The Precipice: A Novel Read online

  I met Nissen on the trail, hurrying north toward the lean-to. To my surprise, he had acquired two companions, a man and a woman. They were a middle-aged couple, both dressed in the traditional garb of older thru-hikers: floppy-brimmed hats, packable raincoats (black for him, purple for her), shorts that showed off their muscular legs, and dirty boots. The long, lumpy packs on their backs looked like they weighed a hundred pounds each.

  “These folks came from Cloud Pond,” said Nissen.

  “What’s going on, Warden?” the man asked, bracing himself on two trekking poles.

  “We’re looking for two missing hikers. They would have been heading north from Monson.” I removed a copy of the MISSING poster from my back pocket. “Have you seen them?”

  The man, who had a thin nose and thinner lips, studied the photograph. “I don’t think so.” He handed the paper to the woman.

  “Naomi Walks and Baby Ruth,” the woman said, reading the trail names aloud. She was a full head shorter than her partner and had black hair with a dramatic white streak in it that made me think of Cruella de Vil. “I remember reading their entries in some of the logbooks. They quoted the Bible a lot in their notes.”

  “We’re atheists,” the man explained.

  “Agnostics,” the woman said.

  I took out my notebook and pen. “Can I get your names?”

  “Rick and Connie Chalmers,” she said. “We’re from Sacramento.”

  The rain had picked up, and a gale-force wind had begun to blow.

  “Are you thru-hikers?” I asked.

  The husband nodded his head. “We did the Pacific Crest Trail three years ago and thought we’d come east.”

  “And you’re sure you never met these women on the AT?”

  “They seemed to be about a week ahead of us the whole time,” said Connie. “Judging by the dates in the trail registers, I mean.”

  The temperature had dropped twenty degrees in the past five minutes. Cold gusts were bouncing around the tops of evergreens, shaking loose pine cones. Dead branches clattered onto the forest floor.

  Rick Chalmers hunched his shoulders reflexively against the rain. “What do you think happened to them?”

  “We don’t know,” I said. “They were supposed to call their parents from Abol Bridge three days ago.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Connie.

  “Warden, would you mind if we talked out of the rain?” Rick pointed with his aluminum walking stick at the shelter.

  I glanced at my wristwatch and saw that it was six o’clock. We had another hour of daylight, not accounting for the premature darkness arriving with the storm. Even if we left Chairback Gap immediately, Nissen and I would still find ourselves negotiating a murky, rain-slick trail. Lightning flashed again over my shoulder. Involuntarily, I found myself counting the seconds before I heard thunder. I barely got to two. The explosion nearly knocked me off my feet.

  “That sounds like a good idea.”

  The Chalmerses and I ducked our heads and made for the shelter, but Nissen took his time. The sudden plunge in temperature had left me shivering, as if I’d just taken a bath in ice water. He hadn’t even bothered to put on his shirt. The rain seemed to bounce off his bare skin.

  When we were all under the overhanging roof of the lean-to, Connie said, “We’d been hoping to make the bunkhouse before the storm arrived, but we were lucky to get this far.”

  I wiped the wet brim of my cap and shook the water from my hand. “What bunkhouse?”

  “Hudson’s Lodge,” said Nissen. “It’s a few miles north of here, along the old AT route.”

  “The Companion says they have a bunkhouse where you can stay for a dollar a night if you do work,” said Rick.

  Lieutenant DeFord hadn’t mentioned the lodge in his briefing.

  “It just opened last year,” said Nissen with a sneer. “‘In the Heart of the Hundred Mile Wilderness’ is their marketing slogan.”

  I had to assume DeFord would have contacted the owners to see if Samantha and Missy had passed through during the previous two weeks. It was protocol to call all the local fishing guides, logging companies, and sporting camps—anyone with a business inside the search radius.

  I showed the Chalmerses the logbook inside the shelter and asked if they knew any of the thru-hikers who had signed their trail names. Daddy Shortlegs and Swedish Meatball were a friendly older couple from the Midwest, they said. The others they knew only from their logbook entries.

  “We’re not the fastest ones out here.” The man smiled at his wife.

  “My trail name is Turtle,” she said. “He’s the Hare.”

  Rain fell in sheets off the lean-to roof. It felt like we were inside a cave behind a waterfall, looking through a diaphanous curtain of water. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nissen squatting on his heels at the edge of the platform. He had his scarred back to us and was staring out at the tempest, as motionless as a gargoyle. Every now and then, a blue flash of lightning would light up the forest like a strobe, and the sky would crack open overhead. I tried to forget the fact that we were two thousand feet up and miles from the nearest road.

  I left the Chalmerses a poster to show other hikers and told them to call the number listed if they encountered anyone who had seen Samantha and Missy. I was about to step down off the log at the edge of the shelter when Connie said to Nissen, “Have we met before?”

  “No,” he said, then leaped out into the pouring rain.

  Connie turned to her husband. “Doesn’t he look familiar?”

  “I don’t remember faces,” Rick said.

  I said good-bye to the Chalmerses and jumped down into the mud. I expected that I might have to whistle for Nissen again, but I found him standing to one side of the lean-to, out of the wind.

  “You ready to head back to Monson?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” I said. “I want you to show me this bunkhouse.”

  “What for? The lieutenant would have called Hudson’s Lodge already. The girls won’t be there.”

  I started off into the cold drizzle without answering him.

  4

  The storm chased us down the mountain. Every few minutes, another blue flare went off, and a deafening shock wave rolled across the landscape. I could feel the reverberations in the walls of my heart.

  The dusk had come early with the clouds, and the downpour had turned the path into a rushing streambed. It was like running blindfolded down a sluiceway. The beam of my headlamp bobbed along in front of me as I tried to keep my balance. I wasn’t always successful. My pants were smeared with mud.

  Half a mile down, we came upon a sugar maple that had been cleaved in two by a thunderbolt. The exposed heartwood looked like a black slash. Charred and broken branches lay scattered among the exposed roots and smoking leaves. When lightning strikes a tree, the electricity travels through the sap, and the superheated liquid explodes the living plant from within. If the previous weeks had been any drier, we might have found ourselves cut off from my truck by a newborn forest fire.

  Nissen didn’t bother with a flashlight. Those lantern eyes of his seemed to function perfectly well in the shadows. He moved by grabbing a sapling and then swinging his body forward until he could grasp another with his free hand. It felt like I was trying to keep pace with Tarzan of the Apes. Once again, I found myself outdistanced. I didn’t know what he planned on doing when he reached the bottom, since I had the only set of keys.

  I stopped in a sheltered crevice between two boulders and took a swig from my water bottle. I’d nearly drained both of the quart containers on my climb up Chairback. It felt strange to be soaked to the skin and yet so dehydrated at the same time. An hour earlier, I’d been on the verge of heat stroke; now I was goose-pimpled from the cold. Every warden has seen fatal cases of hypothermia in the middle of summer: swimmers who overestimate the warmth of a spring-fed pond, mountain climbers who wander into pouring rain above the tree line. All it takes is enough cold water to depress your body temperatu
re ten degrees. There are so many ways a person can die in the woods.

  Including murder.

  Most of the thru-hikers I’d met on the AT had been great people, but I had a friend who worked as a ranger in Baxter State Park, at the trail’s terminus, and he had told me about the increasing amount of drug use he was seeing in his campground. Pot and booze had been the traditional intoxicants of choice among the White Blazers (named for the color of the markers along the path). Hallucinogens, too, of course—the Appalachian Trail had long attracted hippies and the younger people who emulated them. But in recent years, crystal meth had started appearing in Maine, brought up in backpacks from the South, where it was epidemic in the hollows of the Great Smoky Mountains. “I’ve seen methamphetamine turn a normal guy into a werewolf,” my ranger friend had told me one night over a crackling campfire: a horror story for twenty-first-century America.

  Add to that the local creeps who lived within spitting distance of the trail—the poachers, predators, smack addicts, recluses, robbers, and Doomsday preppers—and it was a wonder there weren’t more homicides.

  But it wasn’t my responsibility to compile a list of suspects for a crime that might not even have taken place. My only job was to gather information for Lieutenant DeFord and report back. With luck, Samantha and Missy had already stepped out of the woods, unharmed and embarrassed by all the fuss.

  Then I remembered Stacey’s warning. “I wouldn’t bet on it,” she’d said.

  I stuffed my Nalgene bottle into the rucksack, readjusted the headlamp on the brim of my dripping cap, and set off in pursuit of Nissen. The legendary trail runner was also earning a place in my personal rogues’ gallery.

  * * *

  I’d parked my patrol truck behind a stand of shrub willows at the edge of a clearing. Like any good warden, I prided myself on knowing how to hide a vehicle from prying eyes—an essential skill when your job involves sneaking up on poachers—but Nissen had had no trouble finding the truck again in the gloom. The wiry little man was sitting on the hood, swinging his legs like a bored kid in church. He’d finally put on a shirt: a blue-and-gold baseball jersey with the University of West Virginia mascot on the front. His alma mater, I assumed.

  “Thanks for waiting,” I said.

  “You’re welcome,” he replied without a hint of sarcasm.

  The temperature had begun to climb again now that the storm had passed through, and the mosquitoes were out enjoying the evening. I slapped at my neck but missed the insect feeding on me, then swatted at my arm and missed the next. The bugs seemed not to want to bite Nissen, despite the invitation of all that exposed skin.

  I reached into my pocket for my cell phone.

  “You won’t get a signal here.” Nissen slid off the truck. “There won’t be anything until we get over to the lodge.”

  I needed to report what I’d found atop Chairback to Lieutenant DeFord. And I still hoped to connect with the team that had gone up Whitecap Mountain. I wanted to hear what they’d discovered at the next lean-to. After a minute of searching, the NO SERVICE message appeared again on the illuminated screen. I put the phone away and beeped open the truck.

  Nissen climbed into the passenger seat and let in a squadron of mosquitoes before he closed the door. I tried every channel on the police radio, but all I heard was static. The heat coming off our wet bodies caused the windows to fog up instantly, and I had to run the blower to clear them. There was nothing to do but wait until the defogger did its job on the windshield.

  “So what’s the deal with this new lodge?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have the sense you don’t approve of it.”

  Nissen had a disquieting habit of conversing without making eye contact. “They’ve got a chef there and bathrooms in most of the cabins. You can go stand-up paddleboarding and everything. It’s real nice.”

  “So you don’t like it because you’re a purist?”

  “Nothing is pure on the trail anymore,” he said, “least of all the fabled Hundred Mile Wilderness. You’re lucky you don’t get hit by a logging truck crossing the KI Road these days. And Gulf Hagas has basically become just another tourist attraction. Someone should sell T-shirts.”

  Gulf Hagas (rhymes with Vegas) was a spectacular ravine nearby with hundred-foot slate cliffs and a series of stomach-dropping waterfalls carved by the West Branch of the Pleasant River. It was commonly, but inappropriately, nicknamed “the Grand Canyon of the East.” I’d hiked the Rim Trail when I was a student at Colby College and had nearly slipped over the edge trying to impress my girlfriend with my foolhardy fearlessness.

  “We’re not going to find those girls holed up in the bunkhouse,” Nissen said, “so why are we going over there? Who exactly are you looking for?”

  “Any of the other names I found in the Chairback trail register.”

  The air inside the cab of the truck smelled worse than a locker room now, but the blowers had cleared a sliver at the base of the windshield. I shifted the transmission into reverse and backed carefully out of the bushes. My pickup was a brand-new black GMC Sierra, which I washed and waxed every weekend. It was inevitably going to get scratched and battered, but this was the first nice vehicle I had ever been assigned, and I intended to baby it as long as I could.

  “So what’s your story, Nissen?” I asked.

  He cocked his head as if to shake water out of his ear. “What do you mean?”

  “What do you do for work when you’re not out searching for lost hikers?”

  He paused, as if the answer was a state secret he was forbidden to disclose. “I’m an apiarist.”

  “You mean a beekeeper?”

  “That’s what the word means. I have a few bee yards with three hundred hives. I sell honey and beeswax, but the big money is in pollination services.”

  “And you make decent money doing that?” I asked.

  “Probably more than you make.”

  “That wouldn’t take much,” I remarked, as if he hadn’t intended the insult. Maybe the poor guy’s autistic, I thought. I could never tell the difference between someone with Asperger’s syndrome and a garden-variety misanthrope. I tried to be charitable.

  “I have a booth at the Big E in Springfield, Massachusetts, next week. I usually clear ten grand there.”

  This was the nickname of the month-long Eastern States Exposition, the largest agricultural fair in New England. The Warden Service had a traveling display it set up there, featuring taxidermy mounts—deer heads, moose antlers, stuffed fish—confiscated from poachers; it was called the “Wall of Shame.” Something like half a million people attended the Big E, I’d heard.

  We rumbled down the narrow tote road in the dark. The truck shook back and forth as it traversed a path of stones bulging up from the weeds. I heard branches scraping the sides of my vehicle and rocks bouncing against the undercarriage. So much for babying my new truck.

  “What did you do before you started keeping bees?” I asked.

  “This and that,” he said.

  “Do you live in Monson?”

  “No, Blanchard.”

  It was the next town to the south—even deeper in the boondocks. “Any family?” I asked.

  “It’s just me and my shadow. Hey, I like to keep my privacy, you know?”

  I’m a curious person by nature, and sometimes I go too far asking questions. Normally, I would have apologized for the intrusion, but with Nissen, there seemed to be no point in making the gesture.

  After a while, the logging trail dropped us onto the gravel thoroughfare Nissen had mentioned. The KI Road sliced across the Hundred Mile Wilderness from one side to the other. From the village of Brownville, it traveled west past the old foundry at Katahdin Iron Works (for which the road was named), then paralleled the rapids of Gulf Hagas before it climbed up and over the Longfellow Mountains, ending at last in Greenville, on the shores of Moosehead Lake. There were checkpoints at both ends maintained by the North Maine Woods Associat
ion, but the gatekeepers were essentially toll takers and did little to police the wild lands.

  I rode the brake hard down a hill, watchful for deer and moose that might leap from the trees, and saw in my headlights the sudden reflection of parked vehicles in a lot up ahead, where the Appalachian Trail crossed the road. If we’d kept following the path instead of bushwhacking down the mountain, Nissen and I would have ended up here. I counted two GMC warden trucks, two Toyota pickups, one Ford Explorer SUV, and one Subaru BRAT. The vehicles belonged to the searchers who’d gone up Whitecap Mountain.

  “Is this the ford across the Pleasant River?” I asked.

  “On the other side is the Hermitage,” Nissen said. I recognized the name. It was a historic stand of old-growth white pines, some hundreds of years old. “Then the trail follows Gulf Hagas Brook up the mountain. It’s roughly nine point nine miles from Chairback Gap to the Newhall shelter.”

  I grinned. “Roughly nine point nine miles?”

  But Nissen didn’t get my joke.

  As I pulled into the unlit parking lot, the door of one of the black GMCs opened and a short blond woman climbed out. I would have recognized Warden Danielle Tate from a mile away. Five-four, square-shouldered, and hands perpetually clenched into fists, as if to show the world she was ready for battle. She was just twenty-four and a recent graduate of the Advanced Warden Academy.

  Dani Tate belonged to what I thought of as the new breed of Maine game wardens, who saw themselves as law-enforcement officers first and foremost. They tended to identify more with state troopers and county deputies than with the older wardens, who could remember a bygone era, the time before deer hunters were required to wear blaze orange and when logs were still being driven down the timber-clotted rivers each spring.

  Because of my age, I was often lumped in with this younger crowd. The truth was, I’d always emulated the woods-wise veterans who had never graduated from college but could follow the path of a fleeing poacher across bare stone in the middle of the night. Charley Stevens had once described me as the “youngest old fart he’d ever met,” and I’d taken it as a compliment.