Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(37)
Then the line went dead.
A moment later, the phone buzzed again.
This time it was a message. Just one word: Asshole!
*
Before I had become a warden, and during my first years on the job, my thoughts had been so clouded with guilt and anger that I couldn’t see anything clearly. At the time, I had believed my mind was perfectly sound. It was only later—after I had participated in my fourth or fifth critical incident stress debriefing—that I had realized I couldn’t necessarily trust my own mental process; a sick psyche is, by its very nature, incapable of understanding it is sick. I remembered a question I had asked a counselor after she had diagnosed me with post-traumatic stress syndrome: “How can you think through your problems when your problems are your thoughts?”
If Stacey was right, I might be suffering some sort of psychological relapse brought on by that knife in my back. I needed to take a step back and make an attempt to assess my present difficulties with some objectivity.
I was miles from home—and my distance from Stacey at the moment couldn’t be measured in mathematical units.
My superiors at the Warden Service had forbidden me to return to work until my wounds healed, but they would hardly have been pleased to learn how I had spent my so-called sick day.
Not to mention that Amber had taken off without so much as a note about where she was going.
And then there was the matter of the snow. Another inch had accumulated on my windshield since I had returned to the Scout, with only more to come. I flipped the switch and watched the hard rubber blades clear half-moons in the powder.
The easiest problem to deal with was Amber.
I keyed in her number and, of course, got her voice mail. “It’s Mike,” I said, trying to keep the frustration I was feeling out of my voice. “I thought you were going to be waiting for me at the Sluiceway, so we could talk about Josh. What happened? If you’ve heard from Adam, I’d appreciate your calling me back, since I froze my ass off going up that frigging mountain.”
As soon as I hit disconnect, I felt a pang. Amber might have been a self-involved schemer, but I had no business taking out my self-disgust on her. For all I knew, she had received horrible news.
With everything that had happened at the Sluiceway, and then my disastrous conversation with Stacey, I had nearly lost track of the important details I had learned from Josh Davidson: about Adam’s needing money, about his having a black eye, about his driving a truck no one knew he even owned.
Amber had told me to seek out Don Foss, though she doubted he would speak to me. I had to admit that every mention of the man had left me more intrigued.
Pulsifer had called him “a secular saint or a modern-day plantation boss.”
Shaylen Hawken had said he was “the last chance some of these men will ever have.”
And to Cabot and the Night Watchmen, he had been Adam’s “personal savior,” in ironical quotation marks.
What else did I have to do tonight but go searching for this enigma of the North Woods?
On my way down the mountain and out of the resort, I passed an open maintenance hangar. A PistenBully was idling out front, and I saw someone who looked like Elderoy having a conversation with another man while two dogs played in the open lot. The men seemed to be watching the animals leap into the air and bite at the snowflakes.
As I drew closer, I saw that it was indeed Elderoy. The other, younger man I didn’t recognize, but he was dressed in a Widowmaker snowsuit and leaning on a shovel. The dogs were large hounds of some sort; they had appeared black from a distance, but the coloring of their coats, even coated with frost, seemed to have more nuance than I had first thought.
I honked my horn and waved.
Elderoy glanced at my Scout, and we made eye contact, but he didn’t reciprocate my gesture. We hadn’t parted on the best of terms, it was true. He must also have muttered something to the snow shoveler, because the man gave me a look of such intense interest, I lifted my foot from the gas pedal. Then something even more curious happened: The man whistled. I couldn’t hear the sound from the moving vehicle, but I saw the reaction of the hounds. Both dogs ceased to play and faced their master with absolute attention. It made my untrustworthy brain wonder what Elderoy had told the stranger about me.
*
The road down the mountain had begun to get slick. Cars lined up behind me. Most of the traffic was heading south on Route 16, back into Rangeley. I turned north onto the stretch of highway everyone called Moose Alley.
The road deserved its name. The slow-flowing Dead River ran along one side, slithering through a lowland of swamp maples and gray birches: a landscape custom-made for moose. In all seasons, there was something good for them to eat within a few feet of the unfenced road. During warm-weather months, moose loved to hang out in the open, where the breeze could push away some of the biting flies that followed them, and they could submerge themselves in refreshing pools while dining on catkins and water lilies. When the cold weather came, the animals would switch to a diet of evergreen needles and pinecones. They also enjoyed licking up the mineral-rich salt from the asphalt itself.
On average each year, four hundred Maine drivers collide with a moose. Most humans survive the encounters (albeit with totaled vehicles and broken bones); far fewer moose do. I kept my eyes open and both hands on the steering wheel, ready for what might come crashing out of nowhere.
I hadn’t imagined Don Foss Logging would be hard to find. There was pretty much only one road through Kennebago, and I was on it, driving slowly enough that I should have been able to spot a business sign, even half-hidden behind the falling snow. But somehow I managed to miss it.