Bad Little Falls Read online

  “Young man,” said Doc. “Can you hear me?”

  He snapped open his eyes. The pupils were the size of dimes. “No.”

  “I’m a doctor,” Larrabee said calmly. “I’m going to help you.”

  Doc had a pretty good bedside manner, considering his patients were mostly cows and horses.

  “I’m calling an ambulance,” I said.

  “Ben already did,” said Mrs. Sprague.

  “Do you know who this man is?”

  “I’m not sure. His face is so…” She hugged herself and shivered, as if the man’s hypothermia were contagious. “His wallet is over on the table. I tried to cover him with a blanket, but he keeps saying he’s hot.”

  “Press,” said the man.

  “What’s that?” asked Doc. “Press what?”

  “Presster,” said the man.

  “Is that your last name or your first name?” Doc asked.

  I opened the wallet and pulled out the driver’s license. The picture showed a good-looking version of the disfigured face before us. He had high cheekbones and feathered chestnut hair cut like a disco dancer’s from the 1970s.

  “His name is John Sewall,” I said.

  FEBRUARY 14

  It’s snowing wicked hard out tonight. I’m writing this under the covers with the headlamp Aunt Tammi gave me for my birthday.

  THIS IS MY LAST WILL & TESTAMENT

  I bequeath everything to Ma except my Bruce Lee poster. Give that back to Dad.

  And Tammi should get my headlamp, I guess.

  I want to be buried at sea or burned like a Viking. Either way is fine.

  On my tombstone it should read—

  I hear something.

  WHISPERING!

  It ain’t the wind. That’s a voice speaking. A woman’s voice.

  SHE’S HERE!

  8

  Should I have made the connection between the face on the driver’s license and the incident I’d witnessed at McDonald’s? It’s easy now to say yes. In my defense, I hadn’t focused on the smaller of the two men. My attention had been fixated first on the jaw-droppingly beautiful woman behind the counter and later on the tattooed thug. I’d barely noticed the big one’s sidekick, and the name Sewall—like Beal, Cates, or Sprague—is common in eastern Maine.

  From his knees beside the bed, Doc looked up at Mrs. Sprague. “Doris, I need you to bring me all the blankets and sleeping bags you have in the house.”

  The solid little woman embraced herself tightly. Her eyes had a glassy sheen. She seemed to be in a trance. “What did you say?”

  “We need to wrap this man up in as many warm layers as possible. I’m barely getting a radial pulse.”

  “Should I run a hot bath?” she asked.

  “Christ no. He could have a heart attack from the shock.”

  She began blinked rapidly. “I’m sorry! I didn’t know.”

  “It’s all right, Mrs. Sprague,” I said. “Let me help you.”

  Hypothermia is a decrease in the body’s core temperature to the degree where the entire cardiovascular and nervous systems collapse. The only way to treat it is to warm the afflicted person up gradually. Hospitals pump humidified air into the lungs and irrigate body cavities with warm liquids, but these methods were beyond our capabilities in the little Swiss chalet. The best we could do was wrap up Sewall like a burrito in as many layers of insulation as we could find.

  I followed the woman from room to room, gathering up every Navajo blanket, down sleeping bag, and cotton sheet in the place. Doris Sprague found a hot-water bottle for me and began to fill it with water from the kitchen tap. We would apply it to Sewall’s armpits or his groin, above the femoral artery.

  I brought the accumulated bedclothes into the room with the frozen man. It was obviously a teenage boy’s bedroom. A bureau held various sports trophies (baseball and basketball) and assorted animal teeth and skulls. There was a picture of the pop singer Katy Perry on one wood-paneled wall; on another was a poster of an airbrushed-looking wolf, which was staring out at the room with the same intensely blue eyes as Ms. Perry’s. The poster bore the slogan IN WILDNESS IS THE PRESERVATION OF THE WORLD.

  “How’s our patient?”

  “Not good. He needs to get to a hospital. I don’t know how long the EMTs will take to get here—if they can get here—but we have our work cut out for us. At best, he’s going to lose some fingers and toes from the frostbite.”

  “It’s the worst case I’ve seen,” I said.

  “Can you find some fluids for him?”

  I went into the kitchen and found Doris Sprague standing beside the still-running kitchen tap. She wasn’t making a sound, but tears were sliding down her cheeks. I turned the faucet off and gently set my hand on the woman’s shaking shoulder.

  “Do you have any Jell-O?” I asked.

  She gazed up at me and her mouth opened. “Are you hungry?”

  “No, ma’am. It’s for our patient. If we can get him to drink some hot liquid Jell-O, it would help.”

  “Is raspberry OK?”

  “Any flavor is fine.”

  I looked around the kitchen. There were two dirty plates with chicken bones on the counter beside the sink, two sets of dirty silverware, four empty Moxie cans. In our circuit through the sad rooms of the house, I realized, we hadn’t encountered another person—neither this “Joey” nor the man of the house himself.

  “Where’s your husband, Mrs. Sprague?”

  “Out looking for the other one.”

  “What other one?”

  “This one’s friend.”

  I tried to make my voice soft and reassuring. “Mrs. Sprague, can you tell me what happened here tonight? From the beginning.”

  As she spoke, she seemed to regain her presence of her mind little by little. “Ben and I had finished eating and were listening to the radio when we heard a thud at the front of the house. At first we thought it was snow falling off the roof, but it sounded too heavy for that. So Ben took a look outside and he found the young man collapsed against the window. He’d just stumbled into the glass like a confused bird. Ben got him inside—my husband’s not very tall, but he’s rugged—and we put him down in the guest room. He was mumbling the whole time, the young man.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Something about a car. We figured he must have gone off the road somewhere. There’s a whole maze of logging roads between Bog Pond and the Heath, and none of them is marked, and if he’d gone in before the snow started to fall, he might’ve gotten turned around pretty easy. So Ben went to call Doc Larrabee, and I covered the boy with a blanket. He kept saying a name. It sounded like ‘Kate.’ I asked him if he’d been with someone else out there named Kate, and he said, ‘In the car.’”

  I glanced at the kitchen window, which was spackled with frost. “And your husband went out in the storm to look for this Kate?”

  “He took the plow.”

  “Does he have a phone with him?”

  “Yes, but if he’s down in the Heath, he won’t get reception.”

  “Can you heat up that Jell-O for me, Mrs. Sprague? I need to speak with Doc Larrabee for a moment.”

  * * *

  In the bedroom, Doc had succeeded in swaddling John Sewall in about eight inches of goose down, wool, and linen. We needed to keep the blood moving through his arteries until the EMTs arrived, and then hope he would hang on long enough to reach the hospital in Machias. Every few minutes, Sewall’s eyelids would begin to flutter, and Doc would give his shoulder a gentle shake and whisper to him in the same tone I bet he used with skittish horses.

  “So I’m thinking I should go out there,” I said.

  Doc gave me a frown. “The man’s delirious, Mike. There’s no reason to believe anything he says.”

  “All the more reason to find Ben Sprague, then.”

  “Can’t Doris just call him?”

  “She says there’s a dead zone in the Heath.”

  Doc pulled a wrinkled handkerchie
f from his shirt pocket and blew his nose forcibly into the cloth. “Well, it’s up to you. There’s not much you can do here except spell me on bathroom breaks. And I guess you’re right to worry about Ben. But I seem to remember that your Jeep’s stuck in a snowbank about a hundred yards up the road.”

  “I was thinking of borrowing one of the Spragues’ sleds.”

  Doc called my bluff. “So who’s going to rescue the rescuer?”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “I’m sure that’s what Ben told Doris.”

  “Didn’t you say that Kendrick was headed over this way with his dog team?” I said. “Your house is just up the hill and across Bog Pond.” He should have beaten us here by nearly half an hour, and Doris hasn’t mentioned seeing him.”

  “Maybe he ran into Sprague out there,” said Doc. “I wouldn’t worry about Kendrick. This kind of weather is his natural element.”

  “It’s my job to worry, Doc.”

  I stepped into the TV room to call the state police. “The EMTs are never going to make it down this hill unless they’re driving a military half-track,” I told the dispatcher in Augusta. “Can you arrange for DOT to send a plow over this way to help out the ambulance?”

  “Anything else?”

  “Contact Sergeant Rivard and tell him I need assistance searching for a lost person.”

  Call me chicken, but rousing my surly new sergeant in the middle of this snowstorm wasn’t a task I cared to do myself.

  * * *

  The Spragues’ sleds were Yamaha RS Ventures in the same colors: blue and white. They were touring machines, built for long-distance rides along well-manicured trails. Their meticulous Japanese engineers had never intended them to be ridden into the teeth of a full-on blizzard.

  At first the snowmobile floated atop the powder. I gave the engine a half handful of throttle and felt myself pulled along as if by actual horses given their head. The tracks bit into the snow and pushed the runners through the scattering spray.

  The conditions didn’t seem so bad until, going around a curve, I turned the handlebars and everything went wobbly. The sled rolled to the outside and dug into a drift, throwing cold mist up into the visor of my helmet. I stood up, leaned hard against the inside, and pulled the machine level for all of ten seconds before it pitched away from me again. I needed to find my balance quickly or I’d be wallowing in a snowbank with a quarter ton of steel on top of me. The last time something like that had happened, I snapped two bones in my hand. I planted both feet on the outside running board and let my body weight pull against the roll. Soon I was swaying back and forth down the trail.

  Doris Sprague had called the frozen swamp behind her house the Heath. There were about a hundred places with that name in my district. Most were raised peat bogs from which, every now and then, someone dug up a tea-stained mammoth tusk. The word heathen is derived from these prehistoric wetlands because heaths were home to criminals, outcasts, and lepers. Bogeymen dwelled in bogs. In northern Europe, they were the sites of ritual human sacrifices.

  This one was pretty much just a trackless wasteland. No virgins had ever been sacrificed here except by accident. Beneath the blowing snowdrifts, the sphagnum moss was hardened into permafrost. Stunted pines and swamp maples clustered together on islands of rock. Along the edges of the Heath, loggers had carved a rat’s maze through the laden evergreens. Every way you turned, there was another trail that dead-ended against a white wall of trees.

  Why had John Sewall been lurking in this swamp on a subzero day? And how had he found his way out?

  A lost person usually behaves in certain specific ways. Deprived of his bearings, he travels downhill or downstream under the mistaken impression that water always leads to a road (often it only leads to more water). Once he finds a trail, he will typically keep walking in one direction. A lost person moves with conviction and rarely reverses course, which is why wardens find so many of them headed 180 degrees from their intended destinations. The worst ones start bushwhacking and get themselves thoroughly turned around. Without clear visual clues, humans really do wander in circles.

  To make matters worse, John Sewall was hypothermic. In addition to the normal panic one experiences upon being lost, he was freezing to death, and his behavior had likely been irrational. The worst-case scenario was that he’d never been in the Heath to begin with; perhaps his car had slid off Route 277, and maybe Kate was the name of his girlfriend back home. But my gut told me the young man really had come from the bog and that someone else was lost out here.

  Snow sparkled in my headlights. It was often easier to see the outline of the road overhead than the road itself; the jagged treetops showed dark gray against the lighter gray of the sky.

  Where the hell was Kendrick—or Ben Sprague, for that matter? I saw no evidence in the shapes of the drifts of a plow truck having come this way. The wind was blowing so hard that the snowbanks were moving around me like slow-motion waves. I realized Sprague might have pushed his way down this very road fifteen minutes earlier and I’d never know it.

  I decided to mark a waypoint. I fumbled in my coat pocket and removed my DeLorme GPS unit. The satellite showed my location as a green arrow near the intersection of two branching tote roads. There were low hills on either side of me, steep enough to have presented a barrier to anyone traveling through deep snow on foot. Farther to the west was Bog Pond. I toggled north and south. If Sewall had come from this direction, the hills would have funneled him to this same spot. The road divided south of me. I needed to pick a direction.

  East, I decided.

  Out of the brute force of the blizzard, the wind wasn’t quite as loud, and I became aware of a distant sound. It was the barking of dogs.

  Kendrick.

  I twisted the throttle, and a noxious cloud of gasoline fumes rose up beneath my visor. Very quickly, the sound of the engine drowned out the yapping of the malamutes. I prayed my sense of direction wouldn’t fail me, or I would shoot right past them.

  In a few minutes, as I moved east along the trail, my headlights found the phosphorescent eyes of a dog. It stood, legs planted far apart, barking at me with a curled lip. Behind it were others. Kendrick had lashed his team to a tree.

  I cut the engine but left the lights shining, and tilted up the visor on my helmet. Moving at forty-five miles per hour, the windblown snow felt like shards of glass being driven into my face.

  “Kendrick!” I shouted.

  A shadow staggered out of the darkness.

  Because he hadn’t bothered to put on the snowshoes he kept strapped to his dogsled, he was floundering, knee-deep, in the drifts.

  “Have you seen Sprague?” I asked.

  His fur-lined hood and the shoulders of his buckskin parka were crusted with snow. “I met him on the road outside his house. He said there was a car lost out here with a girl in it. I sent him north across Route Two seventy-seven to search.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  He smiled, cracking the ice on his mustache. “Yep.”

  I jumped off the snowmobile into a deep drift. It was like trying to walk in wet cement.

  The light from Kendrick’s headlamp bounced along, leading the way. A huge snowbank rose across the trail. The handle of an entrenching tool protruded from the top of it.

  I watched Kendrick drop to his hands and knees and begin jabbing at the snow with the pointed shovel. I saw that he had already excavated a deep hole, exposing a black car. The door had been ajar when the storm began refilling the crater. Someone had entered or exited the buried vehicle in the past hours, and it was logical to think that person had been John Sewall.

  Kendrick burrowed deeper into the car. Snow had piled up behind the steering wheel and spilled over into the passenger side. From my perspective, standing behind Kendrick, I couldn’t see any farther into the darkened interior.

  I dropped to one knee and squinted into the face-lacerating wind. “Is there anyone inside?”

  Kendrick stopped di
gging. He propped himself on his elbow and turned to face me. “Not a soul,” he said.

  FEBRUARY 14

  Ma shakes my shoulder in the middle of the night. Get up, Lucas! Get up! she says.

  It’s pitch-black. I’m all groggy.

  Prester is on his way to the hospital, she says. He got caught in the snowstorm.

  Is he froze to death?

  Put your clothes on, she says.

  The first time I went to the hospital was when I tripped on the stairs that time. I was so tired, I fell asleep walking up to my bedroom and my bottom teeth bit straight through my lip. The tops of them got stuck on the skin. Ma had to peel them apart and there was blood everywhere.

  They gave me NINE stitches. I still have this scar along my bottom lip.

  That was when I was four years old.

  Aunt Tam is downstairs in her chair. She has her coat in her lap. I want to go with you, she tells Ma.

  Tammi, there’s a blizzard, Ma says. What if the van gets stuck? I don’t know how we would deal with your chair if we had to walk through the snow.

  Tammi starts to cry.

  Ma bends over her chair and gives her a hug. It’s important that you be here in case the hospital calls with news, Ma tells her. You can call me on my cell if there’s an update. I’m relying on you, Lil Sis.

  Tammi smiles, but she’s still kind of crying, too. She used to be a basketball star in high school. In her room Tammi keeps a picture of her team, with her standing next to the other girls. One of them is holding a gold trophy ball.

  9

  “Let me have a look,” I told Kendrick.

  The musher backed out of the hole on his hands and knees. I grabbed the car door and tried to force it open, but it was stuck fast in the snow. I wriggled my way through the narrow gap.

  It took me a moment to realize that everything was pitched at a slight angle. The car had slid halfway off the road before the storm buried it. The halogen glow of my light turned the scene in front of me a bluish white. When I exhaled, my breath sparkled. I felt like I was deep inside the cold heart of a glacier.