Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(6)

When I returned to the living room, I found Amber standing with her purse over her shoulder. I had thought I might have to throw her out, as emotional as she’d been. But she seemed strangely composed now.

I held the door open for her. Sure enough, it had begun to snow while we were inside.

“Don’t you want to know how to reach me?” she said.

“I can always ask Gary Pulsifer.”

Her expression softened. “It’s better that you know about your brother, Mike.”

I barely stopped myself from saying “It doesn’t feel better.”

I followed her out into the driveway and waited while the Jeep started up and the headlights came on. After she had driven off, the silence of the woods closed in around me. The sensation was of being imprisoned inside a snow globe.

I went back into the house to deal with the burned mess in the kitchen. It wasn’t until later that I found Adam’s picture where she had hidden it, under a dirty plate on the coffee table. She had scribbled her phone number on the back of the photograph. She had left the dog tags, too.





3

I read a lot as a kid. My mother used to come home from the library with free books she’d found in the donation boxes by the door. I remember one battered paperback in particular. It was an encyclopedia of different kinds of ghosts: phantoms, wraiths, apparitions, et cetera. A field guide to the undead. There was a chapter on poltergeists that has stayed with me. We tend to think of them merely as noisy, mischievous specters, but what this book explained was that, unlike other ghosts that tend to haunt places, poltergeists haunt specific people. No matter where you go, those loud, disruptive spirits will always follow you.

My father was my personal poltergeist.

I tossed the dog tags in my hand, listened to them jingle, turned them in my fingers, felt the stamped letters like braille I was unable to read. I had never known that we shared the same blood type. As if I needed another reminder of how much we had in common. I clenched my fist so hard around the tags that they left a rounded rectangle imprinted in the skin of my palm.

I knew that my father had always been a womanizer. He had been a handsome, red-blooded mountain man, possessed of an unshakable self-confidence and an animal magnetism I had seen on display in too many barrooms. But he had also loved my late mother in his own oddly ardent way, and the idea that he had fathered a child with another woman while he was still married to her—I didn’t want to believe it.

And yet my dad had made a fool of me before. Why shouldn’t he do it again from beyond the grave?

I tucked the tags into the chest pocket of my uniform and picked up the photograph Amber had left behind in a last-ditch effort to manipulate me into doing her bidding.

Adam Langstrom’s eyes were so blue, many people would have thought they had been retouched, but I saw the same color every morning in the mirror. If she had been lying to me, either she was a terrific actress or she had also been lying to herself.

I felt a sense of panic growing inside my gut that I had never experienced before. For the past five years, I had thought I was the last in a cursed bloodline. But now …

Not knowing what else to do, I reached out for Stacey.

I dialed the number of the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife’s office in Ashland, a remote logging town north of the forty-sixth parallel in a part of Maine that had more moose than people. That was why Stacey and several of her colleagues were holed up there for the winter. They were investigating how an epidemic of blood-sucking winter ticks was devastating Maine’s moose population. Thousands of the big animals from Minnesota to Nova Scotia had already died, and there seemed to be nothing biologists could do to stop the plague. The direness of the situation had only hardened Stacey’s resolve. Like her father—my friend and mentor Charley Stevens—she seemed to fight the hardest for causes other people had given up for lost.

“Stacey’s not back yet,” said the man who answered the phone. “They’re still out in the field.”

“Isn’t it dark?”

“Let me check. Yep, it’s dark all right.”

“Isn’t it snowing?”

“It snows every day this time of year.”

“What you’re telling me is not to worry,” I said.

“I’ll have her call you when she gets back.”

I tried to keep busy while I waited. I took off my gun belt again and changed out of my uniform into a flannel shirt and jeans. I even washed the dishes. But worrying about Stacey and not being able to tell her my news only added to my agitation.

I had a fifth of Jim Beam in my cupboard that I hadn’t yet opened. My father had been an alcoholic, and I’d had more than my share of moments when things were going badly and I had felt the pull of the bottle. But if ever I needed a drink, it was now. I filled a glass with bourbon and sat down in front of my laptop to read the sad tale of Adam Langstrom.

And sad it was.

I started by accessing the state law-enforcement database to see if there really was a warrant out for his arrest. The page that came up showed a picture of Langstrom taken by the Department of Corrections and listed him as a fugitive, wanted for violating his probation. He looked older and more hardened than he did in the photo his mother had left behind. He had put on muscle, and his hair was dull and in need of cutting, but what was most noteworthy was his right ear. It was missing the lobe, as if something—or someone—had chomped it off.