Paul Doiron - Bad Little Falls

“I’ve got to agree with the lady,” said Corbett. “You don’t seem like you’re in much of hurry.”

“I know this kid,” I said. “He’s not the type to go running off in a panic. I have a good idea where he is from the map he made in his notebook. What I don’t know is whether he took his grandfather’s rifle with him. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a second, I’m going to look in the basement.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“If you need something to do, call the sheriff and tell her about that pot you found. I’m sure that’ll make her day. You certainly have a nose for the stuff. The psychic connection you have with these drug dealers is uncanny. It defies all belief.”

Corbett tightened his mouth, not quite sure what to make of my veiled accusation. The truth was that I would never be able to prove that the chief deputy had been on the take from Randall Cates. Everyone who could testify to that effect was conveniently deceased.

The cellar was pitch-black, and the light switch didn’t seem to do anything when I gave it a try. Probably there was some sort of naked bulb with a pull cord down there. I trained my flashlight on the steps and carefully descended.

The air felt damp but not as cold somehow. I crouched down and shined the light around the corners of the room. There were boxes everywhere, plus a tool bench, a dusty old television, a girl’s bicycle, a brace of canoe paddles-the usual detritus of a family’s life. An ancient oil tank squatted against the fieldstone wall, an open box of rat poison beside it.

I couldn’t stand up without knocking my head against a pine rafter or getting a faceful of cobwebs. Hunched forward slightly, I picked my way through the junk to have a look at the door that opened onto the bulkhead steps. On the dirt floor there was a small drift of snow that must have tumbled in when Lucas turned the doorknob and took off into the wild.

The next question was whether he had taken his dead grandfather’s. 22 with him. Dusty tools hung from a Peg-Board over a wooden workbench. I saw a hammer, various wrenches, an electric drill-all dusty, and some showing signs of rust-and I had the feeling somehow that none of these tools had been used since the death of the Sewall parents.

I saw an antique advertisement hanging on the mossy fieldstone wall in the corner above the workbench. Someone must have clipped it from an old magazine and stuck it inside a picture frame. It showed an attractive woman in a strange white outfit made of feathers. She wore a sort of cowl that hid her hair from view, and she had her finger extended straight at the viewer, in imitation of the famous recruiting poster

featuring Uncle Sam. Her eyes were heavily made up in 1960s fashion, but there was nothing alluring, or even friendly, about them in the least. Beneath her picture, the poster said I WANT YOU FOR THE DIPLOMAT CORPS.

Below the command, or the threat, or whatever it was, was some explanatory fine print about the corps, along with a picture of an open cigar box.

It was an ad for White Owl cigars.

The scary drawings on the covers of Lucas’s notebook made a certain sense now. He’d been terrified of this poster above his dead grandfather’s tool bench. The image had entered into his nightmares in that inexplicable way that things do when you are a child-or an adult.

“You and Lucas have a lot in common,” Jamie had said. I’d rejected the suggestion as absurd at the time, but now I could begin to understand what she’d meant.

My moment of empathy didn’t last long. It ended the second my flashlight beam picked out the open box of Winchester. 22 long-rifle ammunition on the pallet. Lucas Sewall was armed.

When a child disappears in the forest in the winter, especially after dark, you don’t want to waste time, since hypothermia can take hold so quickly. But my sixth sense told me Lucas Sewall was in no immediate danger. As I’d said to the social worker, there is a difference between lost and hiding.

“His mother said he has a tree fort about half a mile from here,” I told Corbett as we returned to our vehicles. I needed a pair of snowshoes if I was going to wade out into that snowy forest. “There’s a map of it in his diary. I think that’s where he went.”

“What else is in that diary?”

“Kid stuff,” I said.

The chief deputy raised the collar on his parka against the chill. “I want to go with you.”

The last thing I needed was a man I didn’t trust trailing after me through snowdrifts and deepening shadows. “Do you have snowshoes in your vehicle?”

“No.”

“Then you’ll just slow me down.”

“The kid doesn’t have them, either.”

“Do me a favor,” I said, “and just wait here until I get back. Call the sheriff for me and ask her if anyone’s questioned Mitch Munro about what he was doing on the Heath the night Cates was murdered.”

Corbett gave me a sad shake of the head. “You won’t let that one go, will you?”

“Call it a character defect,” I said. “Excuse me for a minute. I’ve got to talk to my sergeant.”

Rivard sounded dog-tired on the phone, but he would have mobilized the entire division if I had requested assistance. I had a hard time dissuading him from doing so, in fact. That’s the standard operating procedure for a child who goes missing on a snowy evening.

“I know where the kid is,” I said with confidence I had no right to feel. “His mom told me he has a tree fort behind the house. That’s where his trail goes. I just need to get in there and bring him back. It’ll just take a few minutes.” I withheld the tidbit that the kid I was chasing was armed with a. 22 rifle.

“I take it Prester never washed up,” I said.

“I would have notified you if he had.” His mouth sounded dry from the cold air and chewing tobacco.

“What time are we getting started again with the search?”

“That depends on this snow. The forecast calls for it to end just after dark.”

I flicked my wipers to push the accumulating snow off my windshield. “It’s still snowing here.”

“It’s still snowing everywhere.”

Then he hung up.

I found a halogen headlamp in the glove compartment and snugged it down over my baseball cap so that the light would follow my eyes whenever I turned my head. I removed my snowshoes from the bed of my pickup and strapped the bindings to my boots. The shoes had been fashioned out of white ash and rawhide by a Penobscot Indian craftsman up in Old Town. The modified bear-paw design was oblong in shape, not too long, which made the pair ideal for working in dense cover.

Corbett inspected me from head to foot. “What do you plan on doing if you find him?”

“Mueller wants me to take him into the hospital to get checked out for frostbite and hypothermia. After that, I don’t know. I guess she’ll hand him over to a foster family until his mom gets out of jail.”

“It can’t be any worse than that house.”

I was in no mood to debate. For all of Jamie’s problems-her addictions and self-loathing-I knew she tried to be a good mother. She was a good mother, albeit in ways the bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services would never believe. Lucas was an odd little specimen, but she clearly doted on him and encouraged his preoccupation with writing. Jamie was right to worry that her son might slip from her grip now and tumble into the maw of the state.

I knew people like Magda Mueller did important work. They rescued innocent children from nightmarish situations of abuse and neglect. I also knew that certain bureaucrats considered being poor to be a form of child abuse, no matter how desperately the parents wanted something better for their children. In my experience, multigenerational poverty was a kind of inheritance, impervious to state mandates or meddling, as impossible to change as the color of one’s eyes. My mom had taken advantage of opportunities in the classroom to get her GED and associate’s degree-although mostly she owed her salvation to being beautiful enough to eventually marry a rich man. Then again, she hadn’t fallen into addiction the way Jamie Sewall had.