Trespasser (22 page)

Well, at least Sarah wouldn’t have to worry about me out on patrol.

Kathy followed me to my truck. The temperature had climbed a degree or two while I was shut up in the hospital, and the precipitation was now drifting down lightly as plain warm rain. Still, the surface of the parking lot remained as slick as a hockey rink. Under the wet and swirling arc light, my sergeant rearranged my drooping parka back onto my shoulder and raised my collar. “I still can’t believe you crashed my fucking ATV.”

*   *   *

Despite my wishes, Kathy followed me most of the way home. The snowplows had salted and sanded the main roads, but the driving conditions were as bad as I’d seen in ages. At the turn off to Sennebec, Kathy blinked her high beams at me and kept going.

The image of that redheaded kid in a hospital bed seemed to float beyond the limits of my headlights.

I stopped my truck beneath the frozen pines at the end of the driveway and tried to puzzle out what I was going to tell Sarah. Why hadn’t I called her from the hospital and told her about my broken hand? It was because this latest accident was further proof how unreliable I was going to be as a father—if I was going to be a father.

The front windows were dark. When I opened the door, I heard her call my name from the bedroom.

“It’s me,” I said.

I struggled to remove my wet parka and hang it on the hook by the door. Then I began fiddling, one-handed, with the ice-coated lacings of my boots. It took me forever to get my soaking feet out of them.

I found Sarah reading in bed. As I limped through the door, she began to smile sleepily until she caught sight of my sling and splint. Then her eyes widened and she sat up so suddenly, her book dropped to the floor.

“Michael, what happened?”

“I crashed Kathy’s ATV chasing Calvin and Travis Barter. I broke two bones in my hand.”

She jumped out of bed. “Are you in pain?”

“No,” I lied.

“Let me see.” She examined my wounded fingers with an expression of deep concern. “Oh Mike, your hand looks awful.”

“It could be a lot worse.” I sat down beside her heavily on the bed, so heavily the springs groaned in protest. “I could have broken my neck.”

She sat beside me and clasped my good hand with both of her small ones. “Why do you keep hurting yourself like this? I worry that there’s something self-destructive in you that makes you take these risks. I’m scared for you all the time.”

“Well, I won’t be going on patrol for a while, so you needn’t worry.”

“What will they have you do?”

“Take sick time at first, disability, and then I really don’t know.” I took a deep breath from my diaphragm. “There’s something else I need to tell you. Travis Barter has a serious head injury. The doctors are evacuating him to Boston.”

She put a hand over her open mouth in horror.

I found that I couldn’t meet Sarah’s eyes as I recounted the evening’s events, but kept staring down at my grotesque hand in its ridiculously oversized splint. She didn’t ask any questions or interrupt me, but I could feel her emotions rising in the way her grip tightened.

“You can’t blame yourself for what happened to that boy,” she said after I’d finally lapsed into silence.

“I don’t blame myself.” I used my good hand to push myself off the bed and onto my wobbly feet. “I blame his goddamned father for driving on the goddamned road.”

“Don’t you want to talk about what happened?” Sarah said.

“I’m too tired,” I said, and went into the bathroom to take a Vicodin.

*   *   *

Power was out all along the midcoast. We were among the few fortunate households to have electricity. We heard on the radio that linesmen were assembling from all over New England to assist with the emergency. We spent the day after the storm with Sarah shielding me from phone calls while I slept in the darkened bedroom, knocked out on Vicodin.

Except for alcohol and some extra-strength Tylenol prescribed for previous broken bones and stitched wounds, I had never taken drugs before. Somehow I had negotiated my adolescence without ever smoking a joint. Having a crazed drunk for a father is a pretty good advertisement for sobriety in that respect.

So the spell that the Vicodin cast over me was profound. I drifted in and out of consciousness, unable to tell wakefulness from the hallucinations of my sleeping mind, feeling as if I were submerged at the bottom of a lake, watching lights and shadows dart across the ceiling like quick-moving fish. It was not an unpleasant experience. The pills made the pain in my hand vanish, and I would stare at my splint as if it belonged to some unfortunate person sitting on the bed beside me. Poor fellow, I thought.

Sometime during that first long, drugged afternoon, Sarah appeared with a bowl of minestrone and a plate of crackers. The brightness of the overhead light stabbed into my brain.

“How are you doing, honey?”

“Fine,” I said.

“Maybe you should get up for a while and walk around.”

“No thanks.” I was impatient to return to my languorous existence at the bottom of the lake.

“You should at least eat something.”

She plumped up the pillow behind my shoulders so that I could eat off the tray. I obliged her while she told me of the events that had taken place in the world outside my bedroom.

“The phone’s been ringing nonstop,” she said.

“Haven’t heard it.”

“You got calls from Lieutenant Malcomb and Kathy Frost, both wanting to know how you’re doing. Charley, too. That chaplain, Deb Davies, also called. I guess word travels fast through the Warden Service. You got this weird call from some guy named Oswald Bell earlier. He had this thick Long Island accent. He wanted to know if you’d read the files he gave you. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. There were a bunch of hang-ups, too.”

“The Barters.”

“God, do you think? Are they going to come over here? What should I do?”

“They won’t come over. They know I’d shoot their whole fucking family.”

She removed the tray from my lap and set it on the bedside table. Her eyes seemed a different color from what I remembered—I felt like I’d never truly seen them before.

“How many of those pills did you take?”

“Just what the bottle said.”

“Your voice is slurred. I don’t think you should take any more.”

“OK.”

She put a hand on my forehead and then ran her fingers through my crew cut. “I’m worried about you, honey.”

Her concern struck me as misplaced but very sweet. I felt a sudden desire to share some of the insights I’d recently experienced. “Do you remember your First Communion? There was all this big buildup to it in the Catholic Church. We had these CCD classes—I don’t know what CCD stands for—it was like Sunday school, except it wasn’t on Sundays. The idea of eating the body of Christ—what’s a kid supposed to make of that?”

“Mike…”

“The wafer was just this dusty round piece of paper. I don’t know what I thought would happen—maybe that I’d see a vision of God with beams of sunlight and angels. But instead, there was
nothing.
So which church should we raise our kids in? Catholic or Episcopal? I guess you’d be the one to take them, so you should decide.”

She got up from the bed and lifted the tray. She seemed to be swaying dreamily herself, uncertain on her feet. “Get some rest.”

After she’d left the room, I stared at the shimmering light beneath the bedroom door. It seemed to ripple like waves of heat rising off hot desert sands. Sarah hadn’t understood what I was getting at. These revelations were peculiar to me. No one else could understand them.

24

On Monday morning, after Sarah had left for school, I awoke to a sensation in my right hand. It might best be compared to an elephant sitting on all five of my fingers. I stumbled into the bathroom and began rummaging through the medicine cabinet. The little orange vial of Vicodin had disappeared without a trace.

I telephoned Sarah’s school and left a message. I told the receptionist it was an emergency. Then I waited in my pajama bottoms on the edge of the unmade bed, cradling my bad hand in my good one.

After an eternity, the phone rang. “Mike, what is it? Did you hear something about Travis?”

“I can’t find my pills.”

In my mind’s eye, I saw Sarah easing the receiver away from her ear until she could decide how to respond. “Did you look in the medicine cabinet?”

“Of course I looked in the medicine cabinet.”

“Maybe you got up in the night and misplaced the bottle. You might have dropped it on the floor. Did you check behind the toilet?”

“No.”

A paranoid idea popped into my head: I wondered if she had hidden my pills during the night. Her voice had risen to a higher pitch over the course of our brief conversation. At the police academy, I had learned that was one of the telltale clues to dishonesty.

“I’m sure they’ll show up eventually.” Sarah sounded like the patient schoolteacher she was. “Why don’t you take a shower and get dressed? You need something to occupy your attention. You could read that book Kathy gave you.” She seemed to be making a conscious effort to humor me. “The principal told me she’s transferring the Barter twins from my class as a precaution. Everyone here knows about you and their father.”

“
He
attacked me.”

“It’s unfair, but people blame you for what happened to Travis. You’re the district game warden.”

“Great,” I said. “That’s just what I need.”

“Mike, you didn’t do anything wrong. You were just doing your job. If you find your Vicodin, please just take half a dose, OK?”

“OK.”

After we signed off, I set to work rooting through her underwear drawers and closet shelves in search of my painkillers. I had the thought she might have stashed the vial in a coat pocket or the toe of a boot. But no matter where I looked, I found nothing.

I was still rummaging around the bedroom when there was a knock at the door. It was the mailman with an express package from my mother in Naples, Florida. Inside was a get-well card, signed “With Love,” telling me she hoped the enclosed present would help occupy me while I healed. She’d sent me a video game, Cabela’s Big Game Hunter for PlayStation 2. I didn’t own a PlayStation machine. I didn’t even own a television.

I dropped the video game in the trash. Ora was right that my mother and I would eventually need to have a serious talk about my dad. But I had a gut feeling that discussion would be a long time coming.

Why had I been such a jerk to Sarah? A broken hand was no excuse. She’d never made a habit of lying to me. And yet she had been behaving so strangely lately. I had been so quick to believe Ora’s suspicion that Sarah might be pregnant. I needed to get past my self-pity and paranoia.

I downed a handful of ibuprofen with a glass of tap water. Then I pulled a bread bag from a kitchen drawer and, after stripping naked, wrapped the plastic around my splint and awkwardly fastened it into place with a rubber band. Even with the bag secured this way, moisture from the shower found a way of seeping in and dampening the brace.

I put on a flannel shirt and some oil-flecked Carhartt pants and then made myself the simplest breakfast imaginable—dry toast and orange juice. I ate it at the kitchen table. Looking out at the tidal marsh, I saw a red-winged blackbird, another early migrant, alight briefly atop a swaying stalk of phragmites before winging down the river.

Fishing season kicked off next week, and I wondered who would cover my district. The first day of open-water fishing was one of my favorite days of the year to be a warden. For a moment again, I felt oppressed by my infirmity.

There was another knock at the door.

In my irritable convalescent state, I wasn’t sure who I was expecting, but it surely wasn’t the Knox County sheriff, Dudley Baker.

When I opened the door, I felt a mild brush of wind on my face. Much of the snow and ice had already dropped from the frozen branches. Our little patch of forest was loud with the staccato
drip-drip
of gravity pulling water down out of the trees.

The sheriff looked, as always, like a man whose entire appearance was sealed neatly into place; he seemed to begin each morning by coating himself from head to toe in immobilizing hair spray. His jowly cheeks bore a flush of color from the morning air. As we spoke, his tinted eyeglass lenses misted over, so that he had to wipe them with the corner of a pressed handkerchief.

“I hope I haven’t disturbed you,” he said, knowing full well that he had.

“I just finished breakfast.”

“How’s your hand?”

“Could be worse.”

He nodded his two chins. “Do you mind if I come in?”

We sat across from each other beside the expiring woodstove. I didn’t offer him coffee, tea, or even a glass of water. The sheriff had driven to my house for a specific reason, and I wanted to hear what it was.

“I thought I should give you an update about the Barter boy myself,” he said. “The doctors decided to fly him down to Boston. He’s in a drug-induced coma. There was extensive damage to the anterior frontal lobes of his brain. It’s too early to predict his prognosis.”

I didn’t know how to respond to this news. “So what are you doing with Calvin?”

“We’re holding him on some bench warrants, in addition to his ATV offenses. Unpaid traffic violations, failure to appear—that sort of thing. He’s going to be my guest for a while unless he can muster bail.”

“Morrison told me Barter’s been dealing pills to teenagers,” I said.

“Roofies are his specialty.”

“I guess it makes sense that a registered sex offender would traffic in date-rape drugs.”

“It’s all just hearsay. A kid we busted said he bought the pills off Barter. We can’t pin anything on Calvin.”

I had the distinct impression the sheriff was beating around some kind of bush. “So, I heard Hans Westergaard’s car might have been spotted in Massachusetts?”

“I can’t comment on that.”

If I kept pressing, I wondered if I could tease some information out of him. “A man just doesn’t disappear into thin air. Whoever killed Ashley left that house in a hurry. If Westergaard was panicked and on the run, he would have used one of his credit cards by now.”