The Precipice (6 page)

The man and the woman took out their wallets. They were made of hemp.

Caleb loomed over my shoulder. “Wait a minute. Where’s McDonut?”

I glanced up from photographing the couple’s driver’s licenses.

“He’s taking a shower,” someone said.

“Again?” said Caleb. “We practice water conservation here.”

I recognized the trail name from the Chairback logbook. “Who’s this McDonut?”

Maxwell rolled his eyes. “A kid from Massachusetts. He sprained his knee coming down Chairback and hobbled in with an Ace bandage wrapped around it. He’s been in no hurry to leave. I think he likes it here too much.”

“How long ago did he show up at the lodge?” I had a feeling I knew the answer.

“Eight days ago,” Caleb said.

It was the day after Samantha’s and Missy’s last logbook entry.

6

Hudson’s Lodge was an impressive building made of unweathered logs, new cedar shingles, and lots of glass. Lemon light streamed through the windows, attracting swirling clouds of moths and caddis flies. Nissen and I followed Caleb Maxwell up a rough-hewn series of steps—immense flagstones embedded in the earth—to the double doors.

“He’s got all the fucking lights on, too,” Caleb said under his breath.

I wiped the mud from my boots on a steel grate before stepping inside the lodge. Nissen did not.

“This is quite a place,” I said.

“It’s a state-of-the-art green building,” Maxwell said, as if it were a rehearsed speech he gave to new guests. “You can’t see them in the dark, but there are solar panels on the roof. And all the toilets are composting. The lodge is heated by groundwater from a six-hundred-foot-deep well. We try to conserve as much energy and water as possible, and we recycle everything we can.” He paused in an entry decorated with trail maps and informational posters. “Hey, McDonut!”

“In here!”

The room to the left had several comfortable chairs, arranged around a fieldstone fireplace and a J
ø
tul wood stove so hot the air above it rippled with heat. Low coffee tables were littered with magazines:
Orion, Backpacker, AMC Outdoors.
There was no wall between the sitting area and the brightly lighted dining hall, where a wet-haired man was eating GORP from a glass container and reading one of the magazines he’d picked up in the lounge. He looked young, somewhere in his early twenties, and the bottom half of his face was covered with light brown scruff that was almost but not quite a beard. On the table beside him rested a sweat-stained and sun-faded sombrero.

“Do you remember what I told you about energy conservation, Chad?” Caleb said in his camp counselor tone.

The young man rose stiffly to his feet, and I saw that he had a blue brace on his right knee. He brushed the crumbs off a faded T-shirt with the slogan
DON’T SMOKE (SHITTY) WEED
. If he was a thru-hiker, he was one of the pudgiest I’d ever seen. The miles had done little to melt the fat from his stomach, chest, and back.

“Oh, shit, bro. I came up here to take a shower and lost track of time.” His big head wobbled back and forth on his neck when he spoke, as if his neck muscles were weak. “Hey, I know you!”

I realized that he was looking past me at Nissen.

“You two know each other, too?” I said, wondering how I’d lived this long without hearing Nissen’s name.

“Everyone on the trail knows who Nonstop is. The guy’s like a living legend. Good to see you again, sir.” He gave a military salute.

Nissen grunted and glared off in another direction.

“This is Warden Bowditch,” said Caleb Maxwell.

I put on my Officer Friendly face and crossed the stone floor until I was standing across the table from the soft-bodied hiker. “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“Um, that depends, I guess. Am I in trouble? I didn’t mean to leave the lights on.”

“The light police is another department.”

His openmouthed expression told me he didn’t understand that I was joking. I indicated that he should sit down again. I settled into a chair opposite him. The dining room still smelled of roasted turkey.

“I’m hoping you can help me with some information,” I said.

“Sure thing, bro.” His blue eyes appeared glassy, and the blood vessels around the irises were engorged. Even having just showered, his body gave off the skunky aroma of marijuana.

“Let’s start with your name.”

The smile returned, bigger than before, and he tapped two fingers against the brim of the sombrero on the table. “They call me McDonut.”

“He means your real name,” said Caleb Maxwell.

“Oh!” the young man said. “It’s McDonough. Chad McDonough.”

I held out my palm to him. “Can I see some identification, Chad?”

He looked at my open hand, as if not quite grasping the request, then began fishing around in the many pockets of his cargo shorts until, after several false attempts, he located a battered wallet stuffed with receipts. He opened a flap and held out a driver’s license, which gave his address as North Adams, Massachusetts. In the photograph, he was clean-shaven and his wavy brown hair was cut short in frat-boy style. His height was listed at five-eleven, his weight at 240 pounds. Was it possible to gain weight hiking the Appalachian Trail?

I set the license on the table and got out my point-and-shoot.

“Do you guys want some coffee?” Caleb asked.

“Thanks.”

The lodge manager disappeared into the kitchen. A moment later, I heard the sound of water running from a tap into a pot.

McDonough watched me closely from across the table. “Is everything cool here, sir?”

“Caleb says you’ve been here eight nights. Where are you coming from?”

“Um, Monson.”

“Are you a thru-hiker?”

“No, man, I’m a section hiker.”

“That means he’s doing the trail in pieces,” Nissen offered from across the room. He said this in the way someone might refer to a habitual drunk driver.

McDonough seemed oblivious to the other man’s contempt.

“Easy does it, right? I’m not hard-core like that dude.” He waggled a thumb in Nissen’s direction, as if they were old friends. “So what’s going on? Is there some sort of emergency?”

“We’re looking for two missing hikers,” I said. “They would also have been heading north from Monson.” I removed the well-wrinkled copy of the
MISSING
poster from my pocket and unfolded it so he could have a look. “Have you seen them?”

He squinted at the piece of paper. “Oh shit.”

“You recognize them?”

I could feel my heart swell with blood. Based on everything I’d learned so far, Chad McDonough might have been the last person to see the women alive.

“They never told me their real names.” McDonough returned the flyer to me, grease-smudged from the GORP he’d been eating. “Did something happen to them?”

“Well, they’re missing,” said Nissen from behind me.

I removed my notebook from my pocket. “When was the last time you saw them?”

His bleary eyes drifted away from mine, and he raised a hand to count with his chubby fingers. “Nine—no, ten days ago.”

“Where?”

“Back at Cloud Pond. We stayed together in the shelter there. Drank a little beer, talked about Georgia, where they’re from. I was a lifeguard on Jekyll Island once. Best summer of my fucking life.”

“Was anyone else with you at Cloud Pond?”

“There was another dude, but he slept in his tent outside. He came in after dark and was gone before we woke up.”

I leaned my elbows on the lacquered tabletop. “Can you describe him for me, Chad?”

“Didn’t really see him. He put up his tent beyond the edge of the firelight. Some people are just antisocial. You learn to respect their privacy. We’re all out here for different reasons, you know?”

“Do you remember what color the tent was?”

“Red, I think.” His tongue pushed between his lips, then slipped back out of sight. “Is he a suspect or something?”

I realized that I was getting ahead of myself. “Let’s go back to the beginning. Where did you meet Samantha and Missy?”

“In Monson.”

“At Shaw’s?” It was a legendary boardinghouse frequented by thru-hikers.

“No, we couldn’t get in because it was Saturday. We stayed at the other place, Ross’s.”

“Ross’s Rooming House?”

“Yeah, we had dinner together. The girls were studying French because they were going to Africa—one of those countries where they speak French—to become missionaries after they summited Katahdin. I told them I wanted to practice my
fran
ç
ais, s’il vous pla
î
t.
I spent my junior year in Paris. They thought I was a pretty comical character, I guess.”

“What do you mean?”

“I asked in French if they had any pets back home, because I miss my dog, Einstein, and it turns out
pet
is the French word for ‘fart.’” He grinned. “Naomi almost fell out of her chair, she was laughing so hard.”

“That must have been embarrassing.”

“Hell, no, bro. Back in high school, I was voted class clown. It’s my greatest achievement to date.”

“So you set off the next morning into the Hundred Mile Wilderness? That was on Sunday, the seventh?”

“I don’t know the date, but I remember it was Sunday because the girls wanted to know if there was a church in town. But we ended up cruising out to the trailhead together. We kept leap-frogging each other at first. They’d rest for a while, and I’d pass them. Then I’d rest for a while, and they’d pass me. The last time I saw them was at Cloud Pond. I was hoping we’d end up in the same lean-to, and we did.”

“They weren’t into you, I take it.”

McDonough leaned back so hard in his chair that it scraped across the pine floor. “I’m a gentleman. I don’t kiss and tell.”

I couldn’t imagine two Christian women engaging in a m
é
nage
à
trois with this oaf. “Tell me more about this man in the red tent.”

He ran his hand through his wet hair, undoing the work he’d previously done with a comb. “He showed up after dark. It was hard to see anything beyond the firelight. He might have said hello to one of the girls—I think it was Naomi—and then he just crawled inside his tent.”

I glanced up from my notes. “What do you mean he might have said hello to one of the girls?”

“She was out using the facilities. When she came back, she gave a pretend shiver, like he was a weirdo. You know, her eyes were wide.”

“Did she seem frightened?”

“No, just like he was an odd individual. You meet a few out on the trail.” His eyes darted over my shoulder. “Right, Nonstop?”

Nissen stood with his back to us still, arms crossed, silent as a statue.

“So the man in the tent didn’t sign the Cloud Pond logbook?” I said.

“Not that I remember.”

In all likelihood, it meant his name wasn’t among the ones I’d found in the Chairback register, either.

“If you never got a good look at him, how did you know his tent was red?”

“I had to get up in the middle of the night to drain my vein. I had a few brews I bought at the store in Monson. I must’ve seen the color in my headlamp.”

“And in the morning he was gone?”

“I had kind of a hangover, so I decided to sleep in.”

“What about Samantha and Missy?”

“Naomi woke me as they were packing up, wanted to see how I was doing.” Clownish circles appeared on his cheeks, as if the memory embarrassed him. “The truth is, I had to yack a couple of times. I think it was because I was so dehydrated. I decided to stay another night there.”

“So you didn’t run into them again?”

“No, they were a day ahead of me. I saw that they made it to Chairback Gap, because they wrote in the logbook. You should go up there and check it out.”

Nissen startled me by speaking. “We just came from Chairback.”

I flipped through the photographs I’d taken. When I came to the entry the women had left in the trail register, I passed the camera to McDonough. “Does this look like their handwriting?”

I saw his lips move, as if he needed to sound the words out. “Yeah,” he said. “Huh. That’s weird.”

“What’s weird?”

“That stuff about the coyotes. We heard them howling at Cloud Pond. Baby Ruth had read in a book that wolves sometimes attack women who are having their periods. I had to explain that coyotes weren’t the same as wolves. Naomi said, ‘If one of them gets too close, I’ll Mace it in the face.’ She had this pink canister of pepper spray. You don’t think the coyotes followed the girls to Chairback?”

“No.”

“Now you’ve got me scared to go back out there,” McDonough said, “and I’m not even having my period.”

“When
are
you leaving, Chad?” asked Caleb Maxwell. He’d returned with a pot of coffee and a pitcher of half-and-half. He poured a cup for me and offered one to Nissen, who just ignored him.

“Soon.” McDonough lifted his braced knee to show us. “My leg still hurts.”

I took a sip of coffee. “How did you injure it?”

McDonough shrugged. “Sprained it coming down Chairback. Slipped and fell off one of those big wet rocks. Thought I’d torn my ACL at first, because it hurt like a motherfucker.”

“Were you wasted? Is that why you fell?” Nissen asked.

“No, I wasn’t wasted.” The young man flicked his eyes at me in annoyance.

“What the fuck are you even doing out here,
McDonut
?” There was a sneer engraved on Nissen’s face. “You don’t belong on the trail.”

“Relax, bro.”

“Don’t call me ‘bro,’ monkey mouth.”

I held up my hand in a stop signal. “Knock it off, Nissen.”

“Two girls are missing, and all he cares about is stuffing his hole and getting wasted.”

“Did you just call me a monkey?”

“I called you a monkey mouth.”

“Take it easy, Chad,” said Caleb.

McDonough kicked over his chair as he rose to his feet. “Fuck you, old man. I don’t give a shit who you are.”

Nissen balled his right hand into a fist as he crossed the room in several quick strides. I reached out and grabbed his wrist; it was as hard as rawhide. The man might have been in his mid-fifties, but I wouldn’t have wanted to get into a wrestling match with him.