is going to set a skunk loose inside my trailer? It didn’t just wake up from hibernation and decide to invade my home. The kitchen window was broken.”
Rivard reached into his jacket for a tin of snuff and unscrewed the lid. He pinched some tobacco and jammed it down between his cheek and gums. “Was there another note?”
“No, but it had to be that son of a bitch Brogan again. He was just over here this afternoon with his Viking bodyguard.”
“I wouldn’t jump to conclusions,” my sergeant said.
“I want to hear him deny it himself.” I sniffed my forearm. I hadn’t touched the skunk. I hadn’t even spent five minutes inside the mobile home. But I smelled like a stink bomb had exploded in my face.
“You’re not going over there.”
“The hell I’m not.”
“That wasn’t a request, Warden.”
“You want me to just let this go?”
“No,” Rivard said, “I want you to wait here while I pay Brogan a visit. I’ll give you a call after he and I have a conversation. If he was behind this, I promise you that we’ll make him pay. Understood?”
I spat on the ground, trying to expel some of the bitter skunk taste from my mouth. “Understood.”
I watched his taillights disappear into the night, fighting the impulse to wait ten minutes and then follow. My head ached from frustration, pent-up rage, and lack of sleep. How do you de-scent an entire trailer? I’d have to rip out the carpeting and the drapes and probably jettison the furniture, too. In the meantime, I would have to get a motel room at fifty bucks a night, minimum.
Where had Brogan and Cronk found a skunk in mid-February? They must have known where one was hibernating.
A thought came to me.
I took the big Maglite I kept in my backseat and went exploring around my trailer. My feet punched holes in the deep snow as I made my way around to the backyard. I felt the cold snow being jammed up my pants legs against the bare skin.
Beneath the kitchen window, my flashlight showed tracks: a man’s snowshoes. They were traditional: trapper-style, oblong-shaped, fashioned of northern white ash in all likelihood. The man who owned them was a traditionalist. No modern aluminum and plastic Tubbs for George Magoon. There was good information in these tracks. Now I knew something about my prankster that I hadn’t known before.
I foundered in the snow, following the tracks through the balsam and white spruce. My ears began to tingle, and I thought of Prester Sewall wandering desperately in search of help the night before. The snowshoe trail looped around toward the main drag. Whoever had walked here hadn’t been heavy, I decided. The prints of a big man would have been deeper. That ruled out Billy Cronk.
Eventually the tracks emerged from the birch and beech saplings that made up the second-growth timber. They ascended the high snowbank the plow had muscled out of the road. Then they scrambled down the other side of the drift to the salt-white asphalt. I walked up and down the roadside, scanning for distinctive tire prints with my flashlight, but there were too many marks to distinguish anything useful. Something silver and red glittered up ahead. I reached down to pick it up. It was a round metal tin that had been flattened under the wheels of passing traffic. Someone who had passed by this way chewed Red Man tobacco.
19
In Machias, I ended up at a 24/7 gas station, where I purchased a bottle of bleach, two hand-soap dispensers, and four liters of Clamato juice. The clerk behind the register pinched her nose as she took my money.
“Adieu, Pepe Le Pew,” she said, to the delight of the tipsy customers behind me in line.
No one would describe midwinter in a remote coastal town with no ski or snowmobiling industries to speak of-almost no industries whatsoever-as peak tourist season. Most motel owners had declared their unconditional surrender, switched off their neon signs, locked their doors and boarded up their plate-glass windows, and departed for warmer climes until after the spring thaw. The few holdouts had begun renting out rooms at weekly rates, becoming flophouses for the shiftless, the addicted, and those criminally minded people who intentionally avoided living with fixed addresses.
After despairing of ever seeing another bed, I found a shabby little motor court with a lighted VACANCY sign on the road to Lubec. The Blueberry Bunch Motel consisted of six peeling cabins arranged in a horseshoe shape around a semicircular driveway. Only one of the cabins had an occupant; the others looked dark and forlorn. But when I pressed the luminous doorbell outside the office, a light went on in the house next door, and presently an old woman came hurrying down the walk.
She stood about four and a half feet tall and looked to be a hundred years old. She had big glasses that covered much of her wrinkled face, tightly curled hair that reminded me of sheep’s wool, and a generous nose. She wore a fuchsia sweater, which she might have knitted herself, flannel pants, and boots she’d probably purchased in the kids’ section at L.L. Bean.
“Can I help you, Officer?” She had an accent I couldn’t place. Baltimore, maybe?
“Yes, ma’am. I need a room for the night, if you have one.”
When she laughed, I saw that her gums were receding from her long yellow teeth. “Young man,” she said, “I can’t give rooms away this time of year.”
She unlocked the door and let me into the office. She stepped up onto a wooden box behind the registration desk, opened a book on the counter, and asked me to sign my name. Bleary-eyed, I filled in the information and handed her my credit card.
“I can give you the government rate,” she said.
