The Precipice: A Novel Read online

  When we rolled to a grinding stop at the North Maine Woods checkpoint, we found the gatekeeper—a grandmotherly type with reading glasses hanging on a chain from her neck—seated on the steps of her cabin, reading Guns & Ammo. Her job was to make sure that anyone who entered the wilderness between Greenville and Katahdin Iron Works checked in and checked out. The landowners didn’t want campers secretly holing up in some remote clearing where they might leave trash behind or start a wildfire through carelessness. Wardens and other emergency personnel weren’t required to register. The old woman must have already waved through a dozen search vehicles that morning.

  The little old lady set her magazine down and rose from the steps as we got out of the truck. Her white hair was done up in braids. She wore a camouflage fleece top, brown cords, and deerskin moccasins, but if she had an ounce of Wabanaki Indian blood in her veins, I was a Pacific Islander.

  “You don’t need to sign in, Warden,” she said.

  “I have a question for you if you have a minute.”

  “All I’ve got here is time.”

  I showed her the photo I’d taken of Chad McDonough’s driver’s license. “You don’t have a record of this man coming through here, do you? He’d be driving a Kia Soul with Massachusetts plates. MDONUT.”

  “Does this have something to do with those missing hikers?”

  “I can’t say.”

  She raised her reading glasses up on their chain and squinted at the screen. The sunlight must’ve made it hard to see, because she cupped her hands to create a shadow. She gave me back the camera and ascended into the building with more energy than I would have expected of someone her age. A moment later, she popped through the door with a clipboard.

  “He’s not on my list.”

  “Could he have come in or gone out the Katahdin Iron Works gate?” asked Stacey.

  “Chuck and I send our information to each other every night. If he came through, I’d know about it.”

  I found a business card in my uniform pocket. “If he happens to come by, could you call the state police and ask them to contact me immediately?”

  The old woman read my name and peered at me above her square reading glasses. “Are you any relationship to Jack Bowditch?”

  I had forgotten my late father’s notoriety in this part of the state. In his youth, he had worked all over the western woods—also drank, brawled, and screwed. “Why? Did you know him?”

  “No, but my daughter did.”

  I decided it was a story I didn’t need to hear. I thanked her and began to descend the stairs.

  “There’s one more thing,” she called after me. “We wouldn’t have any record of your suspect if he came in on foot—or if he was a passenger in a vehicle. We only record the name and license number of the driver.”

  “Who said he was a suspect?” Stacey asked.

  “Why else would you be looking for him?” the old woman said smugly.

  * * *

  The crackle and pop of my police radio was constant as we traveled deeper into the mountains. There were reports of searchers fanning out through the Pleasant River valley. We passed patrol trucks parked at trailheads and groups of volunteers gathered in the shade to plot strategy.

  Logging trucks loaded with softwood and dump trucks heaped with gravel came barreling past, heading into Greenville. By the time we arrived at the Head of the Gulf parking lot, my pickup had been so splattered with mud, it looked more brown than black.

  “I’ve always wanted to see Gulf Hagas,” said Stacey.

  “You’ve never been here?”

  “No, but I have friends who’ve taken kayaks through the gorge. They told me there was some big water here.”

  I sometimes forgot that Stacey had been a rafting guide out west for a time. She so rarely discussed that part of her past. The idea of paddling down these chutes struck me as borderline suicidal—and I am someone who enjoys taking physical risks.

  “Do you think Samantha and Missy might have taken a detour to see Gulf Hagas?” she asked.

  “It’s possible.”

  “So for all we know, they fell to their deaths somewhere in the canyon.”

  “They wouldn’t be the first.”

  The gulf had been carved by the spring floods of the Pleasant River in the aeons since the glaciers gave up their icy hold on the land. The walls of the ravine were sheer slate; in places, they rose to heights of 130 feet. Over a three-mile stretch, the river dropped down a series of cascades. Stair Falls, Billings Falls, Buttermilk Falls, the Jaws, Hammond Street Pitch—the waterfalls were named by the log drivers who had once sent pulpwood downstream to feed the furnaces at Katahdin Iron Works. In all seasons, the river was brown with tannins, which are the biomolecules that leach from decomposing pine needles and are used to tan leather.

  We fastened on our packs and applied insect repellent to our exposed skin. I reached instinctively for my cell phone, then realized I wouldn’t be able to use it anywhere along the Rim Trail. I checked the coverage anyway and was surprised to see four bars. All I could think was that the state police must have brought their portable cell tower into the Hundred Mile Wilderness in order to boost the signals the searchers were using to communicate. I’d noticed it parked behind the Monson firehouse the night before.

  I didn’t recognize any of the three other vehicles that were parked in the Head of the Gulf lot and assumed they belonged to day hikers who had come in from Greenville to see one of the natural wonders of Maine. One was a nondescript Subaru Outback; the second was a new Ford Super Duty pickup; the third was a Jeep Cherokee with traces of dried shaving cream like frosting on the windows and strings trailing off the rear bumper.

  “Someone just got married,” I said to Stacey.

  “Maybe they were looking for Niagara Falls and got mixed up.”

  “If you could honeymoon anywhere in the world, where would it be?”

  When she threw back her head, her ponytail danced. “Stop it!”

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop talking about marriage. The last time I got engaged, it didn’t end so well, remember?”

  I grinned like a drunken man. “From my perspective, it worked out perfectly.”

  “You like to think so,” she said, and kissed me hard on the lips.

  The forest floor was flooded from the downpour the previous night, and we had to walk across sawn logs, called “bog bridges,” to avoid the biggest puddles. In a few minutes, we came to the Pleasant River. The water was high and brown except along the edges, where foam clung to the half-submerged alders and birches. We were upstream of the gulf. There was no hint that less than a mile downriver were falls so steep, few human beings had ever survived the plunge.

  “The water’s really high for late September,” I said.

  Stacey kicked a twig off the bridge, and we watched it rush off downstream. “I guess we won’t be skinny-dipping.”

  We crossed the bridge and saw the Rim Trail on the right. Someone had left an improvised walking stick propped against the sign. My quadriceps were still aching from my climb up and down Chairback. I picked the stick up, figuring I could use the support.

  The trail was flat and easy walking except where we had to balance on bog bridges. There were fresh footprints made since the last thunderstorm, all headed toward the canyon. I counted those of three men—one using a ski pole–style walking stick—and two women. As best I could tell, all of the tracks had been made by day hikers.

  Katydids buzzed incessantly in the leaf canopy. Most people I knew confused the insects with cicadas, which emerge from hibernation every seventeen years to drone on in the treetops. Katydids don’t take a break: They are perennial annoyances.

  In the center of the path near Lloyd Pond, we came across a big mound of brown pellets, each the size and shape of a chocolate-covered almond. Stacey squatted down and held her hand over the pile. She glanced up with a girlish smile.

  “Still warm,” she said. “That bull moose was jus
t here a few minutes ago.”

  I thought she was pulling my leg. “You can tell that it was a bull and not a cow just by looking at its shit?”

  “See how blocky these nuggets are? Cow pellets tend to be longer and narrower.” She jutted her chin at a muddy depression in the leaves. I saw a series of hoof marks, each bigger than my hand. “And look how blunt those tracks are. It’s definitely a big bull.” She straightened up and glanced at the trees crowding the path. “I bet if I called, I could get him to come in.” She took a deep breath and cupped her hands around her mouth.

  “Please don’t,” I said.

  The moose rut—or breeding season—was under way in much of the state. I knew how aggressive bulls could get when their testosterone levels spiked. A half-ton blood-mad animal was the last thing I wanted to deal with this morning. I wasn’t sure that my .357 could even stop a rampaging moose before it trampled us to death.

  “I wasn’t really going to do a moose call, scaredy-cat. But that’s what you get for questioning the expertise of Maine’s most kick-ass wildlife biologist.”

  I was glad to see her spirits lifting after her blowup back at the entrance to the Hundred Mile Wilderness. Her moods tended to swing hard. I was learning to appreciate the peaks.

  “I never should have doubted you.”

  “Let’s go find your friend McDonut.” She started off down the path, as eager as a child to see the dangerous waterfalls ahead.

  Like father, like daughter, I thought for the hundredth time.

  * * *

  We heard the gorge before we saw it. About a mile south of the dirt road, the path to the river split off from the main logging trail and became more rugged. To get to the gulf, we had to scramble over great boulders slick with moss and painted with blue blazes, pointing the way forward.

  Stacey was as nimble as Bob Nissen when it came to climbing, but the chain soles of my Bean boots slipped on the wet rocks. She quickly outdistanced me over the slimy boulders. I found that I had to stay focused on each foothold. I slipped and barely got a grip on a fortunately placed birch sapling.

  “How are you doing back there, Bowditch?” she asked.

  “I should’ve put on my hiking boots back at the truck.”

  I paused for a drink of water from my bottle. As I was drinking, I noticed a faint rumbling noise up ahead. Anywhere else, I might have thought I was hearing traffic speeding along a distant highway, but not this deep in the Hundred Mile Wilderness.

  Stacey heard it, too. She peered down the path. “Is that a waterfall?”

  “The first one, yes.”

  Her eyes went wide. Before I could say another word, she took off at a run. I stuffed the bottle into my pack and grabbed the stick from the ground. The binoculars around my neck kept banging into my bulletproof vest every time I took a step.

  As the sound of the falls grew louder, the temperature became twenty degrees cooler. A mist drifted like windblown strands of silk between the boughs of the spruce trees. The air had a clean, effervescent smell.

  I caught up with Stacey on an escarpment that jutted over the river. The cliff dropped straight down into a churning plunge pool the color of root beer foam. She stood inches from the edge and fumbled for her camera in her backpack with one blind hand. My first instinct was to pull her back from the precipice, but she wasn’t a child, and I wasn’t her parent. All I could do was swallow my anxiety and trust she wouldn’t slip.

  “Look at that smoker!” She had to shout to be heard over the sound of the cascades. “Which falls is this?”

  “Stair Falls,” I said.

  I watched while she hung over the cliff, taking pictures of the stepped falls above the gorge and the thundering water below. I was just about to call her name, telling her we should move along, when she popped to her feet. She came toward me, the camera hanging from a strap around her wrist, a solemn expression darkening her face.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I was just thinking something crazy,” she said.

  “Tell me.”

  “I was thinking that you could’ve pushed me over that cliff and told the police that I fell. No one could ever prove that you’d killed me. It would be the perfect murder.”

  “That’s a morbid thought! Why would I want to kill you?”

  “If you did, I mean.”

  I put my arms around her and pressed my mouth to her ear, tasting the chemical bitterness of the bug spray she’d rubbed into her skin. “You have a very disturbed imagination.”

  She blinked several times and let out a humorless laugh. “Matt Skillin really did a number on me, I guess.”

  “You didn’t know what a monster he was.”

  “That’s what’s so scary. I thought I loved him—but he had me fooled.”

  I made my voice soft. “I’m not hiding who I am from you, Stacey. You can trust me.”

  She pulled free of my arms with an embarrassed smile. “What’s the next falls after this one?”

  “Billings.”

  “Is it higher than this one?”

  “Yes.”

  She stuffed the camera into the thigh pocket of her cargo pants and set off ahead of me into the depths of the gorge. I watched her run up a flat boulder that was tilted at a thirty-five-degree angle, wondering what to make of her frightening admission. Then I lost sight of her in the fog-wrapped trees.

  16

  The Rim Trail was a nightmare to negotiate. The lattice of spruce roots underfoot felt as if they had been greased. I have never suffered from a fear of heights, but there was something unnerving about the way my feet kept slipping, as if an invisible pair of hands had closed around my ankles and was trying to yank them over the drop-off. I imagined the gorge as a malevolent entity intent upon tossing me to my death in the churning water below.

  I found Stacey waiting for me at Billings Falls. She was perched on a rock, massaging her leg; the pained expression on her face made me think at first that she’d sprained her ankle.

  “I just realized I left that book I was reading back at Popham,” she said. “It’s a sixty-dollar textbook.”

  Stacey had a way of losing things, especially when she was distracted, which was often. We’d once spent the better part of a morning searching for keys that were in her back pocket all along.

  “I’ll call the property manager and have him send it to you.”

  She stared at me through her dark lenses. “Did that guy strike you as a thoughtful person? I’m sure it’s in the trash. Oh well. It’s only money, right? There are worse things in the world than losing a stupid book. Way worse things. Right?”

  She didn’t have to say more for me to understand she was thinking about the missing hikers.

  I paused a moment to take in the majesty of the falls beneath my feet. There were a few scraggly trees on the downslope, the last chance for someone falling to save himself, and then thin air for half a hundred feet, until the person shattered his spine on a cluster of boulders. Not that landing in the river would be any better. Anyone who has ever paddled a canoe through Class IV rapids knows that the hydraulics of certain waterfalls make them death traps. The circulating currents can drive capsized swimmers to the bottom and hold them there against the sand until they drown. Some of the most furious falls refuse to give up their dead for weeks. For all we knew, Samantha’s and Missy’s corpses might be spinning beneath the leaf-flecked water, as limp as stockings rotating in a washing machine.

  As we started down the trail again, Stacey called to me over her shoulder. “What were their trail names again—Samantha’s and Missy’s?”

  “Naomi Walks and Baby Ruth. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “They’re odd choices.”

  “Maybe Missy ate a lot of candy bars.”

  She clambered to the top of a big rock, pulling herself up by her fingertips until her head was peeking over the top. She froze there for fifteen seconds and then let go, sliding back on the toes of her hiking boots onto the wet
mat of pine needles. She pressed a hand to her mouth to hold in a laugh and motioned with her thumb that I needed to take a look.

  “What?”

  She held a finger over her lips. Then she doubled over, shaking all over with silent laughter.

  I moved around her and took a run up the rock face, catching the top with both hands. Slowly, I raised my head.

  A young couple was having sex thirty feet down the path. Both the man and the woman had their pants around their ankles, and he was driving into her from behind while she steadied herself with both arms braced awkwardly against a birch trunk. He had one hand on her shoulder while his round white buttocks thrust back and forth. Every now and again he spanked her bare ass.

  I dropped back to earth. “It must be the honeymooners.”

  “They don’t look old enough to have gotten married. What’s the age of consent in Maine anyway?”

  “Eighteen.”

  She pressed a hand flat over her heart. “Young love is such a beautiful thing.”

  I peered up into the forest, looking for a detour, but I saw none. The trees were thick as the bristles on a hairbrush, and there were deadfalls everywhere with sharp branches on which you could easily impale yourself.

  “We can’t circle around them.”

  “Let’s have some fun, then.” She tilted her face up at the boughs overhead, giving me a peek at the mole beneath her chin, and let out a shout at the top of her lungs, “Come on, Officer Bowditch! Buttermilk Falls are just a little ways ahead! Don’t quit on me now!”

  “Stacey.”

  “We’ll give them a minute to get their clothes back on.” She counted the seconds on her wristwatch. “You go first. I want to see their expressions when they get a load of your badge and gun.”

  When I pulled myself up again on the rock, I found myself staring into the startled eyes of two fully dressed young people. The young woman’s brown hair was as wild as Medusa’s, and the fly on the man’s Levi’s was unzipped, revealing the bulge of his tighty-whities. Otherwise, I never would have guessed what they’d just been doing.

  I hauled myself over the top.