Bad Little Falls

by Paul Doiron

  “Not according to your boss. He says one of my guys is dirty.”

  The agent heard me and glanced over his shoulder. We made eye contact briefly and he dropped his tone again. “You can’t keep going on TV and accusing the MDEA of malfeasance.”

  “If the shoe fits.”

  I knew from reading the newspaper that the Washington County Sheriff’s Department and the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency—known locally as the MDEA—had a feud that made the tussle between the Hatfields and the McCoys look like a polite disagreement between perfumed gentleman, but no one had yet explained to me the grievances that had fueled the conflict.

  “Maybe you think this media crusade of yours is a joke,” he said. “But it’s going to come back to haunt you at your next election.”

  “That’s what your director told me two years ago. And yet here I am.”

  The agent stood up suddenly in the booth, bumping the table with his knees. “You’ll be hearing from us.”

  “I’m giddy with anticipation. Have a safe drive back to Augusta.”

  The agent didn’t say good-bye to me, but then he hadn’t said hello, either.

  “Asshole,” said the sheriff as the door closed behind him. “Have a seat, Warden.”

  I settled down and eyed her half-eaten sausage McGriddle enviously.

  “You’ve probably heard about my beef with the MDEA.” Roberta Rhine had a gruff voice.

  “I don’t know any of the particulars.”

  “It’s a rogue agency, with a director who excuses and covers up misconduct by his agents. Did you know an MDEA agent lost—I repeat, lost—three thousand dollars in buy money? And then they have the gall to accuse one of my men—they won’t say who—of being on the take from Randall Cates.” She sipped from her paper coffee cup. “So you’re the one who found him dead, I hear.”

  “Me and a couple of other wardens. Your chief deputy told me you had some special interest in Cates.”

  “I certainly do. That tattooed freak killed a student over at the university last year.”

  “That would be Trinity Raye?”

  The sheriff nodded. “Randall Cates sold her some tainted heroin laced with a blood-thinning agent. Her friends said it was her first time smoking the stuff. She was just a hippie chick, experimenting. ODs are pretty common around here, but when it’s a nice girl from a nice home, everyone screams bloody murder. We had nothing to connect Cates to her death except about a thousand rumors.” She leaned back in the booth. The vinyl made a noise like a hand rubbing a child’s balloon. “Speaking of drugs, you look like you could use some caffeine. Why don’t you go get yourself a cup of coffee. Then you can tell me what happened last night.”

  On the sheriff’s instructions, I bought myself the largest-size coffee the restaurant served, added three egg McMuffins, and returned to tell my tale. She listened with rapt attention, not interrupting, fiddling with a big turquoise ring on her right hand the whole time I talked.

  When I’d finished, she said, “The state police will start with Prester Sewall as their prime suspect.”

  “I would, too, if I were investigating the case.”

  “Let’s see if Walt Kitteridge can shine any light on the matter.” Rhine removed her cell phone from her pocket. Kitteridge was the state’s chief medical examiner. She apparently had his number on speed dial, given how quickly the call went through.

  “Walt,” she said. “It’s Roberta Rhine. I bet you know why I’m calling.”

  She smiled at me while he spoke. Then she moved the phone away from her ear and held a man-size hand over the microphone. “He just got out of the woods, and he sounds wicked pissed about being called out in a storm.”

  She moved the phone back to her ear. “I understand it’s still early, but I need to decide whether to put a guard on that guy in the hospital. If there’s a chance he killed Randall Cates, then I owe it to the doctors and nurses to send a deputy over there, don’t you think?”

  Without hearing the other side of the conversation, I could guess the bone of contention: The medical examiner didn’t want to speculate on cause of death until he’d done an autopsy.

  “It’ll be our little secret,” Rhine said. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  Dr. Kitteridge must have relented, because the sheriff fell silent for a full minute while she listened to his preliminary findings.

  “Thanks, Walt. I swear I won’t tell a soul. Give me a call when it’s official.”

  She grabbed her winter coat from the booth and began working her arms into the sleeves.

  “How’d you like to follow me to the hospital, Warden?” she said with a horsey smile. “Kitteridge found contusions on Randall’s neck and signs of petechial hemorrhage. It looks like someone held his face down in the snow until he suffocated to death.”

  FEBRUARY 14

  The hospital has got a weird smell. Like Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory or something. Creepy!

  Ma sits me down in a chair in the waiting room while she talks to some frog-faced woman at a desk.

  She says Prester is in the EMERGENCY ROOM and we can’t see him until he is STABLE.

  Prester has never been stable, Ma says. I think it’s supposed to be a joke, but she don’t laugh.

  She smiles and pats my hand. What do you know, Edgar Allan Poe? she asks me.

  Nothing, I say. That’s what I always say.

  Do you think you’ll be all right here on your own for a few minutes? I need to get something out of the van.

  A cigarette?

  You know I don’t smoke anymore, Lucas. It’s just something I need right now. She smiles and opens my NOTEBOOK on my lap. Just stay here and write some more stories for a while, she says. No one’s going to bother you.

  Can I have a Coke? I need one dollar and twenty-five cents.

  Lucas, don’t think you can trick me just because I’m upset.

  When she goes out the automatic door, a cold wind blows in behind her, and the mean lady behind the desk shivers hard.

  If Prester is frozen solid, that must mean his willie is frozen, too. What if the doctor accidentally snaps it off like an icicle?

  OUCH!

  Ma comes back and she has something in her hand. I can’t tell what. She’s got her eyes closed and she’s moving her lips like she’s praying, but no words are coming out. She sits down next to me again.

  What did you forget, Ma?

  She holds out her hand and there’s a little green plastic chip. It says UNITY/SERVICE/RECOVERY in a triangle around the words 3 MONTHS.

  What’s that? I ask.

  My good-luck charm, she says.

  12

  You can tell a lot about a town from its hospital. The one in Machias was located on a piney stretch of road, not near anything in particular except an abandoned horse-racing track festooned with NO TRESPASSING signs. Most people would have driven past the building without realizing it was the local medical center. The low-slung brick structure was smaller than my old junior high in Scarborough.

  Whoever decorated the interior had gone for a casual down-home effect, sort of like a country inn. The waiting room was painted a canary yellow, with several blue couches and floral-print chairs arranged around an imitation woodstove. A totally bald man who looked like he might have fought in the Battle of the Bulge sat in a robe and slippers, watching old newsreels play in his head. The only other person in the room was an odd-looking boy who had his legs drawn up beneath him in his chair and was scribbling violently in a notebook.

  We met a male nurse, a whip-thin guy in green scrubs, coming down the checkerboard hallway that led to the emergency room.

  “Hey, Sheriff,” the nurse said. “What’s up?”

  “Who’s on duty in the ER this morning, Tommy?”

  “Dr. Chatterjee.”

  “Can I speak with him?”

  “He’s with a patient—it’s a severe hypothermia case.”

  “Yes, I know,” said the sheriff. “The patient’s name i
s Prester Sewall. We have reason to believe he might be dangerous.”

  The nurse nodded as if he understood—although he clearly didn’t—and disappeared down the hall in the direction of the ER.

  The last time I’d set foot in a hospital had been a year earlier, when I’d had my skull fractured by the scariest man I’d ever met. He’d beaten me to within an inch of my life, and it was a miracle I’d survived. It was a different hospital, different emergency room, but the memories of that day made the hairs on my neck prickle.

  After a few minutes, a doctor in a white coat and scrubs came hurrying along from the ER. He had the darkest skin of anyone I’d met in Washington County, and jet-black hair swept up from his forehead. His plastic-frame glasses didn’t hide the shadows under his eyes.

  “Is there a problem?” There was a trace of Bangalore in his inflections.

  “Not yet,” said Rhine.

  “I’ve been up since last night, Sheriff, so I am in no shape for badinage.” When he spoke, his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a walnut caught in his throat.

  “I’m stationing one of my deputies in a chair beside Prester Sewall’s bed.”

  Young Dr. Chatterjee gave a high-pitched laugh. “Tell him to bring a good book.”

  “Now you’re the one not being clear, Doc.”

  The doctor crooked his finger at us. “Follow me.”

  He led us to the intensive-care unit, or med-surg unit, as they called it at this hospital. It was an open area—loud with beeping machines, buzzing phones, and snatches of conversation among passing people—where a nurse sat at a central desk, facing a row of glass-walled rooms. In one of these rooms lay Prester Sewall.

  If anything, he looked even worse than the last time I’d seen him. He was stretched out on a wheeled bed, with a sheet pulled up around his chest and an IV jammed into his freckled arm. Most of his nose and both of his ears had gone completely black. His blistered cheeks were mauve. His hands were wrapped in bandages that made his arms look like soft white clubs.

  “We’ve just moved him here from the ER,” said Chatterjee.

  “Can he hear us?” Rhine asked.

  “We’ve given him a dopamine infusion, but he’s so exhausted, he keeps slipping back into sleep.”

  “This is the warden who treated him,” the sheriff explained.

  Chatterjee studied my face. “You did an excellent job of rewarming him. He’s not showing any signs of atrial fibrillation.”

  “So it looks like he’s going to make it, then?” Rhine asked.

  “His condition is critical but hemodynamically stable,” the doctor said.

  I sensed movement behind me.

  “Prester!”

  Jamie Sewall stood in the door. Her hair was a frizzled mess and her eyes were red as beets, but I recognized the high cheekbones, the wide lips.

  “How did you get in here?” the doctor asked.

  “He’s my brother!”

  “Miss Sewall, please,” implored the sheriff. “You can’t be in here right now. His condition isn’t stable yet.”

  “He’s my brother!” She seemed to be on the verge of hyperventilating.

  Chatterjee stepped between the young woman and the bed, but she nearly knocked him aside.

  “Warden, can you help me with this?” asked the sheriff.

  “Miss Sewall.” I put my hand on her arm, but she threw it off. I tried again with more strength.

  “Let go of me!”

  “Take her outside,” the doctor told me. “There’s a room down the hall—number three. Stay with her.”

  “I want to talk with him!”

  “He’s sedated,” I said softly, trying to calm her down with my voice while I pulled her from the bedside. “He can’t speak to you.”

  “I’ll be there in a moment,” said Chatterjee.

  The woman turned her brown eyes up at me, and I felt her resistance give way. “Why can’t I stay here?”

  “They’re trying to take care of him.”

  It was the only answer I could muster, but it must have sufficed, because she went willingly with me into the examination room the doctor had indicated.

  * * *

  Inside room number three, I sat her down in a plastic chair and stood with my back against the door in case she grew wild again. She had one hand clenched into a small fist, as if ready to throw a punch with it, and she was shaking and crying at the same time.

  “Why won’t they let me see him?” She had a smoker’s rough voice, although there was no smell of cigarettes on her clothing, just a touch of faded perfume, musky and sweet in the closed room. “They said when he left the ER, I could go in and see him, but now the nurse at the desk says he’s not permitted to have visitors. Why is the sheriff here? What’s going on?”

  “The police are conducting an investigation. Do you know what happened to your brother last night, Miss Sewall?”

  “He has hypothermia. The doctor told me he got lost in the storm.” She used her sweater hem to dab at her eyes.

  “He was in a car that got stuck on a logging road in Township Nineteen. Do you have any idea what he was doing out there?”

  She took a while to respond. “No.”

  “Does he own any property in the Heath?”

  Jamie Sewall burst out laughing. “Prester? He doesn’t even own a car.”

  When she smiled, she became again the beautiful young woman I’d met the previous morning. So far, she had shown no signs of recognizing me from McDonald’s. I was just another guy in a uniform, as far as she was concerned.

  “Where does he live?” I asked.

  “With me and my son, Lucas, and my sister, Tammi, in Whitney,” she said.

  “What does he do for work?”

  She laughed again. “Prester doesn’t believe in work.”

  I decided to gauge her candor. “Do you know a man named Randall Cates?”

  She sat up in her chair and looked at me coldly. “He used to be my boyfriend. We broke up last year.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Yesterday afternoon. He stopped at my house to pick up Prester. Why? What happened to him?”

  “Did either of them tell you where they were going or who they might be meeting?”

  Her eyes widened. “Randall is dead, isn’t he? I can tell by the way you’re talking about him.”

  How had I given myself away? I wasn’t supposed to disclose that information until the state police had notified the next of kin. For all the apparent hysteria, Jamie Sewall was a perceptive young woman.

  I remained silent.

  She slumped in her plastic chair. “Oh my God. It’s true.” She didn’t seemed shocked by the news so much as relieved but unwilling to get her hopes up prematurely. Her topaz irises were shining with new tears. “Please tell me he’s really dead.”

  By all rights, I should have refrained from offering a confirmation. Regulations say you should never disclose a death until the next of kin has been notified. But when Jamie Sewall gazed at me with that pleading expression, I found that I couldn’t stop the words from coming out of my mouth.

  “Yes,” I said. “He’s really dead.”

  She clapped her hands to her face. When she did, an object she’d been clutching dropped to the ground and skidded across the floor. I knelt to pick it up. It was a green poker chip. I recognized it as one of the tokens they hand out in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to mark the milestones of sobriety.

  “Thank you,” she said, accepting it from me with an embarrassed smile.

  “You’re welcome.”

  We smiled at each other for a while, and then she leaned forward as if to get a closer look at me. “I know you,” she said suddenly. “You came into the McDonald’s yesterday. You ordered an egg McMuffin and a large coffee.”

  “That was me.”

  “I told you about how Lucas is reading that book on rangers.”

  “Is that your son in the waiting room?”

  “T
he kid with the glasses, writing in the notebook? Yeah, that’s my strange little man.”

  The door opened behind me. It was Dr. Chatterjee. “How is everyone doing in here?”

  Jamie rose to her feet. She was nearly a foot shorter than me. “Is Prester going to be OK, Doctor?”

  Chatterjee cleared his throat and adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose. “Can you give us a moment, Warden?”

  I stepped outside the room and closed the door. I stood in the antiseptic-smelling hall, thinking about the enigmatic woman inside. Her brother and ex-boyfriend were drug dealers. I suspected she knew why they had been going to Township Nineteen and whom they’d planned to meet there. And yet the relief she’d showed when I’d let slip the news of Randall’s death hadn’t been fake. Nor was the gratitude she’d expressed when I’d handed her the sobriety chip.

  Who the hell is this woman? I asked myself.

  I could hear her voice rising as she spoke with Dr. Chatterjee. Washington County wasn’t the most diverse place in the world. What was a young Indian doctor doing in Machias? Another man in exile, I thought.

  The door opened and Dr. Chatterjee peered out. “She wants to know if you can check on her son in the waiting room. We’re going to visit with her brother now.”

  “The police need to get a statement from him before he talks to anyone else.”

  “The sheriff will be there if he wakes up.” His tone suggested that the likelihood of Prester Sewall’s waking up at present was slim.

  The door swung open and the doctor came out, followed by Jamie Sewall. Her model-perfect face was dry now, but she was still clutching the sobriety chip for dear life, and when she passed me in the hall, the smile she gave me was heartbreakingly gorgeous.

  God help me, said the voice in my head.

  FEBRUARY 14

  The last time I was awake all night was when Dad showed up that time outside the house and started yelling for Randle to come out and fight him like a man. Dad could have beat him easy, but Randle went out there in his underwear with his Glock and I thought he might really shoot Dad until Ma ran out, screaming.

  After Dad drove off, Randle called the cops and said there was a drunk guy driving on our road, because he wanted them to bust Dad for OPERATING UNDER THE INFLUENCE.