The Precipice (3 page)

“No, I’m good.”

“I don’t want to push you too hard.”

I clenched and unclenched my fists. I couldn’t tell if he resented being partnered with an inferior climber or if he was just an arrogant son of a bitch. Anyone who hikes two thousand miles alone isn’t likely to be a people person.

When he turned around, I observed that his bare back was heavily scarred between the shoulder blades, the skin pink and welted, whereas the rest of his skin was brown. It was almost as if he’d suffered a bad burn in the distant past. Or maybe he had a tattoo removed, I thought.

I was about to remind him that the Warden Service was running this search, when the breeze brought the sound of a distant engine to my ears. Squinting into the sunshine, I caught sight of a small floatplane flying over the summit of Chairback Mountain. It was a private Cessna—not part of our Aviation Division—but I recognized the two canoe paddles lashed to the pontoon cross braces.

“You know who that is?” Nissen asked.

“A friend of mine,” I said with a smile.

Stacey must have called her father after I’d left the beach house. I should have known the old pilot would have gassed up his plane the moment he heard two young women were missing in the wilderness. The thought of Charley Stevens joining the search filled me with new hope and gave my heart a much-needed jolt of adrenaline. I matched Nonstop Nissen step for step the rest of the way up the mountain.

3

The lean-to perched on a steep hillside in a notch between the summits of two mountains, Columbus and Chairback. Like most shelters along the Maine section of the Appalachian Trail, it had been built in the Adirondack style: three walls made of skinned cedar logs and the fourth open to the elements. A corrugated metal roof did a serviceable job of keeping out all but the worst windblown rain. A rake hung from a nail on the side, to be used to sweep up the campsite.

I stood with my hands on my hip bones, huffing deep breaths. My quads and hamstrings felt twitchy. The light shimmering through the canopy of leaves overhead gave everything a sickly green pallor, even the skin on my arms. Somewhere in the trembling treetops, a red-eyed vireo sang a broken series of notes, then fell silent.

Given the heat and the approaching thunderclouds, I’d expected we might find people at the shelter. It was peak season on the AT as thru-hikers pushed themselves to climb Mount Katahdin before Baxter State Park closed in mid-October. The lean-to slept six campers, and there were bare, beaten patches of dirt in the forested area where others had pitched their tents over the summer. But there was no one to be seen.

Nissen crouched by the fire ring—a circle of scorched rocks near the structure’s missing wall—and thrust his fingers into the mound of charcoal and ashes.

“Still wet.” He showed me his blackened fingertips. “Someone doused a fire this morning.”

“Why don’t you check the privy,” I said.

His scowl told me what he thought of my suggestion. “Let’s have a look at the register before we start poking around the shit house.”

I’d worked on many search-and-rescue operations, including those involving the Appalachian Mountain Club and Outward Bound, and without exception, I’d found the volunteers to be professional and obliging. I’d never encountered anyone with the self-importance of Nonstop Nissen. When we got back to the command post, I intended to talk with Lieutenant DeFord about him, but there was no point in getting into a pissing contest now.

He wiped his hands on his powerful thighs, leaving dark smudges, and rose from the ground. Our climb hadn’t even winded him. He frog-jumped up inside the lean-to before I could take a step in his direction. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but a moment later he stuck his head out of the shadows and said, “They were here.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they signed the logbook.”

I slipped the straps of my pack off my greasy shoulders. Then I unzipped the outer pocket, removed my point-and-shoot camera and my palm-size flashlight, and followed Nissen into the shelter. At the outer edge of the raised platform was a round log on which to sit while you laced up your boots. The wood had been worn smooth and shiny from hundreds of hikers resting their backsides on it. I sat down on the log and swung my legs around until I was facing the interior. Then I crawled forward to meet him. He handed me the trail register, a simple spiral-bound notebook. Up close, I got a whiff of his body odor; it wasn’t musky like normal perspiration, but pungent, as if he’d recently gorged himself on onions.

It was cool and dark beneath the roof, and I couldn’t understand how Nissen could read anything unless he had the eyes of a lemur. I switched on my SureFire and shone the beam onto the open page. There was an entry, written in purple ink, dated nine days earlier:

We have our own private shelter tonight. A full moon is shining almost as bright as the sun. We fall asleep serenaded by coyotes. They sound even closer than the last time.

The entry was signed “Naomi Walks” and “Baby Ruth,” which, we’d been told, were the pseudonyms Samantha and Missy had adopted for their journey. The practice was widespread on the Appalachian Trail. Thru-hikers chose colorful trail names for themselves or were given them by other backpackers.

“‘Serenaded by coyotes.’” Nissen’s breath was as sour as his sweat.

“‘They sound even closer than the last time,’” I recited.

“When was the last time?”

Not having seen the women’s earlier log entries, I had no idea.

“I need to photograph this.” I started to back out into the open air. “How about you check that latrine now.”

“What am I supposed to look for? Used tampons?”

“Why don’t you put up some posters while you’re at it,” I said.

I reached into my backpack and found a few copies of a flyer that Lieutenant DeFord had hurriedly printed out in the Warden Service’s mobile command unit. Each search team had been ordered to tack them up at its assigned lean-to. It showed the photograph of Samantha and Missy taken beside the warning sign at the edge of the Hundred Mile Wilderness. The word
MISSING
was printed in big letters across the top, followed by a description of the two women—their ages, heights, and weights—with instructions for anyone with information to call the Maine State Police.

“Use this.” I handed him the staple gun I kept in my truck to put up
NO HUNTING
signs. My fingers were all swollen from the hike up the mountain.

Nissen grunted but obeyed.

Back in Monson, a representative from the Appalachian Trail Conservancy had told us we would have intermittent cell service between Cloud Pond and Chairback Gap. But when I tried my phone, I had no coverage. I could only assume the approaching thunderstorm was interfering with the transmission. I’d hoped to contact the next team of searchers to the north.

Lieutenant DeFord had assigned another group to check the next lean-to on the trail, ten miles away on the steep approach up Whitecap Mountain. If they discovered that the women had signed in at that shelter, we would keep shifting the search area deeper into the Hundred Mile Wilderness. If there was no record of their having arrived at the Carl A. Newhall shelter, then Chairback would become the point last seen, and we would concentrate our attention on the ten-mile stretch between the two campsites.

I sat on the log at the edge of the platform, taking pictures of the diary pages. We would want to talk with anyone who might have encountered Samantha and Missy in the past two weeks, and so we needed to match trail names with actual people. Some of the pseudonyms were really far-out:

The Incredible Hunk

McDonut

Sassy Frassy

Dogmom

Daddy Shortlegs

Swedish Meatball

Doughboi

El Chupacabra

Hetty-Mae

Almost every search-and-rescue operation has a component that wardens don’t emphasize to the friends and family of the missing persons—at least not at first. People don’t just drop off the map because a compass breaks or they take a wrong turn down an unmarked trail. Sometimes they choose to vanish because they have broken laws or because they are on the run from dangerous situations, usually involving drugs and guns. Other times, they disappear because they’ve met the wrong person on the trail.

Samantha and Missy were wholesome-looking young women who had ventured into a place largely empty of other human beings: a wilderness where cell phones didn’t work and you could scream all night without being heard. There wasn’t a person involved in this search who didn’t share the same dark fears about what might have happened to them.

While I’d been taking pictures, the sky had turned slate gray and the wind had stopped abruptly, as if someone had switched off a giant fan. The sudden stillness seemed eerie. Very often, you get these quiet moments before electrical storms. I wished I had thought to stuff a rain jacket into my pack. Nissen and I wouldn’t leave this mountain without being drenched. Under normal circumstances, I would just have waited out the rain inside the shelter (better to hold tight than break a leg sliding down a muddy path), but time was of the essence, especially since we had already lost so much of it.

As I was putting my point-and-shoot back into its neoprene pouch, I realized Nissen should have returned by now. The privy was down the hill from the lean-to—out of sight and, more important, out of smell. But not that far.

“Nissen?”

I heaved the rucksack onto my shoulders again and made my way through the thigh-high underbrush toward the outhouse. A rumble of thunder sounded in the west and rolled across the forest treetops, a crashing wave of sound.

The privy was a shabby little wooden structure with a half-moon window and a sign nailed beneath it:
LATCH DOOR WHEN LEAVING OR PORCUPINES WILL EAT THIS BUILDING
. Whoever had made the sign had carved chomp marks in it as a playful joke. The door was closed, per instructions.

“Nissen?”

I took a peek inside and got a whiff that made my eyes water and my throat tighten. Someone had scrawled “Help! I’m out of mountain money!” on the back of the door. It was trail lingo for toilet paper. I backed away from the stinking structure and glanced back toward the lean-to. The situation was challenging enough without my having to chase down my search partner, too. I blew on the emergency whistle I was wearing on a lanyard around my neck and waited.

“Up here!” Nissen’s voice came from somewhere south of the shelter.

I trudged up the hill, doing my best to avoid trampling the young firs and spruce trees pushing through the fallen needles. A raindrop landed with a splat on the bridge of my nose. A moment later came another clap of thunder, this one considerably closer to Chairback.

I met Nissen on the trail, hurrying north toward the lean-to. To my surprise, he had acquired two companions, a man and a woman. They were a middle-aged couple, both dressed in the traditional garb of older thru-hikers: floppy-brimmed hats, packable raincoats (black for him, purple for her), shorts that showed off their muscular legs, and dirty boots. The long, lumpy packs on their backs looked like they weighed a hundred pounds each.

“These folks came from Cloud Pond,” said Nissen.

“What’s going on, Warden?” the man asked, bracing himself on two trekking poles.

“We’re looking for two missing hikers. They would have been heading north from Monson.” I removed a copy of the
MISSING
poster from my back pocket. “Have you seen them?”

The man, who had a thin nose and thinner lips, studied the photograph. “I don’t think so.” He handed the paper to the woman.

“Naomi Walks and Baby Ruth,” the woman said, reading the trail names aloud. She was a full head shorter than her partner and had black hair with a dramatic white streak in it that made me think of Cruella de Vil. “I remember reading their entries in some of the logbooks. They quoted the Bible a lot in their notes.”

“We’re atheists,” the man explained.

“Agnostics,” the woman said.

I took out my notebook and pen. “Can I get your names?”

“Rick and Connie Chalmers,” she said. “We’re from Sacramento.”

The rain had picked up, and a gale-force wind had begun to blow.

“Are you thru-hikers?” I asked.

The husband nodded his head. “We did the Pacific Crest Trail three years ago and thought we’d come east.”

“And you’re sure you never met these women on the AT?”

“They seemed to be about a week ahead of us the whole time,” said Connie. “Judging by the dates in the trail registers, I mean.”

The temperature had dropped twenty degrees in the past five minutes. Cold gusts were bouncing around the tops of evergreens, shaking loose pine cones. Dead branches clattered onto the forest floor.

Rick Chalmers hunched his shoulders reflexively against the rain. “What do you think happened to them?”

“We don’t know,” I said. “They were supposed to call their parents from Abol Bridge three days ago.”

“Oh, dear,” said Connie.

“Warden, would you mind if we talked out of the rain?” Rick pointed with his aluminum walking stick at the shelter.

I glanced at my wristwatch and saw that it was six o’clock. We had another hour of daylight, not accounting for the premature darkness arriving with the storm. Even if we left Chairback Gap immediately, Nissen and I would still find ourselves negotiating a murky, rain-slick trail. Lightning flashed again over my shoulder. Involuntarily, I found myself counting the seconds before I heard thunder. I barely got to two. The explosion nearly knocked me off my feet.

“That sounds like a good idea.”

The Chalmerses and I ducked our heads and made for the shelter, but Nissen took his time. The sudden plunge in temperature had left me shivering, as if I’d just taken a bath in ice water. He hadn’t even bothered to put on his shirt. The rain seemed to bounce off his bare skin.

When we were all under the overhanging roof of the lean-to, Connie said, “We’d been hoping to make the bunkhouse before the storm arrived, but we were lucky to get this far.”