Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(57)

Lauren hovered with a dishrag behind her children, watchful of messes. “How are Charley and Ora doing?” she asked. “We miss them so much here. So many good people left the area when Wendigo canceled their leases. That company is as close as you can come to pure evil. Gary says they bulldozed every decent deer yard between Eustis and the Kennebec River. Their plan is to take all the good wood and then develop the waterfront properties for real estate. Maybe sell it to some billionaire to create his own North Woods Kingdom. Don’t you hate it when your predictions come true?”

“Only the bad ones,” I said.

She had an unconvincing laugh. “I guess it’s been a long time since I was an optimist.”

“What’s an optimist?” the boy, Jacob, asked.

“It’s someone who thinks good thoughts,” Lauren said.

I ate quietly while Lauren did her mother thing, and we all waited for Gary. The kids seemed well behaved—loud as most kids, but well behaved. Eventually, she cleared them out of the kitchen with instructions to finish getting ready for school. Almost anyplace else, twenty inches of fresh snow would have meant canceled classes, but not in Maine, where natives consider anything less than four feet to be a dusting.

She removed my empty plate and poured coffee for the both of us. Then she sat down heavily across from me. It was as if she hadn’t wanted her children to see how bone-tired she was.

“The older I get, the more I seem to hate change,” she said. “Don’t you find that’s true? Even when it’s good change, like with Gary. I have a hard time trusting things will be better in the future. I keep waiting for the sky to fall.”

I thought of that empty bottle of bourbon in my duffel. “Stacey says I’m the same way.”

She gave me another of her wrinkly smiles. “I remember her when she was a little girl. What a tomboy! And just as fearless as her dad.”

“She still is,” I said.

“They’re such a wonderful family. Charley helped Gary out of so many scrapes. He could have let my husband self-destruct.” She caught herself, as if she had suddenly remembered I was a relative stranger in her house. “You’re easy to talk to, Mike. You have a comfortable way about you. And those blue eyes don’t hurt, either. They must be your secret weapon with women.”

“I wish that were true.”

“I’m sure people must tell you that you have your father’s eyes,” she said. “I knew him, of course. Everyone around here did. And Gary was obsessed with him because he was so blatant about all the deer and moose he was poaching. He used to come home so, so angry. I know it was one reason he drank. Gary’s sponsor says alcoholics drink because they have a spiritual disease. But I blame your father for a lot of the bad times we had. I am sorry, but that’s just how I feel.”

A door opened down the hall and a gust of cold air rushed into the kitchen before the door shut again and the finger paintings stopped flapping on the walls. Flotsam and Jetsam barreled into the room, their coats matted with snow, their nails clicking on the floorboards. I heard Pulsifer stomping his boots.

Lauren flushed, as if with embarrassment, and stood up from the table, as if she feared being caught with me in a compromising position. Living on an isolated farm in the woods, cooped up with four kids and a husband with a history of alcohol abuse, she probably had no one to talk to about her own problems. We both knew that she had confided far more than she had intended in me.

“Charley Stevens used to be the district warden here before he became a warden pilot,” she began, as if in the middle of a conversation. “I remember when I was in elementary school he came to talk to my class and brought a three-legged raccoon with him on a leash. They probably wouldn’t allow that now.”

“I highly doubt it,” I said.

“Highly doubt what?” Pulsifer was wearing his winter uniform: black parka and snowmobile pants.

“We were just talking about some of Charley Stevens’s escapades,” Lauren said.

“Those could fill a book.” Pulsifer filled a glass of water from the sink and drank it down in one gulp, then did it all over again. “You used to be able to get away with a lot more in the old days.” His voice sounded parched. “There was one state cop—I won’t say who—who had three women he used to visit while their husbands were at work at the same mill. All three husbands worked different shifts, so there was always one open bed.”

“That’s not funny, Gary,” Lauren said.

He hadn’t yet made eye contact with me. “When I started, no one ever knew where I was or what I was doing. As long as I kept my picture out of the paper and wrote my quota of tickets, the colonel didn’t care.”

“It’s a brand-new day,” I said.

“And a cold one, too,” said Lauren. “Thermometer read five below this morning, and the wind’s out of the northwest. It must be one of those Alberta clippers the weathermen always go on about.”

I hadn’t yet decided what I was going to do. On my way south, I could stop at the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department and see how the examination of Adam’s truck was coming along. Maybe I’d run into Clegg there, and I could tell him about the handgun the missing felon had taken from his mother’s apartment.

“I should probably get on the road,” I told my hosts.