The Precipice (21 page)

“It’s still going to take time,” she countered. “And meanwhile, everyone in the state of Maine is going to start panicking about ‘killer coyotes’ on the loose. Even after the medical examiner releases his findings, you know it won’t stop the rumors.” She shook her head, as if she felt sorry for me. “Two attractive young Christian girls get stalked and eaten by wild dogs in Vacationland. That’s a story no one can resist. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. People want to believe in big bad wolves. But only humans can be truly evil.”

23

Shortly after nightfall, Lieutenant DeFord pulled most of his men out of the woods. It had gotten too dark to examine the death scene with portable lights, and the medical examiner was concerned evidence might be missed and the area would be further contaminated. DeFord arranged for a contingent of Division C wardens to keep everyone out of that part of the forest. The investigation of the woods at the base of the precipice would resume at first light.

I was prepared to stick around. I traveled with a sleeping bag in my truck, and the thought of leaving Samantha and Missy (or what was left of them) felt like the worst sort of abandonment.

But DeFord took me aside. He held two plastic bags in his hands containing swatches of red-stained fabric. “Where’s Stacey?”

I pointed down the logging road to where my truck was parked, out of sight in the darkness. “On the radio with her father.”

“I’m thinking you should take her home,” he said. “She seemed really shaken up. Pinkham shouldn’t have taken her in there, but he wanted to know if the condition of the remains is consistent with a canine attack or if it looked like the corpses had been scavenged.”

“What did she say?”

“Inconclusive.” He wiped his hand across his bristled chin. “She said they’ve been dead awhile, though. There are bones everywhere, and some have been gnawed by mice and porcupines.”

“Rodents are always the last ones at the dinner table.”

He didn’t seem to have heard me. “Right now we don’t have a clue how they died,” he said, as if to himself. “The coyotes might have killed them, or they might have fallen off that cliff, or we might find bullet holes when we get a closer look at their skulls. And now I have to drive back to Greenville, wake up their parents, and ask them if they recognize a shredded sock and part of a bandana, because all that’s left of their daughters is a pile of bones.”

“Lieutenant!”

Stacey came running back into the lighted clearing, eyes wide with alarm. She’d removed the rubber band from her hair, which now swung loose on her shoulders.

“What is it?” DeFord said.

“Samantha’s and Missy’s parents are down at the turnoff. They’re trying to get past the troopers.”

“Goddamn it.”

“It’s worse than that,” she said. “The Reverend Mott brought along a television crew.”

The lieutenant thrust the plastic bags into my hand. “Give these to Pinkham. Then grab some men and meet me down at the road.”

DeFord took off at a sprint down the hill. Stacey, as usual, was right on his heels. She always needed to be in the middle of things. I could only imagine the reverend’s rage when he saw her face again.

I found Wes Pinkham conferring in quiet tones with a bald man with a neat white goatee and gold spectacles. He was dressed as if he’d come directly from the golf course: navy polo shirt and creased slacks. He was the state’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Walter Kitteridge. Both men looked puzzled when I pushed the evidence bags on them.

“What’s going on?” Pinkham asked.

“The Reverend Mott has called a press conference at the bottom of the mountain,” I explained. “DeFord wants me to get some wardens down there.”

I grabbed Brochu and Volk, and the three of us quickstepped down the road. The night was so dark I tripped on a stone and nearly went cartwheeling. Up ahead was a constellation of artificial lights: blue, white, and amber. As we drew near, the scene slowly resolved itself out of the blackness. Two state troopers had parked their cruisers to prevent a television van and the Escalade from driving into the clearing. Close to a dozen people—the families and reporters—pushed against the barricaded vehicles. The freaky illumination exaggerated their faces, making the people look like caricatures of themselves.

Lieutenant DeFord stood with his hands up in the light of the television camera, almost as if he were being robbed at gunpoint. “Can you guys stop taping? I’m not going to give you a statement.”

“I want to know where my daughter is!” said Samantha’s father.

Reverend Mott had rolled up the cuffs of his dress shirt. “The families have a right to see what you’ve found, Lieutenant.”

Missy’s mother seemed about to slump to the ground. Her husband had his arms around her waist, but she was a big woman, and he seemed to be having trouble. She was moving her lips silently, and I realized she must be praying.

Stacey hung back at the edge of the light. Caleb Maxwell stood beside her, shoulder to shoulder. I’d lost track of him after DeFord sent Nissen and the other volunteers away.

In my experience, local television people were generally an obliging lot. They rarely pushed the Warden Service too hard, out of fear of jeopardizing their future access. But the reporter with the microphone had a young face I didn’t recognize, and he could smell a career-making story.

“Is it true the girls were killed by coyotes?”

So the rumors were already flying, just as Stacey had feared.

“Oh God!” Samantha’s mother said.

DeFord held his hand up to block the spotlight. “Can you please turn that off?”

Headlights approached from beyond the television vans. A police horn barked. The camera turned toward the new vehicle. The unmarked state police cruiser stopped and both of the front doors swung open simultaneously. Sergeant Fitzpatrick stepped into the kaleidoscope. With him was Commissioner Matthews. Neither of them spoke a word, but Matthews advanced fast on the young TV reporter and lifted her brightly painted mouth to his ear. I don’t know what she whispered, but the microphone nearly dropped from his hand.

“Turn it off, Randy,” he told his cameraman.

The Reverend Mott puffed up his chest. “Mrs. Matthews—”

“I’ll be with you in a minute, Reverend.” She slid past him. “Lieutenant DeFord!”

The three of them—Matthews, DeFord, and Fitzpatrick—huddled together. Except for Samantha’s mother, who had begun to sob, everyone else had fallen silent, waiting to see what was decided. I made my way over to Stacey.

“What a shit show,” she whispered.

“How do you think they found out?”

“Maybe one of those searchers called the media.”

“Nissen?”

“Reverend Mott!” Matthews motioned him over.

I saw the pastor’s golden pompadour nod each time the commissioner finished a sentence. DeFord pointed up the logging road, and they all followed his outstretched arm with their intent eyes. Then they went back to talking.

After a few minutes, Mott returned to the families and gathered them together. Missy’s mother straightened her spine. Samantha’s mom stopped crying. The five of them formed a circle and held hands.

“Let us bow our heads in prayer,” the reverend said, as if speaking to a packed church. “Let us remember the words of the Psalms. ‘God is near to those that are broken at heart; and those who are crushed in spirit he saves.’ For we find ourselves here—parents and friends of Samantha and Missy—brokenhearted and crushed in spirit. We can’t help but ask why you have taken these girls from us, Lord. You who also lost a child and know the agony of grief. Bring peace to those of us who are suffering and hear our prayers that you grant salvation to our lost children.”

Stacey reached up, squeezed my shoulder, and said, “I need to get out of here.”

I’d assumed that she would want to keep a vigil with me until Samantha’s and Missy’s remains were brought out of the woods. But I could see her chest rising and falling, and see her tears, and I knew what I needed to do.

“All right.”

She turned and disappeared from the light in the direction of my parked truck.

Mott began to shout, his words ringing through the trees: “Tonight we find ourselves screaming in a screaming wilderness. God, have mercy on us. We are confused and angry, and we don’t understand the powerful mystery of your ways. Lead us out of our own darkness and back into the light of your love and grace.”

I approached DeFord and said, “Stacey wants me to take her home.”

His expression was firm, almost cold, but I knew it was just a mask he was putting on. Being a police officer means that you are frequently a witness to the worst moments in people’s lives. In those instances, you do your best to maintain your composure and separate yourself from the other person’s pain. Most of the time you hold it together. Sometimes you fail.

Without a word spoken, the lieutenant gave me leave to go.

As we drove out of there, Stacey turned away from the grieving families. They were still holding hands, still saying their prayers. I watched their benediction in my rearview mirror, the glow of the emergency lights growing fainter and fainter as we left them all behind.

*   *   *

News spreads quickly in rural places, quicker than in cities and suburbs even. There are fewer distractions, and so when something dramatic takes place—a selectman is arrested for drunk driving, a farmhouse burns to the ground—the entire community becomes consumed by it. Rumors spread like a contagion. Schoolrooms, diners, and churches become vectors of gossip.

I could almost hear the conversations traveling through the telephone wires along the side of the road:

“Those two girls from Georgia were eaten by coyotes
.”

“I always said those coy wolves were going to kill someone. Only a matter of time.”

“Well, maybe now the state’ll get serious about shooting the damned things.”

“Too late for those Bible students, though.”

Stacey was right: It wouldn’t matter if the forensic pathologist determined that the women were murdered or had died from a fall off the precipice. Some people would still believe the coyotes were to blame. This freak occurrence would validate their prior fear and loathing. No scientific proof can make someone stop hating something if their hatred gives them pleasure.

Deer eyes flashed green in my high beams, then disappeared into the thick cover along the side of the road.

“What did your dad say?” I asked when the silence became too much for me.

“He knew when he saw the ravens that it was them.” She shut her eyes and massaged the bridge of her nose. “He predicts there will be a panic, and the governor is going to do something stupid.”

We passed the gatehouse at the western edge of the Hundred Mile Wilderness and drove through the darkened downtown of Greenville, the only lights coming from the gas stations and lakeside bars. We headed south in silence, both of us lost in our thoughts, until we came to the trailhead outside Monson where Samantha and Missy had snapped their last photograph.

“Did you listen to Mott’s prayer?” she asked. “Did you notice the way he avoided saying Samantha’s and Missy’s names? How he didn’t pray for the salvation of their souls? Because in his mind they are already damned.”

“I noticed.”

“That’s right. You notice things.”

What does it matter? I thought. In my mind, prayers were for the living, to give the survivors strength and comfort. Let Mott prattle on if it helped the parents. Samantha and Missy were past the point of help. But I didn’t want to debate my religious beliefs with Stacey, and I was certain she didn’t want to debate hers with me, either.

“Do you want to get a room for the night?” I asked.

She gathered her hair together and knotted it in the back. “I just want to go home.”

In the village, we passed the Lake of the Woods Tabernacle. The resident pastor must have also owned a police scanner—either that or one of his congregants had telephoned him with the news—because the lighted sign out front carried a new message to the world:

LOOK OUT FOR THE DOGS! LOOK OUT FOR THE EVILDOERS!

LOOK OUT FOR THOSE WHO MUTILATE THE FLESH!

PHILIPPIANS 3:2

“It’s already beginning,” said Stacey. “What did I tell you?”

I turned into the driveway beyond the firehouse, where she had left her Subaru that morning. Her Outback was one of the last vehicles there on the trampled field. The steel sparkled with a fresh sheen of dew when the headlights caught it.

An old man dressed in green sat on the ground with his back against Stacey’s bumper. He rose wearily to his feet when he saw us pull in. It was Charley, I realized. He must have left his floatplane down at Lake Hebron again. His shoulders sagged, and his forehead was etched with deep lines.

Stacey and her father had a complicated relationship. They had been very close when she was a tomboy who wanted to learn how to shoot guns and pilot planes. That they were so much alike had only added to their estrangement after her mother, Ora, was paralyzed in a crash while Charley had been teaching her to fly. For a long time in her twenties, when Stacey was living in the Rocky Mountains and the desert West, neither of her parents knew what she was doing for work. She had returned to Maine only because she had been forced to leave graduate school and was out of money. She’d carried all her old resentments home with her like so much luggage. Being forced to move into her parents’ guest cabin after so many years of independence humiliated Stacey. And her broken engagement with Matt Skillin had only made it worse.

Now she bounded out of the truck the way a child might, leaving her backpack behind. I sat behind the wheel with the engine still running, watching father and daughter embrace.

24

The days that followed seemed to move faster than they had before I’d entered the Hundred Mile Wilderness. It was late September, officially autumn now, with deer season fast approaching, and we were losing the light. In the afternoon it felt like the lengthening shadows were reaching into my soul.