The Midcoast, page 11
“And the broken window?” the principal asked.
“He’ll pay for it,” Ed said, glaring at EJ.
“With what?” EJ asked.
“Your allowance.”
“I don’t have an allowance.”
“EJ,” his mother said, “this is no time to be fresh.”
* * *
—
When EJ tried to ride his bike to Chuck’s that night, his mother told him he wasn’t going anywhere, that he was grounded for a month. Unfair, EJ said; he was just trying to give his sister a little space. He would never be able to sleep that night, feeling as guilty as he did about the events of the day, and he didn’t want to keep Allie up all night. This argument seemed to soften Steph, just for a moment, but then she said, “If you go to Chuck’s, you’re grounded for two months. And no more video games.”
“Fine,” EJ said. “I don’t even like video games anymore.”
And then he grabbed his bike, flipped on the light, and pedaled away.
By the time he arrived at Chuck’s, he was already regretting the decision. Usually he liked staying there, liked that Chuck’s girlfriend Mary-May wore cut-off tie-dyed shirts and boxer shorts and loved to bake, but now he felt doubly guilty. He had walked out on his family twice in one evening. It was like every time he put a stick of dynamite down his own pants, he had to shove a grenade down there, too, to blow up the dynamite. He watched Mary-May as she worked in the kitchen, his arms folded on the counter, head down, cheek smooshed against a forearm. Mary-May always made two batches, one for adults, one for EJ—brownies, cookies, cinnamon buns, you name it. As she mixed, she listened to Van Halen, and as she baked, she listened to Van Morrison. The warm scent of butter and herbs filled the whole apartment. Well, not herbs. Marijuana. Chuck and Mary-May thought he didn’t know, but he knew. Once he’d asked Mary-May where the special ingredients came from, and she said, “Oh, your dad or your uncle, here or there,” and when EJ said, “My dad doesn’t cook,” Chuck had come into the room and said, “What are you, a cop?”
* * *
—
In the morning, EJ slid the blow-up mattress behind the bathroom door, pulled his sweatshirt on, and took two brownies from the baking pan marked EJ. But then—making sure no one was looking—he removed two brownies from Chuck’s pan, then replaced them and aligned them just so, smoothing the edges so they fit with the others. On a Post-it note, Mary-May had written Chuck’s name and drawn a little arm making a big muscle. The joke was that Mary-May only liked Chuck because of his guns, and whenever she gave them a squeeze, she would put a hand to her forehead and pretend to faint. Her baked goods were his spinach—Power Brownies, they called them. EJ had been swapping out Power Brownies for several months now, once a week on average, just to see if anyone would notice, which they never had. Typically he just walked around with the brownies—or buns or muffins—in his hoodie for a couple days, daring himself to take a bite, throwing them out when they finally got hard. Today, though, he vowed to eat them. Before they got hard. Way before. Soon. Whenever he worked up the courage.
The radio was on in his mother’s car as she drove him to the sheriff’s office in Wiscasset, and someone called the rock station’s morning show impersonating President Bush, which made the hosts laugh like they were getting paid to laugh as hard as they could.
“These people are deranged,” Steph said, turning the volume down.
It was stuffy in the Camry. The sun was cutting a hole through the trees and sucking the color from the pavement.
“I don’t know what to do with you,” Steph said.
“Just drop me off.” They were crossing the bridge to Wiscasset, approaching the railroad tracks, the narrow Main Street. He knew she meant something else but didn’t know how to respond. They were almost to the sheriff’s office, which was connected to the jail, built from the same batch of bricks.
“Please be nice to Chief Hunt,” Steph said.
This made EJ not want to be nice to Chief Hunt, although he couldn’t say why.
“You know we believe in letting you make your own decisions,” Steph said.
“I know.”
“You keep making the wrong ones.”
“I know.”
“So that’s what we need to work on.”
“I know, Mom. I’m sorry.”
They reached the parking lot. Steph pulled in next to the K-9 cruiser with the missing window. “I love you, EJ,” she told him.
“I love you, too,” he mumbled.
“And I know you mean well, but I’m really worried about you.”
“I’m worried about you, too.”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
What he meant was that he didn’t want his mom to worry about him, that her worrying made him feel so much worse.
He walked inside the station and found himself alone with Chief Hunt. She told him to sit across the desk and watch her do paperwork.
“Everyone thinks police work is all guns and solving murders,” she said.
“Not me.”
“Well, good.”
* * *
—
There’s a woman I’ve tracked down named Leah Wickersham, a political consultant who lives in Washington, D.C., and in the mid-2000s, in the days before she went back to school to get a master’s in political science, she worked as a cub reporter at the Portland Press-Herald. Mostly her duties entailed copyediting and coffee brewing, but she was also tasked with screening the local police reports from around the state, looking for any stories worth turning over to the senior crime reporter. She was supposed to find anything having to do with drug trafficking, especially in Lewiston-Auburn, the former logging metropolis that had fallen on hard times and re-incorporated itself as a narcotics depot between the Northeast and Canada. Leah, as instructed, always checked the L-A police reports first, coastal reports last, but at least twice a month, it seemed, there was a significant theft in a large home by the water, and she ignored them all until she couldn’t ignore them anymore.
“Are there always this many burglaries?” she asked the senior reporter.
“Burglaries?” he said.
“Yeah, on the coast. Should we investigate?”
“How many we talking?”
“I don’t know, a couple a month?”
“That’s not very many. Try to find me some drug stuff.”
But she kept stumbling across the same reports issued by different police departments, so she began sifting through old criminal records, finding faint patterns: Over the past decade, there had been hundreds of burglaries, all of them hitting wealthy summer people or recently relocated year-rounders, most of them targeting the house’s silver collection, many of them unreported in the press.
She called some of the local police departments, but they all gave her the same line, which was that Kennebunk or Camden liked to present itself as a nice, safe place to live, at least for the summer, because that’s what it was, and they didn’t want to spoil that for anyone, so if all they were talking about was a little break-in here or there, then they didn’t see all that much cause for concern.
Leah wrote up the story anyway, and several days later a headline appeared on the second page of the Press-Herald: “Theft a Growing Problem Along the Coast.”
The story caught the eye of the president of the Maine State Chamber of Commerce, who called the chief of Maine State Police and said, “This is not good news.” Crime along the coast would hurt tourism, which meant that property values could plummet. If the Maine Association of Realtors caught wind of the problem and decided the state’s intended countermeasures didn’t satisfy, they might raise a serious stink. The chief of the state police, like the senior crime reporter, felt they had larger fish to fry, and by fish he meant drugs, and by fry he meant freebase. Not that he, personally, was freebasing drugs. Junkies were freebasing drugs. On his watch, which drove him apeshit.
Nevertheless a small burglary task force was created, and this task force decided that by and large the break-ins looked random. Sometimes there would be a crime a day, each in a different port. Then the trail would go cold for a month. The only witness to any of the burglaries they could dredge up was an old man on North Haven whose account sounded mixed up to the point of nonsense. Whom he described was not a robber at all; to his mind the perp was more of a masked apparition with rubber pants and a rake, who had dropped in merely to dispense snacks and remind the old man that faucet water was indeed potable.
(Of course, if law enforcement had ever thought to cross-reference the break-ins with the weather, they would have realized that there was absolutely a pattern: The daytime incidents always coincided with heavy fog.)
The state police, with no other leads, produced a map. It was covered in red dots, each one marking a burglary. They sent the map to every police station and sheriff’s department along the coast with instructions to post it within headquarters. Some offices followed suit, some did not. In general, the maps were neglected. New incidents rarely appeared on the maps as fresh dots. The map in the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office, for its part, was staying out of the way in a corner of the conference room, rolled into a baton and tucked behind a filing cabinet, under a portrait of an old sheriff, until EJ found it. He had been investigating the office because he was bored. Chief Hunt wouldn’t even let him use the radar gun. Once he had unrolled the map, he brought it over to Hunt and said, “What is this?”
She told him it was a map.
“What kind of map?”
She put her pencil down and sighed, as if this intrusion were interrupting something important. EJ looked at her notepad. Everything was upside down, but if he wasn’t mistaken, what she had been working on, what was so important, was an illustration of a cat. Hunt removed the notepad from her desk and put it in a drawer. She explained the map, what she knew about how it came into being, and then she talked about criminal activity closer to home, in their county. Actually, there wasn’t all that much of it. Which was why it was such bullshit that she was no longer chief of police.
“Let me ask you something,” Hunt said, her eyes narrowing. She had an arid voice, like a slough with all the water gone. “Are you sure you’re related to your sister?”
“What?”
“You heard me. Your sister. She’s like a little”—she waved her hand, looking for the right phrase—“smart person.”
“Oh,” EJ said. “Yeah. She is.”
“Not saying you’re dumb. It’s just—something happened when she came along, didn’t it?” Hunt leaned back in her chair, close to tipping. She had to grab the desk. “Feels like the world just stopped making sense at some point. What happened to honor? Order. Decorum. Stop looking at me like I’m speaking French. Actually, maybe that was French. But you get it.”
She was wrong; EJ did not get it, much as he would have liked to. He kept listening as Hunt kept talking about Allie, then Steph, or really Steph’s hair, which she “got cut down in Portland for some odd reason,” and the Schooner, which had become “too uppity” the moment it started laminating the menus, and then back to Allie, who was the type of daughter, as far as Hunt could tell, who usually only sprang from a line of Goddamn aristocrats.
“Know what I’m saying?” Hunt asked EJ.
“Not really.”
“Well, what do you think of the rest of it?”
“The rest of it?”
“Yeah,” Hunt said. “Everything I just said.”
“Well,” EJ said cautiously, “my dad says some people get jealous because he’s such a hard worker and my mom’s so smart, and also because she works out at the Y every day.”
Hunt made a hmph sound, and then she informed EJ that he had been good; he could play with the radar gun now.
Later in the afternoon, Hunt checked her watch and said, “Grab your jacket. Let’s hit it.”
“I don’t have a jacket,” EJ said.
So she gave him a LINCOLN COUNTY SHERIFFS windbreaker to wear over his sweatshirt and drove him home in an unmarked vehicle, ahead of schedule. EJ tried to exit the passenger’s side when they arrived at his house, but the door was locked. “The door’s locked,” he said.
Chief Hunt was too busy looking at the house to respond. It was small, paint missing, lawn frosty and patchy, sports balls deflating here and there. A faded pink-and-yellow buoy hung next to the front door. Through the windows of the garage, they could see piles and piles of discarded household items and garbage bags.
“It doesn’t look like much,” Hunt said.
“We only have two bedrooms. Well, three. But I have to share a room with my sister, which is bullsh— sorry. Which is stupid. I try not to get on her nerves, but it’s pretty much impossible. This one time I brought home a free turtle—”
“What’s a free turtle?”
“Well, there was this box by the road, and it said ‘Free Turtles’ on it, so I grabbed one, and I found a tank for it at the Pound, and I put it on my sister’s side of the room, as a gift, but when she saw it, she freaked out.”
“She didn’t want a turtle.”
“I guess they’re hard to take care of, and she thought it was scary, but the point is that everyone thought I got the turtle for myself and that I just put it on her side to mess with her or something. Nobody believed it was a present, even though Allie had been asking for a pet for like three years. We just need more space. I keep telling my dad, let me move into the garage and make it a bedroom.”
“Now you’re talking.”
“But no one’s allowed in there,” EJ said, meaning the garage. He was getting confused though. He couldn’t remember if he was trying to vent to Chief Hunt or defend his parents, so he added, “I guess my dad has his reasons.”
“It looks full of shit.”
“It is full of shit.”
“What kind of shit, that’s what I wonder.”
“You really think it’d make a good bedroom?” EJ asked.
“Yup.”
He heard his door unlock, so he exited, then looked back inside the car and thanked Chief Hunt for the ride. And then, as he walked to the house and through the front door, taking off the SHERIFFS windbreaker as he went, he realized that he had neglected to give it back. His father looked up and over the couch, beard curling off his cheek where a pillow had been pressing against it. He yawned. “How was it?” he asked.
“Fine.”
“What’d you do?”
“I don’t know. Cop stuff.”
“Like what?”
EJ was suspicious. His dad rarely asked follow-up questions. EJ toyed with the idea of staying silent, just to keep the intrigue alive, but he couldn’t help it. He had his father’s interest, and that was a special thing. He told him all about the day, about the boredom, about the boardroom, about the map, about the conversations, about the chicken salad sandwich he had had for lunch, and about how Hunt agreed that the garage should really be converted into a bedroom because—
“What kind of map?” Ed said.
EJ explained again, in greater detail. He was happy they were talking, but less happy than he might have been because he was hoping to have a rational conversation about the bedroom situation.
“And it was the only map they had?” Ed said.
“That I saw.”
“Just burglaries?”
“That I saw.”
“Good,” Ed said. “Good.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why is that ‘good’?”
“It ain’t. It’s just interesting.” His dad faced the television again, faced a stocky Scandinavian man who was straining to place a series of heavy objects onto a truck bed.
“What are you watching?” EJ said.
“Some show about bodybuilders,” Ed said.
“Want me to watch it with you?”
“Uh-huh. And if you stick around, you can watch the Celtics game with me and Allie later.”
EJ pulled the windbreaker over his head and zipped it all the way to the top. “Actually, I think I’ll just go to Uncle Chuck’s,” he said.
“Suit yourself,” Ed said. But then he stood up, circled the couch, and stood above EJ. He put both hands, heavy hands, on EJ’s shoulders.
“Hey, EJ,” Ed said.
“Yeah?”
“It’s good you’re doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Working with the police.”
“Thanks,” EJ said. “But I’m not really working with them. I’m not like a junior detective or anything, shooting guns and solving murders. That’s not what police work is.”
“Still. Good you took the initiative.”
“By breaking a window?”
Ed laughed like EJ had just told a self-deprecating joke and then gave him a big hug.
* * *
—
EJ waited for his mom outside Chuck’s apartment, on the stairs, in his hoodie and SHERIFFS windbreaker. His hands were getting cold, so he tucked them under his jacket, into the pockets of his hoodie, and found the two brownies he’d taken the day before. They hadn’t fully hardened yet. He was hungry, so he ate one. It wasn’t a matter of courage; he just didn’t care anymore. Then he ate the other brownie. The smallest dots of snow began to drift across the sky. There were no clouds, only a sky that looked like a cloud. It was as cold as ever, and yet here it was snowing. Everyone had been wrong about the weather.
Finally his mother showed up.
“Good morning,” Steph said once he was inside the Camry.
