Widowmaker (Mike Bowditch #7)(9)

Which, inevitably, made me think about my father again.

And Adam Langstrom, my alleged brother.

It wasn’t even seven o’clock yet, and I had already broken my promise to myself.

*

Gail Evans was waiting for me in the middle of the road, and I could tell from her expression that she had been waiting a long time. She stood beside a sign that read THREADS: FIBER ARTS STUDIO, WEAVING AND SPINNING LESSONS.

I guessed her to be in her late fifties or early sixties. She had sun-damaged skin, bright eyes the color of Navajo turquoise, and silver curls that escaped from under a fibrous, fuzzy cap that reminded me of a purple Furby. She was dressed in blue jeans, a rainbow-hued sweater, and heavy Birkenstock sandals ill-suited to the time of year. She held a snow shovel at port arms across her torso.

“What took you so long?” She spoke as if she suffered from lockjaw.

I treated the question as rhetorical. “You reported seeing a ‘wolf’?”

She waved the shovel at me. “Two hours ago! It chased a little deer right through my yard.”

Contrary to popular belief, there is no population of wolves living in Maine. Occasionally, one might materialize in some northern corner of the state: a lonely wanderer from some distant region of Quebec. My father claimed to have seen a wolf once while he was hunting. There might also be some outcasts that had been let loose by crazies hoping to repopulate the Maine woods with species from the Pleistocene. But the official line from state biologists was that wolves had been eradicated from the northeastern United States in the nineteenth century, and there were no plans whatsoever to bring them back.

In all likelihood what this woman had seen was a coyote: a once-nonnative species that had migrated east to fill the ecological niche vacated by their larger cousins. As the small western coyote drifted into Maine, it evolved into a formidable predator capable of taking down everything from an adult deer to a newborn moose. I’d seen dead coyotes, shot by night hunters (because the best time to hunt them is after dark), that measured five feet in length and weighed in at nearly seventy pounds. Damned big dogs.

“Can you show me where, exactly, you saw this ‘wolf’?” I asked.

The muscles in her neck stiffened. “Why do you keep saying it that way—‘wolf’? You don’t believe me, do you? Well, I can show you the paw prints.”

I followed her down her driveway to a cottage that looked like something out of a storybook. The house was purple, with a green-shingled roof, bright orange doors, and numerous stained-glass windows. In the yard were all manner of sculptures—from enormous wrought-iron human figurines to granite birdbaths, now frozen, to immense metallic balls like gold meteorites that had dropped from the sky to become half-buried in the snow.

“See, there!”

She used her shovel to point at a heavily trampled plot of snow beside a flat-tray bird feeder. There were hoofprints of all sizes everywhere in the yard.

I scratched my nose. “You seem to get a lot of deer here.”

“I put out corn and apples for them. Cortlands.”

“That’s a bad idea, Ms. Evans.”

“Feeding deer in general or giving them Cortlands in particular? Whatever for?”

I started an often-recited speech: “I know you mean well, but feeding deer actually reduces their ability to survive during the winter. It makes deer more vulnerable to predators by drawing them out of their protective cover, and it lures them close to roads, where they get hit by cars. And when they congregate in herds, they pass on illnesses—like chronic wasting disease—to one another.”

Her expression told me she didn’t believe a word I was saying. “So I’m supposed to watch them starve?”

“You could invite hunters onto your land instead of posting it.”

“Right!”

“Well, you shouldn’t feed them, in any case.”

Gail Evans remained unmoved. “That’s ridiculous.”

I had no doubt she would keep putting out feed corn and fruit baskets for the deer no matter what I said. “You’re going to continue having problems with predators, in that case.”

I circled the trampled area, which was littered with cracked kernels of corn and apple scraps the deer hadn’t yet eaten. Sure enough, I saw the prints of a very large canine—five pads with visible claw marks. Felines, like bobcats and lynx, typically don’t show their claws. By the size, I would have said they belonged to a domestic dog.

I rose to my feet and brushed my gloved hands together to remove the snow. “Can you tell me what you saw, exactly?”

She had a rare gift for speaking complete sentences through clenched teeth. “I was in my studio, and I heard howling, and then I saw the deer come through and, a moment later, this fast black shape. And I said, ‘Oh, my Lord, that’s a wolf!’ It scared the hell out of me. No one ever told me there were wolves here.”

“That’s because there aren’t any,” I said. “Are you sure it wasn’t more of a bark than a howl?”

“What—like a terrier?”

I tried to frame my words carefully. “Ms. Evans, I’m sure it seemed to you like a wolf.”

Gail Evans flashed her jewel-like eyes at me. “Here we go.”

“In all likelihood, what you saw was someone’s dog,” I said. “It doesn’t take much to awaken their predator genes. You’d be surprised by some of the breeds I’ve seen—Shetland sheepdogs, boxers, even poodles—chasing deer.”