Bad Little Falls mbm-3

by Paul Doiron

  The stench was overpowering; I could feel it seeping through my pores.

  “Do you see it?”

  I glared at Rivard for him to be quiet. Except for the nauseating odor, all my possessions looked exactly the way I’d left them a few hours earlier.

  I shined the light under the coffee table and sofa. No green eyes flashed back at me. The room was stuffy from the electric baseboards, but when I straightened up, a draft brushed my face. It seemed to be coming from the kitchenette. I crept in that direction until I could get a good look at the countertops and appliances.

  The window over the sink was broken. Someone had shattered the glass in order to undo the lock, then raised the window until the gap was large enough to let in a skunk. George Magoon had paid me another visit in the night. The skin along the back of my neck grew hot as I recalled my confrontation with Brogan and Cronk. I would make them pay for this.

  First, I needed to find the skunk.

  My next stop was the bathroom. Nothing there but mildew.

  The bedroom door was ajar. Gently I pushed it open and swept the flashlight beam around the walls.

  The skunk was curled up on my unmade bed. Its fluffy black tail was draped like a sleep mask across its eyes. I saw the fur ripple as it breathed.

  What to do? If I shot it, I feared the worst-a total, dying release of stench.

  I edged into the room, feeling my heart pause when the floor creaked, and slid the closet door open on its cheap plastic wheels. On the shelf was a gray wool blanket. I spread it open in my arms, extending my wingspan to the widest possible extent. It would be like throwing a minnow net.

  A skunk typically won’t spray if it can’t see. I’d caught many of them over the years in box traps. The trick was to creep up on the trap from the direction of the steel door and then quickly cover the cage with a sheet or blanket. A skunk can still empty its anal scent glands even when it cannot raise its tail, but it is unlikely to do so if it is blind. I reminded myself of these facts as I stepped toward the bed.

  I came within a yard of the animal before it opened its eyes. The skunk cocked its tail as if an electric charge had shot through the hair fibers, and it let out a sharp, almost reptilian hiss. I dropped the blanket on top of it. As fast as I could, I gathered the animal into a ball. With the skunk hissing in my arms, I rushed out the front door, nearly tripping over my welcome mat, and threw the bundle from the top of the steps into a snowbank.

  “Fire in the hole!” Rivard called, and ducked comically behind his truck.

  I stepped back over the threshold and watched the skunk claw its way loose. It emerged, shaken but seemingly uninjured from the blanket, stomping its feet and shaking its fluffy tail: aggrieved and looking for someone to punish. I slammed the door and waited a minute before peeking out again. My last glimpse of the skunk was of its black-and-white derriere as it waddled off into the balsams at the edge of the yard.

  Rivard contorted his face muscles to keep from grinning as I went down to meet him.

  “Nice work,” he said.

  “Go to hell. Everything I own is ruined.”

  “That’s really bad luck.”

  “It has nothing to do with luck. It’s that George Magoon bastard fucking around with me again.”

  Rivard narrowed his eyes. “What makes you say that?”

  “Who else is going to set a skunk loose inside my trailer? It didn’t just wake up from hibernation and decide to invade my home. The kitchen window was broken.”

  Rivard reached into his jacket for a tin of snuff and unscrewed the lid. He pinched some tobacco and jammed it down between his cheek and gums. “Was there another note?”

  “No, but it had to be that son of a bitch Brogan again. He was just over here this afternoon with his Viking bodyguard.”

  “I wouldn’t jump to conclusions,” my sergeant said.

  “I want to hear him deny it himself.” I sniffed my forearm. I hadn’t touched the skunk. I hadn’t even spent five minutes inside the mobile home. But I smelled like a stink bomb had exploded in my face.

  “You’re not going over there.”

  “The hell I’m not.”

  “That wasn’t a request, Warden.”

  “You want me to just let this go?”

  “No,” Rivard said, “I want you to wait here while I pay Brogan a visit. I’ll give you a call after he and I have a conversation. If he was behind this, I promise you that we’ll make him pay. Understood?”

  I spat on the ground, trying to expel some of the bitter skunk taste from my mouth. “Understood.”

  I watched his taillights disappear into the night, fighting the impulse to wait ten minutes and then follow. My head ached from frustration, pent-up rage, and lack of sleep. How do you de-scent an entire trailer? I’d have to rip out the carpeting and the drapes and probably jettison the furniture, too. In the meantime, I would have to get a motel room at fifty bucks a night, minimum.

  Where had Brogan and Cronk found a skunk in mid-February? They must have known where one was hibernating.

  A thought came to me.

  I took the big Maglite I kept in my backseat and went exploring around my trailer. My feet punched holes in the deep snow as I made my way around to the backyard. I felt the cold snow being jammed up my pants legs against the bare skin.

  Beneath the kitchen window, my flashlight showed tracks: a man’s snowshoes. They were traditional: trapper-style, oblong-shaped, fashioned of northern white ash in all likelihood. The man who owned them was a traditionalist. No modern aluminum and plastic Tubbs for George Magoon. There was good information in these tracks. Now I knew something about my prankster that I hadn’t known before.

  I foundered in the snow, following the tracks through the balsam and white spruce. My ears began to tingle, and I thought of Prester Sewall wandering desperately in search of help the night before. The snowshoe trail looped around toward the main drag. Whoever had walked here hadn’t been heavy, I decided. The prints of a big man would have been deeper. That ruled out Billy Cronk.

  Eventually the tracks emerged from the birch and beech saplings that made up the second-growth timber. They ascended the high snowbank the plow had muscled out of the road. Then they scrambled down the other side of the drift to the salt-white asphalt. I walked up and down the roadside, scanning for distinctive tire prints with my flashlight, but there were too many marks to distinguish anything useful. Something silver and red glittered up ahead. I reached down to pick it up. It was a round metal tin that had been flattened under the wheels of passing traffic. Someone who had passed by this way chewed Red Man tobacco.

  19

  In Machias, I ended up at a 24/7 gas station, where I purchased a bottle of bleach, two hand-soap dispensers, and four liters of Clamato juice. The clerk behind the register pinched her nose as she took my money.

  “Adieu, Pepe Le Pew,” she said, to the delight of the tipsy customers behind me in line.

  No one would describe midwinter in a remote coastal town with no ski or snowmobiling industries to speak of-almost no industries whatsoever-as peak tourist season. Most motel owners had declared their unconditional surrender, switched off their neon signs, locked their doors and boarded up their plate-glass windows, and departed for warmer climes until after the spring thaw. The few holdouts had begun renting out rooms at weekly rates, becoming flophouses for the shiftless, the addicted, and those criminally minded people who intentionally avoided living with fixed addresses.

  After despairing of ever seeing another bed, I found a shabby little motor court with a lighted VACANCY sign on the road to Lubec. The Blueberry Bunch Motel consisted of six peeling cabins arranged in a horseshoe shape around a semicircular driveway. Only one of the cabins had an occupant; the others looked dark and forlorn. But when I pressed the luminous doorbell outside the office, a light went on in the house next door, and presently an old woman came hurrying down the walk.

  She stood about four and a half feet tall and looked to be a hund
red years old. She had big glasses that covered much of her wrinkled face, tightly curled hair that reminded me of sheep’s wool, and a generous nose. She wore a fuchsia sweater, which she might have knitted herself, flannel pants, and boots she’d probably purchased in the kids’ section at L.L. Bean.

  “Can I help you, Officer?” She had an accent I couldn’t place. Baltimore, maybe?

  “Yes, ma’am. I need a room for the night, if you have one.”

  When she laughed, I saw that her gums were receding from her long yellow teeth. “Young man,” she said, “I can’t give rooms away this time of year.”

  She unlocked the door and let me into the office. She stepped up onto a wooden box behind the registration desk, opened a book on the counter, and asked me to sign my name. Bleary-eyed, I filled in the information and handed her my credit card.

  “I can give you the government rate,” she said.

  “Thanks, but I’m not here on government business.”

  “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

  She handed me a key attached to an enormous piece of blue plastic on which someone had painted the number 6 with silver glitter nail polish. “That’s the bridal suite,” she said with a wink. “Would you like me to show it you?”

  “I’m sure it will be fine.”

  “I’m not going to ask you about the skunk,” she said. “But I take it you didn’t get the better end of your dispute.”

  From the driveway, the cabin looked no bigger than a garden shed, but inside, once the hesitant light decided to flicker on, I saw that it was more spacious than I’d imagined. Most of the room was taken up by a full-size bed with a synthetic oak headboard and a coverlet woven out of blue polyester fabric. A small television no bigger than a toaster sat atop a pressed-wood bureau. The view through the front curtains was of the parking lot.

  Inside the bathroom was a stained tub with a long pipe that rose to a rusty showerhead. The first thing I did was to strip down to my underwear. I dumped the clothes I’d brought with me into the tub and then doused them all with Clamato juice. Bent over the tub, I worked the tomato juice into the fibers. I let the clothes soak in the bloodred liquid and lay down on the bed. That was when it dawned on me that I would have no way to dry my wet clothing. I could hang a shirt over the creaking radiator, but how long would that take?

  After a while, I got up and returned to the bathroom and ran cold water over my clothes. When the last of the juice had swirled down the drain, I pumped hand soap over the laundry to get a good lather going. I rubbed the foam into the fabric and kept rubbing until my shoulders ached. I rinsed the clothes until the water ran clear and free of bubbles. Then I wrung the last drops from every sleeve and pants leg. Done at last, I pressed my green uniform shirt to my nose and sniffed.

  It smelled like someone had soaked a gym sock in a Bloody Mary.

  In high school, I’d dated a girl who had been born without a sense of smell. I wondered if she was still single.

  I went around the bedroom, hanging shirts on hangers from every nail I could find. I draped wet pants over curtain rods and the desk chair. I arranged socks and underwear on the shelf above the radiator.

  It was after 3:00 A.M. by the time I finished with my washing. I turned off the bedside lamp and pulled the cold sheet and thin wool blanket across my chest. Falling asleep, I listened to the dripping sound my wet clothes made in the darkness, and I dreamed that I was camping alone in the rain forest and that outside it was raining.

  The cell phone’s melodic ringtone pulled me up out of my coma. When I opened my dry eyes, I saw cold sunlight streaming into a tiny room decorated with haphazard items from my wardrobe. I knocked my BlackBerry off the nightstand and then nearly fell out of bed reaching to retrieve it from the floor.

  My mouth was gummy, lips, teeth, and tongue. “Hello?”

  “Warden Bowditch, I think you’ve got some splaining to do.”

  “Sheriff Rhine?”

  “My deputy has been telling me how you showed up at the hospital last night on the arm of Jamie Sewall.”

  That prick Dunbar-I should have figured he would throw me under the bus. “I was just giving her a ride,” I said in a sleep-thickened voice. “She lost her van keys in the parking lot.”

  “And somehow this entailed accompanying her into the hospital?”

  “I didn’t anticipate her brother would be conscious.”

  “I think I’m beginning to understand why your superiors transferred you Down East. You should expect a call soon from Lieutenant Zanadakis. He’s going to be as curious as I am to hear why you neglected to inform us of your relationship with the Sewall family.”

  After I got off the phone, I went into the bathroom to relieve my bladder and take a shower. My uniform was still musky and damp when I put it on. I decided to pack all of my still-wet clothes into the duffel bag. It appeared that I would be spending my morning at the local Laundromat.

  First, I had a stop to make on the other side of town.

  Outside, the sunlight bounced off the snowbanks, scalding my eyes. Winter was a season of such sharp contrasts. There were overcast days when the whole world faded to shades of gray. But when the sun was shining, the landscape became as gaudy as an old Technicolor circus movie.

  I drove across the causeway, where a dam caused the Sabao River to bulge up before it emptied into the Machias below. The lower river was tidal, so whatever ice formed would shift and buckle twice a day as the sea pushed salt water up the estuary. Pressure ridges formed where the ice had broken apart and then crumpled together again.

  But the Sabao, above the sluice, was all fresh. At this time of year, fishermen pulled brown trout, black bass, and pickerel through holes in the ice. State regulations prohibited anyone over the age of sixteen from fishing the Sabao-it was a kiddie fishery, a place where the local youngsters could learn the pleasures of angling without being elbowed off the river by adults-but I never seemed to drive past without having to chase some knucklehead off the ice.

  This morning I spotted a tiny figure way out on the ice. Maybe a teenager-he was too far away for me to tell at a glance. But then the clouds moved off and the sun caught him full-on, and I saw a flash of orange clothing.

  I hit the brakes so hard, the rear of my truck almost fishtailed. The driver in the car behind me tooted his horn and then zipped past on the left. I swung the truck into the causeway lot and reached behind the passenger seat for my binoculars. My hand roved across the backseat debris like a blind tarantula. But it found nothing. Where had my binoculars gone? I remembered using them two days earlier, when I was working ice fishermen on Gardner Lake.

  I leaned forward, shaded my eyes, and squinted into the middle distance, uncertain that I was seeing what I thought I was seeing.

  That numbskull out on the ice was wearing an orange life jacket.

  If you have to wear a personal flotation device out on the ice, then maybe, just maybe, the conditions are unsafe for fishing.

  Did that joker really think a PFD would prevent the river current from pulling him under the ice? The rule of thumb with ice thickness is: It takes a foot of ice to support a medium truck, eight to twelve inches to support a car, five inches to support a snowmobile, and four inches to bear the weight of a person. But those guidelines don’t take into account moving water, not just actual rivers like the Sabao but also the inlets and outlets of larger bodies. Most people assume lakes and ponds are still waters; they don’t realize that strong currents can move beneath their placid surfaces. And wherever the water is flowing, the ice tends to be thin, even when the temperatures collapse in the middle of February. Countless vehicles and people fall through the ice because they have no appreciation of Mother Nature’s treacherous side.

  On some other morning, I probably would have ventured across that unsafe surface to box that idiot’s ears. Not that he was violating any laws by being out there. Kathy Frost had always reminded me that taking stupid chances isn’t illegal. A good thing, too, or else I w
ould already have been serving a life sentence.

  20

  I felt self-conscious entering a public space, smelling even faintly of skunk. As I pushed through the double doors of the McDonald’s, I passed an old geezer on his way out. He gave a noticeable wince, which made me even more nervous than I already was about speaking to Jamie.

  It took her a while to notice me in line. She was busy assembling orders, salting hash browns, and bagging breakfast sandwiches. She was dressed in that ridiculous referee uniform with its indoor sun visor, using a radio headset to converse with someone in the drive-through. When she finally spotted me, she paused briefly and then let the teenage boy at the register take my order.

  “What can I get you?” The kid had a cowlick that stuck up like the stem on a pumpkin.

  “I’d like to speak with the shift leader, please.”

  “Is there something wrong?”

  “Tell her I’ll be seated around the corner.”

  I stepped out of line and made my way to the rear of the narrow restaurant, settling down in one of the booths to wait. The satellite radio broadcasting through the restaurant speakers was playing “Low Rider” by War.

  After about five minutes, she appeared, carrying a plastic tray. She had removed the headset but not the visor. It gave her a vaguely sporty look. I noticed the puffy circles beneath her eyes from ten paces away.

  “What’s this?” I asked as she set the tray down in front of me.

  “The usual,” she said. It was an egg McMuffin and a large cup of coffee with cream and sugar.

  “Please, sit down,” I said.

  “I’m working.”

  “Just for a minute so I can apologize.”

  As she slid partway into the seat across the table from me, her nose twitched. “Did you get sprayed by a skunk?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Shouldn’t they all be hibernating?”

  I didn’t want to get into the whole sordid George Magoon story with her. “They should be. One got into my house and polluted the place.”