The Precipice (32 page)

He stopped himself, but I knew how the sentence ended: It was going to be one of the biggest manhunts since my father, Jack Bowditch, took off into the Boundary Mountains after being accused of murder. And I knew how that sad story had turned out.

“Charley Stevens is up there somewhere in his Cessna,” I said. “He’s looking for Stacey’s truck.”

“She still hasn’t turned up?”

“No, sir. Maybe Charley can help us track Troy Dow down from the air. Do you want me to call him?”

“Do it.”

“He’ll need someone on the ground if he sees anything. You have plenty of men up here now. I’d like permission to assist Charley in the search for Troy Dow.”

DeFord studied my face. He understood that my desire to get on the road was tangled together with my concern for Stacey.

“All right,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“And Bowditch?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let me know when you find her.”

*   *   *

The first responders had dragged aside the cedar log at the bottom of the drive, but no one had removed the rotting steer head from its spike. I paused a moment to stare into the empty eye sockets and had the stomach-churning sensation of falling headfirst into a pit. Maybe if we had taken the ghoulish warning more seriously, a good man would still be alive.

I wanted to let out a howl of rage, but what was the point? I’d never believed in the idea that a person could die before his time—as if there was some sort of cosmic plan for a soul that could be foiled. You die when you die. Wes Pinkham was gone, and that was all that mattered.

I dug my cell phone out of my raincoat pocket and tapped in Charley’s number.

The connection was poor.

“What’s going on down there?” he asked. “I heard the commotion on the radio.”

“Wes Pinkham is dead. He tripped a wire on the Dows’ land, and a bomb blew him up. He lost both of his legs in the explosion. I’m sorry. I know he was your friend.”

He fell silent.

“Charley?”

“Wes was a good man.”

“Yes, he was.”

His voice disappeared again. I listened to the sound of his engine coming through the speaker.

“Charley?”

“I was thinking about the day his first daughter was born. Wes and I were up on the Allagash, looking for a lost canoeist. That was before there were pocket phones. The colonel had to send another warden down the rapids with the good news. I never saw a happier man than Wes Pinkham that day.”

Sometimes I forgot that my old friend was a combat veteran, that he had seen many friends die in the worst-possible ways imaginable. The experience had hardened him to death. He responded to horrible circumstances with a stoicism that might have seemed like coldness if you didn’t know how big his heart was.

“Where are you now?” I asked.

“Up over the Hundred Mile Wilderness, looking down on Hudson’s Lodge. I’m checking everywhere you and Stacey went in your travels. I was just about to buzz Gulf Hagas.”

He didn’t have to tell me he hadn’t found her.

“DeFord is hoping you can shoot down our way,” I said. “Troy Dow took off on a four-wheeler. He was headed north, toward Monson. He might have looped back to the Moxie Pond Trail.”

“He’ll get into some dense country pretty quick if he goes that way. There’s plenty of places to hide himself around Shirley Bog.”

“Why don’t you backtrack the Moxie Pond Loop on your way south? I’m going to ride back into Monson and ask questions. I’m guessing the Dows have secret deer camps all over the county.”

“Good idea. A wounded partridge always goes into a hole.”

I’d never heard the expression before. “Is that an old saying?”

“Well, it’s
my
saying—and I’m old—so I guess you could call it that.”

I wished I had Charley’s ability to maintain good humor in the face of bad news. With any luck, I would live long enough to develop that capacity. For the moment, it remained an open question.

“Keep your eyes open for a VW van and a green IF&W truck,” I said.

“Will do.”

I was about to sign off, when a random question pushed itself into my head. “Whatever happened to the canoeist?”

“Say again?”

“The man you and Pinkham were looking for on the Allagash.”

“Oh, he drowned,” Charley said. “We found his body wedged under a rock below Chase Rapids. It had been there awhile. The poor bastard looked like he prit’near drank the whole river.”

*   *   *

In small Maine towns, convenience stores are the principal hubs of gossip, even more so than post offices and churches. If you want to know anything about anybody, you start at the place that sells tobacco, caffeine, and alcohol.

The Monson General Store was even busier than it had been when Pinkham and I had left. I had to look for a spot on the street because the parking lot was full. I could barely believe that a few short hours ago, the even-tempered warden investigator had been alive, cracking jokes with Pearlene. What a waste. What a stupid, meaningless waste. I caught sight of my reflection in the rearview mirror. My ragged emotional state revealed itself in my overbright eyes and stubbled jaw.

Five people stood in line at the register while Pearlene, still wearing her hairnet and gloves, tried to fix the paper tape. I stepped out of the way of a rotund woman in a hurry. She slammed her bottle of diet soda on the counter.

“Just a minute!” Pearlene said.

“I can’t wait no more. I got an appointment at the beauty salon.”

After the woman left, I heard Pearlene mutter, “It’s going to take more than one appointment.”

Until she could get the line moving, I occupied myself by reading the bulletin board. Someone in Guilford had lost a twelve-year-old black Lab named (ugh) Jigaboo. The high school kids at Foxcroft Academy were performing
Once Upon a Mattress
in October. The tear-off flyer offering goats for sale was missing another tag. There was a conspicuous blank spot in the middle of the corkboard. I tried to recall what had been there previously, but I drew a blank.

A man shuffled past with a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon tucked under his arm. It was the old guy from the Cajun restaurant. For the moment, he seemed to be sober. At least he didn’t reek of alcohol.

“Roland,” I said.

He blinked his crusted eyelashes at me and parted his cracked lips. “Yes?”

“You don’t remember me?”

He made a motion to the holstered gun on my belt. “You’re a game warden.”

“We met last night at Shoebottom’s. The Dows were trying to bully you into cutting down some of your trees.”

There was no spark of recognition in his milky eyes. He sucked at his dentures, deep in thought. I had a sense that sobriety had ceased to be a natural condition for him. “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember.”

“Roland, I could use your help,” I said. “Troy Dow has committed a crime and is on the run. It’s vital that I find him as soon as possible. I don’t suppose you’d know if he has any deer camps in the area?”

He shook his head violently. “I wouldn’t know.”

I could tell he was lying. “If I apprehend him, he’ll go to prison, and you’ll never have to worry about him again. His brother, Trevor, is already in custody.”

A shiver ran through him. “It’s a big family.”

“Warden!” Pearlene had finally spotted me.

I stepped up to the counter. “Good morning again, Pearlene.”

She frowned at me from behind the lottery-ticket display. “Good? This morning has gone from bad to worse. I’ve got an employee who didn’t show up for work. And now I hear you and Wesley Pinkham have gotten the Dows all riled up. Is it true there’s a SWAT team up there?”

So word hadn’t yet reached the store about Pinkham’s death. I was relieved not to have to answer questions about that subject at least.

“There are a lot of officers at the scene.”

“Why aren’t you up there, then?”

“I’m looking for Troy Dow. I was just asking Roland here if Troy might have some places he goes when—”

“When what?”

I turned back to the bulletin board. “What poster used to be in this blank spot?”

“Christ, I don’t know. You think I keep track of every flyer someone tacks up in my store?”

“It was for a shuttle service,” Roland said over my shoulder.

“Do you mean like giving rides to hikers out to the Hundred Mile Wilderness trailhead?”

“That and dropping cars off at Abol Bridge.”

“There was a blue Ford shuttle van parked outside the store last night,” I said. “But it isn’t there this morning.”

“That’s Benton’s van,” Pearlene said. “He drives hikers around for extra cash.”

“And you said he didn’t come in for work this morning?”

“Son of a bitch closed early last night, too. I had to hear it from customers who came looking for beer. Now he won’t answer his phone. Next time he shows his face, I’m going to tell him he’s fired.”

It can’t be a coincidence, I thought. Benton ran a shuttle service for hikers who needed someone to transport their vehicles to Abol Bridge. Hikers like Chad McDonough. Had he also driven Samantha and Missy to the trailhead the morning they set off into the Hundred Mile Wilderness? Was he the one who had taken their final picture?

The phone.

Toby Dow said that he’d found Missy’s Samsung Galaxy in the Dumpster. The boy seemed too simple to fabricate a story like that. At every turning point in the drama, the mysterious clerk had been present, looming in the shadows, watching and listening.

“Hey, can I pay for my breakfast?” a man in line said.

I pushed myself against the checkout counter. “Tell me about Benton.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you know about him? Is that his first name or his last name?”

Her mouth trembled. “His name is Benton Avery. He’s only been working here since June. Came from New Hampshire, he said, but that accent of his sure sounds chicken-fried to me. Told me he moved up here to the middle of nowhere because he likes to hike on the AT. He’s a strange guy. I still couldn’t tell you if he’s a genius or a moron.”

A rootless man who lied about where he was from, whose entire being seemed to be a disguise, who haunted the most godforsaken stretches of the Appalachian Trail. Benton Avery isn’t a moron, I thought with horror. Not at all.

“Where can I find him? This is important, Pearlene, please.”

“He’s got a place on Slate Street. It’s just outside of town, near the old mines. Just what is it you think Benton’s done?”

It wasn’t what he’d done. It was what I feared Benton might do if I didn’t stop him first.

37

Pearlene said to take the Monson Pond Road north of town until I passed the active quarries of the Sheldon Slate Company and to keep driving into the woods toward the village of Willimantic. Slate Street would be on the left, she told me. Benton’s place was at the end.

I picked up the phone and called Charley again.

“Change of plans,” I said. “I need you to take a swing over the Monson slate mines.”

“Did you get a tip?”

“Do you remember the creepy clerk at the general store? Benton? I think he’s the missing link that ties everything together: Samantha and Missy, McDonut, Nissen, the Dows.”

“You think Stacey is there?”

“We’ll see. I’m driving out to his house now. It’s located at the end of a road called Slate Street—you’ll see it on your GPS. Look for my truck.”

“Roger.”

Despite what I’d told Charley, I was having trouble seeing a pattern in the dots. What was the connection between Nissen and Benton? As far as I knew, they weren’t friends; Nissen didn’t seem to have any. The store sold his honey and beeswax candles, but that hardly seemed like the basis for the two loners to begin a partnership murdering people together.

I thought back to my brief conversation with Benton the previous night at the general store. He had closed up early, Pearlene had said, not long after we’d spoken together. Had I said something to panic him? What was that strange quote he’d spouted? “There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.”

Maybe he thought he’d given himself away.

What about Stacey, though? It seemed unlikely that Nissen could have persuaded her to accompany him to Benton’s house in the middle of the night. The alternative was that she hadn’t driven herself because she was incapacitated—or worse. I didn’t want to contemplate that possibility.

As Pearlene had said, the road took me past Monson’s working slate mines. From my truck window, the pits didn’t look as deep as the limestone quarries that pockmarked the face of midcoast Maine. The stone here wasn’t powder gray the way it was back in Rockland, but shiny black, and it sloughed off the walls in flat sheets, some as large as tabletops, or broke into sharp chips like primitive arrowheads and hand axes when it fell to earth. The precipices of Gulf Hagas, miles to the north, were formed of these same minerals.

Soon the mines were behind me, and I was back in the birch and maple forest. Tent caterpillars had hit the trees hard, spinning vast webs to protect themselves from hungry birds and to devour the leaves. The insect army had left behind acres of skeletonized branches to mark their relentless march through the woods. Where the sunlight hit them, the gray silk cones seemed to writhe with the undulations of the larval moths inside.

On the GPS display, Slate Street seemed to be little more than an abbreviated fire road. I slowed as the turnoff appeared on the map, hoping that I would hear a plane and that it would be Charley winging his way to the rescue. Every other law-enforcement officer in the county was occupied, sweeping up members of the Dow family. Had I not been so desperate to find Stacey, I might have waited for backup, but I would never have forgiven myself if something happened to her while I dithered around.

Ahead, I saw a green-and-silver sign with the logo of the Maine Forest Council. As I drew closer, I could read the words:
MONSON STREAM PRESERVE. APPALACHIAN TRAIL
1
.
5
MILES.
I began punching buttons on the DeLorme. I zoomed out on the digital map to get my bearings. Beyond the abandoned pit mines at the end of Slate Street, a dotted line indicated a northbound path. It was a shortcut from the village limits of Monson into the Hundred Mile Wilderness. If you were pursuing someone who had started on the AT at the Route 15 parking lot (as Samantha, Missy, and Chad had done), you might intercept them between Big Wilson Stream and Barren Mountain. At the very least you could count on catching them at Cloud Pond, provided they camped at the lean-to for the night.