Paul Doiron: Trespasser

I wandered over to the lobster pound’s gate. The enclosed area was about an acre in size and fenced against predators. At night, lobsters will creep into the shallows, where scavengers can pick them off one by one. Raccoons will crack open their shells to get at the green tomalley, leaving all that precious meat to waste. Many lobstermen topped their fences with razor wire and used dogs to scare away the little bandits.

But of course the wiliest predator is man. I knew of thefts along the Down East coast where robbers arrived in the night to steal thousands of dollars’ worth of lobsters from these pounds. In almost every case, the heist was an inside job.

I slid my left hand into my pocket to feel the reassurance of my pistol and glanced over my shoulder at the warehouse. The entire wharf seemed abandoned, but a sallow light burned in one window. I crossed to the building and tried the door. It was locked. I pounded on the wood with my fist, but there was no answer.

Smell is the sense closest to memory. The stench of decomposing herring sent me time traveling; I remembered my days as a lobsterboat sternman, stuffing mesh bags with alewives, trying not to vomit. That was the summer Erland Jefferts had abducted and tortured Nikki Donnatelli. Jefferts had been a sternman, too.

There were two lobsterboats riding at anchor in the harbor. My eyes had flitted over the blurry names painted on the transoms when I’d arrived. Now I squinted to read them. The first boat was the Hester. The second, farther out, was the Glory B -the very same boat Erland Jefferts had been been working on the summer Nikki Donnatelli was murdered.

Back at the pay phone outside Smitty’s Garage, I dialed information and asked for the number of Arthur Banks in Seal Cove. It was common knowledge around town that he was the owner of the Glory B. A computerized voice asked if I wanted to be connected directly with the Banks residence. Needless to say, I did.

A woman answered. The warble in her voice told me she was elderly. “Hello?”

“Is this Mrs. Banks?”

“Ye-es?”

“This is Mike Bowditch with the Maine Warden Service. May I speak with your husband, please?”

She paused, as if waiting for me to continue. “Arthur passed away last fall.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” I usually read the obituaries in the local paper, but I had been so preoccupied by my father’s misdeeds over the autumn that I had missed a great many things during those months. “Maybe you can help me. Do you know who owns your husband’s old lobsterboat?”

“The Glory B? Why, Arthur left it to my nephew, Stanley.”

“Stanley Snow?”

“Ye-es.”

What were the odds the Westergaard’s caretaker would now own Jefferts’s old boat? Here was the connection I’d been searching for; I just needed to understand what it meant. “Mrs. Banks, what can you tell me about Erland Jefferts?”

When she spoke again, it was with audible caution. Jefferts’s name had that effect on a lot of the local people. “He just worked on Arthur’s boat that one year.”

“At the same time as your nephew?”

“The two boys were friends when they were little. Stanley’s mother is a Bates. He and Erland are second cousins.”

“They were friends,” I repeated quickly.

She must have sensed that my interest had unhappy implications for her nephew. “That was a long time ago! Stanley was just a boy.” The receiver seemed to be shaking now in her grip. “Excuse me. I have tea boiling.”

Before I could wish her good night, the phone clicked and went dead.

I pumped my last quarters into the slot. I keyed in Detective Menario’s cell-phone number and waited. My call went straight to voice mail.

“This is Bowditch,” I said. “I’m calling from that pay phone on Parker Point. I think Stanley Snow was the anonymous caller who reported Ashley Kim’s accident. He owns a lobsterboat at the fisherman’s co-op here. And he met with the Driskos at the Harpoon Bar before they died in that fire. Erland Jefferts is his cousin. They both worked on the same lobsterboat. There are way too many connections here for this to be a coincidence. You need to find Stanley Snow.”

I kept rambling until the last of my change ran out.

I didn’t trust Menario. It was easy to imagine him receiving my message and hanging up without even listening to it. In his mind, I was the man who cried wolf.

The tide was dropping in the harbor. I could smell seaweed through the gathering mist as the receding ocean exposed slimy beds of dulce and kelp. On nights like this, the Vikings had believed that trolls crawled out of the sea to steal babies from cradles.

The fact that Jefferts and Snow were distantly related was no great shock; Erland had cousins all over Seal Cove. Most of them, however, had come to his defense before and after the trial. When looking through Ozzie Bell’s box of files, I’d read letters and petitions signed by dozens of family members. But not once had I encountered the name Stanley Snow in those documents.

Why?

I needed to call Charley. He was the only person I trusted to act upon the evidence I’d unearthed. With luck, he could persuade some of the higher-ups in the state police to put out an all-points bulletin for Stanley Snow. I tried my cell phone again, but it was still short-circuited.

I began pawing around inside my Jeep, looking for coins. I found a handful of useless pennies in the cup holder-not enough change to make another call.

Erland Jefferts came wandering into my head, unbidden. I remembered that Arthur Banks had signed the J-Team’s letter to the attorney general asking for a new trial. Half the town had. So why hadn’t Erland’s cousin and boyhood friend, Stanley Snow?

In the back of the Jeep, I found Ozzie’s forgotten files. I switched on the rear cargo light and began paging through the overstuffed folders. My fingers stopped on a document I’d only skimmed the previous week.

It was an inventory of items the state police had removed from Jefferts’s person and his truck on the morning he was arrested. The list went on for pages: a Swiss army knife with a broken saw blade; a green plastic trash bag; an unopened pack of Camel cigarettes, slightly crushed; a single twenty-dollar bill; four quarters, two dimes, and fifty-seven pennies; a pair of sunglasses tucked above the visor; a permanent black marker; a tangle of polypropylene rope; an empty pint of Allen’s Coffee Brandy; a sawed-off baseball bat; a single Magnum condom in its wrapper; needle-nose pliers; a crushed ATM receipt showing a balance of $168 in his checking account; six Bud Light bottle caps and an empty bottle; and, of course, one roll of rigging tape.

Something was missing.

I needed to speak with Charley. He had the clout to mobilize a search for Stanley Snow. The word of a legendary game warden still carried some weight in Maine. And maybe my friend could help me understand what it was in this box that I was failing to see.

I closed the cargo hatch, slid behind the wheel of the Jeep, and sped off for home.

When I pulled up to my front door, I noticed that my patrol truck was the only vehicle in the yard. At first, it puzzled me that Sarah wasn’t home; then I remembered her mentioning something about parent-teacher conferences. I glanced at my dashboard clock and saw that it was just past five. She would go ballistic when she learned about my day. I still needed to set up an appointment with the Warden Service’s psychologist, I realized. It was the least I could do.

I had some trouble with my keys at the door: I dropped them once, trying to get the right one into the lock, then dropped them again. Inside, the house was cold and dim. The birch logs in the woodstove had burned away to ashes, and a draft had discovered some previously unidentified crack in the cedar shingles. The faint odor of bad fish told me that the trash can in the kitchen needed to be emptied. The sensation of returning to an empty house made me think of the weeks after Sarah had moved out. These days, I often ended my patrols with a feeling of deja vu.