Trespasser (17 page)

“She says her nephew was wrongfully convicted seven years ago and believes the real killer murdered Ashley Kim last night. For some reason, she thinks I can help her.”

She put the spoon down next to the burner and started to sob.

“Sarah.” I stepped forward and put my arms around her.

A shiver rippled down her spine. “I’m sorry. I’ve been doing this all day. All the teachers were talking about the murder. That’s why I left school early. I kept breaking into tears and didn’t want the kids to see.” She reached for a dishrag to wipe her nose and eyes. “Go on. What were you saying?”

“It was nothing important.”

She shook her head, so that her blond hair swayed just like Jill Westergaard’s had that morning. “I want to hear what you found out from the detectives.”

I took my glass and sat down at the kitchen table and sipped my whiskey. “The state police are still looking for this Hans Westergaard, who owns the house. They think the killing was a rendezvous that somehow went really, really bad.”

“So this professor was the one who murdered her?”

“In these cases, it’s almost always the boyfriend,” I said, parroting Skip Morrison’s words.

“But the detectives don’t know for certain?”

“The probability is high.”

“But there’s a chance it was someone else? It could be some random psychopath who happened on the accident scene and offered to give her a ride.”

I gulped down the rest of my whiskey. “I don’t think there’s a random psychopath in Seal Cove.”

Sarah dished me a bowl of chowder and set it on the place mat. “The teachers were saying—” Her voice caught in her throat again, but this time she managed to recover herself and continue. “We were saying how scary it is for women to drive alone at night on some of these back roads. What happened to that woman, it could have happened to me.”

This conversation seemed poised to become another indictment of our living situation. Sarah had made it abundantly clear that she would have preferred renting an apartment up the road in swanky Camden. I dug into my dinner. “Well, it didn’t.”

“You think Ashley Kim was just unlucky.”

“Basically.”

“That’s how you and I are different.” Sarah had been raised as an Episcopalian and still considered her parents’ family priest a trusted friend. She was a person of faith, just as I was a person of doubt. On the question of happenstance, she saw destiny’s hand instead of random luck. “I don’t believe in accidents.”

*   *   *

At dinner, I kept waiting for Sarah to break the news to me, if there was news, but she ate quietly, lost in her own head.

Finally, as we were washing the dishes side by side at the sink and my inhibitions had been lowered by two more whiskeys, I just blurted out the question. “So how’s your stomach?”

She focused on what her hands were doing in the soapy water. “It’s still giving me trouble.”

I waited for her to say more, but that was the beginning and the end of the subject.

As I refolded the napkins, I sneaked a look at Sarah’s midsection. I wasn’t sure what I expected to see, but her abdomen was as flat as the tabletop. If we had a baby and it was a little boy, I realized I could teach him everything my father had failed to teach me. That possibility of having a second chance at childhood, if only vicariously, appealed to some deep emotion I couldn’t even name.

She must have picked up on one of my brain waves. “Was your father always like that?”

“Like what?”

“Self-destructive.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “My grandmother used to tell me he was different before he went to Vietnam.”

“Different how?”

“I’d rather not talk about my dad.”

“I understand.” She nodded knowingly and put a hand on my shoulder. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.” She hesitated, looking at me intensely out of the corners of her sky blue eyes. “It’s kind of strange.”

Now I was genuinely nervous. “What is it?”

“Did you vacuum the rug?”

“Yes,” I replied, lying.

“You actually cleaned something in this house?”

“Yes.”

She laughed and tossed the wet dish towel at me. “Who are you? And what did you do with my boyfriend?”

19

The phone rang very early the next morning. Sarah reached across my naked back to answer it.

“It’s Kathy Frost,” she mumbled.

I raised myself off the mattress with a groan. “Jesus, Kathy,” I said, blinking at the darkened window. “Do you know what time it is?”

“I don’t know. Early?”

“It’s five o’clock on a Saturday morning.”

“I must still be on Key West time.”

“Florida is in the same time zone as Maine.”

“Oh, yeah.” A dog was whining plaintively somewhere in the background. “Well, now that you’re bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, how would you like to get some breakfast? I brought you a souvenir.”

I sat up and swung my stiff legs off the bed. The floorboards were cold as ice beneath my heels. “OK. Where?”

“How about my place? I’ve got a sick dog here. I don’t know what shit Devoe fed him, but it’s been coming out both ends all night long.”

I rubbed the flakes from my eyelashes. “I’ll see you in an hour.”

“Bring doughnuts! And coffee!”

So my sergeant had somehow conned me into driving forty miles to her house in the predawn light, on my day off no less, and paying for breakfast in the bargain. What was it about women that made me agree to their most outlandish requests?

I left Sarah dozing in bed and shuffled, naked, into the bathroom. The harsh light above the mirror showed a drawn, stubbled face, making me wonder whether I’d done the Rip van Winkle thing and overslept by a decade or two. My head ached from the three whiskeys I’d consumed before bed. I needed to cut back on those, I decided. And my pubic bone was sore in a spot I rarely had reason to consider. I’d been surprised by Sarah’s sudden playfulness the night before. One moment she’d been all sad and teary, and the next she was reaching for my zipper. She hadn’t seemed like a woman worried about an unplanned pregnancy.

When I’d toweled off after the shower and was pulling on my pants, I found Sarah leaning sleepily against the doorjamb, holding the phone. She, too, was naked. “It’s for you again,” she said, yawning. “It’s Hank Varnum.”

She handed me the phone and collapsed once more onto the bed.

I took the call in the kitchen. A gauzy gray light had begun seeping through the windows. The room was so cold, I could see my breath when I spoke. “What’s going on, Hank?”

“You need to get over here, Mike!”

“I’m not on duty today. Do you want me to call John Farwell? He’s covering my district.”

“No, I want you to arrest that pervert Calvin Barter.”

I settled my aching bones down at the table. “Tell me what happened.”

“That pervert just dragged away my mailbox! I was still asleep when I heard the ATVs ride across my front yard. There were two of them, a big one and a little one, and they were whooping and hollering. I grabbed my revolver and ran outside, but they were already racing down the road, dragging my mailbox by a chain.”

“And you’re sure one of the two riders was Barter?”

“Yes! I’d recognize that big pervert anywhere.”

“Why do you keep calling him a ‘pervert’?”

“The man’s a child molester! Everybody in town knows that.”

When I’d moved to the midcoast last year, I’d reviewed the list of sexual predators—the registry of local child molesters, Peeping Toms, public masturbators, and statutory rapists—but Calvin’s name hadn’t jumped out at me. There were lots of Barters in these backwaters. It wasn’t until this conversation with Hank that I finally made the connection.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll drive over to the Barter place. I’ll arrest him on the spot if I have cause, but I can’t just haul him into jail on your say-so. Please promise me that if he comes back over here later, you won’t do anything rash.”

“I’ll defend myself and my property.”

“I don’t want this turning into a feud between you two.”

“It already is!”

With that, he hung up.

I changed out of my Carhartts and put on my wrinkled uniform. Peering into the darkened bedroom again, I saw that Sarah was snoring softly. I looked longingly at her spread-eagled backside, but instead of waking her again, I left a note on the kitchen counter, promising to be back by noon. We were scheduled to drive to Portland to visit her older sister, Amy—the one who hated my guts. Wait till she heard I’d knocked up Sarah.

The sun hadn’t even risen yet, and already this was shaping up to be one hellacious day.

*   *   *

Outside, there was a sting in the air that made my cheeks feel as if they’d both been freshly slapped. Clouds sagged down on the treetops, and the smell of imminent snow made me dread the long drive to southern Maine later that afternoon.

The cab of the truck always took an eternity to heat up. There were many mornings when my vehicle seemed like a four-wheeled icebox. It actually felt warmer standing outside in the open air.

On the drive over to Barter’s farm, I weighed the idea of calling Kathy or Farwell for backup. But I wanted the satisfaction of confronting Calvin on my own. Like Varnum, I was having trouble not taking this as a personal offense. If Barter wanted a fight, I’d gladly give him one. It didn’t matter if he was the size of Andre the Giant.

I drove past the
NO
TRESPASSING
signs and through the orchard of bony apple trees to the dooryard of the farmhouse. Most of the windows were dim, but I saw a light in a lower room, probably coming from the kitchen. I got out of the truck and carefully closed the door, not wanting to spook Barter into fleeing again.

The cold snap had hardened the mud underfoot. The frozen earth was contoured and crusted into waves that crackled with every step I took. I pounded my fist against the flaking front door. I heard muttering inside and saw a light flick on in the entryway.

The door opened, and Barter’s teenaged, redheaded, chicken-shooting son glared out at me from the hall. He wore muddy jeans and nothing else. His jutting ribs reminding me of an inmate recently released from a concentration camp.

“What do you want?” he sassed.

“Go get your father.”

“He ain’t here.”

“I don’t believe you, kid.” The mud-splattered pants told me who Barter’s ATV companion had been.

The boy pushed a heavy red bang out of his eyes and sharpened his sneer. “Didn’t you read them signs?” he asked.

“I read them. Now go get your father.”

“You don’t tell me what to do.”

“Travis!”

Wanda Barter, dressed in a shapeless smock that might once have been a circus tent, came storming down the hall. She already had a cigarette fired up and tucked between her cracked lips. Her reddish gray hair was fastened forcibly back from her forehead by a cruel array of pins. She shoved her son by the head, so that he stumbled away from the door. Then she stepped forward as if to block my entrance should I consider barging into the home. I felt vaguely like Theseus up against the Minotaur.

“What do you want?”

“I know your husband’s inside, Mrs. Barter.” Glancing behind the barrel-shaped woman, I saw the boy down the hall. I raised my voice so that it could be heard throughout the house, in case someone was eavesdropping from the top of the staircase. “We’ve got another warden in the woods behind the house, so Calvin can forget trying to give us the slip again.” It was a blatant lie, but I was sick of Wanda’s bullshit.

She studied me through the wafting cigarette smoke. “I guess you didn’t see the ‘No Trespassing’ signs we put up out front. Or maybe you don’t read so well. You didn’t strike me as the intelligent type the other day. Those signs mean the same as ‘Keep Out.’”

When you grow up in poverty, as I did, you develop a complicated attitude toward the destitute, the shiftless, and the genuinely needy. You remember your own frequent visits to the food bank and the squalor of your playmates’ mobile homes, and you feel an upwelling of sympathy that lasts until the moment some redneck spits in your face. And then you start thinking that ultimately we all deserve the hand we’re dealt.

I counted to ten. “Someone just committed criminal mischief on Hank Varnum’s property for the second time in a week. I know it was your husband who did it.”

A random redheaded toddler wandered out of the shadows and stood behind its mother, or grandmother, or whoever the hell she was. There were too many homes in these parts where the family trees defied easy diagramming.

“Calvin’s away on business,” she said.

Business? The man didn’t work. “We both know I’m going to catch up with Calvin sooner or later. Do I really have to get a warrant to talk with him?”

“Yep.” She blew two massive lungfuls of smoke in my face. “You really fucking do. Now why don’t you get the fuck off my property before I really lose my fucking temper.”

She didn’t close the door on me, just crossed her brawny forearms and made it clear that the conversation was officially over. We both knew that I had no recourse. She hadn’t threatened me, and without a warrant specifying probable cause for a search, I had no business lingering on private property. Once again, Wanda Barter had me by the short hairs, and she damn well knew it.

“I’ll be back,” I said, but the threat sounded hollow even to my own ears.

She merely leered at me while the blank-faced toddler peeked out from between her formidable legs.

I didn’t fully turn my back on the house until I had climbed into my truck. I swung around the circular driveway fast and accelerated through the leafless orchard, furious and tempted to take out a few fence posts along my way. My spinning tires churned up loose gravel, which rattled around the underside of the chassis, and for an instant, I thought I heard a pinging sound.

It was only fifteen minutes later, as I was getting out of the vehicle at the Square Deal to buy Kathy her doughnuts, that I realized where the noise had come from. My side window was cracked in an unmistakable spiderwebbed pattern, one that could only have been produced by a pellet gun.