The Precipice Read online

  I saw your dad’s plane earlier, and it lifted my spirits. I’m not sure how long I’ll be up here. I’m hoping you’re still at Popham. It would make me happy to think so, but I’ll understand if you decided to leave. I wish I were there with you now.

  —Mike

  I hit Send and sat there for five minutes, waiting for a reply that never came, before I gave up and shut down the computer.

  * * *

  I found Caleb Maxwell in the sitting room, warming his hands over the woodstove. His mind seemed elsewhere. He flinched when I spoke his name, as if he hadn’t heard me walk up behind him.

  “Thanks for your help,” I said.

  “Is there anything else I can do?”

  “I’m sure Lieutenant DeFord will be in touch to let you know.”

  “The thought of those girls disappearing up on the mountain is pretty damned awful.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I always felt like I was making a difference back when I was on the search-and-rescue team,” he said. “These days, I’m not so sure.”

  “What happened between you and Nissen?” I asked.

  “I was just busting his balls. He seems to bring it out in me.”

  I knew what he meant. “What’s this about Nissen writing a book?”

  “It’s called Death on the Appalachian Trail, and it’s an encyclopedia of all the crazy ways people have kicked the bucket on the AT. You know—falls, hypothermia, drowning, murder.”

  Since Caleb was opening up, I thought I’d satisfy my curiosity. “You mentioned some incident with a snowboarder.”

  Caleb fell silent for a moment. When he spoke again, there was a quiver in his throat that hadn’t been there before.

  “A kid went off the trails at Big Moose Mountain. There was a pretty bad snowstorm that night. Our team was called in to help the wardens and the ski patrol. We thought the kid might be playing a prank—like he was really hiding somewhere. His friends said he always talked about those survival shows on TV. I guess I convinced myself it was a stunt he was pulling because he wanted attention. The next morning, we were doing a grid search of one of the glades on the back side of the mountain, using ski poles to poke down under the new snow. Nissen was the one who found his snowboard. He called us all over, and there was this boy’s dead face peeking out from under the crust. His skin was sparkling. That’s one of the things I’ll never forget, the way it reminded me of diamonds.”

  A piece of burning wood snapped, popped, and sizzled in the stove.

  “What was the other thing?” I asked.

  “How happy Nissen seemed—like he’d just proven that he was the best searcher on the mountain. The fact that this poor kid’s parents were back at the lodge didn’t mean anything to him. He just kept grinning.”

  * * *

  On the drive out, Nissen sat silently in the passenger seat. At one point, I thought he might have fallen asleep, but when I looked over, I saw his enormous eyes glowing green in the dashboard light.

  We headed west on the KI Road, bound for the town of Greenville, which was the closest thing to civilization in this part of Maine. The road followed a deep notch cut into the bedrock by the Pleasant River. The thunderstorm had opened new potholes in the gravel, and muddy puddles exploded across my headlights, smearing the glass. I was probably going too fast, but I was in a hurry to be rid of my passenger and his foul stench. The static on my police radio began to fade as we crested the mountains. I turned up the volume, but there wasn’t anything new.

  About a mile from the North Maine Woods gatehouse, we came upon an animal sitting in the wet road. If I hadn’t known better, I might have mistaken it for a wolf. Its fur was reddish brown, with a black streak down the back, and I could see the muscles ripple beneath the skin when it scratched one of its pointed ears. I knew that canids tend to be curious by nature—I’d had red foxes approach me in the woods, as tame as dogs—but I’d never encountered a coyote this brazen.

  “Maybe it’s rabid,” I said.

  “It doesn’t look sick to me.”

  I honked my horn, but the animal remained seated on its haunches, staring straight at the truck with eyes that shone like lamp-lighted brass fixtures. I tried my blues, to no avail. Finally, I flung the door open and stepped out, resting my hand on the grip of my sidearm. Before I could take three steps, the wild dog gave a sudden leap and disappeared into the roadside bushes.

  I returned to the pickup, remembering Samantha’s and Missy’s ominous note about coyotes. I could tell from Nissen’s expression that the troubling thought had occurred to him, as well.

  “That’s a strange coincidence,” I said.

  “I don’t believe in them anymore.”

  8

  With the help of another cup of coffee I purchased at a late-night convenience store in Greenville, I managed to make it back to Monson without flattening my truck against a telephone pole.

  The village of seven hundred people was surrounded by forest, except where the paved road went through, and had once been a busy way station for travelers headed to Moosehead Lake and Mount Kineo. Thoreau had passed through town in 1846 and made note of a pair of moose antlers, fastened to a post, that functioned as a road sign directing travelers north to Greenville and south to Blanchard. Later in the nineteenth century, a Welsh immigrant discovered black slate in the ground and made a fortune digging the first of what would become many quarries in the Monson woods. A chain of rectangular pits—some flooded, some not—followed the seam in a northeasterly direction from Lake Hebron into the forested highlands. Locals will proudly tell you that the gravestones of both John and Jacqueline Kennedy in Arlington Cemetery were carved out of Monson slate. But the mining industry, like so many others in Maine, had long been in decline.

  The town’s commercial hub now consisted of a lakeside post office, a general store that doubled as a gas station, a redemption center that paid out a nickel apiece for bottles and cans, and a surprisingly out-of-place Louisiana Cajun restaurant—all strung along a main street where few travelers bothered to stop, because what was there worth stopping for? Many of the downtown buildings had plywood over their windows or faded FOR SALE signs tacked to their doors. Two had been converted into competing places of worship, John the Baptist Missions and the Lake of the Woods Tabernacle, as if faith were the only growth industry left in town. The latter of these churches had one of those changeable letter signs on which the resident preacher had spelled out his message for the week: NO ONE WHO PRACTICES DECEIT SHALL DWELL IN MY HOUSE—PSALMS. The building was a clapboard fire trap, with an external staircase and a roof that looked primed for collapse. If it was indeed the Lord’s house, I wondered who would choose to dwell in it.

  The Warden Service had commandeered the Monson municipal building for the search. When I’d driven past the lopsided wooden structure earlier, I’d noticed that the clock above the firehouse doors was broken, the hands frozen at 11:55. It seemed like an unnecessary metaphor.

  “Do you want me to drop you somewhere?” I asked Nissen.

  “My van’s parked in back.”

  I turned left off Route 15 and plunged down a hill to the field where DeFord had set up his temporary headquarters. The mobile command post was a streamlined black vehicle nicknamed “the RV,” due to its resemblance to a Class C motor home (although no one would have mistaken it for your grandfather’s Winnebago). A communications array bristled from the roof, and inside, state-of-the-art computers ran GPS mapping software to assist search-and-rescue missions.

  When we’d left, the lot had been jammed with all sorts of emergency vehicles: warden trucks, state police cruisers, patrol cars bearing the insignia of the Piscataquis County Sheriff’s Department, a lone ambulance just in case. Most of them had scattered for the night, leaving tire marks in the flattened grass. But a few remained.

  DeFord had also sent most of the volunteers home after dark; it was standard procedure in these operations. A few diehards had pitched their tents at the edge o
f the woods; others slept on air mattresses in their truck beds or in the backs of their Subaru wagons. The Salvation Army wagon still had its door open, light and steam spilling out into the darkness, so the cook could serve hot coffee and beef stew to the night shift.

  I parked my patrol truck in a vacant spot, turned off the engine, and let out a deep breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. Without a word of thanks, Nissen hopped out and walked away. Just when I thought the man couldn’t be any ruder, he found a new level. I watched him zigzag through the parked trucks and cars to a white Woodstock-era VW camper van. A giant honeybee was painted on the side, along with the name of his business—Breakneck Ridge Apiary.

  “You’re welcome,” I said aloud.

  My sore legs had stiffened from sitting in the truck for an hour. The ground was swampy from the thunderstorm and squished beneath my boots. I rapped on the side door of the mobile command post. Then the door opened, and I found myself looking up at Sergeant Kathy Frost.

  “Speak of the devil,” she said.

  Kathy had been my field training officer and was still my best friend in the Warden Service. She was in her fifties and had bobbed hair the color of butterscotch and a spray of freckles on her nose and cheeks. Instead of wearing a regulation uniform, she was dressed tonight in flannel and denim.

  Five months earlier, she had been shot by a sniper outside her farmhouse in Appleton and had lingered in a coma for days, fighting for her life. She’d lost her spleen during surgery and probably pieces of other organs. The last time we’d spoken, she had still been on forced convalescent leave. The purple rings around her eyes told me she was far from healed.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, practically stuttering out the words.

  She gave me a wink. “I’m in charge of the K-9 team, remember?”

  “There’s no way they’ve let you return to duty.”

  “Come in already. You’re letting in all the bugs.”

  I had so many questions for her, but there were half a dozen officers seated around the gray plastic table in the center of the RV. It was the wrong moment for us to catch up.

  The confined space glowed with computer screens and smelled of fresh-brewed coffee. A projector threw a topographical map against one of the beige walls, showing the Appalachian Trail between Chairback Gap and Whitecap Mountain. Icons indicated the locations of the lean-tos, and a dotted line traced the meandering trail.

  Lieutenant DeFord turned from a conversation he was having with a state police detective and glanced up at me from his chair. He had a boyishly handsome face, dark blond hair cut close to the scalp, and a physique that verified the stories of his having almost made the Olympic biathlon team but for an ACL tear.

  “Bowditch,” he said. “Glad you made it back in one piece.”

  “We had a little rain up on Chairback, sir.”

  “There was lightning popping everywhere down here. I wondered whether you and Nissen would even be able to get off the mountain tonight.”

  “Nissen doesn’t seem easily fazed.”

  A few subtle smiles from the assembled officers told me that Nissen’s reputation preceded him.

  “The same could be said for you.” DeFord indicated a chair at the table. “Do you know everyone here?”

  There were four other wardens, including Kathy, all of whom I knew, plus the state trooper, a detective sergeant, who was dressed in a blue T-shirt and blue tactical pants tucked into black boots, and whose name, I was told, was Brian Fitzpatrick. Another man—lean, black-haired, wearing a dress shirt and tie, suit pants, and shiny shoes—sat quietly in the corner. The lieutenant passed over him without introduction.

  DeFord fetched a bottle of Poland Spring water from the refrigerator for me. “So, we’ve been going over the photos you sent. Why don’t you fill in the details for us.”

  It took me fifteen minutes to describe what I’d found at the shelter and recount the conversation I’d had with Chad McDonough. Midway through my monologue, one of the overhead fluorescents began to flicker, throwing a jumpy light on the assembled faces. Both Fitzpatrick and the warden investigator assigned to the case—an affable gray-haired guy named Wesley Pinkham—interrupted me frequently.

  “What was your take on McDonough’s state of mind?” Sergeant Fitzpatrick asked. He worked out of the Maine Information and Analysis Center. “You said he seemed stoned?”

  “He had a strong odor of marijuana on him.”

  Fitzpatrick crushed a piece of hard candy between his molars. “Did you search him for drugs?”

  “I thought it was more important that I establish trust. When he told me he’d hiked with Samantha and Missy, I wanted to learn everything I could from him.”

  “That was the right move,” said Wes Pinkham.

  Except for the handgun and badge on his belt, Pinkham looked nothing like a game warden and everything like the branch manager of a savings and loan. He had thinning hair held in place with pomade, a stomach that overflowed his belted chinos, and aviator glasses that had last been in vogue—well, I wasn’t sure how long ago, but not since before I was born. I could imagine that his average Joe appearance (Little League umpire, president of the Lions Club) might have helped when he went undercover to purchase illegal cuts of deer meat from poachers.

  The lieutenant asked Wes Pinkham to bring up on the computer projector the photo I’d taken of Chad McDonough’s driver’s license. We studied the magnified image on the wall. McDonut seemed so clean-cut in his Massachusetts DMV photograph.

  “Did you believe that he was telling the truth about the girls?” Sergeant Fitzpatrick asked.

  The detective had a reddish gray buzz cut that looked like it would become curly if he ever grew it out. His complexion was pale, but there was a rosy blush on his cheeks that suggested he might’ve enjoyed a nightly nip—or had before he found the program. He had an accent that sounded as if he’d grown up in South Boston.

  I wasn’t sure what Fitzpatrick wanted to hear. I glanced at Kathy, seated beside me. She winked again, as if telling me to trust my instincts.

  “I think he might have been lying about some things,” I said, “but not about Samantha and Missy. The kid definitely has an edge to him, but he didn’t strike me as dangerous.”

  “We ran a background check on McDonough,” Fitzpatrick announced, “and he was suspended from UMass after being accused of sexual assault.”

  I had the sense that he’d been waiting to ambush me with that information. I became aware of the black-haired man watching me with the intensity of a predator. His eyes were so black, they seemed to be all pupil.

  “Was he convicted?” I asked.

  “Criminal charges were never brought,” said Fitzpatrick. “The girl was intoxicated herself and didn’t have a complete memory of the night. The DA couldn’t proceed with the case, but the school decided McDonough should take a year off, until she graduated.”

  “If he was involved with Samantha’s and Missy’s disappearance,” I said, “I have no idea why he would hang out on the trail. Why wouldn’t he have gotten the hell out of there?”

  The mysterious black-haired man in the corner spoke for the first time. “Did it occur to you that he might’ve been making up this ‘man in the red tent’ to divert attention from himself?”

  “It occurred to me, yes.”

  “Do you want to bring him in for an interview?” DeFord asked Pinkham. “At this point, we still don’t have evidence of a crime, so we can’t call him a material witness.”

  “Tell him his help will be invaluable in finding the two girls,” the warden investigator said. “Make him feel like everyone is depending on him.”

  “We’re going to need to track down all the other names on the list Bowditch gave us,” said Sergeant Fitzpatrick.

  Kathy tilted back in her chair. “Personally, I’d start with the Incredible Hunk.”

  “You think he sounds like a suspicious character, do you?” Pinkham asked with a sly grin.
r />   “I just want to see if the man lives up to his name.”

  Everyone smiled except Fitzpatrick and the man in the corner, whose name I still didn’t know. Despite her ill health, Kathy was making a brave effort to participate. I couldn’t help worrying that she might be pushing herself too hard. Her skin was the color of parchment.

  A BlackBerry vibrated on the table. The lieutenant picked it up. “DeFord.”

  The rest of the room fell silent while he had his conversation.

  I leaned my head close to Kathy and whispered, “You should be home in bed, getting your strength back.”

  “Now you’re the one giving lectures?”

  DeFord ended his call and put the phone back on the table.

  “Samantha’s and Missy’s parents are on their way up here from Georgia,” he said. “They’re flying into Greenville tomorrow morning on a private plane. The commissioner wants us to meet them at the airstrip.”

  I didn’t envy the lieutenant. Searches were difficult enough to manage without having powerful people second-guessing every decision.

  “Do you want me to call Deb Davies?” asked Kathy.

  “I think you’d better,” said DeFord.

  The Reverend Davies was one of the Warden Service’s two chaplains. Whenever we got word that an Alzheimer’s patient had wandered off into a blizzard, or a canoe had overturned on a lake and the paddlers were missing, or a snowmobile had crashed into a tree and the driver had been found lifeless, his limbs bent in impossible directions—whenever death, in other words, had become more than just a possibility—she would be summoned.

  Samantha and Missy might yet turn up alive, but someone would need to stand vigil with the waiting, worrying parents, and it made sense for it to be a minister. I was just relieved it wouldn’t be me. My prayers so rarely came true.

  9