After leaving the Square Deal, I drove into Waldoboro to visit a florist. The cramped and steamy store smelled like someone had spilled a vat of cheap perfume on the floor. I wandered in confusion among the lavish displays and gazed dumbly at the frosted refrigerator with its bins of long-stemmed roses before the elderly clerk took pity on me.
“I need to send some flowers to my girlfriend,” I explained.
“Do you know what kinds of flowers she likes?”
“No,” I said honestly.
The woman frowned at me over her reading glasses, as if I’d failed a test. “How much would you be interested in spending?”
“A lot,” I said, then clarified: “Fifty dollars.”
“I see.” The way she crinkled her nose told me that she was finished sizing me up. To this old shopkeeper, sending flowers was more likely to be a neglectful man’s way of asking forgiveness than a genuine expression of love.
I paid the bill for the bouquet and gave her the name of the school where Sarah was teaching.
My mother and father’s marriage hadn’t exactly prepared me for a lifetime of conjugal bliss.
For the first years of my life, I thought that most couples communicated with each other through drunken screams, thrown dishes, and slammed doors. I believed that one of the police’s primary responsibilities was to mediate late-night arguments over misspent paychecks and accusations of adultery.
When my mother married my stepfather, Neil, I learned a different example. For a while, during the early years of her second marriage, my mother would continue to throw tantrums, but to less effect. Neil was a tax attorney and well-off, we had moved into his spacious suburban home, and there was always enough money now for new cars and clothing. Neil didn’t provoke her the way my dad had, either. He would patiently wait out her moods, speaking to her in the reassuring tones a cowboy uses on a spirited colt. After a time, my mother’s temper would cool, and that would be the end of it.
As I got older, I began to feel as if Neil was treating my mother like a child. He was a handsome man with broad shoulders and a dignified touch of gray at the temples-he projected the rugged vitality of a man in an advertisement for erectile-dysfunction pills-and people commented frequently what an attractive couple he and my mom made. But something seemed to be missing between them. They rarely touched each other in my presence, and because Neil went to bed two hours before she did each night, and he left for work before she was even awake, I wondered when they actually had time for sex. Not that I cared to imagine it.
If my mother minded this arrangement, she didn’t show it. After those hot-blooded years with my dad, maybe she’d decided that trading passion for BMW sedans and diamond earrings was a bargain she was finally ready to make.
I wasn’t entirely certain what to do with myself for the rest of the somber afternoon.
Technically, I was still on duty. But every time I paused at a stop sign, I found my mind wandering back to the house on Parker Point. Not knowing what was happening made me feel pissed off and powerless. I listened closely to the police radio but heard no intel about Hans Westergaard. I felt like I had been amputated from the investigation.
I rode by Calvin Barter’s farm. There were NO TRESPASSING notices posted along the fence posts. Since they hadn’t been there before, I interpreted the signs’ sudden appearance as a personal warning that I’d better not roam around the property measuring ATV prints, not unless I wanted a faceful of buckshot. If I was going to nab Barter, it would be red-handed or not at all.
Lieutenant Malcomb had said that Sgt. Kathy Frost was returning from vacation the next day. I could easily imagine how she would react to my latest escapade: “I go away for a week and you find a body!” But aside from Charley, my district supervisor was the closest thing I had to a confidante. Over the past few days, I’d found myself missing her potty-mouthed lectures.
After a couple of hours of driving down dead-end roads, I decided to go home and finish some paperwork. Under the Warden Service’s core shift system, I was required to put in eight hours of work over a twelve-hour period: four days on, two days off. How I accounted for my time was up to me.
Besides, as long as Ashley Kim’s killer was at large, I knew that I was going to be unfocused, irritable, and otherwise next to useless.
I was surprised to find Sarah at home so early. She had started a fire in the woodstove and was reheating the leftover chowder from the night before. I looked around for the flowers as I came in, expecting to see them in a vase on the coffee table or kitchen counter.
“Didn’t you get a delivery at school?” I asked with all the casualness I could muster.
“No,” she said. “Why?”
“I sent you flowers.”
She narrowed her eyes in a playful way. “What trouble are you in now?”
“Nothing! I just thought it would be romantic.”
“Oh, honey.” She laughed. “That’s really sweet. I took off early. I’m sure they were delivered after I left. They’ll be in my classroom tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow is Saturday.”
“Maybe a janitor can let me in.”
“I paid extra for the delivery.”
“I appreciate the effort. You get a gold star.” At least she seemed in a good mood. She’d changed into blue jeans and one of my oversized Colby sweatshirts and was padding around in ridiculously fluffy slippers, which made her look like she had a pink rabbit glued to each foot. Given my own miserable childhood, I was never entirely certain what a happy home life was supposed to look like, but this scene seemed like a good approximation.
I wanted to tell her about Ora’s suspicion, but how do you ask your girlfriend if she’s pregnant without accusing her of misleading you? I had no idea how to broach the subject.
My cell phone rang. I removed it from my belt and held it to my ear. “Hello?”
“Michael Bowditch?” The woman’s accent was as thick as a Down East fog bank.
“Yes, this is Warden Bowditch. Who’s this?”
“My name is Lou Bates. I left you a message previously. It was about the unfortunate girl who got killed last night and a miscarriage of justice I need to bring to your attention.”
Christ, it was Erland Jefferts’s crazy aunt. Sarah was gazing at me expectantly, curious who it might be. I rolled my eyes to indicate it was just another crank.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said in my best cop voice. “I’m afraid I’m not permitted to speak about the matter.”
“I want to talk with you about a wrongfully persecuted individual named Erland Jefferts.”
“I can’t talk about him, either.”
She ignored my response but launched into what sounded like a well-practiced speech. “Warden Bowditch, Erland Jefferts’s supporters ask only for a new trial. Prosecutors at the attorney general’s office are fully aware that they could never win a trial where jurors hear all the evidence, not just what they are willing to disclose. They have done everything in their power to prevent an innocent man from ever having a chance at justice. He has been in prison for seven years, and unless the desperate desire of those prosecutors is overcome, he will remain there until he dies.”
“Mrs. Bates-”
“We, the J-Team, are currently petitioning the governor, the chief justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, and the attorney general of Maine, requesting a complete, fair, and independent investigation of the Erland Jefferts case. This travesty of justice must not be allowed to stand.”
It took me a few moments to realize that she had reached the end of her speech.
“Mrs. Bates,” I said. “I appreciate your commitment to your nephew’s cause, but I just can’t say anything at this time about any open investigations or pending legal matters. Please respect my position and don’t call me again.”
I switched off the phone and stuck it in my belt holster. I removed my gun belt and hung it in the bedroom closet, unbuttoned my uniform shirt and sniffed the underarms to see whether I could get away with wearing it again, decided not, and tossed it into the hamper. Then I went into the kitchen to pour myself a whiskey.
Sarah was stirring the chowder. “So who was on the phone?”
“A crazy lady who thinks I can somehow help get her nephew out of prison.”
“How would you do that?” she asked.
My supposition was that Sarah was unfamiliar with the Erland Jefferts case. The murder and trial occurred while she was still in high school in Connecticut, although the antics of the J-Team still got enough ink these days in the local newspaper.
“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?”