Paul Doiron - Bad Little Falls

The wind tore Kendrick’s breath from his open mouth when he laughed. “I don’t need GPS coordinates. I know exactly where we are.” He tucked the registration in his parka. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to look for him.”

“No offense, Bowditch, but I guarantee you that I am better at it than you are. I know this bog like the back of my hand. Go back to the house. I’ll search the Heath.”

“No offense, Kendrick, but this is my job.” I zipped up my parka and raised the hood over my ears. “See if you can find Ben Sprague while you’re at it. Tell him to clear the Bog Pond Road with his plow so the ambulance can get to his house.”

Kendrick pulled his goggles down over his eyes. “Suit yourself.”

I watched him check his team’s harnesses, his body illuminated in the shaky beam of my headlamp. The animals’ coats were matted with clumps of snow. They looked at their master with bright, enthusiastic eyes. The dogs were eager to run.

Kendrick stepped onto the runners of his sled. Then he gave a single sharp whistle. The lead dogs barked and took off. There was a pause, and then the sled was yanked forward into the night. In no time at all, Kendrick had disappeared through gauzy curtains of snow.

After the last barks of the dogs had faded and all that was left was the howling of the wind in the tops of the cedars, I sat down on the seat of the snowmobile and strapped my snowshoes to the bottoms of my boots. My bare fingers smarted as I secured the buckles. Kendrick was right about the absurdity of my plan: I was alone, at night, in a blizzard in a pathless forest. I was trying to find a lost, perhaps already dead and buried man. And somehow I was going to accomplish this feat without succumbing to hypothermia myself. Where to even begin?

With a spiral search, I decided.

Starting at the driver’s door, I began walking in an expanding circle around the car.

If Randall Cates was indeed dead, my best chance of finding him was somewhere near his encased vehicle. I could imagine the tattooed man lurching off into the dark in his panic or confusion and very quickly collapsing from the cold, especially if he had been dressed as inadequately as his companion was.

Perhaps I was reading too much into his incoherent mutterings, but John Sewall had told us that his friend was “in the car,” which suggested that Cates had remained in the vehicle while his passenger went for help. Maybe the two men had gotten stuck and then tried to wait out the storm, until finally the subzero temperature drove them to take action.

I could understand the desperation. Waves of powder washed like lines of surf along the frozen road. After fifteen minutes of tromping around, I paused in the shelter of a big hemlock until a sudden gust knocked an enormous clump of snow off the heavy boughs and down onto my head.

I decided to expand my search. Back at the Spragues’ snowmobile, I struggled to remove my snowshoes. I could barely see through the ice-painted visor of my helmet. More and more, my fingers were feeling like they’d been carved from sticks of fatwood.

Fortunately, the sled’s engine sprang to life with the first turn of the key. Half standing, with one knee resting on the seat, I rode for maybe a hundred yards into the swamp, calling for the lost man the entire time. The headlights showed no footprints or vehicle tracks. The snow was as pure as a newly washed sheet.

After a while, I gave it up and reversed course. By the time I passed the Grand Am again, the storm had nearly filled the hole that Kendrick had shoveled. If Sewall and Cates had been stuck inside their car for hours, they might have run the engine to keep warm until the gas tank was empty. People who try this maneuver often forget to crack their windows and so expire from carbon monoxide poisoning. Or their tailpipe gets plugged with snow and they die that way from the odorless and colorless gas. Had Sewall gone for help after his friend lapsed into unconsciousness? I was convinced that Cates must have been incapacitated in some way when Sewall had set off on his snow-blind journey into the void. Why else stay behind?

I was traveling through a landscape as sharp as a black-and-white photograph. The greens of the pines looked black. The shadows beyond my headlights were gray. The only brightness was the white of the blowing snow.

I had entered a world of ghosts.

Along that spectral road, I met no living thing.

Around 2:30 A.M., I decided to return to the car. It had been two hours, give or take, since I had sent Kendrick off on his mission; four hours since I had arrived at the Spragues’ house.

With any luck, Ben Sprague had cleared a passage for the ambulance and John Sewall was en route to the hospital in Machias. With any luck, Sergeant Rivard was on his way to my location and searchers were assembling from across the snowbound county to help scour the woods. With any luck, Randall Cates was still alive.

I wasn’t feeling all that lucky.

My lungs hurt from shouting and breathing subzero air. My fingers had begun to throb and cramp. There was no sensation in the tip of my nose.

Back in the glade, there was no sign of Randall Cates. No sign of help. I parked the Yamaha beside the car’s open door to block the wind and then crawled inside the vehicle. Once again, I snapped on my headlamp and inspected the inside of the four-wheeled igloo.

If I could figure out what Cates and Sewall had been doing in this isolated place, I might have a better chance of finding my missing person. Under the seat, my stiff fingers encountered something that felt like a magazine but turned out to be a battered copy of The Maine Atlas, a staple-bound gazetteer that just about everyone I knew kept stashed in their cars or trucks. Maine was a big state, or at least a largely empty one with too many unmarked roads. It was easy to lose your way.

On a hunch, I turned to the page that corresponded to my present location. The topographical map showed vast white expanses that indicated wetlands. Logging roads and jeep trails zigzagged through these empty places. I followed a curving line down from the Spragues’ house, about two miles away. A pencil scratch marked the spot where I was sitting. So Sewall and Cates had come to this specific place for a reason? Was it a drug deal? They’d done something here and then gotten stuck trying to drive out on the snowy road.

I tried the glove compartment again, but it was locked.

What about the trunk?

I loosened the latch. Behind me came a click, but the lid was weighted down with snow. I slid out into the biting night and grabbed Kendrick’s shovel. It took me five minutes to clear off enough snow to get the trunk open.

I found the shotgun inside. It was a Remington 870 pump. Someone had recently cleaned the barrel-the metal gleamed blue under my headlamp-and carefully rubbed linseed oil into the hardwood stock. The trunk also contained a spare tire, a jack, a few ice-fishing tip-ups, and a blue school gym bag emblazoned with the Whitney High mascot, a stern-faced and politically questionable Indian chief. I unzipped the bag. There must have been five thousand dollars in cash rolled up in rubber bands. Someone had thrown in a loaded Glock 9 for good measure.

FEBRUARY 14

There wasn’t another car on the road.

The trees were all thrashing around like those evil trees that almost ate the Hobbits. The electric wires kept swinging like jump ropes. I thought maybe one of them would snap. You can’t get electrocuted in a car, on account of the rubber wheels, Mr. Mason told us.

I kept expecting to see the White Owl around every corner, perched on a fence post.

Ma had to lean over the steering wheel to see anything.

What happened to Prester? I asked.

The police say he showed up at somebody’s house in the middle of the storm.