Paul Doiron: Bad Little Falls

“What happens if a kid kills somebody?” Lucas had asked me.

The boy knew what he’d done. That was why he’d asked the sheriff if we were there to arrest him the night Rhine and I delivered Prester’s death notification. It was the reason he kept asking if I was taking him to jail. No wonder he was being chased in his nightmares by an avenging angel dressed like a white owl.

I grabbed the notebook and hurried out to my truck. What was I going to say to Lucas? What would I tell Jamie? I’d been so worried about seeing her lose custody. Now I found myself in possession of circumstantial evidence that linked her son to the accidental death of a young woman. But who would believe me if I turned it in? Everyone knew about Mike Bowditch and his wild imagination.

Lucas had contaminated Randall Cates’s stash of drugs to get even for the pain the dealer was inflicting on his mother. Maybe he hoped someone would get sick, so the blame would fall on Randall. With the boyfriend out of the picture, his mother and father might finally reunite, as had seemingly happened. Had he expected someone to die? I hoped to God he hadn’t.

If Lucas hadn’t tampered with the heroin, Trinity Raye might still be alive, and if so, Joey Sprague would not have pressed a handgun against his temple and flinched at the moment he pulled the trigger. Kendrick and Ben Sprague would never have had a reason to kill Randall Cates. Prester might not have committed suicide. The whole chain of fatal events, I realized, began with a brilliant, bitter boy who just wanted his daddy back.

You and Lucas have a lot in common.

The drive was a blur. One poor old geezer nearly went off the road when I zoomed past his puttering Buick.

My cell phone rang in my pocket. I dug it out and looked at the number.

“Charley,” I said. “I’m in the middle of something.”

“Hot pursuit?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“I was just calling to invite you up to the Ponderosa for Saturday dinner,” he said. “The Boss said it was past time I offered you a formal invitation.”

It had been too long since I’d eaten Ora Stevens’s fresh-baked bread or shared a hot cup of coffee with Charley while he told me one far-fetched but invariably true yarn after another. And maybe my wise old friend could advise me what to do about Lucas and his notebook. Should I turn it over to the state police with my unprovable suspicions, and if so, to what end? So that the boy would be shunted off into some facility for troubled children? More than ever, I realized, I wanted the benefit of Charley’s considerable wisdom.

The only hesitancy I felt in saying yes to his invitation came when I remembered those jade-green eyes, the most beautiful I’d ever seen.

Charley, as always, was three steps ahead of me. “Stacey will be joining us.”

“What about her fiance? Will he be there, too?”

I could hear the smile in my friend’s voice. “No, I believe Matt is working that night.”

“I’ll be there,” I said, cresting a hill. “But I’ve really got to go. I’ll explain why on Saturday.”

“You damn well better!”

I tucked the cell phone into my shirt pocket, feeling unreasonably hopeful. Stacey might have a fiance, but who knew what was truly possible and impossible?

I braked when I came around the corner, and I braked even harder when I saw the FOR SALE sign in the yard outside Jamie’s house. My patrol truck slid on its brand-new wheels and tires across a sanded stretch of asphalt before it came to rest in front of the driveway.

In the past, Jamie had barely bothered to shovel out a space to park her van, but someone had plowed out a vast expanse of the dooryard to make way for whatever big truck had hauled away her furniture and other possessions. You could tell from the dark, curtainless windows that the Sewall family was long gone. Jamie had sworn to me she’d do anything to hold on to her troubled son, even if it meant spiriting him away in the dead of night. What reason did they have to stay in that haunted house anyway? Who wouldn’t want to escape from this snowbound wasteland?

I tried to remember the story Jamie had told me when we were lying in bed in the motel, the one about Prester John and his legendary African kingdom: “But someday I’m going to take off south, and I’m not going to stop until I find my own golden city in the sun.”

I wondered if she would find it.

Does anyone ever?