The Bone Orchard: A Novel

I sat down with a glass of orange juice at the computer. The weather forecast showed that the low-pressure system currently drenching the Northeast was settling in for an extended stay. I couldn’t imagine Jeff Jordan would have any clients for me to guide once Mason and Maddie headed back to the Big Apple.

Charley and Ora Stevens were off on their Canadian adventure, so I couldn’t even swing by their cottage on Little Wabassus for a bottomless cup of coffee and tall tales. Stacey had never liked me hanging around the place anyway. I wondered if she and her friends were still planning to undertake their camping trip up West Grand Lake and over to Pocumcus and points north. I hope they’d packed plenty of bug dope and firewater.

For more than a year, I’d drawn sustenance from my unrequited love for Stacey Stevens—not unlike the way a vampire bat draws sustenance from its sleeping host. But as the murky light of day filled the cabin windows, I found my self-pity turning to anger. Who needed her?

The new librarian in Machias was single and had pretty legs, and I was willing to bet she didn’t walk around with her nerves pulled as tight as rubber bands. With the exception of Sarah, every woman I’d ever been attracted to should have come with a warning label attached to her forehead. Given my luck, that librarian had a box of strap-ons and anal plugs stashed under her bed.

The phone rang as I was making my artery-clogging breakfast: eggs and smelts fried in bacon grease.

It was the wife of my incarcerated friend, Billy Cronk.

“Hi, Aimee,” I said.

“Hey, Mike. I didn’t wake you, did I?”

She was a cheerful, big-bosomed mother of four with ginger hair she wore pulled back in a scrunchie and an outfit made up entirely of flannel shirts, T-shirts, and jeans she’d purchased on sale at the bargain store in Calais.

“I was just making breakfast.”

“Smelts again?”

I removed the cast-iron pan from the burner. “How in the world did you know that?”

“The last time you were over here, I saw a five-gallon bucket in the back of your truck, along with a slimy smelt net. I figured you’d been out dipping and ran into a few fish.”

Aimee Cronk seemed to have an intuition that bordered on the uncanny, but, in fact, her mind worked entirely through deductive reasoning. She’d never graduated from high school, but I’d always said she would have made an excellent psychologist—or detective.

“I have three bags of smelts in the freezer,” I said. “Do you want some?”

“I’ve been doing Weight Watchers, so I can’t be eating all that bacon fat.”

She paused, and I heard a child scream in the background. Visiting the Cronk house, filled with four kids all under the age of seven, always reinforced my conviction that small children are essentially insane little people.

“Is there any way you could come over here and give me a jump? I need one wicked bad.”

I thought I’d misheard her. “What do you need?”

“The Tahoe won’t start, and I ain’t sure if the battery’s dead or the alternator’s shot. What did you think I meant? That I wanted a quick lay or something?”

I ignored the question. “It could be your distributor cap is wet, with all this humid weather we’ve been having.”

“Whatever it is, I can’t afford to be stranded here in the boonies. I only got the Tahoe now that the bank’s repossessed Billy’s truck. I’m working lunch and dinner at the Bluebird Ranch and can’t miss another shift.”

“I’ll be right over,” I said. “If worse comes to worst, I’ll be your personal chauffeur today.”

“That’s the least you can do if you ain’t going to screw me.”

I nearly dropped the phone.

She laughed out loud. “I’m joking! Billy always said you was the most uptight individual he’d ever met. You’re a worse prude than my aunt Lillian, and she’s a Baptist.”





8



There was a dusky-looking Swainson’s thrush hopping around in the pine needles outside my cabin. It was hunting for ants and beetles. Like all thrushes, it had those big black eyes that looked like they’d been drawn by Walt Disney.

Sarah had taught me a lot about birds during our years together, first at Colby and then in that on-again-off-again period after I’d become a game warden. She enjoyed the outdoors, but only as a playground. Cabin living was never her thing. It hadn’t surprised me when she announced she was leaving our backwoods shack to take a prestigious fellowship in D.C. The prep-school girl from the Connecticut suburbs had never been cut out for a life that involved splitting and stacking wood for the stove.

Maddie had said that Sarah was back in Maine, working at some new school in Portland. I’d never believed that our destinies are predetermined. If you look back on your life, you might see what looks like a meaningful progression, but it’s no different from gazing at the moon and seeing a man’s face. Just because you perceive a pattern doesn’t mean it’s really there. I tried not to dwell too much on the circumstances that were drawing these people from my past into my life again.

The forest road crossed a number of quick-flowing streams whose beauty disguised the fact that they were the breeding grounds for blood-thirsty insects. Unlike mosquitoes—which seek out stagnant pools to lay their wriggling larvae—blackflies only breed in swift, clean water. As the day warmed, the voracious bugs would rise from the streambeds in clouds so thick I was afraid to take a deep breath for fear of inhaling them. Spring is a season of pure misery in the Maine woods.

When I arrived at the Cronk house, I checked my phone again for a message from Kathy, but there was nothing. It bothered me not having heard from her. I typed a text message and hit SEND. Please let me know how you’re doing, it read.

In the meantime, I had plenty of chores to keep me occupied. The Cronks lived in a too-small shack of a place in a clearing in the woods down around Whitney. Looking through my bug-smashed windshield, I noticed that the pile of firewood Billy had furiously cut before he went to prison was a quarter of its former size. There also seemed to be a crack in one of the upstairs windows that was new since my last visit. And a roof gutter was dangling free and needed to be reattached.

As I climbed out of the Bronco with my toolbox in hand, Aimee Cronk appeared in the doorway, holding their youngest child, a daughter, under her arm, while a snotty-nosed boy peeked at me from behind her leg. Billy called his blond brood of four “the Cronklets.” I could never keep them straight.

Aimee was a big woman, but shapely; she carried her weight in places men found attractive. She had just washed her hair, and loose red strands hung around her open, freckled face. Watching her husband head off to jail for close to the next decade or so would have crushed lots of women, but not Aimee Cronk. “I always figured it was more a question of when and not if,” she’d told me. “You can’t break the law as much as Billy did without it breaking you sooner or later.”

“There’s the man of the house,” she said.

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

She showed the gap between her front teeth when she smiled. “You’re still thinking about that joke, ain’t you?”

How did she know these things? I couldn’t imagine a single secret Billy had managed to keep hidden from his wife. It would have been like being married to Hercule Poirot.

“So I guess I should have a look at your engine,” I said.

She gestured with her free hand at the faded blue Tahoe parked beside the picnic table. “Keys are under the seat,” she said. “I got to get changed for work.”

A damp gust blew the smell of blossoming apple trees down the hill while I worked, and a chestnut-sided warbler harangued me from the roadside willows. In my ears, the call sounded like words: Hey! Hey! Hey! What’s with you?

I poked around under the hood, checked the electrical wires for loose connections, found none, then tried using my jumper cables. I ran the engine for a solid fifteen minutes, but the Tahoe failed to start. I was despairing of fixing it and figured I’d have to remove the air-intake system in order to get at the distributor, when an odd thought occurred to me. I used a screwdriver to pry loose the battery port covers.

When I knocked at the front door again, I saw that Aimee had changed into her pale blue waitress uniform and was slipping barrettes into her newly dried hair. “What’s the bad news?” she asked.

“I don’t suppose you have any distilled water.”

“Billy might have a jug in his shed. What for?”

“Your battery has no water in it.”

“In all this wet weather?”

“The battery is sealed,” I said, rubbing my blackened hands together. “The good news is that if we refill it, we can probably get you on the road, but you should have your battery changed in Machias while you’re at work.”

She smiled. “Ain’t you the handy one, though.”

“Not like Billy,” I said.

Her smile went away like the sun behind a cloud. “So when are you gonna visit him in the penitentiary, anyway? He thinks you’re punishing him by not going down there.”

“I’m the one who testified for the prosecution!”