Paul Doiron: Trespasser

On this occasion, she was gone for three days. While she was away, I began thinking what it would be like to have a little brother or sister. I decided it wasn’t a prospect I welcomed. The whole pregnancy thing baffled me. I knew where babies came from-my father had shared the facts of life with me, using Playboy magazine as an instructional guide. It was more that I’d been oblivious to my mother’s condition. I’d noticed she had been gaining weight, because she never gained weight; to this day, she could still wear clothes she had worn in high school. But I was just a kid, so what the hell did I know?

When my mom came home from wherever she’d gone, she looked ashen and thinner, and she hugged me so hard, I could barely breathe. In the car, riding back to our mobile home from the Coles’, she told me that she’d had an accident and was no longer pregnant.

“What happened?” I asked as the wind rushed in around my ears.

“I fell,” she said.

“What happened to the baby?”

“He’s in heaven.”

She must have stopped at the house to break the news to my father before she came to fetch me, because when we got there, the door was ajar and his truck was gone. He didn’t return for three weeks, and when he finally did, my mom announced they were getting a divorce and that the two of us were moving to the big city, which was how she always referred to Portland.

My mother was a strict Roman Catholic. She attended Mass every Sunday and still said the Rosary. It didn’t occur to me until much, much later what she’d done.

When I woke again in the hospital, Sarah was sitting in a chair at the foot of my bed. She was wearing Levi’s and a black turtleneck. Her lower lip was swollen, and I late discovered that she had purple-and-black bruises across her abdomen. Her hair appeared greasy for the first time I could recall, and the shadow behind her eyes was visible for any fool to see. She leaned forward and called my name, summoning me from sleep.

“Stanley Snow is dead,” she said.

My voice was still barely a croak. “Good.”

“I thought he was going to kill you. I thought he was going to kill us both.”

“Me, too.”

She came around to the side of the bed and touched my hand. “The doctor said you have a concussion but that you’re going to be OK.”

“What about you?”

“Just some cuts and bruises.” She said this while looking at my IV bottle.

I had a hard time getting the next words out. “Why didn’t you tell me about the baby?”

My question startled her. Her eyes widened and she leaned back slightly, and I could see her trying to decipher how I could have discovered her secret. After a moment, she breathed out again. Ultimately, it didn’t matter how I knew.

“I was going to tell you, but you weren’t ready and-I think it was because I was afraid.”

She waited for me to answer, not knowing if I would respond with anger or with tears.

“You didn’t need to be afraid,” I said.

She didn’t speak, just squeezed my hand harder.

Two days later, the gentle yet hulking prison guard named Thomas escorted me into the Maine State Prison’s visiting area. I had received special permission to see a prisoner on such short notice. Once again, I had an appointment with Erland Jefferts.

When I’d called Ozzie Bell to arrange the visit, he’d been ecstatic. He’d heard the news about my fight with Stanley Snow, and although he voiced concern for my girlfriend and myself, he couldn’t suppress his giddiness. He was so upbeat, he didn’t bother asking me why I wanted to talk with Jefferts alone.

I didn’t have long to wait. The model prisoner came through the door with the biggest shit-eating grin I’d ever seen.

“My man Bowditch!” He looked neat and clean in his blue denim outfit. His wavy blond hair was wet and combed carefully back behind his ears. He surveyed my bandaged head and new sling and shook his head with amusement. “You look like half a mummy, dude.”

“Have a seat, Jefferts.”

The inmate and I faced each other across the table. He waited for me to start the conversation, but I was in no particular hurry.

“I guess I should start by thanking you,” he said. “I can’t believe it was Stanley. He was, like, the last person I ever suspected.”

I tried to remain still as I spoke. “Why was that?”

He gave me one of his patented movie star smiles. “He just seemed like this honest, hardworking type of guy. He never got too high or too low. ‘Steady Stanley,’ I used to call him. I don’t think I ever saw him drink a beer. But I guess that’s how psychopaths are-cold and calculating.”

“Some are,” I said. “But then you have killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, people who are complete alcoholics. My father was a drunk.”

He leaned back in his chair. I was certain he didn’t know what to make of my subdued manner. Maybe he figured I was sedated.

“Well, in any case,” he said, “Stanley wasn’t a drinker.”

“Do you remember the last time you saw him?”

“The dude never visited me. Not once in seven years. And he was my own cousin. But it makes sense now, in retrospect.”

I shook my head. The motion was like a flare going off inside my brainpan. “I meant the night Nikki disappeared.”

“He came out into the parking lot after Folsom tossed me out of the bar. He said I was too drunk to drive, but I told him to get lost. I guess he must have seen how wasted I was, and that was when he got the idea to pin the murder on me. It was probably when he stole the tape out of my truck, too.”

“You never mentioned in your court testimony that he was at the Harpoon.”

He brought his hands together, laying one over the other. “I was pretty wasted.”

“How do you think he found you passed out in the woods?”

“He must have followed me around that night.”

“When do you think he abducted Nikki?”

He gave a halfhearted shrug. “Good question.”

“It looks like you’ll be getting a new trial,” I said placidly.

He flashed that brilliant smile. “That’s what Ozzie says. There’s just no way they can railroad me again after what Stan did. It’s open-and-shut, man. Open-and-shut.”

“How so?”

He seemed bemused by my question. “It all makes sense now, right? At the trial, my lawyer argued that I couldn’t have killed Nikki, because she died while I was in police custody-on account of the rigor mortis evidence. Snow killed her after they arrested me, just like we always said happened. But that bitch Marshall was so hot to nail me, she denied the state’s own science. The newspapers are going to crucify her now.”

I sat there quietly.

Jefferts seemed to sense something was amiss. “Are you OK, man? You don’t look so hot.”

“No, I’m not OK,” I said. “Your accomplice just tried to kill me and my girlfriend.”

“My accomplice?” Jefferts tried to shake the accusation off by pretending he hadn’t heard me correctly. But he’d heard me all right.

“You remember the last time I was here?” I said. “I asked you what you did after you left the Harpoon that night, and you said something that struck me, but it took me a while to figure out what it was. You said you drove around and called some of your friends on your ‘CrackBerry’ to find out if there were any parties going on.”

He smiled again, but this time without showing his teeth. “I’m not following you.”

“Well, I remembered the inventory of items the police recovered from your truck. There was a lot of crap there, but no BlackBerry.”

Jefferts stared at me silently for a few moments, without expression. “I must have lost it.”

“Either that or someone stole it.”