Winter at the Door

Carl Bogart’s old Fleetwood double-wide mobile home stood on a cleared half acre surrounded by a forest of mixed hardwoods, spruce, and hackmatack trees shedding their dark-gold needles onto the unpaved driveway.

It was late October. From the black rubberized roof at the mobile home’s kitchen end protruded a sheet metal stovepipe topped by a screened metal spark guard and a cone-shaped sheet metal rain cap.

No smoke came from the stovepipe. Cody Chevrier pulled the white Blazer with the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Department decal stenciled on its door up alongside the double-wide and parked. Bogart’s truck, an old green Ford F-150 pickup, was backed halfway into the lean-to shed that stood at right angles to the trailer.

A day’s worth of fallen hackmatack needles veiled the truck’s windshield. Cody got out, his door-slam loud in the clearing’s silence.

“Hey, Carl?” Half a cord of white maple logs chainsawed to stove length lay in a mess of wood chips with Carl’s splitting axe stuck in the chopping block at the center of them, as if he’d just gone inside for a drink of water or something.

“Carl?” At midmorning, frost still glazed the fallen leaves lying in coppery drifts in the trailer’s shade, the day clear and cold now after
a night that had gotten down into the twenties. There were no marks in the rime under the trailer’s windows that Cody could see.

Besides the pickup truck, Carl’s shed held a shotgun-shell reloading press bolted to a massively overbuilt wooden workbench, the bench’s legs fastened through big galvanized angle irons to a pair of old railroad ties set parallel into the shed’s poured concrete floor. Seeing this reminded Cody that it was about time for him and Carl to start thinking about lugging the shell press indoors for winter. Turning slowly, he regarded the double-wide again.

Around it, long grass lay flattened by the deer who used the clearing as a sleeping yard; Carl didn’t hunt anymore himself, just reloaded the shotgun shells for others. No tire tracks were on the grass, and the hackmatack needles on the driveway had already been disturbed by Cody’s own vehicle, as well as by the breeze that had sprung up at dawn.

So: no sign that anyone else had been here recently, Cody thought, unable to keep his mind from running that way even with no real evidence yet of anything amiss.

A red squirrel scampered up the steps to the double-wide’s screened porch—from May through September, the mosquitoes here could stand flat-footed and look right over the house at you, and the blackflies were worse—then reversed itself in mid-leap and ran back down them again, hot-footing it across the yard into the woods.

“Carl, you old son of a bitch, get your ragged ass out here,” Cody yelled, because Carl was scaring him now. This was not like the old retired ex-cop.

It was not like him at all. A low howl rose from the back seat of Cody’s vehicle, where Carl’s black and tan hound, Rascal, had been confined for nearly an hour already. The dog had been found way over on the old White Oak Station Road, nobody with him, and calls to Carl to come down and get the animal hadn’t been answered.

Which was also not like him. Cody mounted the steps, shading his eyes with his hands to peer into the screened enclosure. As he did so, memories from years past assailed him, from back when a much younger Cody Chevrier was the newest, greenest Aroostook County sheriff’s deputy imaginable, and Carl was his boss.

Back then, by this time of the morning Carl’s wife, Audrey, would’ve had her day’s laundry out drying already, Carl’s flannel shirts and tomato-red long johns flapping from a line strung on pulleys between the porch and the shed. She’d have had strong coffee burbling in a percolator and fresh-baked coffee cake laid out on a white paper doily, sweet smelling in the warm, bright kitchen.

Broiled brown-sugar topping on the coffee cake, she’d have had; Cody could almost taste it. But Audrey had been gone all of ten years now, and from the porch’s far corner the old clothesline hung slack on bent wheels, a few blackened wooden clothespins still clipped to it.

Cody called through the screen, heard Carl’s radio playing tinnily inside. No other sound, though. And Carl wouldn’t ever have left his axe out that way.

Or his dog roaming. Rascal howled dismally again from the rear of the Blazer, the sound raising the hairs on Cody’s neck. The breeze kicked up another notch, chilling his armpits inside his jacket and giving him gooseflesh.

Oh, he didn’t like this. He didn’t like it a bit.

With a feeling of deep reluctance, he pulled open the screen door and crossed the porch he and Carl had built together one fine autumn weekend all those years ago. Rascal’s predecessor, Rowdy, was just a pup at the time, Cody recalled, the young dog nosing around and getting in their way, while inside, Audrey fried ham-and-egg sandwiches for lunch.

The eggs were from her own hens, the crisp homemade pickles preserved from cukes grown in her garden. She’d raised prize dahlias, too, back then, or was it roses? Cody couldn’t remember.

No matter, though; once she died, Carl had quit mowing so much and let the raised beds and the cold frame go to ruin. Now in the screened porch a rickety wooden card table heaped with old copies of
Field & Stream
and
Sports Illustrated
stood beside a bent-ash rocker with a striped blanket for a cushion, a reading lamp with a blue plaid shade on a tripod stand, and a trash-bag-lined barrel half full of empty Budweiser cans.

No ashtray. Carl never smoked. He always said a cop couldn’t afford to mess up his sense of smell. From inside the trailer, Cody sniffed scorched baked beans and a rank whiff of something else.

“Oh, man,” he said softly.

Carl Bogart’s body lay sprawled on the linoleum just inside the double-wide’s entry. Cody stepped over it into the familiar kitchen, then turned and crouched to feel for a pulse in his old friend’s whiskery neck.

He’d known there wouldn’t be one, though. Blood stained the cabinet fronts in the kitchen and a dark pool had begun drying under Carl’s head near the weapon, a .45 revolver that Cody recognized, fallen by Carl’s hand.

“Oh, buddy,” Cody said sadly. “I’m so sorry.”

Then he went back outside to call dispatch.

TWO WEEKS LATER

“This is not what I signed up for,” Lizzie Snow said. “And you know it.”

She gazed around in dismay at the small, dusty office whose plate-glass front window looked out at the remote northern town of Bearkill, Maine. The office walls were covered with fake wood paneling, the ceiling was stained 1960s-era acoustical tiles, and the ratty beige carpet was worn through to the backing in the traffic areas.

“You said I’d be …” The furnishings consisted of a beat-up metal desk, an office chair with one of its cheap plastic wheels missing, and a metal shelf rack of the kind used to store car parts in an auto supply store, plus one old phone book.

Not that sticking her in a
better
office would’ve helped. “… on patrol,” she finished, trying to control her temper.

Squinting out across Main Street, she told herself that the town, at least, wasn’t so bad. Two rows of small businesses and shops, a luncheonette, and a corner bar called Area 51 whose sign featured a big-eyed alien with a cocktail in its hand made up the downtown district. There was a laundromat, a flower shop, a supermarket, and an office supply place called The Paper Chase.

All were apparently doing business, though not exactly thriving; years ago in the post-WWII housing boom and for decades after, timber harvesting had supported this community and many others like it. But with the lumber industry sadly diminished, the area’s agriculture—potatoes, oats, broccoli—couldn’t take up the slack, and there wasn’t much else here to work at.

Or so she’d read. Bearkill was one of many Maine towns she’d Googled before coming here, but this was her first visit.

Too bad it’s not my last …

She supposed she should’ve liked the little town’s air of brave defiance, stuck way out here in the woods with not even a movie theater or a Whole Foods, much less a museum or jazz club.

But, dear God, there wasn’t even a Starbucks, the only hair salon was called The Cut-n-Run, and if you could buy any makeup but Maybelline in this town, she’d eat her hat.

“Yeah, I know the job’s not like I described,” Aroostook County sheriff Cody Chevrier admitted.

Six-two and one-eighty or so with close-clipped silver hair and the perma-tanned skin of a guy who spent a lot of his time outdoors, summer and winter, Chevrier was in his late fifties but still trimly athletic-looking in his tan uniform.

“Since you and I talked last, though, there’ve been a few developments.”

“Yeah? Like what, a crime wave?” she asked skeptically. On the sixty-mile drive north up Route 1 from the Aroostook County seat of Houlton this morning, she’d seen little evidence of that.

Farms, forest land, widely spaced homes and small roadside businesses were the norm here, she’d seen after filling out the stacks of pre-employment paperwork Chevrier had put before her. Around the courthouse and the sheriff’s office, men and women in business garb carried briefcases and drove late-model sedans, but once she’d left Houlton it was good old boys in gimme caps and women in pastel sweatshirts all the way. Nobody looked as if they had a whole lot to steal, or the inclination to steal anything, either.

“You might be surprised at what goes on in this area,” said Chevrier.

“Uh-huh.” She eyed him sideways. “Maybe.”

And moonbeams might fly out of her ass the next time she passed gas, too. But she’d been a cop for a dozen years now, and she wasn’t betting on it; crime-wise
—and otherwise
, she thought bleakly—this place was deader than Elvis.

“You said I’d be on the road,” she reminded Chevrier again. “First with a partner and then …”

According to the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Department’s website, there were 2,500 miles of public roadway in “the County” (locals always used the capital
C
), which spread across half of northern Maine. Eight thousand miles more of privately maintained roads belonged to major landowners, primarily lumber companies. In area the County was larger than Rhode Island and Connecticut combined; its 71,000-plus residents generated approximately 600 criminal complaints and 400 traffic incidents each quarter.