Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(24)
As I backed out of the driveway, I reached into my glove compartment for a pair of sunglasses. I also carried one of my off-duty pieces in there: a Walther PPK/S that jammed on hollow-point bullets, no matter how well I cleaned the barrel. I kept it for softheaded, sentimental reasons. It was the first handgun I had ever owned.
I debated whether to call the shelter to check up on Shadow. Joanie Swette had mentioned doing a blood test. I supposed that it was probably more reliable in terms of determining genetics, especially when the stakes were so high for an animal. But they wouldn’t have the results for a while.
The GPS on my phone said it would take more than two hours to get to Widowmaker.
The resort was located north of Rangeley, a lake town not far from the New Hampshire border. I decided to take the cross-country route, following the frozen Androscoggin River through Lewiston, Maine’s second-largest city, and past the mill towns of Livermore Falls and Jay, where the air smelled like rotten eggs and every snowbank seemed to have a crust of asphalt grit.
I had lived briefly along the Androscoggin as a small boy when my dad had a job at the old Atlantic Pulp and Paper mill, and I could still remember my mother’s warnings. Below the dams, the plunging river was coffee-brown and frothy, but then it would slip beneath a sheet of seemingly solid ice for miles.
“You can’t trust it,” she’d said. “Not ever, Michael. Do you understand me?”
Her warnings had given me the idea that the river was an evil serpentine thing, a winding white dragon, slithering through the snow. The impression would be strongest at night, when I heard the ice forming and shifting. The grumbling sound made me think of sleepless monsters, and then in the morning I would see jagged new patterns in the surface, cracks and ridges that hadn’t been there the night before. The term my mother used for those nocturnal noises was river talk, but to me it sounded much more like the growls of something that would swallow me whole if I didn’t take care.
Then I would watch my father trudge out to the middle of the frozen river with a six-pack and his ice-fishing gear and sit there safely for hours pulling brown trout through holes, one after the other, while he got a buzz started for the coming night at the bars. When he returned with a bucket of trout, I knew for certain he must be the bravest man in the world. Who else could ride the back of that white dragon all day and return home alive?
*
The road to Rangeley took me through the college town of Farmington, where Shaylene Hawken had her office, and then northwest through the impoverished Sandy River Valley. Bleak little towns with names like Strong, Avon, and Madrid were strung like tarnished beads along the highway. Hunchbacked mountains blotted out the light for long stretches, and moose warning signs flashed amber at every curve in the road.
Surrounded on both sides by hills, the isolated shacks and trailers down in the river bottom must have seen the sun for only a few hours each day. I found myself imagining the domestic dramas that might be playing out inside those benighted homesteads—the drugs being injected, the alcohol being consumed, the blows and the screaming, the guns being placed speculatively against temples.
I pressed the gas harder to outrace my grim thoughts.
The crossing for the Appalachian Trail came into view. Few people attempted to hike this stretch of glacial terrain in the winter. There was a short ascent to Piazza Rock that got some foot traffic, but almost no one dared venture out onto the exposed ridges beyond. The foolish ones who did—the backcountry skiers and alpine snowshoers—often needed to be rescued by game wardens risking their own lives.
And then, suddenly, the mountains let me go, and I was back in the bright white world.
Down in the Sandy River Valley, almost all of the variety stores and motels had been closed for the winter—if not boarded up for good—but now I began seeing motor inns with glowing VACANCY signs, and restaurants with snowmobiles parked out front. SUVs with out-of-state plates and ski racks began to zip past. Finally, a great white bowl opened before me, and I saw the hard, shining expanse of Rangeley Lake. Bright-colored dots raced back and forth on the distant ice; the sledders were out en masse for Snodeo.
I’d never attended the winter carnival, but I understood it to be an extended weekend of snowmobile races, bonfires, and hard partying. While our fellow officers in the state police and the sheriff’s department patrolled the roads, Maine game wardens were given the trails and frozen lakes to watch over. Most of what we dealt with on the sledding routes were speedsters and drunks. I assumed the wardens assigned to Rangeley for the carnival must have gotten cramped hands from writing tickets.
As I drove through the village itself, I had to stop several times to let pedestrians cross the road. They piled in and out of the clothing boutiques and sipped lattes behind the steamed windows of the restaurants along Main Street. After the poverty and desolation I’d witnessed in the Sandy River Valley, I found it disorienting to see so much money on display in what seemed, on the map, to be the middle of nowhere.
The GPS told me to make a right onto Route 16, locally nicknamed “Moose Alley” for the number of collisions that occurred along it. Just past the village, the road took another hard turn, and then I was leaving the town and the traffic behind again. The houses began to be spaced farther and farther apart, and the woods began to edge closer to the snowbanks, until the trees on either side became unbroken walls of green. I drove fifteen more minutes along Moose Alley before seeing the sign for Widowmaker.