Bad Little Falls Read online

  To a purrfect friend, it read.

  Sarah had always given me ironic cards—the sappier the better—so why should it be any different now that our relationship was over? She’d handwritten a note in purple ink inside:

  Dear Mike,

  I hope things are well and that you’re enjoying the winter Down East. Do you have any time to ski or ice fish? How are Charley and Ora doing? I know it’s not your way to do something special for yourself, but it would make me happy to think of you having some fun with friends today. Life is busy here in D.C., but it’s stimulating work and I’m meeting lots of fascinating people. One of these days we should catch up—it’s been so long since we talked.

  xoxo

  S.

  I didn’t really want to speak with my ex-girlfriend. Sarah and I were finished forever as a couple, and probably finished as friends, no matter what her birthday card said. A year earlier, she had become pregnant with my child, a condition she had hidden from me until she miscarried. The fact that she had concealed her pregnancy proved that she would never overcome her doubts about my fitness to be a husband and father. We had broken up by mutual agreement over the summer, before I’d received my transfer to the North Pole. She was now living in Washington, D.C., working for the national office of the Head Start program. Sometimes I pictured her going out for drinks with people our own age—with men our own age—while I was stuck in the wilds of eastern Maine, fielding dinner invitations from elderly veterinarians.

  I’d been struggling to find meaning in the sequence of events that had led me to this wasteland, but my prayers always seemed to disappear into the black void that stretched from horizon to horizon, and I never got any answers. All that was left to me was to accept my fate and do my job with as much dignity as I could muster.

  Tonight, however, I found myself yearning to hear Sarah’s voice, even though I knew that speaking with her would make me feel more lonely and not less. Two years earlier, when we were weathering a rough patch, I had convinced myself that I was a lone wolf by nature. It was the reason why I had chosen the profession of game warden—because I secretly wanted a solitary life.

  Now I knew better.

  * * *

  The moon was high and bright overhead when I arrived at my trailer on the outskirts of Whitney. I’d lived in my share of mobile homes as a child, and this one was better than most. The roof barely leaked, all but two of the electrical sockets worked, and a rolled towel pressed against the base of the door was enough to stop the snow from blowing in through the crack. My rented trailer was located down a dead-end road, far enough from the main drag that I could park my patrol truck out of sight—although every poacher, pill addict, and petty criminal within a hundred miles knew where I lived.

  As I turned the truck into the plowed drive, the bright halogen bulbs swept across the front of the building. Something long and dark seemed to be affixed to the door. I couldn’t tell for sure what the black thing was until I climbed the steps with my flashlight in hand.

  The object was a coyote pelt. Whoever had killed the animal had done a poor job of skinning it, because the fur stank to the heavens. A tenpenny nail had been driven through the head into the hollow metal door.

  There was a note written in block letters, large enough for me to read in the moonlight: “WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD.” It was signed, “GEORGE MAGOON.”

  FEBRUARY 12

  The moon don’t rotate, you know. All you ever see is the same side of it! There could be space aliens living up there in the shadows and we’d never know if they was planning to invade us.

  Aunt Tammi don’t believe me.

  What do you think that Pink Floyd song means? I ask her.

  She’s knitting in her wheelchair. Which one, Lucas?

  The one you’re always playing. DARK SIDE OF THE MOON.

  She says it don’t mean anything. It’s just a song.

  We’re all having dinner, Tammi, Uncle Prester, and me. Ma likes to eat at the table like we did when Gram and Gramp were alive and this was their house.

  She always makes us say a prayer now, ever since she started going to those Don’t Drink meetings.

  About halfway through dinner, Randle comes by to get Uncle Prester.

  Randle’s got that scary new tattoo all over his face—the spiky one he got after Ma kicked him out before Christmas.

  You don’t have to go with him, Ma tells Prester.

  Yeah I do, Prester says. He seems real sad about it, though.

  Randle laughs and says they’re just going coyote hunting is all.

  Where’s your dogs? I ask him. He used to have a pit bull, but they don’t hunt.

  Don’t need any.

  You using bait, then?

  Nope.

  So how you going to get them?

  We call them in, he says. He does a sort of wolf call then, because he likes to scare Tammi and me.

  After Randle and Prester leave, I say to Ma, They ain’t going coyote hunting, are they?

  She don’t answer. She just keeps washing dishes.

  They got some kind of big drug deal, don’t they?

  That gets her all worked up. Don’t you have homework?

  I already did it, I tell her.

  Don’t lie to me, Lucas.

  She gives me that X-ray look. I can’t understand how she figures things sometimes.

  The curtains are rolled up in my room and the moon is shining in until I yank down the shade. I don’t like seeing the full moon out my window. It reminds me of the White Owl.

  3

  “Who’s George Magoon?” I asked Sgt. Kathy Frost.

  I’d risen early to do push-ups, burpees, and planks, and I was standing in my boxer briefs, with the cell phone clamped to one sweaty ear. The windows inside the trailer were all frosted over, but I could tell from the ashen light that the day was shaping up to be a dark one. The sun had risen brightly at dawn, but menacing clouds were already rolling in from the northwest. The forecast called for snow.

  I’d reached Kathy on the road. She was heading up north for a few days, towing her Ski-Doo Renegade on a trailer behind her patrol truck. The guys in Greenville needed some extra wardens to help work snowmobilers over the Presidents’ Day weekend. There had been a fatality on Moosehead Lake five days earlier—too much booze, speed, and testosterone.

  Kathy’s voice was cutting in and out. Our connection wasn’t great. “George who?”

  “George Magoon. I checked the computer, but there’s no one in the area with that name.”

  Kathy laughed. “I wouldn’t think so.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “George Magoon is a fictional character—like Robin Hood or Brer Rabbit. He was this wily poacher who was always outwitting the game wardens Down East. There are all kinds of tall tales about his exploits. Ask Rivard about them.”

  Kathy Frost wasn’t just my former supervisor; she was the closest thing I had to a friend in the Warden Service, someone who had been a confidante to me during the tense days when my father was a fugitive in the North Woods. Kathy was also the most physically fit person I’d ever met. She was a tall, strong-limbed woman who wore her hair in a blondish bob and could bench-press her own weight. She routinely won triathlons without ever bothering to train for them.

  “So you’re saying that some jackass is pulling a prank on me?” I said.

  “Just be glad he didn’t nail a skunk to your door.”

  “What do you know about Brogan?”

  “He’s so dumb, he needs to unzip his fly to count to eleven.”

  I missed Kathy’s warped sense of humor. I fancied myself a stoic, but the isolation of my new post seemed to be having an insidious effect upon me. The blank-eyed, unsmiling face I saw in the mirror each morning seemed to belong to one of those guys who sleeps under a bridge. Part of being a Maine game warden was being ready to move at a moment’s notice. But the department’s decision to transfer me out of Kathy’s division (technically, I had voluntee
red) was an especially cruel blow.

  There was static on the other end of the line. “You should talk to Rivard about that coyote,” she said. “He might have some idea who the local jokers are.”

  “OK.”

  Rivard and I were scheduled to meet later that morning. My new sergeant had woken me at dawn, saying that he needed me to accompany him to a nearby school to confront some teenagers who might or might not have broken into several vacated summer cabins on the shores of Bog Pond.

  “How you holding up down there, Grasshopper?” Kathy asked.

  “Fine.”

  “Liar. You’ll be all right once you get laid.”

  “Jesus, Kathy.”

  “We’re breaking up here,” she said before we finally lost the signal.

  * * *

  Washington County has lots of nicknames.

  It’s sometimes called the Bold Coast because of its wave-washed cliffs. Others refer to it as the Sunrise Coast because, as the easternmost stretch of land in the continental U.S. it is supposedly the first place to see the sunrise—provided there’s no mist, rain, or snow, which is almost never. There are stony capes and islands here that see more fog than San Francisco or the entire Olympic Peninsula.

  But the most common term people use to refer to Washington County is Down East.

  In Maine, you might say that up is down. You travel down the coast from New Hampshire to New Brunswick—not up it—despite the fact that you’re heading north the whole time. Down East is an old nautical term from the age of sail, when schooners sailed downwind from Boston, carrying passengers and rum to Maine’s eastern ports and the Canadian Maritimes.

  The windjammer trade might have blown south, but the contraband was still flowing freely in Washington County, although rum had largely been replaced by coffee brandy (Maine’s unofficial state liquor), crystal meth, heroin, locally grown marijuana, and illegal prescription drugs, many of which were smuggled in from Canada. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the border with New Brunswick had hardened. There were more checkpoints, more Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, more unmanned surveillance of the boundary woods and waters. Certainly there were more hassles for anyone who wished to drive from one nation to the other. None of these impediments seem to thwart smugglers.

  By most measures, the state of Maine has the worst prescription-drug-abuse rates in America. The Maine Drug Enforcement Agency had given wardens a list of commonly abused medications, which included Dilaudid, Lorcet, Lortab, OxyContin, Percocet, Percodan, Tylox, Librium, Valium, Xanax, Adderall, Concerta, Vicodin, and Ritalin. Cross-border smuggling was only part of the problem. Addicts also forged prescriptions and conned multiple doctors into writing multiple scripts. They stole pills from the medicine cabinets of sick friends and relatives. Occasionally, some drugstore cowboy would even hold up an actual pharmacy. Painkillers were easy to obtain in Down East Maine—provided you had the money.

  The problem was, nobody had any money. The street price for an Oxy 80—an eighty-milligram tablet of oxycodone—was eighty dollars. Very few jobs in depressed Washington County paid half that much for a day’s work. As a result, burglaries and home invasions were epidemic. Aside from the drug dealers themselves, the only entrepreneurs thriving in my district were the backwoods fences who dealt in stolen electronics and Grandma’s heirloom jewelry.

  After I showered and shaved, I buttoned my uniform up over the thin ballistic vest I was required to wear each day. The uniform was olive-colored, like the fatigues worn by soldiers in Korea or Vietnam, with POLICE stenciled across the back. The trousers tucked into black combat boots. My P226 rode low on my gun belt, counterbalancing a holster containing Cap-Stun pepper spray. Every day I dressed like a man going to war.

  I opened the fridge to see what I had for breakfast. Inside was a single blue can of Foster’s, half an onion in a plastic bag, and a box of baking soda. I’d purchased the beer the night I’d moved in as a housewarming gift to myself but had decided against opening it. Toward the end of my relationship with Sarah, I’d been drinking way too much, and I worried that living alone, I might fall into bad habits. Seeing that can of Foster’s every day and not opening it had become a personal test of will.

  I was still studying my bare cupboards when Rivard’s GMC pulled up to my trailer. He gave the horn a honk, scattering a flock of Bohemian waxwings from the crabapple tree across the right-of-way.

  I zipped my parka and stepped outside into the barbarous cold. Instantly, my eyes began tearing up and my cheeks burned as if I’d been smacked in the face with a bag of ice.

  I slid into the passenger seat. “Jesus, how cold is it?”

  “Minus four.”

  As usual, he was wearing dark sunglasses despite the overcast sky. Marc Rivard wasn’t that much older than I was—I would have guessed thirty or thirty-one—but he seemed to have suffered an early onset of middle age. The black hair along his temples was edged with gray strands, and he had a developed a paunch, which bulged over the top of his gun belt. Rivard had grown up in a Franco-American household outside Lewiston, and his speech reminded me of my mom’s French uncles and aunts. You didn’t hear many people of my generation with that singsong accent.

  “So where are we headed?” I asked.

  “SAD seventy-seven,” he said. “Whitney High School.”

  SAD stood for school administrative district, but the acronym seemed sadly fitting in this part of the state.

  “And what are we doing, exactly?”

  He pulled the truck out onto the road that led down to the coast. The asphalt was lined with five-foot-tall snowbanks. A week of subzero temperatures had hardened the drifts into rock-solid ice. If an ambulance came speeding along behind us, there would be no room to pull over, I realized.

  “There’s a kid I want to talk to named Barney Beal. My snitch says he’s the one who broke into those cabins over on Bog Pond, the ones with satellite dishes.”

  “He was stealing TVs?”

  “No, there’s this microchip inside the relay that connects to the television. It goes for one hundred dollars a pop. It’s small and easy to hide in your pocket. It’s like stealing hundred-dollar bills.”

  “Why do you need me for this?”

  When he turned his head, I saw my fun-house reflection staring back from the bronze lenses of his sunglasses. “What’s with you and all the questions today?” he said. “It’s more intimidating if there are two of us showing up in his classroom.”

  Rivard was in a foul mood again. He had gotten divorced and remarried the previous summer, and many of our “conversations” were long monologues by him on the inequities of the state’s laws concerning alimony and child support. His new wife was already pregnant, too, but he didn’t seem to see it so much as a blessing as another expense he couldn’t afford.

  He removed his hand from the wheel to sip coffee from an aluminum mug. It occurred to me this was yet another difference between my two sergeants. Kathy would never have come to my house without also bringing me a cup of coffee.

  “Do you mind if we get some breakfast first?” I asked.

  He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. “The McDonald’s in Machias has a drive-through.”

  Ever since I’d moved to Whitney, I’d been in search of a regular breakfast joint. Back in my old district, I’d become a fixture at the Square Deal Diner. Just about every day, I’d stop in for a molasses doughnut and some good-natured ribbing from the owner, Dot Libby, or her plainspoken daughter, Ruth. They’d been among the first people to welcome me into what had started out as an unfriendly community. Over the course of the two years I’d spent in Sennebec, I’d formed an unexpected attachment to the restaurant. It surprised me, thinking about the Libbys, to feel such intense homesickness.

  We drove along, listening to the fuzzy chatter on the police radio. I turned my head to take in the view.

  The road into town was hardly beautiful. The snowbanks outside my window were black with
soot and impacted grit. The bigger pines and birches had all been cut within the past fifty years, and so you were left with nothing but adolescent trees elbowing one another for sunlight. The scattered houses were a mix of rusty trailers, farmhouses with advanced cases of osteoporosis, and newer modular homes that looked like they had come out of the same cereal box. The residents tended to hang their laundry even in the dead of winter: faded bedsheets, spit-stained onesies, stretch pants, and a surprising amount of thong underwear.

  Back on the midcoast, we’d had hidden pockets of poverty amid the splendid rows of summer cottages. Here, the poverty was proudly on display for the world to see. Whenever it snowed, everything would look pure and white again, but only for a few hours, until the first plow came along or the first pink panties got pinned to a clothesline.

  After ten minutes of not conversing, I tried again. “So tell me about Joe Brogan.”

  “Kind of a dick—but his business is good for the local economy.”

  “I’m not a fan of game ranches.”

  “Yeah, well, they’re legal, so you’d better get over it.”

  “What sorts of problems have you had with him and his guides?”

  “One of his buffaloes got loose a year ago, and we spent a month looking for it in the woods. Freaked-out people kept calling us after it ran through their yards, asking us if there were bison in Maine. A guy finally shot it the first week of moose season, thinking it was an obese moose or something.”

  “What about Billy Cronk?” I asked.

  “Good guide. Grew up in the woods. Are you still going to send that night hunting charge against him to the DA?”

  Rivard had never told me to let the matter drop, but I could decode his sentiments easily enough. And the truth was that I was conflicted about the matter myself. Brogan might have been a jerk, but Cronk seemed like a decent guy, and the thought of ruining his life rubbed my ethics the wrong way. But Kathy had warned me against seeming soft. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “Well, it’s your call.” My sergeant took another sip of coffee. “That zebra thing is pretty crazy shit.”