Widowmaker (3 page)

“Your dad didn't write letters,” she said, as if I should have known better than to ask. “And A.J. burned the only picture of Jack and me together when he found it.”

I rose stiffly to my feet. “I'm sorry, but you need to leave.”

“Wait!” she said. “I have these.”

She reached into her jacket pocket again and pulled out a pair of dog tags on a chain. She passed them to me across the table. I read the words stamped into the stainless steel:

BOWDITCH

JOHN, M.

004-00-8120

O NEG

NO PREF.

My father had done two tours of duty in Vietnam with the Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment and had returned home a hero. But the war had left him badly scarred, both physically and mentally. What he'd experienced in the jungles of Southeast Asia—killing men, nearly being killed by them—had managed to turn him into the worst version of himself, or so people told me who had known him before he left Maine.

He had continued to wear his dog tags long after he'd left the army. In every memory I had of him with his shirt off, they hung around his neck. They seemed to have some talismanic power, as if he credited them with having saved his life, while so many of his friends had died. I had been surprised to hear those tags hadn't been found on his body at Rum Pond. I had always wondered what had become of them.

“Jack gave those to me the night he first held Adam in his arms,” Amber said. “He wanted me to give them to him when he was older.”

Another invisible blow struck my chest. “You mean my dad
knew
?”

“He offered to take care of us, but I was still with A.J. and trying to make things work. Besides, as young as I was, I knew that Jack wasn't going to make a good husband—or a good father.”

I was having a hard time getting my wind back. “You need to leave.”

“What about Adam?”

“What about him?”

“You won't help me find him?”

“No.”

“Not after what I just told you?”

“Especially not now,” said a rough voice issuing from my mouth.

She remained seated, looking up at me. I could see her in the act of thinking. In the quiet, I heard the furnace start up in the basement.

Then Amber twitched her nose. “Is something burning?”

I had left the venison stew simmering, and it had begun to scorch the pot.

I hurried out to the kitchen. I used a dishrag to lift the handle and drop the bubbling contents into the sink. A haze hung in the air, its odor as foul as a failed animal sacrifice.

When I returned to the living room, I found Amber standing with her purse over her shoulder. I had thought I might have to throw her out, as emotional as she'd been. But she seemed strangely composed now.

I held the door open for her. Sure enough, it had begun to snow while we were inside.

“Don't you want to know how to reach me?” she said.

“I can always ask Gary Pulsifer.”

Her expression softened. “It's better that you know about your brother, Mike.”

I barely stopped myself from saying “It doesn't feel better.”

I followed her out into the driveway and waited while the Jeep started up and the headlights came on. After she had driven off, the silence of the woods closed in around me. The sensation was of being imprisoned inside a snow globe.

I went back into the house to deal with the burned mess in the kitchen. It wasn't until later that I found Adam's picture where she had hidden it, under a dirty plate on the coffee table. She had scribbled her phone number on the back of the photograph. She had left the dog tags, too.

 

3

I read a lot as a kid. My mother used to come home from the library with free books she'd found in the donation boxes by the door. I remember one battered paperback in particular. It was an encyclopedia of different kinds of ghosts: phantoms, wraiths, apparitions, et cetera. A field guide to the undead. There was a chapter on poltergeists that has stayed with me. We tend to think of them merely as noisy, mischievous specters, but what this book explained was that, unlike other ghosts that tend to haunt places, poltergeists haunt specific people. No matter where you go, those loud, disruptive spirits will always follow you.

My father was my personal poltergeist.

I tossed the dog tags in my hand, listened to them jingle, turned them in my fingers, felt the stamped letters like braille I was unable to read. I had never known that we shared the same blood type. As if I needed another reminder of how much we had in common. I clenched my fist so hard around the tags that they left a rounded rectangle imprinted in the skin of my palm.

I knew that my father had always been a womanizer. He had been a handsome, red-blooded mountain man, possessed of an unshakable self-confidence and an animal magnetism I had seen on display in too many barrooms. But he had also loved my late mother in his own oddly ardent way, and the idea that he had fathered a child with another woman while he was still married to her—I didn't want to believe it.

And yet my dad had made a fool of me before. Why shouldn't he do it again from beyond the grave?

I tucked the tags into the chest pocket of my uniform and picked up the photograph Amber had left behind in a last-ditch effort to manipulate me into doing her bidding.

Adam Langstrom's eyes were so blue, many people would have thought they had been retouched, but I saw the same color every morning in the mirror. If she had been lying to me, either she was a terrific actress or she had also been lying to herself.

I felt a sense of panic growing inside my gut that I had never experienced before. For the past five years, I had thought I was the last in a cursed bloodline. But now …

Not knowing what else to do, I reached out for Stacey.

I dialed the number of the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife's office in Ashland, a remote logging town north of the forty-sixth parallel in a part of Maine that had more moose than people. That was why Stacey and several of her colleagues were holed up there for the winter. They were investigating how an epidemic of blood-sucking winter ticks was devastating Maine's moose population. Thousands of the big animals from Minnesota to Nova Scotia had already died, and there seemed to be nothing biologists could do to stop the plague. The direness of the situation had only hardened Stacey's resolve. Like her father—my friend and mentor Charley Stevens—she seemed to fight the hardest for causes other people had given up for lost.

“Stacey's not back yet,” said the man who answered the phone. “They're still out in the field.”

“Isn't it dark?”

“Let me check. Yep, it's dark all right.”

“Isn't it snowing?”

“It snows every day this time of year.”

“What you're telling me is not to worry,” I said.

“I'll have her call you when she gets back.”

I tried to keep busy while I waited. I took off my gun belt again and changed out of my uniform into a flannel shirt and jeans. I even washed the dishes. But worrying about Stacey and not being able to tell her my news only added to my agitation.

I had a fifth of Jim Beam in my cupboard that I hadn't yet opened. My father had been an alcoholic, and I'd had more than my share of moments when things were going badly and I had felt the pull of the bottle. But if ever I needed a drink, it was now. I filled a glass with bourbon and sat down in front of my laptop to read the sad tale of Adam Langstrom.

And sad it was.

I started by accessing the state law-enforcement database to see if there really was a warrant out for his arrest. The page that came up showed a picture of Langstrom taken by the Department of Corrections and listed him as a fugitive, wanted for violating his probation. He looked older and more hardened than he did in the photo his mother had left behind. He had put on muscle, and his hair was dull and in need of cutting, but what was most noteworthy was his right ear. It was missing the lobe, as if something—or someone—had chomped it off.

It listed his age: twenty-one, as Amber had stated.

It listed his height as six feet two inches—my height.

It listed his weight as two hundred pounds—ten pounds heavier than me. Adam Langstrom was a big kid.

I then pulled up the public sex offender registry and typed in his name. The same photo came up, along with his “town of domicile,” which was Kennebago Settlement, east of Rangeley on Route 16. It listed his place of employment, too: Don Foss Logging, also located in Kennebago. The site identified him as a ten-year registrant and said he had been convicted of one count of unlawful sexual contact and one count of unlawful sexual touching. No additional details were given about his crimes.

I had to continue my search elsewhere.

The Maine newspapers had barely covered his arrest and trial, in deference to the sensitivities of the Alpine Sports Academy, no doubt. It wouldn't have been in ASA's interest to trumpet the news that one of its scholarship students had raped the daughter of some captain of industry. The school tended to enroll kids who had spent their formative years on the ski slopes of Vail, Park City, and Jackson Hole. It had produced a handful of Olympians, but its greatest achievement was building its endowment, which some sources said rivaled that of some Little Ivies, including my own alma mater, Colby College.

There was no mention in any of the articles of a prior romantic relationship between Langstrom and the unnamed girl. To read the stories, you would have thought the case came down to a single assault. Langstrom had claimed the sex was consensual, but under examination, the girl had said she had been coerced.

Even though the papers hadn't identified her by name, I remembered that Amber had called her Alexa Davidson. From there, it was easy enough to search the academy's archived press releases and discover that a Seattle couple named Ari and Elizabeth Davidson had given a million-dollar gift to the school five years earlier. Now I could see why the headmaster had been so eager to turn the investigation over to the Franklin County Sheriff's Department.

The only other photograph of Adam Langstrom predated the picture on the registry. It had been taken at his sentencing. He was dressed in an ill-fitting suit, and his tie was askew, as if it were a noose he had managed to loosen. I couldn't see his right ear to see if it was missing its lobe. What struck me most about the picture was the expression on his face. So often defendants in court appear ashamed and already defeated; either that or emotionless and temporarily brain-dead. But Langstrom was glaring straight into the lens, as if he wanted to vault across the room and strangle the photographer with his own camera strap.

Langstrom's anger was as familiar as the color of his eyes. I had seen it too many times in my father's face and, sometimes, in my own bathroom mirror.

The cell phone buzzed on the desk. I took another sip of bourbon before I answered.

“Stacey?” I said.

“Graham told me you'd called.” Her voice sounded nasal, her sinuses clogged, as if she was suffering from a bad cold. “What's going on, Mike? I'm too frostbitten for phone sex, if that's what you want.”

“I was worried about you.”

“What? Why?”

“You were late getting back to the office. And I saw from the weather radar that it's snowing even harder up there than it is down here.”

She paused. “Your voice sounds funny.”

I couldn't lie to her. “I've had a couple of shots.”

“What happened?”

“I had a visitor earlier. This woman named Amber Langstrom tracked me down at the house. She says she knew my dad.” My voice sounded like someone else's in my ears. “She says I have a brother, Stacey.”

I pressed the phone against my ear. I heard nothing for a long time.

She spoke slowly. “You have a brother?”

“She says his name is Adam. And he just got out of prison for statutory rape, and now he's missing.”

“You need to back up,” Stacey said “Start from the beginning.”

I remembered how Amber had taken yoga breaths. I closed my eyes, breathed in and then out, and began my tale. I am sure I rambled. Bourbon on an empty stomach hadn't been the best idea. But Stacey was good at keeping me on point.

When I had finished, she said, “Can you e-mail me his picture? I want to see if he looks like you.”

“It might be fuzzy, since it'll be a picture of a picture.”

“That's all right. Do you believe this Amber woman is telling the truth?”

“Maybe. I don't know. It's possible. My dad slept with plenty of women. And Amber seems like his type.”

“What type is that?”

“Ready, willing, and able.”

Not to mention hot as hell, I thought. But that detail didn't seem like one I should share with my girlfriend.

“Then you've got to help her find this Adam guy,” Stacey said. “Aren't you curious to meet him?”

“No.”

“Liar.”

“My life was perfectly fine before I knew he existed.”

“Perfectly fine? Who are you kidding?” she said with a laugh. She really did sound stuffed up. “You might have a half brother, Mike. You'll never forgive yourself if something ends up happening and you never get to meet him.”

I pushed the bottle away. “I've been down that road before, Stace. It didn't end well.”

“You're not the same person you were when all that shit happened at Rum Pond.”

“Exactly. I'm not that person anymore.”

“At least make some calls for the poor woman.”

“Who would I call?”

“Start with Gary Pulsifer,” she said. “Find out how he knows this Amber Langstrom. Then ask him what the hell he was thinking, sending her to look for you.”

Those were good questions. But I wanted to talk about something else, anything else.

I tried to picture Stacey on the other end of the line. In my imagination, her dark hair was wind-tousled and her lips and cheeks were rosy from the cold. Like her mother, she had uncanny green eyes that were both beautiful and unsettling, as if she were descended from some supernatural race of beings gifted with the powers of telepathy and clairvoyance. I smiled at the face I saw in my mind's eye.