The Devil's Scribe Read Online Free Page A

frigid, a tough place to farm. Winter reigns half the year, snow piles to the windowsills, and a serious biting cold whips over the empty potato fields.
    Occasionally, someone does freeze solid, and because Luke is one of the few doctors in the area, he’s seen a number of them. A drunk (and there is no shortage of them in St. Andrew) falls asleep against a snowbank and by morning has become a human Popsicle. A boy, skating on the Allagash River, plunges through a weak spot in the ice. Sometimes the body is discovered halfway to Canada, at the junction where the Allagash meets up with the St. John. A hunter goes snow-blind and can’t make his way out of the Great North Woods, his body found sitting with its back against a stump, shotgun lying uselessly across his lap.
    That weren’t no accident , Joe Duchesne, the sheriff, told Luke in disgust when the hunter’s body was brought to the hospital. Old Ollie Ostergaard, he wanted to die. That’s just his way of committing suicide. But Luke suspects if this were true, Ostergaard would have shot himself in the head. Hypothermia is a slow way to go, plenty of time to think better of it.
    Luke eases his truck into an empty parking space at the Aroostook County Hospital, cuts the engine, and promises himself, again, that he is going to get out of St. Andrew. He just has to sell his parents’ farm and then he is going to move, even if he’s not sure where. Luke sighs from habit, yanks the keys out of the ignition, and heads to the entrance to the emergency room.
    The duty nurse nods as Luke walks in, pulling off his gloves. He hangs up his parka in the tiny doctors’ lounge and returns to the admitting area. Judy says, “Joe called. He’s bringing in a disorderly he wants you to look at. Should be here any minute.”
    “Trucker?” When there is trouble, usually it involves one of the drivers for the logging companies. They are notorious for getting drunk and picking fights at the Blue Moon.
    “No.” Judy is absorbed in something she’s doing on the computer. Light from the monitor glints off her bifocals.
    Luke clears his throat for her attention. “Who is it, then? Someone local?” Luke is tired of patching up his neighbors. It seems only fighters, drinkers, and misfits can tolerate the hard-bitten town.
    Judy looks up from the monitor, fist planted on her hip. “No. A woman. And not from around here, either.”
    That is unusual. Women are rarely brought in by the police except when they’re the victim. Occasionally a local wife will be brought in after a brawl with her husband, or in the summer, a female tourist may get out of hand at the Blue Moon. But this time of year, there’s not a tourist to be found.
    Something different to look forward to tonight. He picks up a chart. “Okay. What else we got?” He half-listens as Judy runs down the activity from the previous shift. It was a fairly busy evening but right now, ten P . M ., it’s quiet. Luke goes back to the lounge to wait for the sheriff. He can’t endure another update of Judy’s daughter’s impending wedding, an endless lecture on the cost of bridal gowns, caterers, florists. Tell her to elope, Luke said to Judy once, and she looked at him as though he’d professed to being a member of a terrorist organization. A girl’s wedding is the most important day of her life, Judy scoffed in reply. You don’t have a romantic bone in your body. No wonder Tricia divorced you. He has stopped retorting , Tricia didn’t divorce me, I divorced her, because nobody listens anymore.
    Luke sits on the battered couch in the lounge and tries to distract himself with a Sudoku puzzle. He thinks instead of the drive to the hospital that evening, the houses he passed on the lonely roads, solitary lights burning into the night. What do people do, stuck inside their houses for long hours during the winter evenings? As the town doctor, there are no secrets kept from Luke. He knows all the vices: who beats his wife; who