Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(5)

If I had known her at all, or been in any mood to explain, I might have confessed how embarrassed I was, humiliated even, by my past self. As a first-year warden, I had been reckless and headstrong. My insubordinate actions had nearly gotten me fired. I had no business getting a second chance in the Warden Service, but sometimes life rewards the undeserving. These days, I took every opportunity to distance myself from that Mike Bowditch. I treated him as a disreputable stranger—not even a blood relative—just someone who happened to share my name.

“You don’t understand,” she said yet again.

“I hope your son is all right and that he comes home soon.”

She inhaled, then let out a long breath, as if preparing to jump off a cliff into deep water. Her eyes filled again wth tears. “Adam is your brother!”

I thought I had misheard her. “What did you say?”

She leaned across the table. “Jack and I had an affair—I was married to A.J. at the time—and I got pregnant.”

I felt as if I had been punched in the sternum. “That’s impossible.”

“He is!”

How old was Adam? Twenty-one? I did the math. Twenty-one years ago, I had been seven, going on eight, and my parents had still been married. Soon after, I would come down with pneumonia when my father dragged me through the woods checking his trapline; my devoutly Catholic mother would get an abortion but pass it off as a miscarriage; she would pack her station wagon with little more than a few changes of clothing, and we would take off in the night while my father was out drinking, without even leaving a note, never to return. Twenty-one years ago my world hadn’t yet fallen irretrievably apart.

Amber’s face became fuzzier and fuzzier as she spoke: “I’d thought about telling you when Jack died—and then again after I heard your mom had passed away. I thought you should know you weren’t alone in the word, that you had a little brother. But then Adam went to jail and everything spun out of control.”

I found myself taking the photograph from her hand and sitting down hard in the armchair opposite her. I stared at Adam Langstrom’s face, searching for a resemblance I hadn’t noticed at first glance. He had the same brown hair and sky-blue eyes as my dad and me. Maybe the jawline looked faintly familiar. But the similarities were all superficial.

“How do you know?” The words came out as a croak. “How do you know that my dad is the father?”

“I know.”

It felt as if every muscle in my body had gone taut. “Why should I believe you? You just dropped this on me after I refused to help find your son.”

“What do you want from me?”

“A letter from him. A picture of you together. Anything.”

“Your dad didn’t write letters,” she said, as if I should have known better than to ask. “And A.J. burned the only picture of Jack and me together when he found it.”

I rose stiffly to my feet. “I’m sorry, but you need to leave.”

“Wait!” she said. “I have these.”

She reached into her jacket pocket again and pulled out a pair of dog tags on a chain. She passed them to me across the table. I read the words stamped into the stainless steel:

BOWDITCH

JOHN, M.





004-00-8120


O NEG


NO PREF.

My father had done two tours of duty in Vietnam with the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment and had returned home a hero. But the war had left him badly scarred, both physically and mentally. What he’d experienced in the jungles of Southeast Asia—killing men, nearly being killed by them—had managed to turn him into the worst version of himself, or so people told me who had known him before he left Maine.

He had continued to wear his dog tags long after he’d left the army. In every memory I had of him with his shirt off, they hung around his neck. They seemed to have some talismanic power, as if he credited them with having saved his life, while so many of his friends had died. I had been surprised to hear those tags hadn’t been found on his body at Rum Pond. I had always wondered what had become of them.

“Jack gave those to me the night he first held Adam in his arms,” Amber said. “He wanted me to give them to him when he was older.”

Another invisible blow struck my chest. “You mean my dad knew?”

“He offered to take care of us, but I was still with A.J. and trying to make things work. Besides, as young as I was, I knew that Jack wasn’t going to make a good husband—or a good father.”

I was having a hard time getting my wind back. “You need to leave.”

“What about Adam?”

“What about him?”

“You won’t help me find him?”

“No.”

“Not after what I just told you?”

“Especially not now,” said a rough voice issuing from my mouth.

She remained seated, looking up at me. I could see her in the act of thinking. In the quiet, I heard the furnace start up in the basement.

Then Amber twitched her nose. “Is something burning?”

I had left the venison stew simmering, and it had begun to scorch the pot.

I hurried out to the kitchen. I used a dishrag to lift the handle and drop the bubbling contents into the sink. A haze hung in the air, its odor as foul as a failed animal sacrifice.