The Precipice: A Novel Read online

  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.

  After I left Stacey with Charley, I had driven to my rented house in southern Maine, where the Portland suburbs faded into the woods and cornfields around Sebago Lake, arriving just before dawn. DeFord disbanded the search team later that morning, after the corpses had been removed from the base of the cliff and taken in a repurposed ambulance to the office of the state medical examiner in Augusta. The investigation into the cause of death continued, but I wasn’t to be part of it. I heard that Pinkham wasn’t ready to accept the prevailing wisdom that the women had been killed by wild animals, not until the forensic pathologist signed off on the theory. In the meantime, the warden investigator would continue to explore the human element.

  Others were less circumspect. As Stacey had predicted, the national media seized on the salacious story of the beautiful young girls eaten by wolves. That Samantha and Missy were so-called Bible students only added to the tale’s juiciness. I did my best to stay away from television sets and tabloids, but I couldn’t escape the rumor mill that was the Maine Warden Service. I learned from Tommy Volk that the Reverend Mott had gone on the morning news shows as a spokesman for the families. There was no doubt in the preacher’s mind that Samantha and Missy had been chased to their deaths by coyotes, and he was open in his condemnation of the state of Maine, as if somehow the searchers were at fault for not knowing the women had gone missing over a week earlier. There was talk of a lawsuit—for what and against whom, I had no idea.

  Just as the story was about to be shoved aside by a new wave of fighting in the Middle East, a student at Pentecost University appeared in front of the cameras to tell the world that Samantha and Missy had secretly been lovers. Now there was sex to go along with the violence and religion. The university refused to comment on the rumors, and the Reverend Mott disappeared abruptly from the airwaves.

  To quiet the panic and minimize the bad publicity threatening Maine’s tourism industry, the governor issued an executive order, placing a bounty of one hundred dollars on every coyote killed around Moosehead Lake. Driven by money, revenge, and bloodlust, dozens of hunters and trappers took to the woods. Biologists were dispatched to tagging stations to receive the dead animals and take blood and hair samples to compare against the evidence found in the forest where Samantha’s and Missy’s bones were discovered. Stacey was pulled away from the study she had been doing on white-tailed deer and stationed back in Monson.

  At the end of her first day collecting pelts, she called me from Ross’s Rooming House, where she was staying.

  “A German shepherd, Mike.” Her voice sounded dry, as if she had yelled herself hoarse.

  “What?”

  “Some asshole shot a goddamned German shepherd today. He wouldn’t believe me when I told him it was somebody’s pet, even after I showed him the nails had just been clipped. He just wanted his hundred bucks.”

  “Oh God, Stacey.”

  “Troy Dow and his relatives brought in thirty-three animals. Thirty-three! Some had been snared, others shot. One had an arrow broken off in it. For all I know, they imported half of them from other places around the state. It’s like a fucking gold rush here.”

  “People are scared.”

  “Scared and greedy,” she said. “I met a bunch of the Dows today. Trevor, Terrence, Todd, Tara—there seems to be a pattern. I guess the family matriarch is named Tempest. People think she’s a witch because she never comes down off her hilltop. She just sits up there cursing people.”

  “Have you met Toby yet?”

  “The developmentally disabled boy who hangs out at the general store? I asked Pearlene—she’s the woman who owns the place—why she allows him to beg money from her customers, and she says everyone is terrified of the Dows, herself included. The whole inbred clan lives together in a compound in the woods. Supposedly, the settlement is booby-trapped with all sorts of trip wires and explosives. In addition to the usual poaching and drug dealing, they’ve got a racket going as caretakers for the cottage owners around Hebron Lake. If you don’t hire them to watch your place for the winter, they’ll burglarize it or just burn it down. It’s like the hillbilly mafia up here.”

  “Take care of yourself.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ve got my pink canister of pepper spray.” She paused when I didn’t respond. “That was a joke. But if my body shows up, gang-raped and shot in the head, you’ll know who to talk to first.”

  I pinched my brow between my thumb and forefinger. “That’s not funny, Stacey.”

  “None of this is funny. It’s sickening is what it is. Today was one of the worst days in my life. Pickups were coming in stacked with dead animals, one after the other. I’ve never seen slaughter like this, and people were just gleeful about it. Guys were teasing each other because they’d shot more coyotes than their buddies. Others were pissed off at me that I wouldn’t pay them cash and told them they’d have to send in a voucher to be paid. Not one of them mentioned Samantha or Missy, either. Those women were just an excuse for these assholes to commit mass murder—or whatever you want to call it. I don’t know if I can do this, Mike. I’m just praying that the medical examiner will come out with a statement tomorrow saying that the coyotes didn’t kill them, so that the bounty gets called off.”

  I hesitated before I spoke. I respected Stacey immensely but was obliged in my job to consider all possibilities. “We don’t know what the forensics report will say.”

  “What do you mean?” She seemed genuinely puzzled.

  “What if the results are inconclusive? There’s also the chance that—”

  “What?”

  “It happened before up in Canada. Remember Taylor Mitchell?”

  Stacey seemed to go away for a long time. I wondered if the call had been dropped.

  “Not you, too,” she said at last.

  That was when she hung up on me.

  * * *

  The next morning, I met Kathy Frost for eggs and coffee at a breakfast place in Lewiston. She was on her way to have some tests done at Central Maine Medical Center. I didn’t ask what kind of tests, but I assumed they had something to do with her having been shot. Some of the steel pellets wer
e still lodged inside her torso and would be as long as she lived.

  My former sergeant came through the door of Simones Hot Dog Restaurant. She looked better than the last time I’d seen her—but not much.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “Like a road-killed raccoon. Is it that obvious?”

  The waitress came over with a coffeepot to fill our cups. She blinked her heavy eyelashes at me and said how much she liked my uniform, causing me to redden in spite of myself. I ordered a chili and cheese omelette. Kathy opted for oatmeal.

  “Your gastrointestinal system must hate you,” she said.

  “I have an iron stomach.”

  “Wait until you hit forty.”

  Two old geezers at the next booth were arguing with each other in singsong French. One of them—it sounded like he owned apartment buildings—had a gripe against les Somalis.

  Lewiston was a former mill town. At the turn of the twentieth century, the textile factories along the Androscoggin River had employed tens of thousands of Canadian émigrés, my great-grandparents among them. In those days, fancy restaurants had signs in their doors saying NO FRENCH ALLOWED, and children at the Catholic schools were slapped by nuns for not speaking English. In time, the mills began to close as the manufacturing jobs went to Asia. Lewiston’s population plummeted, until a new wave of immigrants arrived from Somalia. Now it was commonplace to see dark-skinned women in head scarves carrying bags of groceries along Lisbon Street. Inevitably, there were culture clashes. The Lewiston mayor appeared on national TV telling the Somalis to stop coming and draining the city’s welfare services. A man tossed a pig’s head into a downtown mosque.

  The names change, I thought, but hate reigns eternal.

  “Stacey is mad at me,” I said.

  “What did you do now?”

  I sat back in the mustard-yellow booth. “Why do you assume I’m to blame?”

  By way of an answer, Kathy raised an eyebrow over the rim of her coffee mug.

  I lowered my voice so that the Franco men wouldn’t overhear. “She’s convinced that the medical examiner is going to find that Samantha and Missy were murdered,” I said. “She thinks the governor’s bounty program is a waste of time and money. She says he’s just whipping up fear for political purposes.”