“Thanks, but I’m not here on government business.”
“I won’t tell if you won’t.”
She handed me a key attached to an enormous piece of blue plastic on which someone had painted the number 6 with silver glitter nail polish. “That’s the bridal suite,” she said with a wink. “Would you like me to show it you?”
“I’m sure it will be fine.”
“I’m not going to ask you about the skunk,” she said. “But I take it you didn’t get the better end of your dispute.”
From the driveway, the cabin looked no bigger than a garden shed, but inside, once the hesitant light decided to flicker on, I saw that it was more spacious than I’d imagined. Most of the room was taken up by a full-size bed with a synthetic oak headboard and a coverlet woven out of blue polyester fabric. A small television no bigger than a toaster sat atop a pressed-wood bureau. The view through the front curtains was of the parking lot.
Inside the bathroom was a stained tub with a long pipe that rose to a rusty showerhead. The first thing I did was to strip down to my underwear. I dumped the clothes I’d brought with me into the tub and then doused them all with Clamato juice. Bent over the tub, I worked the tomato juice into the fibers. I let the clothes soak in the bloodred liquid and lay down on the bed. That was when it dawned on me that I would have no way to dry my wet clothing. I could hang a shirt over the creaking radiator, but how long would that take?
After a while, I got up and returned to the bathroom and ran cold water over my clothes. When the last of the juice had swirled down the drain, I pumped hand soap over the laundry to get a good lather going. I rubbed the foam into the fabric and kept rubbing until my shoulders ached. I rinsed the clothes until the water ran clear and free of bubbles. Then I wrung the last drops from every sleeve and pants leg. Done at last, I pressed my green uniform shirt to my nose and sniffed.
It smelled like someone had soaked a gym sock in a Bloody Mary.
In high school, I’d dated a girl who had been born without a sense of smell. I wondered if she was still single.
I went around the bedroom, hanging shirts on hangers from every nail I could find. I draped wet pants over curtain rods and the desk chair. I arranged socks and underwear on the shelf above the radiator.
It was after 3:00 A.M. by the time I finished with my washing. I turned off the bedside lamp and pulled the cold sheet and thin wool blanket across my chest. Falling asleep, I listened to the dripping sound my wet clothes made in the darkness, and I dreamed that I was camping alone in the rain forest and that outside it was raining.
The cell phone’s melodic ringtone pulled me up out of my coma. When I opened my dry eyes, I saw cold sunlight streaming into a tiny room decorated with haphazard items from my wardrobe. I knocked my BlackBerry off the nightstand and then nearly fell out of bed reaching to retrieve it from the floor.
My mouth was gummy, lips, teeth, and tongue. “Hello?”
“Warden Bowditch, I think you’ve got some splaining to do.”
“Sheriff Rhine?”
“My deputy has been telling me how you showed up at the hospital last night on the arm of Jamie Sewall.”
That prick Dunbar-I should have figured he would throw me under the bus. “I was just giving her a ride,” I said in a sleep-thickened voice. “She lost her van keys in the parking lot.”
“And somehow this entailed accompanying her into the hospital?”
“I didn’t anticipate her brother would be conscious.”
“I think I’m beginning to understand why your superiors transferred you Down East. You should expect a call soon from Lieutenant Zanadakis. He’s going to be as curious as I am to hear why you neglected to inform us of your relationship with the Sewall family.”
After I got off the phone, I went into the bathroom to relieve my bladder and take a shower. My uniform was still musky and damp when I put it on. I decided to pack all of my still-wet clothes into the duffel bag. It appeared that I would be spending my morning at the local Laundromat.
First, I had a stop to make on the other side of town.
Outside, the sunlight bounced off the snowbanks, scalding my eyes. Winter was a season of such sharp contrasts. There were overcast days when the whole world faded to shades of gray. But when the sun was shining, the landscape became as gaudy as an old Technicolor circus movie.
I drove across the causeway, where a dam caused the Sabao River to bulge up before it emptied into the Machias below. The lower river was tidal, so whatever ice formed would shift and buckle twice a day as the sea pushed salt water up the estuary. Pressure ridges formed where the ice had broken apart and then crumpled together again.
But the Sabao, above the sluice, was all fresh. At this time of year, fishermen pulled brown trout, black bass, and pickerel through holes in the ice. State regulations prohibited anyone over the age of sixteen from fishing the Sabao-it was a kiddie fishery, a place where the local youngsters could learn the pleasures of angling without being elbowed off the river by adults-but I never seemed to drive past without having to chase some knucklehead off the ice.
This morning I spotted a tiny figure way out on the ice. Maybe a teenager-he was too far away for me to tell at a glance. But then the clouds moved off and the sun caught him full-on, and I saw a flash of orange clothing.
I hit the brakes so hard, the rear of my truck almost fishtailed. The driver in the car behind me tooted his horn and then zipped past on the left. I swung the truck into the causeway lot and reached behind the passenger seat for my binoculars. My hand roved across the backseat debris like a blind tarantula. But it found nothing. Where had my binoculars gone? I remembered using them two days earlier, when I was working ice fishermen on Gardner Lake.
I leaned forward, shaded my eyes, and squinted into the middle distance, uncertain that I was seeing what I thought I was seeing.
That numbskull out on the ice was wearing an orange life jacket.
If you have to wear a personal flotation device out on the ice, then maybe, just maybe, the conditions are unsafe for fishing.
Did that joker really think a PFD would prevent the river current from pulling him under the ice? The rule of thumb with ice thickness is: It takes a foot of ice to support a medium truck, eight to twelve inches to support a car, five inches to support a snowmobile, and four inches to bear the weight of a person. But those guidelines don’t take into account moving water, not just actual rivers like the Sabao but also the inlets and outlets of larger bodies. Most people assume lakes and ponds are still waters; they don’t realize that strong currents can move beneath their placid surfaces. And wherever the water is flowing, the ice tends to be thin, even when the temperatures collapse in the middle of February. Countless vehicles and people fall through the ice because they have no appreciation of Mother Nature’s treacherous side.
On some other morning, I probably would have ventured across that unsafe surface to box that idiot’s ears. Not that he was violating any laws by being out there. Kathy Frost had always reminded me that taking stupid chances isn’t illegal. A good thing, too, or else I would already have been serving a life sentence.
20
I felt self-conscious entering a public space, smelling even faintly of skunk. As I pushed through the double doors of the McDonald’s, I passed an old geezer on his way out. He gave a noticeable wince, which made me even more nervous than I already was about speaking to Jamie.
It took her a while to notice me in line. She was busy assembling orders, salting hash browns, and bagging breakfast sandwiches. She was dressed in that ridiculous referee uniform with its indoor sun visor, using a radio headset to converse with someone in the drive-through. When she finally spotted me, she paused briefly and then let the teenage boy at the register take my order.
