Bad Little Falls (25 page)

Rivard returned to the line, asking me what I could see.

“Nothing” was my answer.

Nevertheless, we kept looking—and followed the river to Bad Little Falls. As it cascaded into the bay, the Machias was such a raging torrent—with so many plunging waterfalls and swirling eddies capable of sucking entire logs to the bottom without a trace—it seemed futile even to hope. Eventually, I stopped trying. I lowered my binoculars and buckled myself back into my seat.

“Do you think it was a suicide?” I asked Rivard. “Or did he have some crazy idea about getting across?”

“We’ll never know.”

After I hung up, I put on the headset and told Stacey to set me down near my truck at the Gardner Lake boat launch.

“You mean that’s it?” she asked. “Shouldn’t we keep looking?”

“If we haven’t seen him now, it means he’s probably stuck on something beneath the surface, or the hydrodynamics of the falls are keeping him submerged.”

“The wardens will recover the body,” said Charley. “You can’t send divers anywhere near those falls, though, so that’s going to complicate things. The river’s tidal below the waterfall. They might have to look all the way down the bay before they find him.”

At least I knew what I would be doing for the near future: scouting the river for a corpse.

“It seems anticlimactic,” said Stacey.

“Not everything has a neat ending,” I replied.

Where is Jamie at this moment? I wondered. Does she know? Has anyone told her? It felt very urgent and important for me to be the one to break the news.

Stacey brought the plane around for an approach on Gardner Lake. Once again, the ice fishermen all paused in their chitchatting to watch the Cessna drop down out of the white sky and skate across the frozen pond. The propeller roared as we slid to a stop just yards from the boat ramp.

Both Charley and Stacey got out of the plane to bid me good-bye.

Stacey, I discovered, was taller than her father, nearly six feet, and slender. Her legs were long and her shoulders were broad for a woman. Physically and, I suspected, in most other ways, she was the opposite of shapely little Jamie Sewall.

Charley clapped one hand on my shoulder and patted my chest with the other. “This was a sad day, so let’s make plans for a happier one. Ora will be heartbroken if you don’t join us for supper soon. We could go ice fishing for some of those big salmon we’ve got up at West Grand Lake.”

Stacey folded her arms above her breasts and studied us. She had propped her sunglasses atop her head. I finally had a good look at her face. Her eyes were almond-shaped and as green as Chinese jade. Those are the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen, I thought with some discomfort.

“I’m sorry I dragged you into this,” I said.

“Just let me know when you recover his body.”

“Your father will hear about it first,” I said. “Somehow he gets all the news before anyone else in the Warden Service.”

“That’s because he’s the biggest gossip in the North Woods.”

Charley lifted his chin and grunted. I don’t think he cherished his daughter’s relentless teasing.

In preparation for takeoff, she lowered her glasses back to the bridge of her nose. Until that moment, I hadn’t noticed the engagement ring on her finger. The diamond was the size of a pea.

I extended my right hand to Stacey. “Thanks for the plane ride.”

She had her father’s iron grip. “Good luck,” she said.

I saw my dopey reflection again in her mirrored sunglasses.

*   *   *

In my truck, I tried to decide what to do about Jamie. Should I call her on my cell? And tell her what? If she hadn’t yet heard, then I couldn’t very well inform her over the phone that her beloved brother was now dead. My sixth sense told me she had already rushed to the scene. Machias was such a small town. News of a dangerous prisoner escaping from the hospital was the sort of information that moved from person to person with the speed of electrical impulses flashing between neurons.

My phone rang, settling the question. It was Rivard, asking me to meet him where Sylvan Street dead-ended. It was a little riverside neighborhood, near the spot where Prester had disappeared.

As I drove into town, it dawned on me that, in all likelihood, Zanadakis would be closing his case now. Prester’s flight from the hospital seemed a self-incriminating act. Why run if he wasn’t guilty of killing Randall Cates? Then there was the manner of Prester’s death. Whether or not you could brand his actions as suicidal, at the very least they suggested the mind-set of a man who would prefer drowning over a lifetime spent behind bars.

The whole episode flew in the face of everything Jamie believed. She had been so vehement about her brother’s innocence. How would she process the information that he was, in fact, (a) a murderer and (b) dead? I was having trouble accepting these realities myself, and I barely knew the guy. The twin bombshells would blow Jamie to pieces.

By the time I arrived at the end of Sylvan Street, there were only a few police vehicles left: Rivard’s patrol truck, the sheriff’s Crown Vic, and two white cruisers with the Washington County star on the door. Deputy Dunbar stood in the street with his hands raised, indicating I should stop.

I rolled down my window. “Any news?”

“I’m looking for a new job,” he said. “Does that count?”

“Seriously?”

“How the hell was I supposed to know he was strong enough to run away? I was just trying to help the kids who got hurt in that school bus.”

I didn’t particularly like Dunbar, but I sympathized with his plight. In his shoes, with the hospital in such a state of chaos and everyone focused on the injured children, I probably would have left Prester unguarded, as well.

“Have you seen Jamie Sewall?”

He sneered at me. “I thought that was your department.”

I found my capacity for sympathy diminishing rapidly. “Just tell me, Dunbar.”

He made a hitchhiking motion over his shoulder. “Why don’t you ask the sheriff?”

Dunbar stepped away to avoid being clipped by the door of my truck. I brushed past him and headed down the unplowed street. I found Rivard, Sheriff Rhine, and Chief Deputy Corbett standing in a snow-covered yard fifty feet from the river. A few snowflakes drifted past on the breeze.

“Just the person we were talking about,” said the sheriff.

“Where’s Jamie?”

“She showed up at the hospital during the search,” Rhine said. “I had a deputy escort her home.”

Jamie didn’t strike me as the sort of person who would follow police orders, especially when they involved separating her from someone she loved. “How did you accomplish that feat?”

“We told her he might try to call home,” Corbett said.

Rhine fiddled with her turquoise ring. “I’m headed over to her house now.”

“And you want me to go with you,” I said.

“How’d you guess?”

Rivard moved a wad of tobacco around in his cheek. “You didn’t tell me you were dating the suspect’s sister, Bowditch.”

“I’m not dating her.” Technically, this was not a lie.

“Whatever you want to call it,” said the sheriff, “I’d like you to come with me to break the news.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I’m not doing it for you, I’m doing it for
her.
This kind of news is always better coming from someone you trust.”

Rivard tried to work some stiffness out of his neck by moving his head around. “When you’re done with the sheriff, give me a call, and we’ll talk about the recovery efforts. I need to talk with the dive team and airboat guys. I have no clue how they’re going to tackle this one.”

“Maybe they should just string a net at the base of the falls,” said the sheriff.

“Crazier ideas have been tried,” replied Rivard.

I stared past them at the frozen river. The opposite shore seemed deceptively close at this stretch, and the light was dull enough that you couldn’t see the treacherousness of the ice. Beneath its thin coating of windblown snow, it looked solid. Maybe Prester really had expected to get across. It was confusing that he could have shown such a determination to live when he was lost in that snowstorm and then have decided to end his life just days later.

“Throwing yourself into a waterfall is a hell of way to commit suicide,” I said. “I don’t think he intended to die.”

“You didn’t see the look on his face,” said Corbett. His own face was blazing red from the cold wind.

Until that moment, I hadn’t realized it was the chief deputy who had pursued Prester out onto the ice. “From the plane, he looked like he was taking tentative steps,” I said. “He didn’t appear to be racing headlong to his death.”

Rivard started in on his sore neck with both palms. “Does it make any difference?”

It will to Jamie, I thought.

“It was a suicide,” Corbett said, his voice rising. “I don’t know why it’s such a difficult concept to accept. The guy was maimed for life. He was in agony from the detox. And he was headed to jail on a murder rap. Those are three good reasons to end it all, if you ask me.”

I remained unconvinced, but Rhine pursed her lips, as if she could see the logic.

Rivard just didn’t seem to give a shit.

The sheriff motioned me to follow her to our vehicles. “Come on, Bowditch. Let’s get this over with.”

I gave one last look at the river and dug my hands into my parka pockets. Rhine didn’t speak to Dunbar as she strode past, but she fixed him with a withering stare, which caused the woeful deputy to examine his boots.

I’d scarcely gotten behind the wheel before the sheriff took off at warp speed. It was fortunate Roberta Rhine was the chief law-enforcement officer, or she would have racked up more speeding tickets than anyone in Washington County. I started the engine and turned around in hot pursuit.

27

The sheriff arrived at the Sewall house before I did and took the only parking space in the largely unshoveled driveway, pulling into the slot beside Jamie’s van.

I turned off the engine and studied the house. What a wreck it was on the outside. The asphalt shingles were flaking away from the rooftop like dead skin from a dry scalp. A rusted washing machine rose from a snowbank in the lawn like a weird garden sculpture. Jamie had hung some laundry to dry on a clothesline in the front yard—bedsheets and towels—but the hyperborean temperatures had frozen them solid.

I knew that she killed herself trying to keep everything spick-and-span inside. She mopped and vacuumed and dusted every surface. I had the sense it was a recovery thing: literally getting her house in order. But the face the house showed the street was drawn and haggard, a reflection of its owner’s recent afflictions and a reminder how tenuous a hold she had on sobriety.

Jamie had shown up at my motel door with beer, which seemed unwise for someone in AA, even if she was drinking Diet Coke, and then there were the five empty bottles this morning, when I recalled consuming only four. But maybe I was mistaken. And maybe the Higher Power she couldn’t quite believe was real would assert itself now and stand between the sucker punch headed her way and the seemingly inevitable fall that would result.

I joined Rhine at the foot of the walkway. Fat snowflakes drifted like falling cherry blossoms on the breeze. The beauty of it seemed jarring, given our morbid task.

I’d participated in only one death notification so far, visiting the family of a young man who’d crashed his snowmobile into a tree, but I’d had with me the Reverend Deborah Davies, who served as one of the Warden Service’s two female chaplains. Her presence proved a great help when the mother collapsed to the floor, insensible from the shock.

“I hate this part of the job,” Rhine said.

“I’m surprised you didn’t bring a chaplain along.”

“I wouldn’t be much of a sheriff if I didn’t do my own dirty work.”

The more time I spent with Rhine, the more I respected her. She was notorious in law-enforcement circles, known for her Pocahontas hairstyle, her public feud with state bureaucrats, and the landslide elections that kept returning her to office. When you picture a Maine county sheriff, the first image that springs to mind isn’t a gimlet-eyed lesbian, and yet Roberta Rhine had won the job and made it her own in a part of the world not known for its open-mindedness. I was beginning to understand why.

I followed her up the snow-dusted wheelchair ramp.

Lucas answered when the doorbell rang. He blinked at us silently through thick glasses. His hair was wet and smeared across his bulbous forehead. He wore pants rolled at the cuffs to fit his stunted legs and a long-sleeved sweatshirt decorated with the leering face of Batman’s archnemesis, the Joker.

“Hello, Lucas,” I said. “Is your mom at home?”

“I didn’t do nothing!”

“We’re here to see your mother,” explained the sheriff.

He spun away from us. “Ma!”

A woman’s voice croaked from a distant room. “Who’s at the door?”

“The cops!”

And then he took off up the stairs. I remembered what Jamie had said to me the night before, how I reminded her of Lucas. The comparison left me baffled and disturbed. All I could conclude was that she hoped I might take a paternal interest in the kid. Having met his father and uncle, I could understand why Lucas might require another male role model.

The house smelled of cigarettes. What I’d first taken to be wood smoke from the stove was, in fact, burning tobacco. A bubble of fear unlike anything I had felt before formed in my stomach.

I am about to cause someone great pain, I realized.

Jamie emerged from the living room, still dressed in her McDonald’s uniform. She usually pinned up her hair to work, but she must have lost a barrette during the day, because a strand of hair hung in her eyes, which were already bloodshot from crying or smoking. She hung in the doorway as if barred from approaching by an invisible force field.

“Where is he?” The question was directed at me, as if we were alone in the motel room again.

“May we come in, Jamie?” the sheriff asked.

“Tell me first.”

The cold tickled the hairs along my neck, but I stopped myself from shivering. Stillness seemed important at this moment. I wasn’t sure how to begin.