The Precipice (11 page)

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a human shape arise from behind the gas pump.

“Trevor? Trevor?”

In the confusion, no one had noticed that Trevor Dow had left the boy behind.

12

Inside the store, Charley and I watched as a kneeling Pearlene wiped Toby Dow’s cheeks with a paper napkin. His sneakers, I noticed, were the kind that fastened with Velcro instead of laces.

“There, there,” she croaked. “It’s going to be OK, honey. Your uncle didn’t mean to leave you behind like that. He’ll be back here as soon as he realizes you’re not in the truck.”

Charley and I exchanged glances; we weren’t so certain.

Pearlene massaged Toby’s small pink hand. “Would you like a Milky Way bar?”

The boy lifted his head. “Snickers?”

She settled back on her heels. “Whatever you want, honey. Benton, can you fetch me a Snickers bar?”

“I’ve got it,” I said.

I walked down the aisle, past a display of moose key chains, beeswax candles, and Monson T-shirts, to the candy. I grabbed a handful of large Snickers bars from the box and returned to the checkout counter. Toby all but snatched the chocolate bars from my hand.

“Those are on me.”

“Thanks,” said Pearlene, but her tone wasn’t exactly full of gratitude.

We all waited for the boy to eat the first candy bar, everyone except Charley, who was studying a bulletin board filled with notices offering livestock for sale, announcements of upcoming bean suppers, and shuttle services for hikers who needed a ride to the trailhead. Someone had already posted the
MISSING
poster with the photograph of Samantha and Missy.

Pearlene wiped the smeared chocolate from the boy’s lips. “Do you want to go sit on your bucket, honey?”

Toby Dow nodded his head vigorously.

“Come on, then.” She led him by the hand through the front door.

I stepped over to Charley and lowered my voice so that I wouldn’t be heard by the checkout clerk. “Do you know anything about these Dows?”

“It sounds like they’re the resident bullies.”

The heavy door swung open, and Pearlene came back inside. She wrapped her bony arms around herself and gave a shiver. “Benton, turn down that air conditioning!” She reached for the packet of Virginia Slims in her breast pocket, then stopped herself. “It seems like a person should be able to smoke inside their own goddamned establishment.”

“Trevor Dow has no reason to burn down your store, ma’am,” I said.

Charley sighed through his big nose. “I did embarrass him pretty badly.”

“That’s right!” said Pearlene. “You’re exactly right. You’re an old man—no offense—and you made Trevor look like a wimp. He’s not going to let that go. He knows the story’s going to get around Monson. He needs to show this town what a badass he is.”

I lifted my cap and scratched the back of my head. “Do you want us to talk to the Piscataquis County sheriff about the Dows?”

“It wouldn’t do any good,” she said. “Maybe if I pay them off in free beer, they’ll leave this place alone.”

A prematurely old-looking man set a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon on the counter. It wasn’t even eight o’clock, and already he was buying beer. If you stake out most convenience stores in Maine, you’ll find the morning rush includes a fair number of alcoholics.

I stared at Charley. “This is the place where Chad McDonough bought his case of Budweiser.”

“I expect it is.”

“Do you think Samantha and Missy came here, too?”

Charley shrugged.

I glanced at my wristwatch and realized that the altercation with Trevor Dow had caused us to run late for DeFord’s morning briefing. I handed my credit card to the tall man behind the counter and paid for the gasoline, the bottle of water I’d dropped on the floor, and the candy bars I’d bought for Toby.

“Can you give me a receipt?” I asked Benton. The Warden Service reimbursed my gasoline purchases.

“Printer’s broken,” he mumbled.

“That figures.” I could have sworn I’d heard it spitting out tape earlier.

After the refrigerated climate inside the store, the heat of the parking lot felt subtropical. As I reached for my keys, I spotted Toby Dow by the side of the building. He was sitting on an overturned five-gallon bucket on which someone had scrawled the words
Mayor of Monson
with a permanent marker, and he was pretending to talk on a cracked cell phone.

I went over to him. “Who are you talking to?”

He stared at me with eyes as shiny as new pennies. “Tom Brady.”

“Say hello for me.”

He pressed the oversized phone to his cheek again. “Yeah? OK? Uh-huh.”

“I’m sorry if I hurt you, Toby. I didn’t mean to if I did.”

He lowered the broken phone and held out his soft palm. “Pay the toll, please.”

“What?”

“Pay the toll, please.”

I thrust my hand into my pants pockets and found a quarter. When I laid the coin in the boy’s hand, he shook his head. I got my wallet out and found a wrinkled dollar.

“Always heard the taxes around here were steep,” Charley said after I’d climbed behind the wheel again. He put on the expensive sunglasses I had given him.

*   *   *

The parking lot behind the fire station was so packed with cars and trucks that we had to leave my pickup on the street.

I’d been afraid that we were going to miss some sort of public address by the lieutenant, but people were still milling about in groups. The game wardens in green, the state troopers in blue, the sheriff’s deputies in brown. The volunteers were a motley crew—men and women of all ages—dressed in hiking gear. A few wore blaze orange or reflective yellow vests. The decals and bumper stickers on their vehicles announced their affiliations: Moosehead Search and Rescue, Wilderness Rescue Team, Maine Search and Rescue Dogs. There was even a horse trailer from the Maine Mounted Search and Rescue unit parked at the far end, where the horses wouldn’t be spooked by the constant opening and shutting of metal doors.

It all made for a clubby atmosphere, as if we were all gathered for a friendly sporting event instead of a desperate mission to find two lost women. I saw Kathy Frost kneeling down beside a German shepherd, scratching its nape while she spoke with a smile to the dog’s warden handler.

In the light of day, my former sergeant didn’t look much healthier than she had the night before. Her skin was sallow, almost waxy-looking, but her hair didn’t seem so limp. And I still found it strange to see her dressed in hiking clothes at a search instead of in her sergeant’s uniform.

“What happened?” she asked. “Did you oversleep?”

“Charley got into a fistfight outside the gas station.”

“A what?”

“Tell her, Charley.”

Somehow, I’d already managed to lose my friend. As I scanned the crowd, I saw Nissen talking with Dani Tate.

“I don’t know where he disappeared to,” I said.

“I need to get moving anyway,” said Kathy. “We’re sending a K-9 team up to Chairback Gap to see if we can pick up Samantha’s and Missy’s ground scent. Another is going to cross the Pleasant River and go through the Hermitage. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” She took a hesitant step toward an idling patrol truck. “Oh, yeah. DeFord is looking for you.”

“He is?”

“It’s about your friend McDonut.”

Whatever it was couldn’t be good. Suddenly, the pancakes I’d eaten for breakfast felt very heavy in my stomach.

I felt a tap on my shoulder, and turning, I found myself face-to-face with a grinning Charley Stevens. “You’ll never guess what I found.”

“Surprise,” said Stacey.

I couldn’t see her eyes behind her oversized iridescent sunglasses, but her mischievous smile made me cough out a laugh. She had tied her long hair in a ponytail, and she was wearing a gray T-shirt with the insignia of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, olive drab cargo pants, and hiking boots. A camouflage backpack hung from her shoulders.

I wrapped my arms around her. “What are you doing here?”

“I heard you needed volunteers.”

Stacey had participated in other search-and-rescue missions. She was a pilot and a wilderness first responder. I shouldn’t have been startled to see her. I pressed my face to her ear and got a loose strand of hair in my mouth. Her body felt warm from standing in the sun.

“I was worried when you didn’t answer my e-mail,” I said.

“
You
were worried about me? You’re the most accident-prone person I’ve ever met, Bowditch. Tell me again how many bones you have broken?”

“I lost count after ten.” I tightened my grip around her waist. “I’m just glad to see you.”

She patted my back to let me know that I needed to release her. I blushed when I saw Kathy’s and Charley’s amused expressions.

“You two go right ahead,” Kathy said. “Just pretend we’re not here.”

She shook Charley’s and Stacey’s hands before she left. She moved with an unmistakable gingerness. It took me a moment to focus my thoughts again.

“Lieutenant DeFord is looking for me,” I said. “Can you wait here?”

“That depends on whether my old man is going to let me fly his plane today.”

Charley’s hair was white and bristly in the sunshine. “Sounds like too many pilots in the cockpit to me.”

“I’ll be right back,” I said.

I wove my way through the crowd, heading for the mobile command post. As I passed a row of warden trucks, I heard a woman call my name. It was Danielle Tate. The young warden had eluded Nissen and his awkward advances. Her black boots were shining as if she’d gotten up early to polish them, and she was as full of energy and enthusiasm as ever. She wore mirrored sunglasses, which showed me a haggard face I didn’t want to believe was mine.

“What’s this I’m hearing about coyotes?” Like just about every employee of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, she pronounced the word in the western fashion:
ki-yotes
. “Nonstop Nissen told me the girls were being stalked by them.”

And I’d thought he couldn’t do anything more to piss me off. “They wrote in their last diary entry that they’d heard coyotes outside the lean-to. They never said anything about being stalked.”

“Nissen said the coyotes followed them from Cloud Pond to Chairback Gap.” Dani Tate tended to speak in an artificially gruff voice, probably as a way to project authority that wouldn’t be afforded an officer of her gender and height.

“That’s just hearsay, based on what a hiker told us at Hudson’s Lodge.”

“So you don’t think there’s anything to it?”

“Absolutely not,” I said.

“Crazy rumors always fly around during times like this,” Tate said, as if she were a seasoned veteran and not a twenty-four-year-old rookie. “The other one is that there’s a serial killer on the AT and the feds have been covering it up.”

In my mind I saw the stony face of the FBI agent who had watched DeFord debrief me inside the mobile command post the night before.

“Covering it up how?”

“Saying the deaths were accidents instead of homicides. Not admitting there’s a pattern. What do you think about that?”

“I think that serial killers are what we have today instead of wolves,” I said. “Monsters lurking in the woods.”

“That doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”

“Have you seen DeFord? I’ve heard he’s been looking for me.”

“He’s inside the RV. Some of us are headed up to Baxter State Park to coordinate with the rangers and interview thru-hikers. But it doesn’t sound like you’re going with us.”

“Where am I going?”

“Back to Hudson’s, I heard.” She shifted her weight from side to side and pursed her lips. “So, I saw that Stacey Stevens is here.”

“That’s right.”

I waited for her to say more, but she walked away.

So the lieutenant wanted to bring in Chad McDonough after all. But why send me back to the lodge? Why not send a state trooper? It wasn’t as if I had established a great rapport with this McDonut.

I knocked on the metal door of the mobile command post and waited, my stomach turning flip-flops. Lieutenant DeFord himself opened the door. He stepped down, forcing me backward.

“There you are, Bowditch. I’m on my way home. I need to take a shower before I meet the plane with the girls’ parents in Greenville. Come walk with me.”

“Yes, sir.”

We started toward his unmarked patrol truck.

DeFord’s chin was stubbled, and there were bags under his eyes that hadn’t been there last night. I wondered if he’d slept at all. “How was your room?” he asked.

“I was tired enough, it didn’t matter where I slept.”

“That’s good.” His mind seemed to be elsewhere.

“I ran into Danielle Tate. She mentioned that you wanted me to go back to Hudson’s.”

The lieutenant stopped to avoid a state police cruiser passing through the lot. “I need you to track down Chad McDonough.”

“He’s not at the lodge?”

“Caleb Maxwell said he took off before dawn. He almost slipped out of there without being seen, but he ran into a woman coming back from the showers. McDonough told her he was getting an early start because he wanted to see Gulf Hagas before he hit the trail again. Maxwell didn’t realize he’d left until breakfast. McDonough must have known that leaving in the dark would seem suspicious.”

I thought back to my conversation with the pudgy section hiker. “I’m not sure he has that level of self-awareness.”

“You said he was complaining about his sprained knee still hurting?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, he left his splint under his bed, so it must have healed overnight.”

I knew I should have pressed the kid harder. He’d struck me as a harmless fabulist—those outlandish stories about Jekyll Island and his junior year in Paris—but I should have been more skeptical. I realized now why DeFord was assigning me the task of hunting McDonough down. He wanted the experience to be a lesson to me.

We’d reached the lieutenant’s truck. “He’s driving a Kia Soul with Mass vanity plates.
MDONUT
, of course. Ross says he didn’t leave the car at the rooming house, and the state police didn’t find it at the trailhead outside town. He didn’t tell you where he parked it, I suppose?”