2
Five years earlier, my father had been the most notorious criminal in Maine: a legendary poacher turned cop killer and fugitive. Needless to say, he was more than that to me; everything I was, for better or worse, I owed to him. I had lived my entire life in the shadow of his reputation, and that shadow had only grown longer and colder in the aftermath of his death. Over the past half decade, I had struggled to separate myself from the man and his crimes, successfully for the most part. In my mind, at least, I had buried Jack Bowditch once and for all.
Which was why the mention of his name now was like the sudden emergence of a repressed memory.
“Come inside,” I told Amber Langstrom.
She gathered up her ski jacket and purse and climbed down out of the Jeep. She was shorter than she had looked behind the wheel and thin in the way many smokers are unnaturally thin. I watched her dance around a patch of black ice and thought that in bars, out of the light, she must have been frequently mistaken for a woman in her twenties.
She stomped her boots on the woven mat inside the door to loosen the snow from the treads.
“Bathroom’s down the hall on the right,” I said.
“Thank you!”
I heard the lock click on the door and began to wonder why—despite all my training and better instincts—I had just let a stranger into my house. It had to be more than her having mentioned my dead father.
I have always had a foolhardy streak. I used to mistake it for bravery until it nearly got me killed for the umpteenth time. Then I saw it for what it was: a chronic addiction to adrenaline. My body craved danger the way a junkie does his next hit of heroin. I wondered how many of the dead cops in that video had suffered from the same weakness.
My girlfriend had only been gone a few days, and already the house was a mess: boot prints on the carpet, coats fallen from the rack in the hall, dirty plates on every tabletop. Stacey and I didn’t live together—we hadn’t yet taken that step in our relationship—but her irregular visits gave me the incentive to keep the place somewhat clean. I might have forgotten and left up my Christmas decorations all winter if she hadn’t pointed out the brittle fir boughs over the mantelpiece.
“How can a man who is so curious that he notices everything not notice his house is a tinderbox?” Stacey had said, her long brown hair shaking as she laughed.
When Amber came out of the bathroom, I made sure to be standing to the side of the door with my hand resting on the butt of my SIG Sauer.
She gave me a nervous smile. “Oh, there you are.”
I hadn’t yet had a chance to stoke the fire in the woodstove; the house felt unnaturally cold. I motioned to the living room. “Have a seat.”
Under the brightness of the overhead bulb, Amber had become middle-aged again. There were faint creases around her mouth and bags beneath her eyes. She was overdue for a visit to the hair salon. Her gray roots had begun to show. She sat with her knees pressed together, her jacket folded over her thighs, clutching her purse.
I remained standing with my back to the wall.
“You look so much like your dad,” she said, gazing up at me. “It’s a little spooky.” She smiled briefly again and glanced around the room, taking in the cold woodstove, the fish mounts on the wall, the overloaded bookcases. “You have a lovely house. Do you live here alone?”
I made a vague throat-clearing noise and shifted my weight from one foot to the other.
She seemed to get the point. “So, I guess I should explain what I’m doing here.”
“I would appreciate it.”
She inhaled through her nose and exhaled through her mouth, as if performing a yoga exercise. “I knew your father. He used to come into the bar where I work. Well, he used to come in until he got banned for breaking a guy’s arm. It was a different bar back then, the Red Stallion in Carrabassett. It’s been closed a long time. I’m over at the Sluiceway now up Widowmaker.”
It was a ski resort near Rangeley. My father had worked there briefly, long ago, driving one of the snowcats.
“Anyway,” she continued, “I heard about what happened with Jack. I mean, who didn’t hear about it? All that horrible stuff up at Rum Pond. It was just—just unbelievable.”
“My father was a bad man,” I said simply.
“No, he wasn’t!” Without fully rising, she started to lift herself from the sofa, eyes widening with disbelief, then sat back down again. “Jack had a good heart. He was just so troubled.” Her bloodshot eyes filled with tears again. “You don’t really believe that he was bad. Why did you try to help him if you thought he was some sort of monster?”
I had puzzled over that same question for years, but I had no intention of baring my own troubled psyche to this unhinged woman.
Her smoky perfume hung heavily in the air.
“Ms. Langstrom…”
“Amber.”