The Bone Orchard: A Novel

We lost touch six months after he deployed, and I never heard about the explosion that left him without a nose, scarred across his face and shoulders, and half-blind in one eye.





2



The truth was, I was too busy circling my own drain.

While Jimmy was busy patrolling the twenty-foot walls outside the Bagram prison, the Maine Warden Service saw fit to redeploy me as well. After two years stationed in Sennebec, my supervisors politely encouraged me to swap my pleasant coastal district for a rugged outland on the border with the Canadian Maritimes. It was a transfer that I viewed (correctly) as a punishment for various insubordinate acts, not the least of which was going AWOL after my father was accused of committing a double homicide.

The reassignment was painful, since it meant leaving a landscape I had grown to know and love, as well as a supervisor who was a friend and mentor to me. I owed my career—such as it was—to Kathy Frost, who had been my first sergeant and defended my habitual misbehavior for reasons that baffled both of us. My supervisors had long viewed me as a know-it-all and a meddler. They had pushed me to rethink my choice of professions, and after nearly four years of being resented and criticized, I got tired of pushing back. I had made the decision they’d always hoped I would make.

And so, on the night in question, I was nearly two hundred miles away, making a halfhearted attempt to study for the LSATs while raindrops ricocheted like BBs off the hard metal roof of my cabin.

At the time, I experienced no premonitions. When the people we love are in danger, we like to think psychic powers will kick in and that we will somehow sense their peril. Maybe this is true of mothers and children—my own mom claimed she’d felt a jabbing pain in her chest the day I was shot in the line of duty—but Kathy Frost wasn’t a blood relative. In some ways, she was as close to me as a family member, though, which is why I can imagine so clearly how events must have unfolded on the night of the shooting.

The Gammons’ farm, for instance.

On that rainy evening in late May, a curtain of falling water must have hung between the road and the distant farmhouse as Kathy’s patrol truck turned onto the quarter-mile drive. The long stretch of wet weather had brought with it a plague of frogs, which hopped every which way through the blurred beams of the headlights. Earlier, Kathy and her passenger, Warden Danielle Tate, would have slowed to avoid the amphibians—I can imagine Kathy making biblical jokes—but the mood in the truck would have turned serious after the wardens received the call from the Knox County dispatcher:

An Afghan war veteran, a former military policeman, had barricaded himself inside a horse barn and was threatening to blow his head off with a shotgun.

Frost and Tate were the first to respond.

The two wardens were soaked to the skin from having spent a bug-bitten day checking turkey hunters who were either too determined or too dumb to let the rain keep them from setting up their blinds and decoys, often illegally on posted property. They’d had a bad encounter with a man from Maryland—a military contractor—who had claimed any criminal conviction would jeopardize his government clearances. They had written half a dozen summons and been on duty for close to twelve hours.

Physically, the women were a study in contrasts. Kathy was past fifty, although she looked ten years younger, and was tall enough to have played college basketball. She wore her sandy hair cut in a shoulder-length bob and was considered attractive by male wardens, not because she was good-looking in any conventional sense, but because of her good humor and sheer likability.

Danielle “Dani” Tate was newly graduated from the Advanced Warden Academy, and she was half Kathy’s age. At five-four she was also the shortest warden in the service. Her body was solid and square, and her shoulders were as wide as her hips. It was rumored that she held a black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu. She had flat gray eyes and a flat face that rarely displayed any emotion except seriousness of purpose. Every morning, she shined her patrol boots before zipping them up and pulled her blond ponytail through the hole in the back of the brimmed service cap all wardens are required to wear.

In the rain, the lighted windows of the farmhouse must have looked fuzzy, as if seen through smudged eyeglasses. The clapboard building had been erected in the mid-nineteenth century, but the original structure was unrecognizable beneath the extensive renovations and additions that James Gammon had made when he’d purchased the property. The four-car garage was entirely new, as was the barn where Lyla Gammon kept her Morgan horses and taught riding lessons to the wealthy children of Knox and Lincoln counties.

She was waiting for the wardens behind the misted glass door, a skeleton-thin silhouette around which the interior light had gathered like an angelic aura. As the patrol truck pulled up, Lyla Gammon stepped outside, wearing a waxed-cotton Barbour raincoat, riding pants, and knee-high wellies. Despite the rain gear, the wardens could see that she was thoroughly drenched.

Kathy checked the time on the clock and radioed in that they had arrived at the scene. Then both wardens pulled up the hoods of their olive jackets and climbed out of the truck for the hundredth time that day into a raging downpour.

“Thank God you’re here!” Lyla Gammon said. She’d come from Virginia originally, and she spoke with a Tidewater accent that was as out of place in midcoast Maine as the Chanel cosmetics smeared across her face.

“You’re Mrs. Gammon?” Kathy asked.

“I’m Jimmy’s mom. Yes.”

“We received a report that your son was threatening to harm himself,” Kathy said. “Where is he now?”

“Still in the barn.” Lyla stretched out her arm to indicate the long red structure behind the house. Its external floodlights had been turned off, and there was no glimmer visible through the windows. The double doors in front were both shut. “He locked himself in with the horses.”

The two wardens exchanged glances. The bitumen smell of rain falling on asphalt hung in the air. The night was neither particularly warm nor particularly cold—just unrelentingly wet.

“We understand that he is armed,” Danielle Tate said.

“I believe so.”

Kathy wiped her forehead. “You don’t know for certain?”

“I found the case he keeps his shotgun in open on the dining room table. It was empty.”

“Do you know what kind of shotgun it is?”

Kathy wanted to know if they were dealing with a single-shot firearm or a tactical weapon capable of firing nine shells without being reloaded.

“It’s a Royal,” said Lyla.

The pouring rain made it hard for the wardens to hear; it must have been like trying to have a conversation while standing under a showerhead.

Danielle Tate blinked water from her eyes. “A what?”

“A British model—an over-and-under twenty-gauge made by Holland & Holland.”

Meaning that the gun held two shells. But a person needs only one shell to blow his brains out—or those of somebody else.

“Is it possible he has another gun with him?” Kathy asked.

The mother gathered her raincoat at the throat and clutched the waxed cotton tightly. “I checked the safe, and the Royal was the only one missing.”

“Why do you think Jimmy might be suicidal?” Danielle Tate asked.

It was an important question, but Kathy would have known not to phrase it bluntly when his mother was already so distraught.

“He was badly injured in the war. He’s been drinking all day. And he’s on pain medications. He’s not supposed to mix them.”

“Is anyone else at home?” Kathy asked.

“My husband is driving back from the airport. He should be here soon.”

Kathy studied the darkened building. “How many doors does the barn have?”

“Three,” Lyla said. “There’s another set of doors at the far end and a smaller door around the corner on the right that we use to enter the building.”

“How do you know Jimmy is in there now?” Kathy asked.

“Because that’s where he goes when he is sad,” his mother said. “Jimmy loves the horses.”

* * *

In the statement she made to the state police, and in subsequent interviews she gave to the media and the attorney general, Lyla Gammon recounted what (according to her) happened after the wardens arrived.

The two women conferred for a minute or two, and then the taller one—the sergeant, Kathy Frost—told the mother to wait inside the house. Lyla wanted to go with them to the barn. She thought she could help calm her son down, but Sergeant Frost said that they needed to assess the situation first.

Lyla believed the wardens had her son’s best interest at heart, or she never would have returned to the house. Sergeant Frost appeared to be a competent and experienced officer. The younger one, Tate, seemed nervous, although she didn’t say or do anything to confirm that impression; it was just a vague feeling Lyla had as a mother.

She went into the house, where the dog—Winston Churchill, or “Winnie”—was whining anxiously at the door. Jimmy usually took the springer with him everywhere he went on the property. The two had been inseparable since her son was released from the hospital. But on this night, the young man had locked the brown-and-white spaniel in the house when he made his way through the torrential rain to the barn. That act alone had frightened his mother.