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recognize. I think
I’d better find out who it is and what he, or she, wants. For now,
I plan on getting back home on Thursday afternoon. Can you come
over Thursday evening and stay after band practice?”
    “I’ll be there,” she said. “I’ll try to get
off on Friday so I can stay over for a late morning breakfast.”
    “It’s a date, Peaches. See you then.”
    “Bye,” she said.
    I looked again at my messages and missed
calls. The caller rang my phone a couple dozen times throughout the
night, but didn’t leave a single message. I found that odd. The
caller ID provided me with the number, but the name was private. I
scrolled through my address book; none of the numbers matched.
Apparently somebody I don’t know knows me well enough to stay up
all night hoping to talk to me. My curiosity was piqued, to say the
least. I highlighted the number and hit “send.”

 

3
     
A Call from the Cemetery
     
     
     
    Before my phone registered a second ring, a woman’s
voice came on the line, and in an excited, but muffled tone, she
said, “Jesse, is that you?”
    “Yes,” I said tentatively. “I’m sorry I don’t
recognize your number. Who is this?”
    “Cynthia Dumais,” she said.
    And that’s all she said for an unusually long
stretch of time. I guessed she was giving me a chance to recall who
she was, or perhaps she was collecting herself before following up
with the story she’d been hoping to tell for the past ten hours. In
that space of time, I quickly recapped our relationship.
    About two years earlier, Cynthia hired me for
personal protection. She had been divorced for about a month when
her former husband, Travis Perkins, began to show up in the
evenings and hang around her home. He wouldn’t knock at the door or
call out to her, but he would stroll along the street, often
pausing one or two houses away and just stand there staring at her
house. Sometimes he would make his appearance very late at night.
When this behavior became a habit, Cynthia decided to confront him.
She asked him to leave, but he simply replied, “It’s a free
country.”
    Now that’s the sort of response you’d expect
from a pest in junior high school with thick glasses and a bad
haircut, not from a Maine State Trooper, entrusted with the task of
protecting the governor and his family.
    Rather than begin the arduous process of
filing for a protection order, she decided to hire me on a
short-term basis to position myself in her front yard for the few
minutes every day when she came home from work. This was in
December, and it was pitch dark by the time she arrived home at
5:30. I’d show up at 5:15, wait for her to drive up, and escort her
inside. I had done this for about a week before I first laid eyes
on Travis.
    He just “happened” to be walking by the house
when Cynthia arrived. It was freezing cold that night, so it was
more than a bit peculiar that he “happened” to be there at that
time. I recognized him from a photograph that Cynthia had given me,
so I approached him directly and asked, “What are you doing
here?”
    “I just happened to be in the
neighborhood.”
    I replied, “If you just happen to be
here again, I’ll file a complaint with the Maine State Police, and
they might just happen to think you are unfit for your
present employment.”
    Travis responded briskly, “Who are you ?”
    I produced one of my PI business cards, and
that, more or less, put an end to the whole affair. He didn’t show
up the next week, and Cynthia decided that the issue was probably
settled. She thanked me for my help, paid for my services, and that
was the last time I heard from her—until now.
    As I quickly replayed my relationship with Cynthia
Dumais, I didn’t fail to take note of Travis Perkins’ relationship
with the governor. Bells began to ring inside my head, and the
word, “governor” lit up the gray matter like “Tilt” on a pinball
machine.
    “Cynthia, what’s going on?” I asked, now
almost as