The sheriff arrived at the Sewall house before I did and took the only parking space in the largely unshoveled driveway, pulling into the slot beside Jamie’s van.
I turned off the engine and studied the house. What a wreck it was on the outside. The asphalt shingles were flaking away from the rooftop like dead skin from a dry scalp. A rusted washing machine rose from a snowbank in the lawn like a weird garden sculpture. Jamie had hung some laundry to dry on a clothesline in the front yard-bedsheets and towels-but the hyperborean temperatures had frozen them solid.
I knew that she killed herself trying to keep everything spick-and-span inside. She mopped and vacuumed and dusted every surface. I had the sense it was a recovery thing: literally getting her house in order. But the face the house showed the street was drawn and haggard, a reflection of its owner’s recent afflictions and a reminder how tenuous a hold she had on sobriety.
Jamie had shown up at my motel door with beer, which seemed unwise for someone in AA, even if she was drinking Diet Coke, and then there were the five empty bottles this morning, when I recalled consuming only four. But maybe I was mistaken. And maybe the Higher Power she couldn’t quite believe was real would assert itself now and stand between the sucker punch headed her way and the seemingly inevitable fall that would result.
I joined Rhine at the foot of the walkway. Fat snowflakes drifted like falling cherry blossoms on the breeze. The beauty of it seemed jarring, given our morbid task.
I’d participated in only one death notification so far, visiting the family of a young man who’d crashed his snowmobile into a tree, but I’d had with me the Reverend Deborah Davies, who served as one of the Warden Service’s two female chaplains. Her presence proved a great help when the mother collapsed to the floor, insensible from the shock.
“I hate this part of the job,” Rhine said.
“I’m surprised you didn’t bring a chaplain along.”
“I wouldn’t be much of a sheriff if I didn’t do my own dirty work.”
The more time I spent with Rhine, the more I respected her. She was notorious in law-enforcement circles, known for her Pocahontas hairstyle, her public feud with state bureaucrats, and the landslide elections that kept returning her to office. When you picture a Maine county sheriff, the first image that springs to mind isn’t a gimlet-eyed lesbian, and yet Roberta Rhine had won the job and made it her own in a part of the world not known for its open-mindedness. I was beginning to understand why.
I followed her up the snow-dusted wheelchair ramp.
Lucas answered when the doorbell rang. He blinked at us silently through thick glasses. His hair was wet and smeared across his bulbous forehead. He wore pants rolled at the cuffs to fit his stunted legs and a long-sleeved sweatshirt decorated with the leering face of Batman’s archnemesis, the Joker.
“Hello, Lucas,” I said. “Is your mom at home?”
“I didn’t do nothing!”
“We’re here to see your mother,” explained the sheriff.
He spun away from us. “Ma!”
A woman’s voice croaked from a distant room. “Who’s at the door?”
“The cops!”
And then he took off up the stairs. I remembered what Jamie had said to me the night before, how I reminded her of Lucas. The comparison left me baffled and disturbed. All I could conclude was that she hoped I might take a paternal interest in the kid. Having met his father and uncle, I could understand why Lucas might require another male role model.
The house smelled of cigarettes. What I’d first taken to be wood smoke from the stove was, in fact, burning tobacco. A bubble of fear unlike anything I had felt before formed in my stomach.
I am about to cause someone great pain, I realized.
Jamie emerged from the living room, still dressed in her McDonald’s uniform. She usually pinned up her hair to work, but she must have lost a barrette during the day, because a strand of hair hung in her eyes, which were already bloodshot from crying or smoking. She hung in the doorway as if barred from approaching by an invisible force field.
“Where is he?” The question was directed at me, as if we were alone in the motel room again.
“May we come in, Jamie?” the sheriff asked.
“Tell me first.”
The cold tickled the hairs along my neck, but I stopped myself from shivering. Stillness seemed important at this moment. I wasn’t sure how to begin.
Fearing that I wasn’t up to the task, the sheriff threw herself into the breach. “This afternoon, your brother escaped from Down East Community Hospital,” she said.
“How could he just escape? I thought someone was watching him.”
“Prester walked out of the med-surg unit while the doctors and nurses were distracted with a bus accident. We followed his footprints across Route 1A into the woods behind Sylvan Park. He tried to elude our searchers by crossing the Machias River, just west of town.”
The sheriff paused. She wanted the import to sink in without having to say certain words. She hoped Jamie would take her meaning.
“And?”
I knew the next line belonged to me: “Prester is dead, Jamie.”
Her lip began to tremble. “What?”
“He fell through the ice.”
“No.”
“We’re very sorry for your loss,” Rhine said.
Jamie didn’t speak. The news about her brother’s death seemed to have left in her a nearly catatonic state. With some people, hearing about a death can have that effect. Others become wailing banshees.
Her wet eyes met mine. “Where is he, Mike? Where is he right now?”
“We don’t know.”
“The Warden Service has begun operations to recover his body from the river,” offered the sheriff.
This seemed to be a cue for me to say something. “We’re going to bring him back to you, Jamie, I promise.” My words made it sound as if her brother’s corpse were a lost puppy, a living puppy.
“No,” she said again.
She began to wobble. Looking across the foyer, I could see her knees going weak. She put a hand out to steady herself against the lintel but miscalculated the distance. I barely got there in time to catch her.
We were together on the floor, with me down on one knee, supporting her slumped, shaking body. I smelled her faded perfume and the cigarettes she’d been smoking. I stroked her chestnut hair.
“Jamie?”
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no.”
“I’m here,” I said.
She was sobbing uncontrollably, great wrenching sobs that seemed to be coming from someplace deeper than her heart.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no.”
“What’s wrong?” Tammi appeared in her wheelchair. She’d crept out to the edge of the foyer like a shy animal at the edge of a field. “Is it Prester?”
The sound of her sister’s voice seemed to affect Jamie instantly. She squirmed loose of my arms and struggled to her knees. She threw herself between her sister and me, as if her body could be a shield.
“Something’s happened,” she said in a sniffly voice.
“He’s dead, isn’t he? The sheriff wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
No censor between brain and mouth-that was the way I understood brain injuries, some of them anyway.
“He fell through the ice,” Jamie said. She turned her head at me, red eyes half closed with confusion. “How did he fall through the ice?”
“He was trying to get away from the police,” I said.
“Warden.” The sheriff’s tone was stern with warning.
“You mean you were chasing him?”
“Not me. I wasn’t there.” I didn’t mean this to sound defensive, only explanatory.
“Where were you, Mike?”
I climbed to my feet. “In a plane.”
Another unsatisfactory answer. “Who chased him?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Rhine.
“It does too matter! I wanted to know what happened to my brother.”
“We’re still trying to determine how he escaped from the hospital,” said the sheriff.
“I don’t care about that,” said Jamie. “I want to know who was chasing him. Who was he trying to get away from?”
“Jamie,” I said.
“You told me he’d be safe in the hospital. You told me he’d be safe.”
I felt utterly helpless, afraid to speak lest I make the situation even worse. “I know how hard this is.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Is there someone we can call for you?” the sheriff asked.
“Gloria,” I said, thinking of her AA sponsor “Do you want me to call Gloria?”
She sprang to her feet. “I want you to tell me who chased him onto the ice.”
“Your brother escaped police custody, Miss Sewall,” the sheriff said. “That was his decision.”
“Get out of here,” Jamie said with a snarl. “I want you to leave my house.”
“I think we should call your sponsor,” I said softly.
“Will you shut up about Gloria?”
“We’ll be on our way, then,” the sheriff said. “We’ll be in touch when we have more information.”
“I’d like to stay,” I told Rhine.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” The sheriff was afraid that if I remained there, I would tell Jamie it was Corbett who had pursued her brother across the frozen river. It was a legitimate worry.
“No,” said Jamie. “I want you to go, too.”
“What?”
“I can’t look at you right now.”
“I want to help you, Jamie,” I said.
“I don’t want your help! I don’t need your help!”
The words hit me like a slap across the face.
Rhine put her hand on my shoulder. “Let’s leave them in peace,” she whispered in my ear. Then she looked at Jamie and said, “You have our condolences.”
I raised my eyes and saw a face peering out of the shadows from the upstairs landing. Lucas Sewall had been eavesdropping on our entire conversation. He made no effort to disappear this time. We stared at each other, and I was struck by the look of utter betrayal on his face. Like his mother, he blamed me for what had happened to Prester.
Neither Rhine nor I spoke until we had returned to our vehicles. The snow was falling thickly in the cedars across the road. The scene was as quiet as a Japanese woodblock print.
“People can’t be held responsible for what they say in those situations,” the sheriff said.
“I guess not.”
Rhine gazed up at the house. “I’d forgotten the sister was in a wheelchair. That explains a lot.”
“How so?”
“People with lots of prescriptions are real popular around here. For someone like Randall Cates, living in the same house with Tammi Sewall would have been like having his own in-house pharmacy. It might even have been why Cates cozied up to her sister in the first place.”
An image came to me of Jamie naked in my bed. “I doubt that was the reason.”
“I guess you would know,” Rhine said. “Should I even bother giving you advice, or are you just going to ignore it again?”
The question was obviously rhetorical, so I let her continue.
“Leave the Sewalls alone for a while. Otherwise, you might find yourself named in the wrongful-death lawsuit she’ll probably bring against the hospital, the county, and God only knows who else.”
“Jamie wouldn’t do something like that.”
“How sure are you of that?”
Not very, I realized.
Rhine climbed behind the wheel of the Crown Vic. “Call me if you hear anything.”
I backed my truck into the road so she could pull out. She snapped on her headlights and hit the gas hard. I watched the sheriff rocket down the road toward Machias.
When I glanced back at the house, I saw a parted curtain in an upstairs window. Lucas Sewall was still watching me.