The Precipice: A Novel Page 2

  Two weeks. Too late.

  Those four words were running in a loop in my head as I adjusted the sweaty straps on my canvas rucksack and looked up the forested mountainside at the rapidly receding back of my search partner—an improbably able-bodied volunteer whom I’d met earlier that afternoon at the command post. The two of us had driven in my patrol truck from the North Woods village of Monson to a distant logging road where we could intersect the trail closer to the midsection of the Hundred Mile Wilderness. Despite my best efforts at making conversation, he’d barely spoken a word to me on the hour-long drive, preferring to stare out the window at the blur of green trees through which we were traveling.

  I assumed my youthful athleticism was why I’d been assigned the legendary Bob “Nonstop” Nissen and sent to check the remote Chairback Gap lean-to for signs the women might have stopped there. But as soon as the two of us had set off on the access trail to the shelter, I knew this middle-aged man was going to kick my ass. He was well past fifty, but he could scramble up a sheer cliff like a Barbary ape. Most wilderness rescue volunteers use trekking poles, or even climbing axes, to steady themselves, but Nissen preferred to use his big calloused hands to pull himself up the mountain, going on four limbs at times. He had skin so sun-browned, it seemed to be turning to leather; and he was wearing safari shorts, which showed off calf muscles the size of grapefruits. His climbing boots were made by La Sportiva, one of the best and most expensive brands in the world, which told me a lot about the man’s priorities.

  Now I watched him disappear around a clump of lichen-crusted boulders.

  Since we’d started climbing an hour earlier, Nissen hadn’t so much as glanced back in my direction. He seemed to view our assignment less as a search-and-rescue mission and more as a personal competition. His sole purpose seemed to be getting to the top of Chairback before me.

  Back in Monson, while we were packing our supplies, the officer in charge had told me how Nissen had gotten his unusual nickname. For more than two decades, he’d held the record for the fastest “unsupported” thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail—sixty-one days from south to north, carrying his own supplies, without the assistance of another human being. He’d recently lost his title to a young trail runner from Virginia, but I could easily imagine Nonstop coming out of retirement to regain his former glory.

  Perspiration had soaked the brim of my black duty cap and was now streaming freely into the corners of my eyes. I’d left my olive green ballistic vest and button-down shirt back at the truck. I was now dressed in green cargo pants and a black T-shirt with the words GAME WARDEN printed on the back. In place of the L.L. Bean hunting shoes I normally wore, I’d put on a pair of Danner climbing boots. I’d even locked my SIG Sauer .357 pistol in the glove compartment. It felt unsettling to be in the wild unarmed.

  The skies were gray and darker in the west; the forecast called for late-afternoon thunderstorms. The hot, humid air surrounded me like a damp towel thrown over my head. The September woods were still lush and green on certain north-facing hillsides but sunburned and dry as kindling in other places. Both the thermometer and the calendar indicated that this was a summer day, but I had noticed a swamp maple glowing red in one of the wet ravines—a harbinger of autumn soon to come. A broad-winged hawk soared high above the treetops, crying its thin cry. The raptors had begun their southbound migration.

  Stacey teased me about being a “compulsive noticer.” I was like a cat, she said, easily distracted by every crawling bug and fluttering leaf. What could I do? It was who I was. And I thought it made me good at my job.

  Five hours earlier, I’d been relaxing in bed beside her, feeling the cool sea air on my skin and listening to the rhythmic crashing of the waves. Now here I was in the sweltering mountains, trying to keep pace with a freak of nature. As much as I loved the forest, the appeal of mountain climbing for its own sake had always eluded me. I could understand why some people—especially those who lived in cities or suburbs—might feel the urge to hike the Appalachian Trail, but for someone who essentially lived in the Maine woods, as I did, there was no need to embark on a two-thousand-mile journey to commune with nature.

  On the drive up, I’d kept picturing the dazed look in Stacey’s eyes when she’d told me about hiking Vermont’s Long Trail with her friends. I was more and more certain that she was withholding something from me about that experience. She’d mentioned meeting “creepy men” in the woods. God knows, there are plenty of them out here, I thought. My search partner among them.

  When I had finally worked my way around the clump of boulders, I was surprised to find Nissen seated on a log, waiting for me. He had taken off his shirt, displaying a brown torso so venous and devoid of fat that it looked like a textbook illustration for the human circulatory system. There was a small crucifix tattooed in green ink between his pectoral muscles. And he was eating a banana that he had removed from the fanny pack he wore slung around his narrow hips.

  “You hanging in there?” he asked with an expression that didn’t seem overly concerned with my answer.

  I nodded, unable to utter an actual sentence in reply. My lungs burned as if I’d inhaled smoke from a campfire. It annoyed me that I couldn’t keep pace with a man old enough to have been my father.

  Nissen had interesting hair: dark brown in color and cut in a style that fell somewhere between Moe of the Three Stooges and early Paul McCartney. His head was triangular in shape, narrowing to a stubbled chin. He had enormous brown eyes, like an arboreal creature that had evolved to see in the dark.

  “I’m used to hiking alone, so sometimes I go too fast,” he said.

  “Wouldn’t it have been easier to come up the AT rather than bushwhacking like this?” I reached for one of my water bottles and unscrewed the lid.

  “Easier, yeah. But this shortcut is faster. Besides, I thought you’d prefer slabbing.”

  “Slabbing?”

  “Going around the summit. There’s a precipice near the top that’s a bitch to climb.”

  I didn’t appreciate the insinuation that I wasn’t up to the challenge. “We should be looking for signs of Samantha and Missy rather than just racing to the top. Blowing our whistles, too.”

  He stuffed the remainder of the banana into his mouth and then carefully rolled up the peel and tucked it into his fanny pack. “Until we get a look at the logbook in the Chairback Gap lean-to, we won’t even know if those girls made it this far. First order of business is narrowing down the PLS, right?”

  The abbreviation stood for “point last seen.” In the jargon of search-and-rescue, it indicated the place on a map where a missing person had last been positively identified. I hated to admit it, but Nissen was right about the futility of examining every rock and leaf for signs of the two college kids. The reason we’d been sent on this quick ascent up Chairback Mountain was to help refine the search area. Normally, we would have been part of a bigger group, but the officer in charge—Lt. John DeFord—had deployed teams to do quick checks, called “hasty searches,” of the trail registers. Other squads were rushing to inspect the lean-tos at Logan Brook and Potaywadjo Spring, farther north, in hopes that Samantha and Missy might have left messages there.

  Nissen sprang like a jack-in-the-box to his feet. He was probably no taller than five-seven. “Do you want to rest some more while I go ahead?”

  “No, I’m good.”

  “I don’t want to push you too hard.”

  I clenched and unclenched my fists. I couldn’t tell if he resented being partnered with an inferior climber or if he was just an arrogant son of a bitch. Anyone who hikes two thousand miles alone isn’t likely to be a people person.

  When he turned around, I observed that his bare back was heavily scarred between the shoulder blades, the skin pink and welted, whereas the rest of his skin was brown. It was almost as if he’d suffered a bad burn in the distant past. Or maybe he had a tattoo removed, I thought.

  I was about to remind him that the Warden Service was
running this search, when the breeze brought the sound of a distant engine to my ears. Squinting into the sunshine, I caught sight of a small floatplane flying over the summit of Chairback Mountain. It was a private Cessna—not part of our Aviation Division—but I recognized the two canoe paddles lashed to the pontoon cross braces.

  “You know who that is?” Nissen asked.

  “A friend of mine,” I said with a smile.

  Stacey must have called her father after I’d left the beach house. I should have known the old pilot would have gassed up his plane the moment he heard two young women were missing in the wilderness. The thought of Charley Stevens joining the search filled me with new hope and gave my heart a much-needed jolt of adrenaline. I matched Nonstop Nissen step for step the rest of the way up the mountain.

  3

  The lean-to perched on a steep hillside in a notch between the summits of two mountains, Columbus and Chairback. Like most shelters along the Maine section of the Appalachian Trail, it had been built in the Adirondack style: three walls made of skinned cedar logs and the fourth open to the elements. A corrugated metal roof did a serviceable job of keeping out all but the worst windblown rain. A rake hung from a nail on the side, to be used to sweep up the campsite.

  I stood with my hands on my hip bones, huffing deep breaths. My quads and hamstrings felt twitchy. The light shimmering through the canopy of leaves overhead gave everything a sickly green pallor, even the skin on my arms. Somewhere in the trembling treetops, a red-eyed vireo sang a broken series of notes, then fell silent.

  Given the heat and the approaching thunderclouds, I’d expected we might find people at the shelter. It was peak season on the AT as thru-hikers pushed themselves to climb Mount Katahdin before Baxter State Park closed in mid-October. The lean-to slept six campers, and there were bare, beaten patches of dirt in the forested area where others had pitched their tents over the summer. But there was no one to be seen.

  Nissen crouched by the fire ring—a circle of scorched rocks near the structure’s missing wall—and thrust his fingers into the mound of charcoal and ashes.

  “Still wet.” He showed me his blackened fingertips. “Someone doused a fire this morning.”

  “Why don’t you check the privy,” I said.

  His scowl told me what he thought of my suggestion. “Let’s have a look at the register before we start poking around the shit house.”

  I’d worked on many search-and-rescue operations, including those involving the Appalachian Mountain Club and Outward Bound, and without exception, I’d found the volunteers to be professional and obliging. I’d never encountered anyone with the self-importance of Nonstop Nissen. When we got back to the command post, I intended to talk with Lieutenant DeFord about him, but there was no point in getting into a pissing contest now.

  He wiped his hands on his powerful thighs, leaving dark smudges, and rose from the ground. Our climb hadn’t even winded him. He frog-jumped up inside the lean-to before I could take a step in his direction. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but a moment later he stuck his head out of the shadows and said, “They were here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because they signed the logbook.”

  I slipped the straps of my pack off my greasy shoulders. Then I unzipped the outer pocket, removed my point-and-shoot camera and my palm-size flashlight, and followed Nissen into the shelter. At the outer edge of the raised platform was a round log on which to sit while you laced up your boots. The wood had been worn smooth and shiny from hundreds of hikers resting their backsides on it. I sat down on the log and swung my legs around until I was facing the interior. Then I crawled forward to meet him. He handed me the trail register, a simple spiral-bound notebook. Up close, I got a whiff of his body odor; it wasn’t musky like normal perspiration, but pungent, as if he’d recently gorged himself on onions.

  It was cool and dark beneath the roof, and I couldn’t understand how Nissen could read anything unless he had the eyes of a lemur. I switched on my SureFire and shone the beam onto the open page. There was an entry, written in purple ink, dated nine days earlier:

  We have our own private shelter tonight. A full moon is shining almost as bright as the sun. We fall asleep serenaded by coyotes. They sound even closer than the last time.

  The entry was signed “Naomi Walks” and “Baby Ruth,” which, we’d been told, were the pseudonyms Samantha and Missy had adopted for their journey. The practice was widespread on the Appalachian Trail. Thru-hikers chose colorful trail names for themselves or were given them by other backpackers.

  “‘Serenaded by coyotes.’” Nissen’s breath was as sour as his sweat.

  “‘They sound even closer than the last time,’” I recited.

  “When was the last time?”

  Not having seen the women’s earlier log entries, I had no idea.

  “I need to photograph this.” I started to back out into the open air. “How about you check that latrine now.”

  “What am I supposed to look for? Used tampons?”

  “Why don’t you put up some posters while you’re at it,” I said.

  I reached into my backpack and found a few copies of a flyer that Lieutenant DeFord had hurriedly printed out in the Warden Service’s mobile command unit. Each search team had been ordered to tack them up at its assigned lean-to. It showed the photograph of Samantha and Missy taken beside the warning sign at the edge of the Hundred Mile Wilderness. The word MISSING was printed in big letters across the top, followed by a description of the two women—their ages, heights, and weights—with instructions for anyone with information to call the Maine State Police.

  “Use this.” I handed him the staple gun I kept in my truck to put up NO HUNTING signs. My fingers were all swollen from the hike up the mountain.

  Nissen grunted but obeyed.

  Back in Monson, a representative from the Appalachian Trail Conservancy had told us we would have intermittent cell service between Cloud Pond and Chairback Gap. But when I tried my phone, I had no coverage. I could only assume the approaching thunderstorm was interfering with the transmission. I’d hoped to contact the next team of searchers to the north.

  Lieutenant DeFord had assigned another group to check the next lean-to on the trail, ten miles away on the steep approach up Whitecap Mountain. If they discovered that the women had signed in at that shelter, we would keep shifting the search area deeper into the Hundred Mile Wilderness. If there was no record of their having arrived at the Carl A. Newhall shelter, then Chairback would become the point last seen, and we would concentrate our attention on the ten-mile stretch between the two campsites.

  I sat on the log at the edge of the platform, taking pictures of the diary pages. We would want to talk with anyone who might have encountered Samantha and Missy in the past two weeks, and so we needed to match trail names with actual people. Some of the pseudonyms were really far-out:

  The Incredible Hunk

  McDonut

  Sassy Frassy

  Dogmom

  Daddy Shortlegs

  Swedish Meatball

  Doughboi

  El Chupacabra

  Hetty-Mae

  Almost every search-and-rescue operation has a component that wardens don’t emphasize to the friends and family of the missing persons—at least not at first. People don’t just drop off the map because a compass breaks or they take a wrong turn down an unmarked trail. Sometimes they choose to vanish because they have broken laws or because they are on the run from dangerous situations, usually involving drugs and guns. Other times, they disappear because they’ve met the wrong person on the trail.

  Samantha and Missy were wholesome-looking young women who had ventured into a place largely empty of other human beings: a wilderness where cell phones didn’t work and you could scream all night without being heard. There wasn’t a person involved in this search who didn’t share the same dark fears about what might have happened to them.

  While I’d been taking pict
ures, the sky had turned slate gray and the wind had stopped abruptly, as if someone had switched off a giant fan. The sudden stillness seemed eerie. Very often, you get these quiet moments before electrical storms. I wished I had thought to stuff a rain jacket into my pack. Nissen and I wouldn’t leave this mountain without being drenched. Under normal circumstances, I would just have waited out the rain inside the shelter (better to hold tight than break a leg sliding down a muddy path), but time was of the essence, especially since we had already lost so much of it.

  As I was putting my point-and-shoot back into its neoprene pouch, I realized Nissen should have returned by now. The privy was down the hill from the lean-to—out of sight and, more important, out of smell. But not that far.

  “Nissen?”

  I heaved the rucksack onto my shoulders again and made my way through the thigh-high underbrush toward the outhouse. A rumble of thunder sounded in the west and rolled across the forest treetops, a crashing wave of sound.

  The privy was a shabby little wooden structure with a half-moon window and a sign nailed beneath it: LATCH DOOR WHEN LEAVING OR PORCUPINES WILL EAT THIS BUILDING. Whoever had made the sign had carved chomp marks in it as a playful joke. The door was closed, per instructions.

  “Nissen?”

  I took a peek inside and got a whiff that made my eyes water and my throat tighten. Someone had scrawled “Help! I’m out of mountain money!” on the back of the door. It was trail lingo for toilet paper. I backed away from the stinking structure and glanced back toward the lean-to. The situation was challenging enough without my having to chase down my search partner, too. I blew on the emergency whistle I was wearing on a lanyard around my neck and waited.

  “Up here!” Nissen’s voice came from somewhere south of the shelter.

  I trudged up the hill, doing my best to avoid trampling the young firs and spruce trees pushing through the fallen needles. A raindrop landed with a splat on the bridge of my nose. A moment later came another clap of thunder, this one considerably closer to Chairback.