Paul Doiron: Trespasser

The day was dissolving into darkness by the time I escaped from Hutchins’s cave.

I had no doubt that, under the wrong circumstances, he could be a very dangerous man. The idea that this thug identified with me, that he thought we were kindred spirits, bound together by mutual bad luck, a hatred of women, and who knew what else, sickened me more than anything he’d actually said.

I pulled the Jeep over onto the shoulder of the Catawunkeg Road to think through Hutchins’s story. He had been at the bar when Nikki disappeared. He had been at the crash scene when Ashley disappeared. He was a police officer. Women would trust him.

He could have easily shown up at the crash scene while Ashley Kim was still there and offered her a ride to Westergaard’s house. The next day, he could have sneaked back to Parker Point to rape her and abduct the professor. I remembered how Hutchins had gone alone into the house after Charley and I had broken in and the countless minutes he’d spent inside. Had he been searching for incriminating evidence he might have left behind?

I’d begun to wonder if I’d just escaped a close encounter with the Grim Reaper.

But if Hutchins was a cold, calculating killer, how could I explain the drunken mess of a man I’d just found at his house? He’d permitted me to walk into his den, accuse him of murder, and then waltz out again, unharmed, when he could have shot me and dumped my body at the bottom of a flooded quarry.

Something didn’t add up. It was as if I were standing too close to a painting in a museum and could only see splashes of color, when what I really needed to do was take a step back. Only then would I see the larger design.

I needed to return to the intersection where my involvement in this all began, back to the accident scene on Parker Point.

As the temperature had warmed through the course of the afternoon, a fog had crawled up from the sea. Chilled by arctic currents washing down from Labrador, the Gulf of Maine remained unbearably cold all year long. When the sun heated the land, a mist would creep in from the coves and harbors.

I drove directly to the site of the accident. The rain had fallen and the snowplows had come along and scraped the deer blood from the road. I pulled my Jeep over to the approximate place I’d first parked and tried to re-create the scene in my head, but my memories already seemed to be dissolving. The angle of the wrecked car along the road, the location of the blood pool, the places where I’d set up my hazard markers-all the details were melting away into a gray haze.

What if Ashley Kim’s homicide was never solved? Sarah had reminded me of the sad litany of unsolved murders in Maine. Every day that went on without a break in the investigation suggested that Ashley Kim was herself dissolving into some sort of fog. Without the closure of an arrest and conviction, the woman would become a kind of ghost. In time, her name would cease to refer to a specific person-an intelligent young woman from Massachusetts who had found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time-and become a local watchword for fear. People in Seal Cove would tell their daughters about her in whispers.

How did that old legend of the vanishing hitchhiker go? A traveling salesman sees a young woman standing along a roadside at night. He stops to give her a ride. She provides him with a street address, then sits mutely while he drives her home. When the salesman arrives at the house, he goes around to the passenger door to let the pale girl out, only to discover she’s disappeared. He knocks on the door, and the man who answers tells him that his daughter died in a car accident one year earlier, at the very spot the salesman saw the apparition.

A car came rushing past me out of the fog. It didn’t have its headlights on, so it seemed to materialize out of nowhere and then disappeared just as fast. My heart clenched up before it began forcing blood back through my circulatory system.

Think, I told myself. Try to remember.

I felt a sudden need to hash over these mysteries with Charley. On my own, I seemed to be getting nowhere. At the very least, I needed to stop telling myself ghost stories.

Bracing the steering wheel, I reached into my pocket for the mobile phone. I tapped in the old pilot’s number. It took me half a minute of utter silence to realize the cell was dead. Maybe the battery had gotten soaked while lying in the mud. For some reason, it reminded me of my visit with Erland Jefferts. Had he mentioned something significant about a mobile phone?

Or maybe I was misinterpreting the message that was trying to push its way through from my subconscious. Someone had used a nearby pay phone to report the deer/car collision. The identity of the unknown caller seemed to be the key to all this.

The man who had reported the crash had called from outside Smitty’s Garage, two miles down the road. I restarted my engine and pulled carefully back onto the pavement, headed south.

The garage was a drab little building assembled out of cinder blocks, asphalt shingles, and broken windows. Across the road, a lane led down to the fishermen’s wharf. Two antique gasoline pumps stood ready out front, but their tanks had run dry ages ago, back when gas sold for less than a dollar a gallon. The garage had been out of business for years, and the fading sign above the bays was the last remaining legacy of the late Mr. Smith.

For some reason, the local phone company kept a pay phone in operation here. It was just a hooded metal box bolted to the cinder blocks. Vandals had stolen the phone book-its snapped chain dangled to earth-but the phone itself was functional. I lifted the receiver to my ear and heard that distinctive hum a disconnected line makes. Seven nights ago, a man had used this phone to call the Knox County Dispatch to report a deer/car collision.

What had he been doing here? Smitty’s was pretty close to the end of the road, which suggested that the caller might live somewhere between the garage and the tip of the peninsula. At the very least, he must have known of the phone’s existence; this dark crossroads wasn’t a place you happened by.

Because of the mist, I could only see a short distance, but the briny smell of the sea was pungent here. The turnoff to the commercial fishing wharf beckoned from across the road. I decided to take a drive down to the water.

It was March, and with the exception of two fishing boats floating in the harbor, the local fleet was still in dry dock. At the edge of the parking lot, I passed the hulking shapes of lobsterboats balanced on cradles. Most were still cloaked against the elements in tight casings of white shrink-wrap. The sight of these ghost boats recalled the pale sheets the movers had thrown over the furniture in the Westergaard house.

The fishing wharf consisted of a steep boat launch beside a dock that teetered on piers above frigid gray waters. A shingled warehouse sat atop the pilings, which were slathered with black tar to keep marine worms from chewing through the wood. Towers of yellow-and-green lobster traps were arranged along the wharf, waiting to be returned to the bottom of the Mussel Shoals channel. On the far side of the dock was the lobster pound: a fenced-in rectangle of the cove where the fishermen dumped their daily catch. Lobsters could be kept alive in that saltwater corral for weeks before being hauled up for shipment.

The parking lot was empty of vehicles, but there was a glow in the upstairs window of the fisherman’s co-op. I pulled up to the garage door and got out. The smell hit me at once. Even after the long winter, the lobster traps stank of rotten bait.

I peered around me into the mist. The air was damp and very still. I could hear the waves slapping against the pilings and, in the distance, the repeated moans of a foghorn out in the channel.