Boiled Over (A Maine Clambake Mystery) (11 page)

The drive to Rockland was a pretty one along U.S. Route 1, the road that ran 2400 miles from Key West, Florida to the Canadian border. In Maine, the road sometimes clung to the coast. In other places, it meandered through picturesque towns. But I wasn’t in the mood to be charmed. I saw license plates from all over the country and felt like I was channeling Bud Barbour as I cursed the slow, uncertain, and sometimes downright lost, out-of-state drivers clogging up the two-lane road.

Finally, I came into Thomaston. The Henry Knox Museum, a 1930s replica of Knox’s grand eighteenth century mansion, dominated the skyline. After that came the much less beautiful, but even more imposing Dragon Cement Company, its giant silo rising Godzilla-like on the horizon. Once I passed it, I was practically in Rockland.

I’d always loved Rockland, its Main Street lined with galleries and restaurants, the fantastic Farnsworth Museum with its huge collection of Wyeths. I found the address I was looking for, not that far from Main Street. I parked across the street and sat in my car, figuring out what to say to this man, the only person Cabe Stone felt he could count on as a reference. Of course, there was a good chance the man wouldn’t be home. Most teachers had summer jobs. There was no way to know until I tried.

Despite the pleasant temperature, the sun began to heat up the car. With the comforting thought that probably no one would answer the bell, I heaved myself from the seat.

“Hello?” A man not much older than me opened the door. He was handsome, blond, and sunburned, dressed in khaki shorts and a yellow polo shirt. “Can I help you?”

I still hadn’t figured out how to ease into the reason for my visit. “Hi. I’m Julia Snowden, Cabe Stone’s current employer. He gave you as a reference on his job application. I wondered if we could talk.”

The man stood silently, processing what I’d said. I felt a momentary panic. I hadn’t even let the poor guy tell me his name. Maybe he wasn’t the right person.

He must have decided I was harmless and offered his hand. “Adam Burford.” We shook. “There’s a picnic table around back. My daughter’s down for her nap. Let me grab the baby monitor and I’ll come out.”

I sat at the table in the backyard. The lawn was lush, but needed mowing. A wild profusion of hedges holding the deepest, bluest hydrangeas I’d ever seen surrounded the yard.

Adam came out the back door, baby monitor in hand. “I think we have a few minutes.”

“Thanks for seeing me.”

“I feel terrible about Cabe. I can’t believe what I’ve read in the papers.”

“He’s only wanted as a witness,” I said, pushing Binder and Flynn’s deeper interest in Cabe to the back of my mind. “Do you know where Cabe is?”

“No,” Adam answered without hesitating.

I believed him. He had an honest face and a straightforward manner. “Do you have any ideas? Any places he used to hang out when he was in high school?”

Adam shook his head. “Cabe was a good kid. I taught him senior English. He was miles behind when he started school in September. He’d missed a ton of school. But he had drive, you know? He wanted to do better, and given half a chance, he did. He and I spent hours going over his papers. When I first handed them back, there was so much red ink, it looked like someone had been murdered.” Adam paused, realizing what he’d said. “Sorry. But Cabe would rework each paper, and rework it, until it was an honest B, occasionally even an A. The kid was dogged.”

“You said he started in September of his senior year. Is that because he’d just moved to the area?” Missing tons of school jibed with Dr. Crane’s description of Aaron, but his drive did not. Unless being on his own had caused Cabe to grow up fast.

“Sort of. Cabe lived at Moore House, a group home for troubled kids. Mental trouble, trouble with the law. Some of the kids go to the high school. Others aren’t capable of functioning in a public school.”

This was new information. How would a runaway from New Jersey end up in a group home in Maine?

“I never felt like Cabe belonged at Moore House,” Burford added.

“He wasn’t violent?”

“The opposite. Sometimes kids from Moore House got taunted by other kids at school. Cabe went out of his way to avoid confrontations.” The sounds of a toddler waking came through the baby monitor. “We’ve got about two minutes,” Adam said, “before she blows.”

“Is this Moore House in town?”

“Yes, pretty near the high school.” He gave me an address. The baby fussed noisily at the other end of the monitor. “I’ve got to go.”

“Just one more thing. Did Cabe ever say anything about his family?”

Adam climbed out from behind the picnic table bench. “Not a thing. But he wrote about families constantly in his essays and book reports. As Cabe saw it, loss of family was the theme of almost every book the class read and he wrote eloquently about it. I assumed a stable family life was a fantasy for him. I tried to get him to open up about his situation, but he never confided in me. Eventually, I stopped asking. I didn’t want to risk the relationship we had.”

The baby began to wail. I thanked Adam as he jogged toward his back door.

It didn’t take me long to find Moore House. As I drove Mom’s Buick the few blocks to the address, I processed what I’d learned. Cabe was a spottily educated boy, obsessed with loss of family. That fit with Aaron Crane, whose biological father had gone to prison and disappeared from his life, and whose mother was a suicide.

The hardworking kid Burford described, who strove to be better, was the Cabe I knew. He seemed far removed from the troubled kid who’d left New Jersey. What had transformed him?

I was making progress. Adam Burford had led me to Moore House. Perhaps someone there could lead me to Cabe.

Though in a residential neighborhood, Moore House had a distinctly institutional feel. The newish structure looked more like a small professional building than like the older homes that lined the rest of the street. I parked and got out, more confident about taking the direct approach. After all, it had worked with Adam Burford.

A young woman came to the door. For a moment, I couldn’t tell if she was an administrator or a resident. “I’m Julia Snowden, looking for the person in charge.”

“That’d be me. Emily Draper.”

“Oh. I want to talk to you about a former resident here. Cabe Stone.”

She looked me up and down, gray eyes narrowing. Her curly brown hair was cropped short and she wore a casual white T-shirt and a nondescript pair of khaki shorts. “The cops have already been here. Three days ago.”

“I’m Cabe’s current boss. I want to help him.”

“C’mon in.”

She led the way to the kitchen at the back of the house. It was an odd mix of institution—professional refrigerator and stove—and dorm room, piled up cases of soda and snacks. She sat at the room’s center table and gestured for me to do the same.

“It’s awfully quiet here,” I said.

“Most of the kids are working. The ones who work nights are probably at the beach.”

“How many do you have?”

“A dozen at a time, or so. It fluctuates.”

“Adam Burford, Cabe’s teacher, told me he didn’t think Cabe belonged here.”

“The kids who live here can’t live at home. They have a whole list of problems, including dysfunctional relationships with any parent or relative they may have. They may have been in an institution—mental hospital, rehabilitation center, jail—but, however bad things might have been for them, they’re on the upside. They don’t come here until they’re on a path to getting better and eventually, to being able to live independently. But most of the kids here are also fragile. Cabe wasn’t. He was self-possessed, optimistic.”

All things I’d seen in Cabe. “How did he end up here?”

She took so long to respond, I wondered if she was going to. Clearly, she was struggling, though I couldn’t tell if it was something about me, something about Cabe, or some bureaucratic confidentiality restriction that stopped her. “You say you want to help Cabe?”

So it was me. ”Yes. As I said, he works for me. And I owe him. He saved my life.” She arched an eyebrow at that, but waited for me to go on. “I don’t know Cabe all that well, but he doesn’t seem like he could kill someone.”

Emily stared at the chipped Formica tabletop. “But that’s the point. He’s already been accused of murder once. His foster father.”

My stomach flipped as if I was on a roller coaster. Binder and Flynn weren’t looking for Cabe because he was Stevie’s son. They’d fixed on him because he’d been accused of murder before. All my assumptions drained away, leaving me feeling weak, like after an adrenalin surge.

Emily looked up and saw my shocked expression.

“What happened?” I finally managed to ask.

“Cabe was adopted as an infant. By all accounts, a good placement with Lilia and Dave Stone. They were older, childless, but up to the task of raising an energetic little boy. Dave was a commercial fisherman, quite skilled. They moved around for his job, but always on the Maine coast. It was a good life.”

“How did Cabe wind up in foster care?”

“When Cabe was twelve, Lilia and Dave died within six months of one another. She of breast cancer. Everyone expected Dave would outlive her and end up as a single parent to Cabe. But while Lilia was in hospice, Dave had a fatal heart attack. There was no one to take Cabe. His parents had been pretty much on their own, which was one of the reasons their adopted child had been such a gift.”

Emily gave me a minute to absorb what she’d said. I couldn’t imagine young Cabe, a child from a loving home, losing both parents at twelve. My dad had died five years ago, when I was already an adult, yet it was still a staggering loss.

“That’s when Cabe went into the foster system. He passed through three foster families in the next year, disruptions that were bad luck and circumstance, nothing to do with him. But by that point the weight of his losses must have been enormous. Then he landed at the Jensens’ in Bangor.

“It wasn’t pretty. Mrs. Jensen was timid, her husband was a bully—toward her, their biological kids, and the foster kids. He was a yeller. Cabe was a pretty hard-edged thirteen-year-old by then. He wasn’t going to put up with anything. He was skinny, but tough as nails. Verbally, he gave it to Jensen as good as he got. It must have been a shock to that big man to have the boy yelling back at him. So he went further with Cabe. He punched him, knocked him flat on his back.”

Emily hadn’t offered me anything to eat or drink, but I wished she had, so we could take a sip or a bite and break up the relentless flow of her words. I sensed where this story was going. My stomach clenched into a ball.

“Cabe was the first one home after school the day after Jensen hit him. Mrs. Jensen was off somewhere with the younger kids and the older ones had stuff going on after school. Cabe called 911 and calmly reported he’d found Mr. Jensen stabbed to death on the couch in the family room. When the police got there, Cabe had blood on him and George Jensen had a big kitchen knife sticking out of his chest. Cabe claimed he’d found Jensen that way. The blood on his clothes was from checking to see if he was alive. There were no signs of forced entry.

“Cabe was a suspect immediately. It was spring, the windows were open and the neighbors had heard the fight. He was taken in for questioning, given a public defender, and a guardian
ad litem
. He was completely alone in the world.”

I sat, thinking about the young man I knew. The young man Emily had just described as self-possessed and optimistic. How did that person arise from this scenario?

“There’d been no incidents in the home,” Emily continued. “No police visits, no problems discovered by child welfare, but older kids, adults who’d been in the home before, came forward and told the cops there was bullying to the point of abuse.”

“It’s nice that those older kids came to Cabe’s defense.”

“That’s not the way the cops saw it. To them, confirmation of Jensen’s cruelty gave Cabe motive.” She looked at me to make sure I understood. “But the case unraveled before it could begin. Cabe was never formally charged. The state’s own blood spatter expert’s opinion was that Cabe’s explanation for the blood on him was probable and the killer was likely a larger individual.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

“The bare bones of it was in Cabe’s file when he came here. Bit by bit, he told me the rest. And then I checked it out independently. I need to know who’s living here. Mrs. Jensen told the cops her husband had a gambling problem and owed money to some bad people.”

Emily noticed my quizzical look and said, “I know. Stabbing seems like a messy and unprofessional way to settle gambling debts. But it was enough. There just wasn’t the evidence to put together a case against Cabe.”

“Was Mr. Jensen’s murder ever solved?”

“Never,” Emily answered. “Not to this day.”

“How many times was Jensen stabbed?” The state police hadn’t, as far as I knew, released the cause of Stevie’s death.

“I used to know, but I can’t remember exactly,” Emily said. “Lots though. More than a dozen.”

The same MO as Stevie’s death. “And after his foster father’s murder, where did Cabe go?”

“Obviously, he wasn’t going to another foster family. Ironically, he ended up at the same juvenile mental health facility where he would have been sent if he’d been arrested, tried, and found not guilty by reason of insanity, although in a different wing. He hated the place. He ran away repeatedly and stayed on the streets of Portland for months at a time. But he was always found and returned. When he was seventeen, they sent him here.”

“He spoke to you about—all of it? What happened? His feelings?” It was hard to imagine the reticent young man I knew talking about his feelings.

“We talked all the time. He seemed to understand the challenges of my job and he supported my work with the other kids. Honestly, he was a godsend. He told me seeing the kids in that place, the facility where he was sent, hearing the stories of the lives they’d lived, made him grateful for the life he’d had with the Stones. He decided to focus on what he’d been given, rather than on what he’d lost.”

“Why did he leave here?” I asked.

“He graduated from high school and aged out of the system. I can’t have people here once they’re legal adults.”

How would I have felt at eighteen if I’d been cast out into the world without family or support? I was relieved Cabe couldn’t be Stevie’s son. He’d been known to the Maine child welfare and justice systems for years. The horror of his life, the repeated losses, and the nature of the crime he’d been suspected of—a stabbing, just like Stevie’s—must be what Binder and Flynn knew and why they laser-focused on Cabe.

“Where did Cabe go when he left here?”

“I don’t know. If you’re his boss, you know more about where he ended up than I do. Last summer he worked in Columbia Falls up in Washington County in the blueberry camps. You know, with the Mi’kmaq Indians who come down from Canada to pick the crop? I heard from him a few times while he was there. After that, I lost track. It’s not like he had a laptop or a cell phone for keeping in touch.”

“Did you tell the police what you’ve told me—including the part about the blueberry camp?”

“They asked if I knew where he was now. I answered honestly, I did not.” So Emily, too, was reluctant to give the police more information than she had to about Cabe.

“Do you think he’d go back to the blueberry camp?”

Emily gave me a hard stare, assessing. “You really want to help him, don’t you?”

“I do.” I held her gaze.

“Yes, I think he might go back. He seemed at home there. Happy. And if you’re his boss, you know he’s not afraid of hard work.”

“Is there anything else you think might help me? Any place Cabe might go? Anything he planned to do?”

She looked down at the table and said in a low voice. “He told me he wanted to find his birth parents.”