Back at the pay phone outside Smitty’s Garage, I dialed information and asked for the number of Arthur Banks in Seal Cove. It was common knowledge around town that he was the owner of the Glory B. A computerized voice asked if I wanted to be connected directly with the Banks residence. Needless to say, I did.
A woman answered. The warble in her voice told me she was elderly. “Hello?”
“Is this Mrs. Banks?”
“Ye-es?”
“This is Mike Bowditch with the Maine Warden Service. May I speak with your husband, please?”
She paused, as if waiting for me to continue. “Arthur passed away last fall.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” I usually read the obituaries in the local paper, but I had been so preoccupied by my father’s misdeeds over the autumn that I had missed a great many things during those months. “Maybe you can help me. Do you know who owns your husband’s old lobsterboat?”
“The Glory B? Why, Arthur left it to my nephew, Stanley.”
“Stanley Snow?”
“Ye-es.”
What were the odds the Westergaard’s caretaker would now own Jefferts’s old boat? Here was the connection I’d been searching for; I just needed to understand what it meant. “Mrs. Banks, what can you tell me about Erland Jefferts?”
When she spoke again, it was with audible caution. Jefferts’s name had that effect on a lot of the local people. “He just worked on Arthur’s boat that one year.”
“At the same time as your nephew?”
“The two boys were friends when they were little. Stanley’s mother is a Bates. He and Erland are second cousins.”
“They were friends,” I repeated quickly.
She must have sensed that my interest had unhappy implications for her nephew. “That was a long time ago! Stanley was just a boy.” The receiver seemed to be shaking now in her grip. “Excuse me. I have tea boiling.”
Before I could wish her good night, the phone clicked and went dead.
I pumped my last quarters into the slot. I keyed in Detective Menario’s cell-phone number and waited. My call went straight to voice mail.
“This is Bowditch,” I said. “I’m calling from that pay phone on Parker Point. I think Stanley Snow was the anonymous caller who reported Ashley Kim’s accident. He owns a lobsterboat at the fisherman’s co-op here. And he met with the Driskos at the Harpoon Bar before they died in that fire. Erland Jefferts is his cousin. They both worked on the same lobsterboat. There are way too many connections here for this to be a coincidence. You need to find Stanley Snow.”
I kept rambling until the last of my change ran out.
I didn’t trust Menario. It was easy to imagine him receiving my message and hanging up without even listening to it. In his mind, I was the man who cried wolf.
The tide was dropping in the harbor. I could smell seaweed through the gathering mist as the receding ocean exposed slimy beds of dulce and kelp. On nights like this, the Vikings had believed that trolls crawled out of the sea to steal babies from cradles.
The fact that Jefferts and Snow were distantly related was no great shock; Erland had cousins all over Seal Cove. Most of them, however, had come to his defense before and after the trial. When looking through Ozzie Bell’s box of files, I’d read letters and petitions signed by dozens of family members. But not once had I encountered the name Stanley Snow in those documents.
Why?
I needed to call Charley. He was the only person I trusted to act upon the evidence I’d unearthed. With luck, he could persuade some of the higher-ups in the state police to put out an all-points bulletin for Stanley Snow. I tried my cell phone again, but it was still short-circuited.
I began pawing around inside my Jeep, looking for coins. I found a handful of useless pennies in the cup holder-not enough change to make another call.
Erland Jefferts came wandering into my head, unbidden. I remembered that Arthur Banks had signed the J-Team’s letter to the attorney general asking for a new trial. Half the town had. So why hadn’t Erland’s cousin and boyhood friend, Stanley Snow?
In the back of the Jeep, I found Ozzie’s forgotten files. I switched on the rear cargo light and began paging through the overstuffed folders. My fingers stopped on a document I’d only skimmed the previous week.
It was an inventory of items the state police had removed from Jefferts’s person and his truck on the morning he was arrested. The list went on for pages: a Swiss army knife with a broken saw blade; a green plastic trash bag; an unopened pack of Camel cigarettes, slightly crushed; a single twenty-dollar bill; four quarters, two dimes, and fifty-seven pennies; a pair of sunglasses tucked above the visor; a permanent black marker; a tangle of polypropylene rope; an empty pint of Allen’s Coffee Brandy; a sawed-off baseball bat; a single Magnum condom in its wrapper; needle-nose pliers; a crushed ATM receipt showing a balance of $168 in his checking account; six Bud Light bottle caps and an empty bottle; and, of course, one roll of rigging tape.
Something was missing.
I needed to speak with Charley. He had the clout to mobilize a search for Stanley Snow. The word of a legendary game warden still carried some weight in Maine. And maybe my friend could help me understand what it was in this box that I was failing to see.
I closed the cargo hatch, slid behind the wheel of the Jeep, and sped off for home.
When I pulled up to my front door, I noticed that my patrol truck was the only vehicle in the yard. At first, it puzzled me that Sarah wasn’t home; then I remembered her mentioning something about parent-teacher conferences. I glanced at my dashboard clock and saw that it was just past five. She would go ballistic when she learned about my day. I still needed to set up an appointment with the Warden Service’s psychologist, I realized. It was the least I could do.
I had some trouble with my keys at the door: I dropped them once, trying to get the right one into the lock, then dropped them again. Inside, the house was cold and dim. The birch logs in the woodstove had burned away to ashes, and a draft had discovered some previously unidentified crack in the cedar shingles. The faint odor of bad fish told me that the trash can in the kitchen needed to be emptied. The sensation of returning to an empty house made me think of the weeks after Sarah had moved out. These days, I often ended my patrols with a feeling of deja vu.
Awkwardly, I slid my coat off and hung it on a hook by the door.
I heard the floorboards creak and was just turning my head when a sharp pain exploded along my right biceps. I fell back against the wall, aware that I was being assaulted but unable to do more than raise my splinted hand against my attacker. The metal crowbar came down hard on my forearm. I howled in agony and kicked out with my legs, but the intruder leaped back.
I was left to squirm there for a moment, blinded by tears, before my assailant tapped me, almost delicately, on the forehead with a steel club. There was an instant of achingly hot light-like a flashbulb going off at point-blank range-and then I ceased to see.
I came to as my attacker was slinging my limp body onto the sofa. Whoever it was must have torn the splint off my wrist, because my first sight was of my own corpse-colored hand. My eyes were watery and had trouble focusing.
For a moment, I didn’t know where I was or what had happened. I was as disoriented as a surgery patient emerging from anesthetic. If a voice had whispered that I’d been in a car crash, I would have believed it.
I felt a boot kicking my shins and then heard a high-pitched voice say, “Sit up.”
As I did, a weight shifted inside my head like a bocce ball rolling around inside my cranium. Something was standing over me. At first, it was just a shadow. Then, as my pupils began to function once more, the shadow became a man.
He was a tall, balding man with darting eyes. He had bulbous cheekbones and a jutting jaw. He was wearing a dark peacoat, oil-stained work pants, and heavy rubber boots. In one gloved hand, he held a crowbar. In the other, he clutched a rectangular bottle of amber liquid, which he thrust into my face.
“Drink this,” said Stanley Snow.
I blinked and tried to speak, but my tongue wouldn’t obey. I cradled my useless right arm against my chest.
“Drink it!”
It was my own half-empty fifth of Jack Daniel’s. He must have found the whiskey in the cupboard. A fishy scent came wafting off his clothes, the stench of rotten bait.
I pulled the words up out of my larynx. “The cops know it’s you, Snow.”
The sound of his own name being uttered caused the Westergaards’ caretaker to catch his breath. Slowly, he took a seat in the chair across from me, but his posture remained as tight as a coiled spring. He set the whiskey bottle on the table between us. “Bullshit.”
“I called Menario.” My voice sounded as if I had gargled with drain opener.
“No, you didn’t.”
“I called him on the pay phone at Smitty’s. I told him you owned the Glory B. ”
Every muscle in his body became utterly still. “What else did you tell him?”
I understood that Stanley Snow was going to kill me, but I was too weak and in too much pain to defend myself. All I could do was try to gather my strength and wits.
“She knew you,” I croaked. “Ashley Kim.”
He leered at me with a gargoyle’s smile. “She thought she did.”
“She met you with the Westergaards last summer.”
“That slant-eyed slut.” He leaned forward and waved the crowbar in my face. I followed the motion warily, as if it were a swaying cobra that might suddenly strike. “She came up here to get fucked. She got fucked all right.”
My head and hand were beating to different drummers, but my thoughts were beginning to flow freely again. Hans Westergaard had told his caretaker to get the house ready. Had he mentioned-master to servant-that he was bringing his mistress? Snow had been lying in wait for Ashley to arrive.
“But why Westergaard?” I asked.
“He shouldn’t have cheated on Jill. He had no right to do that.”
“You killed Ashley for her?”
He snickered but didn’t answer my question. He just scratched his nose absently.
I needed to keep talking, keep stalling. “The police know it’s you, Snow.”
The crowbar stopped waving. “There’s nothing they can pin on me. It’s pretty easy to set up alibis. Just drop in on some diners and gas stations. Make sure people see you. Collect receipts. If you turn on the TV loud in your apartment, people will swear you were there all day.”
In my mind I saw his white pickup truck with the snowplow parked outside the Square Deal Diner. I saw his face sneering at me from the other end of the counter the morning after Ashley Kim disappeared. Even then, he’d already been readying his alibis.
“They’ll connect the dots.”
“Cops are dumb,” he said. “Including you.” He was trying to project self-assuredness, but I detected a hint of desperation behind the bluff.
“I know you killed the Driskos. They saw you at the crash scene with Ashley. They demanded money to keep quiet.”
Some of the confidence drained out of those quick-moving eyes. “What else?”
“You murdered Nikki Donnatelli.”
“Strike one,” he said with a one-sided grin. “Jefferts killed that girl. A jury said so.”
“You used to be friends.”
“That’s what Erland thought.”
So why hadn’t Jefferts named Snow as an alternate suspect? He’d named every other degenerate in Seal Cove. “You pinned the murder on him.”
His eyes became merry. “There’s proof I didn’t.”
“What kind of proof?”
He reached inside his peacoat and removed something from his inner pocket. It was a cell phone. “I’ve got a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card.”
I was baffled. How would a cell phone enable him to avoid prison? “Is that Jefferts’s?”
“No, this one is mine, but you’re getting warmer. That’s strike two, by the way.” He dropped the phone and raised the crowbar, clutching it with both hands, imitating a batting stance. “You know what happens with strike three, right?” He swung the club. It whistled through the air above my head.
“You’re going to beat me to death?”
“I’m considering my options.”
“You’re out of options, Snow.”
“That’s what you think.” He said this with such calmness that I was completely unprepared when he came vaulting across the table at me.
Snow was quick and agile for such a gangly man. He tossed aside the crowbar and grabbed the whiskey bottle and knelt hard against my chest, pinning me to the sofa. With his free hand, he pinched my nose and began pouring scalding whiskey down my throat. I clamped my teeth shut, so the liquor spilled down my shirt, but he held my nostrils firmly, waiting for me to gasp for breath. When I did, he emptied the bottle down my gullet.
After he’d finished, he backed off, leaving me hacking. My insides burned like I’d swallowed acid. I could feel the whiskey trying to come back up.
“This is a pretty shitty little house,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “I guess they don’t pay game wardens crap. No wonder you’re so depressed.”
I coughed and spit, trying to vomit up the alcohol. My eyes had become gushers again, so he appeared blurred to me once more. I became aware of Snow stooping to retrieve his crowbar from the floor.
“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for that pretty girl of yours to come home?’ he asked.
I tried to sputter out something but couldn’t.
“I’ve been having trouble getting your gun safe open.” He gestured with his crowbar to the bedroom. “You mind telling me the combination?”
“Fuck you.”
“Figured you’d say that.”
He smacked my right arm again with the steel bar. I managed to move the wrist at the last second so that the blow caught me on the muscle of my forearm. Pain traveled up the median nerve and into my spinal column.
Snow peered at me from beneath his Frankenstein brow. “Yeah, I know all about you. Your old man shot himself, right? And Ruth Libby said you blew the head off some Indian. And now Calvin Barter’s boy is gonna be a vegetable because of you.” He began rocking back and forth on his boot heels. “No wonder you’re such a basket case, Bowditch. When I saw you at the Harpoon, I said, ‘That guy’s gonna blow his brains out some night.’” He let out a fake yawn. “What’s the combination to the safe?”
His plan was to make my death look like suicide. It would seem that I’d swallowed my gun out of guilt for Ashley Kim, Hans Westergaard, Travis Barter, and every other reason I had to feel depressed. And the state police might even believe it, too. Would Charley and Kathy, though? What about Sarah? In my heart of hearts I feared that everyone I knew would accept the evidence that I had committed suicide, just like my cowardly father had.
“Two suicides in two days, Westergaard and me,” I said. “No one will believe it.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
The whiskey came surging into my bloodstream. “I’m not going to tell you the combination.”
He plopped down suddenly in the chair. The legs squeaked across the floor. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should wait for Sarah to come home.”
He reached into his coat sleeve and, like a vaudeville magician performing a trick, drew out a wad of cloth. It was a pair of Sarah’s underpants. He dangled it between us and then pressed the cotton against his nose and inhaled loudly.
I snarled at him and tried to rise, but he pushed me back with the curved end of the crowbar.
The alcohol was beginning to zap the nerve connections in my brain. Sarah was due home any minute. The thought of this monster raping the woman I loved in front of my eyes was the most horrific thing I could imagine.
Dear God, I prayed. Please don’t let him hurt her. He can kill me and it will be all right, but please don’t let him hurt Sarah. I won’t fight him if you just make him go away afterward. I’ll trade my life for hers, God. I’ll do whatever you want me to do, but please, God, don’t let him hurt her.
“So what’s it going to be?” Snow asked.
My eyelids were getting heavy. There was no escape. All I could do was save Sarah. Let him shoot me with my Walther and maybe he’d go away before she came home.
Except the Walther wasn’t in the safe. My off-duty weapon was still in my coat pocket.
“The combination is forty-three fifty-five,” I mumbled.
“You’d better not be fucking with me.”
I closed my eyes and shook my drowsy head to indicate that I was being truthful.
Snow flicked my nose with his finger. “Don’t pass out on me yet.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, as if I were slipping into unconsciousness. I heard him give a hyena laugh and then I heard the stomping of his boots as he left the room. It wouldn’t take long for him to realize the combination was bogus.
The whiskey had numbed much of the pain in my body, but the booze had left me uncoordinated. It took all my strength to sit up on the couch. I leaned my weight on my good arm and tried to get my feet under me, but it was as if my legs had turned to spaghetti. I crashed forward onto the pine floorboards. I tried to crawl toward my coat, which was hanging beside the door.
Snow sprang from the bedroom and stepped hard on my spine. “Where do you think you’re going?”
I could barely breathe with his weight crushing me. “It’s twenty-one fifty-four,” I gasped.
“What?” He removed his boot but held it ready to crack my spine.
I flopped onto my back. “The combination is my call number.” This was the truth; I didn’t figure I could lie to him twice.
Snow cocked his head suddenly and a smile oozed across his lips.
I didn’t understand why he was smiling.
Then I heard the puttering of a car engine. Blue-white headlights pierced the front windows as Sarah’s Subaru turned into the dooryard. I could feel my swollen heart pumping hard against my sternum.
Snow stepped out of the light. I rolled my head toward him and saw his sick, goblin leer.
“Just like Ashley and the professor,” he said.
The car door slammed as Sarah got out.
It took everything in me to shout her name.
Snow kicked me hard in the head. “That was stupid.”
He yanked open the door and went leaping down the front steps like some long-legged hunting dog. I felt myself on the verge of blacking out again, but fear kept me awake. I got up on one knee and then collapsed forward against the hanging coats, bringing down a pile of wool and Gore-Tex on top of me.
I heard Sarah shriek out in the yard. But I didn’t allow myself to be distracted.
Focus, focus, focus.
I found the pistol in the pocket of my jacket with my left hand and pulled back the hammer with my thumb.
Snow had left the door hanging ajar. Mist drifted into the house on the breeze. When I crawled onto the front stoop, I saw him stretched on top of Sarah in the mud, pummeling her. She kept screaming my name over and over.
Carefully, I raised my left arm. I watched the barrel of the pistol weave back and forth. I steadied it with my shattered hand.
“Snow,” I mumbled.
He didn’t hear me above Sarah’s screams.
“Snow!”
As he twisted his body and rose up on his knees to face me, I shot him through the chest.