Paul Doiron: Trespasser

The engines got louder and louder, I saw a flash of headlights through the fog, and then, just as I was getting ready to spring, the shouts and revving motors began to recede.

Varnum jumped to his feet. “They turned off down that fire road!”

My knees cracked as I straightened up beside him. “Will they come back this way?”

“How the hell do I know?”

In a few weeks, the spring peepers would begin to call, but right now the forest was quiet except for the dripping trees. “Look, Hank, I know you’re angry. But I promise you, we’ll do what we can to catch the punks who did this.”

He didn’t even answer, just snapped on his flashlight and stormed off toward home.

I took two steps after him, and then the ground slid out from under me, and the next thing I knew I was lying face-first in the mud.

When I finally dug the mud out of my eye sockets, I saw Varnum looming over me, his jaw stuck out, his anger unabated. He pulled a handkerchief from his pants pocket and threw it at me. “Wipe the dirt off your face.”

It wasn’t until I’d left Varnum at his door and gotten back to my truck that I remembered I’d turned my cell phone off. Dispatch was trying to reach me on the police radio: “Twenty-one fifty-four, please respond.”

“Twenty-one fifty-four,” I said.

“Do you need assistance?” Lori sounded uncharacteristically animated. She was a good dispatcher in that she usually kept her emotions in check. That’s an important skill when you deal with freaked-out callers all night.

“No, I’m fine.”

“We couldn’t reach you.”

“Sorry, I had my phone off. What’s going on?”

“Four-twelve had engine trouble. He couldn’t take that deer/car.”

“You mean no one’s responded yet?” I already knew where this conversation was heading. “Can’t a deputy take it?”

“Skip’s dealing with an eighteen-wheeler that went off the road in Union, and Jason’s bringing in a drunk driver.”

It had been at least thirty minutes since the call came through. I was mud-soaked and exhausted, with an impatient girlfriend waiting at home. And now I had to go scrape a deer carcass off the road and take down insurance information. “All right, I’m on my way.”

Parker Point was a narrow peninsula that jutted like a broken finger southward into the Atlantic. It was one of dozens of similar capes and necks carved out of the Maine bedrock by the glaciers during the last ice age. Ten thousand years might seem like an eternity, but in geological terms it was scarcely time enough to cover these ridges with a dusting of topsoil and a blanket of evergreen needles. Nothing with deep roots could thrive on Parker Point, just alders, beach roses, and bristling black spruces that blew over easily when the March winds came storming out of the northeast.

The houses on the point had once belonged to fishing families, but as waterfront real estate prices soared and the codfish stocks collapsed in the Gulf of Maine, these homes had been increasingly sold as summer “cottages” to wealthy out-of-staters. Or they had been torn down and replaced with new shingle-sided mansions with radiant-heat floors and gated fences. I could easily envision a time, very soon, when every Maine fishermen who still clawed a living from the sea could no longer afford to dwell within sight of it.

Because of all those NO TRESPASSING signs, the local deer population had exploded. Without hunters to control their numbers, the animals multiplied like leggy rabbits, but their lives were no easier, and they died just as brutally. The difference was that death tended to come now in the form of starvation, disease, or, as in this case, a speeding car.

The fog had gotten so thick, it bounced my headlights back at me. As I drove, I keyed in my home number on my cell phone and readied myself. But when I told Sarah I’d be late, her reaction was not what I’d expected.

“That’s all right, Mike,” she said in a muted voice.

“It’s just that a car hit a deer in this fog,” I said.

“Was anyone hurt?”

“Just the deer. Maybe we can see that movie tomorrow night.”

“Amy said it wasn’t a good film anyway.”

Neither of us spoke for a while. Something was definitely bothering her.

“I’m sorry I missed dinner,” I offered.

“It was just pea soup. You can heat it up.”

I tried lightening the mood. “Why do they compare fog with pea soup anyway? It’s not like it’s green.”

But she wouldn’t play along. “I’ll see you when you get home, all right?”

“I love you.”

“Please be careful,” she replied. It was the way she ended many of our calls.

The night was getting colder, or maybe it was because my uniform was damp. The sensation was that of being wrapped in wet gauze. Shivering, I got on the radio. “Lori, I’m ten-twenty on the Parker Point Road. I’ve located the Ford Focus, but there’s no one here. Who called in the accident-was it the driver?”

“Negative. It was someone passing by. He said he’d stopped and spoken to the young woman who hit the deer. She called a tow company and was waiting for the wrecker. The caller said she was a little shaken up but uninjured. He said he wanted to make sure an officer dealt with the deer in the road.”

“But the caller didn’t identify himself?”

“He said he didn’t want to get involved.”

In my experience, this meant that the guy who’d phoned in the accident was probably driving drunk-or operating under the influence, in Maine lingo. What we had here was the Good Samaritan impulse versus the fear of being arrested on an OUI charge.

“Was the caller on a cell or a landline?”

“He was on that pay phone outside Smitty’s Garage.”

It was an abandoned repair shop located two miles down the road. “Can you contact Midcoast Towing and see if they got a phone call about this from the driver?”

“Ten-four.”

The car, I noticed, was a rental with Massachusetts plates. So where was the driver? I walked up and down the road a hundred yards in either direction, shining my flashlight along the mud shoulder to see if the young woman had staggered off into the trees. But there was no sign of any footprints.

I applied myself to the problem of the missing deer.

There were hunks of hair caught under the fender and more of it floating in the viscous pool of blood in the road. This evidence established that the Focus had indeed struck a deer and not some weirdo who happened to be walking in the fog dressed like Daniel Boone.

I wondered if my anonymous Good Samaritan had been the one to help himself to the deer. Under Maine state law, any driver who hits a deer or moose has first dibs on the meat. After that, it’s up to the responding officer to dispose of the carcass as he or she sees fit. Dealing with a hundred pounds of dead but still-warm animal is usually the last thing someone who’s just totaled a car wants to worry about. I routinely brought the remains to a butcher who worked with the Rockland food bank or traded it to my informants in exchange for tips on local poachers. Other officers passed the meat along to families that were going through tough times.

Sometimes the underprivileged took a more active role in their own nourishment. I knew of some penniless backwoods characters who sat around the cracker barrel listening to police scanners. If they heard about a deer/car accident, they would rush to the scene to beg for free venison. Half the time, the officer was just glad to be rid of the hassle. Other times, if no cop happened to be present yet, the game thieves would abscond with the roadkill. It was possible the man who’d reported the accident fell into this category of self-help opportunists.