Paul Doiron - Bad Little Falls

“Hey! Hey!” a woman said, stepping into the fray. She wore an unbuttoned sweater over surgical scrubs. She was as lean as a marathon runner and had short sandy hair and a voice like an army bugle. “What’s going on here?”

“I’m sorry, Doctor,” I said.

“I’m not a doctor. I’m the charge nurse.”

“This is Mr. Sewall’s sister,” I explained.

“I don’t care who she is. This man is in serious condition. He’s recovering from hypothermia, and he’s detoxing off alcohol and opiates. Are you officers trying to give him a heart attack?”

“Everything is under control,” Dunbar said.

“The hell it is.” She thrust her finger in the direction of the nearest door. “I want you out of here right now.”

Prester seemed to be hyperventilating. “The cops think I killed Randall, Jamie.”

“No, they don’t,” she said. “It’s got to be some kind of mistake. Isn’t it, Mike?”

My silence must not have reassured her because a look came into her widening eyes, as if she’d just guessed the answer to a riddle.

“You all need to leave this instant,” said the nurse.

“You heard the nurse,” said Dunbar in his “Move along” voice.

“Including you, Deputy,” said the nurse.

“I want to wake up now,” Prester sobbed. “I’m having a nightmare!”

Jamie grabbed her coat from the floor and said, “I’ll be back tomorrow. I’ll bring Tammi and Lucas.”

“I want to wake up,” wailed the injured man.

“If you don’t all leave this instant, I’m calling the sheriff,” said the nurse.

“We’re leaving,” I said.

The nurse yanked the drapes shut across the glass windows; it was like a curtain closing at the end of a play.

“You need to calm down, Mr. Sewall,” I heard her say. “Take deep breaths.”

Jamie stormed down the hall to the admittance desk as if she’d forgotten I was in her company.

I glared one last time at Deputy Dunbar, who looked like a kid who’d just broken a window with a baseball, and followed her out into the stark light of the parking lot.

By the time I caught up with her, she’d beeped open the van and was rummaging around the passenger side for something.

“Jamie?”

She spun around with an ice scraper in her hand and went to work on the layer of frost that had built up across the windshield. Her motions were quick, compact, and violent.

“So when were you planning to tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

She stopped scraping but kept her back to me. “The cops think my brother killed Randall.”

“I’m not part of the investigation,” I explained.

Jamie turned around. In the cold light of the parking lot, I became aware of the bones beneath her skin. I could easily imagine the shape of her skull. “What does that mean?”

“It means I don’t know what theories the state police are pursuing.”

“Prester wouldn’t hurt anyone,” she said.

“Not even if he was provoked?”

The question seemed to catch her off balance, because she took her time answering. “My brother loved Randall. Don’t ask me why.”

“And you have no idea what they were doing in the Heath?”

“You asked me that before.”

“Look, I know this has been a horrible shock.” I dug my bare hands into my parka pockets. “But if you want to help your brother, you need to tell me what you know.”

“You just said you weren’t part of the investigation.”

“I’m not, but maybe I can help you.”

She let out a sharp laugh. “Because you care so much for my well-being.”

“I know we just met,” I said. “But I understand what you’re going through.”

“Oh, you do, do you?”

It was a good question. “Let me buy you a cup of coffee, and I’ll try to explain.”

“I thought you were different,” she said.

“I am different.”

“No, you’re not. You’re just a guy with a stiff dick like all the rest.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but really, what was there to say?

After Jamie screamed off into the night, I decided to grab a late, lonely dinner and reflect on the absurdity of my day.

I made a circuit of the mom-and-pop restaurants that constituted the Machias dining scene and found that all of them had ceased serving for the night. Eventually I put aside my scruples and returned to the McDonald’s on Route 1.

I paused in front of Jamie’s portrait on the wall and felt my pulse speed up. Her golden brown eyes looked so clear in the photograph, and her smile seemed so genuine, as if being named Employee of the Month were truly an honor. And maybe it was an honor after all she’d been through: a busted marriage, the death of her parents, caring for a brain-damaged sister, an alcoholic brother, and a weird little boy. I remembered her sobriety chip and her breakdown in my truck, when she’d blamed her past behavior for the calamities that had befallen Prester.

She’d accused me of being no different from all the leering men she met at the restaurant, as if somehow my desire to save her was just a deluded manifestation of lust. Looking at her portrait again, feeling the effect her smile had on my heart and groin, I found I couldn’t totally deny the accusation.

My dinner consisted of a rubbery Big Mac, served with some wilted lettuce, too much special sauce, and a side order of oversalted fries. To compensate for the empty calories, I ordered a Diet Coke, as if that would make any difference. I settled down in a corner booth and watched a party of intoxicated young people nervously watching me. A hulking kid with his back to me was wearing a T-shirt with the slogan

YOU AIN’T HAVING FUN TILL THEY DIAL 9-1-1.

Was that Barney Beal? I contemplated going over to speak with him. But then one of the giggling girls leaned over to kiss him, and I saw that it was just another pimple-faced lunk.

Poor Prester. I wasn’t sure how often he’d been getting laid before-he looked handsome enough on his driver’s license-but having a nose was usually the minimum requirement to lure a woman into bed. I needed to remind myself what the sheriff had told me: As pathetic as he now seemed, he and Randall Cates had been dealers in deadly narcotics. At least one person, a young woman, had died from ingesting the poison they’d peddled. Wasn’t there poetic justice in the idea of a man who’d traded in snortable drugs losing his nose? The sheriff, I was certain, would say yes.

My brief encounter with Roberta Rhine led me to believe that Dunbar might be headed for an extended stay in the doghouse if the sheriff got wind of what had happened at the hospital. For the first time, I began to wonder how my own sergeant would react when he learned I’d showed up in the med-surg unit with the sister of a murder suspect. And here I’d been so pleased with my professional development as a law-enforcement officer. My old reckless self was still lurking in the shadows, ready to jump out and say “Boo!” as soon as I turned my head.

When we’d first arrived, Dunbar had made a cryptic remark, but in the ensuing chaos I’d forgotten to pursue the matter with him: “What is it with this guy? How many times do I have to tell people he can’t be disturbed?” The comment suggested that someone else had shown up, asking after Prester.

What the hell had happened out in the Heath? It seemed impossible for someone so distraught, so emotionally naked, to lie about his innocence with such skill. Unless he’d killed his friend in some sort of irrational state brought on by severe hypothermia and could no longer remember his actions, it meant that someone else had suffocated Cates.

When I was busing my plastic tray, I realized that the drunken teenagers had slipped out without my seeing them. What are the odds, I wondered, of my being summoned in a few short hours to scrape their dead bodies off the road?