The Precipice (12 page)

Unlike Samantha and Missy, who had been been hiking since March, Chad McDonough was doing a single leg of the Appalachian Trail, meaning he had to coordinate transportation getting to and from the Hundred Mile Wilderness. “I assumed he’d left his car in Monson,” I said. “Maybe he parked it at Abol Bridge, then had a shuttle pick him up and drop him off at the trailhead.”

“I’ll have Fitzpatrick send a trooper across the Golden Road to take a look,” DeFord said.

“What should I do when I find him?” I asked.

“Bring him over to the Greenville HQ so Pinkham can interrogate him.”

“What if McDonough doesn’t want to come willingly?”

DeFord used both hands to pull himself up into the pickup. “I think he will.”

“Why do you say that?”

He kept the door open as he turned the key in the ignition. “An hour ago, we got a call from the Appalachian Mountain Club. A couple camping along the river found something downstream of Gulf Hagas. They turned it in to the AMC ranger at the ford. It was a red tent. Or the remains of one, I should say.”

13

After DeFord had driven off, I got myself a cup of coffee from the Salvation Army wagon and mulled over my assignment.

All along I had thought Chad McDonough was fabricating the story about the man in the red tent. Cops are so used to being lied to every day. I knew law-enforcement officers who were incapable of believing anyone was ever telling the whole truth. I had personally fallen into this trap on occasion and had to remind myself what a pathological and dangerous way it was of looking at the world. The possibility that McDonut’s story might actually be true hit me like a bucket of ice water dumped over my head.

The crowd had begun to disperse as different teams got their orders for the day. I looked for Nissen, hoping to confront him. The task of finding Samantha and Missy was daunting enough without rumors going around of four-legged phantoms. But the man was nowhere to be found.

From a distance I saw Stacey rubbing sunscreen on her forehead. She smiled as I approached, and wiped her greasy fingers on her pants. I felt bubble-headed at the thought of her having driven all these miles to join me in the search.

“Where’s Charley?” I asked.

“He caught a ride to his plane with Chris Anson. The two of them were going to talk search patterns.”

Anson was one of the Warden Service’s three active-duty pilots, a former Marine who had served in Iraq and idolized Charley Stevens. Sometimes I forgot that my friend was a mentor to more young men than just myself.

“So you’re not flying with him?”

“I was hoping to find some handsome warden who’d be willing to drive me around all day.”

I pretended to survey the crowd. “Too bad there are none here.”

“That’s just what I was thinking,” she said with a smile.

As we walked up the hill to my truck, I told her about the assignment DeFord had given me to track down the fugitive section hiker. It was a serious conversation, but I couldn’t stop myself from grinning like a teenager whenever we made eye contact.

She climbed into the pickup, sat beside me, and dropped her backpack behind the seat. She sniffed the air loudly. “Did something die in here?”

“Not exactly.”

I’d been sprayed by a skunk a few years earlier, and the embarrassment of seeing people hold their nose everywhere I went was coming back to me.

“You might consider getting one of those little pine tree thingies to hang from your mirror,” she said.

“Thanks for the tip.”

“Always glad to help, Bowditch.”

She put on her sunglasses again. They had emerald frames and enormous lenses that had a greenish purple tint, depending upon the angle of the light. “Those glasses make you look like a bug,” I said.

“Don’t disrespect my shades!” She brought her knee up and pressed it against the glove compartment. “So DeFord suspects McDonut took off when he realized he might be a suspect?”

“He definitely left in a hurry,” I said. “When I talked to him, he made it sound like he was going to stick around the lodge. He claimed that his sprained leg hurt too much to hike.”

“It sounds like something spooked him.”

“Maybe it was me showing up there in the middle of the night.”

“Tell me about this guy, Nissen,” she said. “You said McDonut knew him.”

“Everyone seems to know him. He’s famous—or notorious—among the thru-hikers. We met a couple on top of Chairback, and the woman recognized him, as well.” I leaned forward to look in my side mirror before pulling into traffic. “The one thing I know is that the guy is a world-class asshole. Dani Tate told me Nissen was going around this morning telling everyone that Samantha and Missy were being stalked by a pack of coyotes.”

Stacey snapped her head around in alarm. “What?”

“McDonut said they heard coyotes howling at Cloud Pond. The girls’ last log entry at Chairback also mentioned coyotes.”

“Wonderful,” she said through her teeth. “It’s bad enough that the hunters already have people freaked out about coyotes being ‘coy wolves.’”

“I thought eastern coyotes had wolf DNA.”

“Their skulls and jaws are more wolflike, but it’s not like they’re out in the woods looking for Red Riding Hood.”

In my time as a warden, I had checked the licenses of many coyote hunters and trappers and seen more than a few pelts hanging from hooks. “Some of them are pretty big.”

“Bigger than western coyotes, but we’re still talking about forty-pound animals.” Her voice was getting louder the longer we talked. “I just hate to see any species vilified.”

Most of the outdoorsmen I knew in Maine hated coyotes with a passion. Whenever I visited a rod and gun club, I heard horror stories about coyotes chasing deer onto slippery ice or herding them into snowbanks where they could be eaten alive. The reasons for this disdain were primarily selfish, I’d assumed, because the predators competed with human hunters for deer. Truth be told, they were far from my favorite animals, since I myself had seen their bloody work in many frozen cedar swamps.

Stacey was the only wildlife biologist I knew who stuck up for them. She despised the snaring program the department had implemented to control their populations, calling it a waste of money, since scientific research showed that coyotes reacted to such drastic measures by having more pups. If nothing else, the animals were survivors.

I knew that a pack of coyotes had attacked and killed a young woman in Nova Scotia some years ago, but I didn’t want to make Stacey any madder by bringing up the incident. “How would you feel about hiking the Rim Trail at Gulf Hagas? McDonut told a woman at Hudson’s that he was headed over there.”

“Don’t you think he was lying?”

“Probably,” I said. “But we’ve got to start somewhere.”

Outside of Monson, we passed the place where the Appalachian Trail crosses Route 15 and entered the Hundred Mile Wilderness. There were two Warden Service trucks parked in the lot and a hodgepodge of other vehicles—belonging to volunteers in all likelihood—alongside the road.

“Stop!” said Stacey.

I hit the brakes harder than I’d intended. The impact jolted us both forward against our seat belts.

“What is it?”

“I want to see something.”

The engine was still idling when Stacey got out and began jogging back toward the trailhead. I grabbed my keys from the ignition and hurried to catch up with her.

Thousands of people walked this section of the AT each year, but you never would have known it from the path, which was almost a tunnel running through a thick stand of birches, hemlocks, and firs. Green branches pressed together overhead. The trail itself was crisscrossed with tangled roots, worn smooth of their bark beneath the boots of so many hikers. I followed Stacey down from the parking lot and into the cooler dark of the forest. A dank and decaying odor circulated in the shadows—seemed, in fact, to be the smell of the shadows.

The sign where Samantha and Missy had taken their last picture was located in a sun-warmed clearing about fifty yards from the highway. It had been set in concrete to keep vandals from toppling it over. The women must have climbed onto the base to have posed the way they did. To our left was a denim-blue body of water, which the map said was one of the Spectacle Ponds.

Someone had tacked the
MISSING
poster to the base of the brown sign. Stacey paused before it. She crossed her arms and shivered noticeably, despite having emerged from the murky wood into sunshine.

“Baby Ruth and Naomi Walks,” she said. “God, they look so young.”

“We’re not that much older than they are.”

“Yeah, we are.”

A dragonfly landed on her shoulder and fluttered its cellophane wings. Its thorax was light brown and it had white shoulder stripes and a black line down its abdomen—a chalk-fronted corporal. Another one landed beside it. Stacey paid no attention to them.

“Tell me about Samantha and Missy,” she said.

“They graduated early this spring from Pentecost University in South Carolina so they could hike the AT. After they finished the trail, they were headed to West Africa to do some sort of missionary work.”

She blew air through her nose, loud enough for me to hear.

“What?” I said.

“Pentecost was the school in the news last year that expelled a lesbian student when one of the administrators saw her wedding photos on Facebook. They claimed she’d violated their ‘Lifestyle Covenant.’” Two more dragonflies landed, one on her bare arm, the other on the toe of her boot. “What else do you know about them?”

“They went to high school together in Buckhead, Georgia, before Pentecost.”

“Do they have brothers or sisters?”

“I don’t know.”

“How are we going to find them if we don’t know anything about them?”

It was a good question. “DeFord has been talking to the families. The parents are flying into Greenville this morning. He’s gone to the airport to meet them.”

“God, I can’t even imagine what they’re going through.”

She turned back toward the poster and started to shake.

“Are you all right?” I thought she might be crying.

She spun around, and all the insects took flight. Her jaw was firm, and her face was flushed with blood.

“I’m
mad,
” she said. “And you should be, too. Someone killed those women, and it wasn’t a bunch of fucking coyotes. Do you know what I think about when I look at that poster?”

“No.”

“I think they look just like me when I was their age. The difference is that I survived.”

14

The woods, which had been so dense on either side of the road, began to give way to fields and house lots as we approached Greenville. When Thoreau had visited Moosehead Lake in 1853, lumberjacks were just beginning to range out into the surrounding forests, clearing miles of timber. Horse teams would haul the felled trees to the lake, where steamers would surround the floating logs with booms and pull them to the outlet of the Kennebec River. From there, they would be washed downstream to the sawmills. I often thought of his essay “Chesuncook” whenever I crested Indian Hill and found myself dumbstruck by the shimmering vista before me.

Thoreau had called Moosehead “a suitably wild-looking sheet of water, sprinkled with small, low islands, which were covered with shaggy spruce and other wild wood—seen over the infant port of Greenville, with mountains on each side and far in the north, and a steamer’s smoke-pipe rising above a roof.” The description still held true, although the loggers were gone, and the last remaining steamship, the MV
Katahdin,
now ferried tourists to Mount Kineo, where they could snap pictures of the rhyolite cliffs rising above the hard blue chop. In Thoreau’s days, there was “no village, and no summer road in this direction.” Now there were magnificent lakefront estates with Cigarette boats docked out front, a nine-hole golf course, and even plans for a condominium development on the undisturbed shores of Lily Bay.

We drove through Greenville’s tiny downtown—just a crossroads with a blinking red light and a string of restaurants and souvenir shops extending out to each point of the compass—and turned right, headed uphill and inland again toward the western border of the Hundred Mile Wilderness. As we neared the Greenville Airport, I caught sight of a familiar yellow Volkswagen Beetle at the side of the road. A gray-haired woman in a green uniform was kneeling beside the back right tire. I slowed down.

Stacey sat up from her slouch and adjusted her sunglasses. “What’s going on?”

“It’s Deb Davies.”

The Warden Service chaplain was a Methodist minister who lived on a back-to-the-land farm, complete with Silkie chickens and Angora goats, down in central Maine. I had a closer relationship with her than most of my fellow officers. Over the years, the Reverend Davies had come to see herself as my personal spiritual adviser, thanks to the many opportunities my supervisors had given me to seek counseling after my puzzlingly frequent brushes with death.

She had short hair, which she stiffened into spikes with some kind of gel or foam. Since I’d last seen her three months earlier, she’d swapped her blue-framed glasses for red-framed ones. This morning, she was wearing her dress uniform and her white clerical collar. I realized instantly where she had been headed when she got her flat tire.

Stacey and I got out of the truck at the same time and met her on the sand shoulder.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” I said. “Did you call AAA?”

“Hey there, stranger!”

“It’s good to see you, Deb.”

Davies turned to Stacey with a tentative smile. “How are you, Stacey?”

The two women formally shook hands. “What’s wrong with the Love Bug?” Stacey asked.

“There’s a nail in my tire, and I’m already running late.”

“You must be headed to the airport,” I said.

She blinked and made an exaggerated look of surprise. “I always forget about your deductive powers,” she said. “It’s not just me meeting the plane. The commissioner is also flying in to welcome Samantha’s and Missy’s families.” She meant Marianne Matthews, who directed the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.