CHAPTER 11
As I drove south on the Mile-A-Minute Highway, I tried to convince myself that I needn’t bother with Carolyn Poulin. I told myself she was Al Templeton’s experiment, not mine, and his experiment, like his life, was now over. I reminded myself that the Poulin girl’s case was very different from that of Doris, Troy, Tugga, and Ellen. Yes, Carolyn was going to be paralyzed from the waist down, and yes, that was a terrible thing. But being paralyzed by a bullet is not the same as being beaten to death with a sledgehammer. In a wheelchair or out of it, Carolyn Poulin was going to live a full and fruitful life. I told myself it would be crazy to risk my real mission by yet again daring the obdurate past to reach out, grab me, and chew me up.
None of it would wash.
I had meant to spend my first night on the road in Boston, but the image of Dunning on his father’s grave, with the crushed basket of flowers beneath him, kept recurring. He had deserved to die—hell,neededto—but on October 5 he had as yet done nothing to his family. Not to his second one, anyway. I could tell myself (and did!) that he’d done plenty to his first one, that on October 13 of 1958 he was already a murderer twice over, one of his victims little more than an infant, but I had only Bill Turcotte’s word for that.
I guess in the end, I wanted to balance something that felt bad, no matter how necessary, with something that felt good. So instead of driving to Boston, I got off the turnpike at Auburn and drovewest into Maine’s lakes region. I checked into the cabins where Al had stayed, just before nightfall. I got the largest of the four waterside accommodations at a ridiculous off-season rate.
Those five weeks may have been the best of my life. I saw no one but the couple who ran the local store, where I bought a few simple groceries twice a week, and Mr. Winchell, who owned the cabins. He stopped in on Sundays to make sure I was okay and having a good time. Every time he asked, I told him I was, and it was no lie. He gave me a key to the equipment shed, and I took a canoe out every morning and evening when the water was calm. I remember watching the full moon rise silently over the trees on one of those evenings, and how it beat a silver avenue across the water while the reflection of my canoe hung below me like a drowned twin. A loon cried somewhere, and was answered by a pal or a mate. Soon others joined the conversation. I shipped my paddle and just sat there three hundred yards out from shore, watching the moon and listening to the loons converse. I remember thinking if there was a heaven somewhere and it wasn’t like this, then I didn’t want to go.
The fall colors began to bloom—first timid yellow, then orange, then blazing, strumpet red as autumn burned away another Maine summer. There were cardboard boxes filled with coverless paperbacks at the market, and I must have read three dozen or more: mysteries by Ed McBain, John D. MacDonald, Chester Himes, and Richard S. Prather; steamy melodramas likePeyton PlaceandA Stone for Danny Fisher; westerns by the score; and one science-fiction novel calledThe Lincoln Hunters,which concerned time-travelers trying to record a “forgotten” speech by Abraham Lincoln.
When I wasn’t reading or canoeing, I was walking in the woods. Long autumn afternoons, most hazy and warm. Dusty gilded light slanting down through the trees. At night, a quiet so vast it seemed almost to reverberate. Few cars passed on Route 114, and after ten o’clock or so there were none at all. After ten, the part of the world where I had come to rest belonged only to the loons and the wind in the fir trees. Little by little, the image of Frank Dunning lyingon his father’s grave began to fade, and I found myself less likely to recall at odd moments how I had dropped the souvenir pillow, still smoldering, over his staring eyes in the Tracker mausoleum.
By the end of October, as the last of the leaves were swirling down from the trees and the nighttime temperatures began to dip into the thirties, I started driving into Durham, getting the lay of the land around Bowie Hill, where a shooting was going to occur in another two weeks. The Friends’ Meeting House Al had mentioned made a convenient landmark. Not far past it, a dead tree was leaning toward the road, probably the one Al had been struggling with when Andrew Cullum came along, already wearing his orange hunting vest. I also made it a point to locate the accidental shooter’s home, and to trace his probable course from there to Bowie Hill.
My plan was no plan at all, really; I’d just follow the trail Al had already blazed. I’d drive to Durham early in the day, park near the fallen tree, struggle with it, then pretend to have a heart attack when Cullum came along and pitched in. But after locating Cullum’s house, I happened to stop for a cold drink at Brownie’s Store half a mile away, and saw a poster in the window that gave me an idea. It was crazy, but sort of interesting.
The poster was headed ANDROSCOGGIN COUNTY CRIBBAGE TOURNAMENT RESULTS. There followed a list of about fifty names. The tourney winner, from West Minot, had scored ten thousand “pegs,” whatever they were. The runner-up had scored ninety-five hundred. In third place, with 8,722 pegs—the name had been circled in red, which was what drew my attention in the first place—was Andy Cullum.
Coincidences happen, but I’ve come to believe they are actually quite rare. Something is at work, okay? Somewhere in the universe (or behind it), a great machine is ticking and turning its fabulous gears.
The next day, I drove back to Cullum’s house just shy of five in the afternoon. I parked behind his Ford woody station wagon and went to the door.
A pleasant-faced woman wearing a ruffled apron and holding a baby in the crook of her arm opened to my knock, and I knew just looking at her that I was doing the right thing. Because Carolyn Poulin wasn’t going to be the only victim on the fifteenth of November, just the one who’d end up in a wheelchair.
“Yes?”
“My name’s George Amberson, ma’am.” I tipped my hat to her. “I wonder if I could speak to your husband.”
Sure I could. He’d already come up behind her and put an arm around her shoulders. A young guy, not yet thirty, now wearing an expression of pleasant inquiry. His baby reached for his face, and when Cullum kissed the kid’s fingers, she laughed. Cullum extended his hand to me, and I shook it.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Amberson?”
I held up the cribbage board. “I noticed at Brownie’s that you’re quite the player. So I have a proposal for you.”
Mrs. Cullum looked alarmed. “My husband and I are Methodists, Mr. Amberson. The tournaments are just for fun. He won a trophy, and I’m happy to polish it for him so it looks good on the mantel, but if you want to play cards for money, you’ve come to the wrong household.” She smiled. I could see it cost her an effort, but it was still a good one. I liked her. I liked both of them.
“She’s right.” Cullum sounded regretful but firm. “I used to play penny-a-peg back when I was working in the woods, but that was before I met Marnie.”
“I’d be crazy to play you for money,” I said, “because I don’t play at all. But I want to learn.”
“In that case, come on in,” he said. “I’ll be happy to teach you. Won’t take but fifteen minutes, and it’s an hour yet before we eat our dinner. Shoot a pickle, if you can add to fifteen and count to thirty-one, you can play cribbage.”
“I’m sure there’s more to it than a little counting and adding, or you wouldn’t have placed third in the Androscoggin Tournament,” I said. “And I actually want a little more than to just learnthe rules. I want to buy a day of your time. November the fifteenth, to be exact. From ten in the morning until four in the afternoon, let’s say.”
Now his wife began to look scared. She was holding the baby close to her chest.
“For those six hours of your time, I’ll pay you two hundred dollars.”
Cullum frowned. “What’s your game, mister?”
“I’m hoping to make it cribbage.” That, however, wasn’t going to be enough. I saw it on their faces. “Look, I’m not going to try and kid you that there isn’t more to it, but if I tried to explain, you’d think I was crazy.”
“I think that already,” Marnie Cullum said. “Send him on his way, Andy.”
I turned to her. “It’s nothing bad, it’s nothing illegal, it’s not a scam, and it’s not dangerous. I take my oath on it.” But I was starting to think it wasn’t going to work, oath or no oath. It had been a bad idea. Cullum would be doubly suspicious when he met me near the Friends’ Meeting House on the afternoon of the fifteenth.
