Bad Little Falls

by Paul Doiron

  A couple of years earlier, I had been so reckless—so driven by self-destructive impulses—that I might have called Jamie’s house that very instant to ask her on a date. But I had been working hard to keep my emotions under control. Avoiding a romantic entanglement with the ex-girlfriend of the local drug dealer seemed like a good first step in that direction.

  Feeling both virtuous and blue-balled, I telephoned Sergeant Rivard and got his voice mail. I left a long-winded message, telling him about my conversation with the sheriff and our visit to the hospital, and asking him to call me with news. Then I started off in the direction of my unheated little trailer. There was a hardware store along the way where I could buy some new fuses for the electrical box, and I needed to get some milk and frozen burritos, too.

  I glanced at my wristwatch. It wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. I’d been awake and on the go for more than thirty hours. No wonder my brain felt like Muhammad Ali’s punching bag.

  The date, I noticed, was February 14: Valentine’s Day.

  * * *

  There was a four-door pickup, a silver Chevy Avalanche, emblazoned with the logo of the Call of the Wild Guide Service and Game Ranch, parked in my dooryard.

  Now what?

  Two men were seated inside the cab. I recognized Brogan’s fur hat through the window, but the other guy was just a shadow. I put on my sunglasses and stepped outside into the bright and freezing morning.

  The passenger door opened and a blond-bearded man unfolded himself from inside the Avalanche. He was about six five, maybe 230, my age more or less, and he glowed like a fallen god out of Norse mythology. His skin was deeply tanned, and he had gathered his blond hair up in a braid, which was draped over one shoulder like a pet snake. He wore a camouflage jacket over a heavy duck-hunting sweater, loose-fitting wool logger’s pants, and tall LaCrosse boots. I spotted a big knife in a leather sheath on his belt.

  “Hey, Warden,” said Billy Cronk.

  “What are you guys doing here, Billy?”

  A week earlier, I’d busted Cronk for guiding a party of coyote hunters through an old lady’s front yard. They’d been running dogs at night with GPS units fastened to their collars, chasing coyotes over hill and dale, until the dogs finally cornered a pup in a streambed, seventy feet from a woman’s bedroom. Then one of Cronk’s sports had recklessly opened fire with his AR 15, perforating her porch light. I’d watched the whole episode unfold through night-vision goggles; a week later, the sheer stupidity of the act still left me speechless.

  “I just want to apologize again.”

  For all his physical grandeur, Billy’s body language was completely lacking in confidence. His head was hanging, his shoulders were slumped, and he couldn’t meet my eyes. He reminded me of a little boy whose father had just introduced him to the business side of a belt.

  “We’ve already been through this.”

  “I’m not trying to make excuses,” he said, which meant that he was about to make an excuse. “I totally fucked up. But the sports I was guiding, they were real demanding, you know? They were from Pennsylvania, right? And we’d been at it two nights in a row with no luck, and then one of the guys got overexcited. He’d never been hunting at night before, and he didn’t follow my instructions.”

  Brogan was glowering at us from behind the wheel of the Avalanche.

  “You were his guide,” I said. “It was your job to make sure everyone followed state law about shooting near a residence.”

  “You know how some of those out-of-staters are.” He raised his head. His eyes were like pale crystals set into a bronze war mask. “These guys were big-time businessmen—insurance agents!—and they kept busting my balls about every little thing.”

  “The point is that you put that man in a position to take a shot at that animal.”

  “I know, I know. But I told him not to shoot. I saw the house through the trees. If you was watching, you saw me yell at him to stop.”

  I had indeed seen Cronk shout at the man before he raised his rifle. But that scarcely excused his negligence as a guide. “I’m sorry, Billy, but I’ve got to put the summons through. My hands are tied.”

  In reality, I had all sorts of latitude. No law-enforcement officer is ever compelled to report every petty illegality he happens across. But gonzo coyote hunters had never been my favorite people. Back in Sennebec, I’d busted a father and his three sons for terrorizing the entire town, running their baying dogs through the woods at night like the Wild Hunt.

  “Come on, man,” he said, looking down at me from his considerable height. “I’ve got four little kids at home. My wife don’t work because she’s got to take care of them. I should have been more forceful with those assholes. I shouldn’t have let them boss me around that way. But this one mistake is going to fuck up my entire life. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime here.”

  Unlike some of the officers I worked with, I’d never enjoyed the power trip that came with being a cop. Billy Cronk seemed like a good guide who’d had a bad night. I reconsidered letting him go with a warning and was on the verge of doing so, in fact.

  Before I could open my mouth, however, the driver’s door swung violently open and Joe Brogan hopped out. I didn’t know how much he’d heard of the conversation—his truck engine was loud—but he’d come to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to cut his guide any slack. His thick brown beard bristled as he said, “So you’re just going to be an asshole?”

  “Stay out of this, Brogan. You’re not persuading me of anything by invading my property this way.”

  “Billy has a wife and four little kids to feed. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “This conversation is over.”

  I opened my passenger door and grabbed the plastic bag of overpriced groceries I’d purchased at the variety store. On the floor mat in the backseat, a yellow notebook was peeking out. I leaned in to retrieve Lucas Sewall’s forgotten journal.

  When I tried to walk to my door, Brogan stepped in front of me and crossed his arms. “We know all about you,” he said. “Your superiors think you’re a fuckup, which is why they transferred you here. Everyone in Augusta is just waiting for you to make a mistake so they can fire your ass.”

  Brogan spoke as if he were sharing a secret he’d learned from an informant deep inside the Warden Service. My reputation was fairly public, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if the ranch owner had had a few buddies in the department, as well. I realized he was trying to goad me into doing something stupid. A voice spoke to me from my days at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy: If you lose control of yourself, you lose control of the situation.

  “Get out of my way,” I said.

  “You’re going to wish you had a few friends real soon.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Brogan’s eyes smoldered like hot black coals. “You’ll find out.”

  The temptation to pop him on the nose was nearly uncontrollable. Instead, I clenched my molars and made a wide circle around his position. Over my shoulder, I said, “Don’t come to my house again, or I’m going to bust you for trespassing and threatening a law-enforcement officer.”

  Loud enough for me to hear, Brogan muttered, “Asshole.”

  As I fiddled with the keys, I noticed the hole left by the nail in my door. My vandal’s identity no longer seemed much of a mystery. It had to have been Brogan or one of his men.

  The trailer was cold and dim. I parted the curtains and looked out at my snowy dooryard. I watched as Brogan snarled something and then spat his entire wad of tobacco against the side of my patrol truck. He raised his collar and climbed behind the wheel of the Avalanche.

  Cronk remained where he’d been standing, his blond head in his hands.

  15

  After I heard Brogan and Cronk drive away, I put in another call to Sergeant Rivard. “Were you ever going to call me back?” I asked him.

  “What are you all worked up about?”

  “Nothing.” I sat down hard on
the sofa and released all the air from my lungs. “I just had a run-in with Joe Brogan and Billy Cronk. They were waiting for me at my trailer.”

  Rivard paused, waiting for me to continue. “So what happened?”

  “Never mind.”

  Kathy Frost would have kept nagging me for more details, but my new sergeant seemed relieved to let difficult matters drop.

  “How’s our buddy Prester doing?” he asked.

  “He won’t be getting many dates in the future. The doctor says he could still have a heart attack, but the more time that passes, the better chance he has of pulling through. Were you there when the ME examined Cates’s body?”

  “I took off after the state police evidence technicians showed up. It was too cold out there to hang around drinking coffee and shooting the shit with the troopers. I had to take Gail to her doctor, anyway. This new baby is going to bankrupt me. My advice to you is, never have kids.”

  “At the moment, that’s not an issue. Who’s handling the case for the CID?”

  “Zanadakis is the primary. He’s going to want to talk with you in person. Do yourself a favor, though, and write up your report ASAP.”

  It was yet another task to finish before I could get some shut-eye. “So what do you really think happened out there between Sewall and Cates?” I asked.

  “They got stuck in the snow and had a fight.”

  “So Prester smothers his buddy, then wanders off to find shelter from the storm? When he arrives at the Spragues’ house, he’s almost half dead, but the first thing he does is tell them to go help the man he just killed. That makes no sense.”

  There was a silence on the other end.

  “Even if he had the presence of mind to concoct some kind of story—”

  “Enough, Mike.”

  “I’m just trying to piece this together.”

  “It’s not your job to conduct homicide investigations. It’s Zanadakis’s. If you want to play detective, you should join the state police.”

  “I’m not playing anything.”

  “Curiosity killed the cat. Did you ever hear that before?”

  The message had been delivered, loud and clear. If I’d ever doubted that Sergeant Rivard had been instructed by the brass in Augusta to keep his new cat on a tight leash, I finally had my answer.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ve heard it.”

  After I got off the phone, I reclined on the sofa and rehashed the various threats I’d experienced since I’d returned home. First, Brogan had showed up to strong-arm me into dropping criminal charges against Cronk, and then Rivard had all but come out and said that he was going to make my life miserable if I didn’t stop thinking about the Sewall case. I looked at my BlackBerry, feeling a desire to call Kathy Frost or Charley Stevens, but what did I really have to say to my friends, except that I was feeling lonely and frustrated? There was no point in whining about the situation.

  I screwed the new fuses into the box and was relieved when the heater begin making a reassuring ticking sound. After a few minutes, the odor of the electric baseboards—the earthy smell of warming dust—emanated from the four corners of the room. I removed my parka and sat down at my laptop with a glass of milk.

  I wrote up my report in the short sentences and strict chronology that the criminal justice system demands:

  On 2/13 I attended an off-duty social event at the residence of JAMES LARRABEE on Route 277 in NO 19 TWP. I left the residence at approximately 2215. At approximately 2230, I was driving west on Route 277, when I received a call on my personal cell phone from LARRABEE, asking me to return to his residence. He advised me that his neighbors, BEN and DORIS SPRAGUE, of Bog Road, had called him, requesting his emergency medical assistance. (LARRABEE is a veterinarian.) He said that a man, whom I later identified as JOHN SEWALL, of Whitney, had appeared at their door in a state of extreme hypothermia and frostbite. LARRABEE asked that I accompany him to the SPRAGUES’ house and assist him in assessing SEWALL’S condition and performing medical assistance as needed.

  I debated whether our game of chicken with the unknown snowmobiler merited inclusion but decided to make note of everything. Detective Zanadakis could decide which incidents warranted further discussion and which did not.

  It took me half an hour to finish the report. I reread it twice for omissions, but the words kept blurring on the screen. Eventually I gave up worrying about errors and pressed SEND.

  Lucas Sewall’s yellow notebook lay in front me on the table, where I’d first put it down. The kid’s drawings were positively grotesque. One picture showed an owl with its wings extended and blood dripping from his parted beak; another image was of a scary-looking woman wearing a wimple and gown made entirely of feathers. Lucas must have a strange bird phobia, I decided.

  There was some sort of code on the cover:

  DORT OSNZ CNAP IOZZ

  Usually I enjoyed riddles and thought of myself as having an aptitude for solving all manner of puzzles, but I was too exhausted to play word games. I returned to the couch and unbuttoned the top buttons on my shirt. After a while, I closed my eyes.

  * * *

  The phone woke me. I snapped awake with a start, not knowing where I was. The room had grown almost completely black. How long had I been asleep?

  “Hello?”

  “Warden Bowditch?” It was a man’s voice.

  “Yeah. Who’s this?”

  “Detective Lieutenant Zanadakis of the state police’s Criminal Investigation Division. They’ve given me the Randall Cates mess to clean up. I read your report, and I wondered if you can come into Machias to talk with me about what happened. You’ve given us the play-by-play, but I’d like to hear the color commentary.”

  I leaned forward and rubbed my eyes, trying to wake up fast. “Just tell me where and when.”

  “We’re running this investigation out of the sheriff’s office. Can you be here at ten o’clock?”

  It was nearly 7:00 P.M. now. “Tomorrow?”

  “Tonight.” He paused. “Is that going to be a problem?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I appreciate the cooperation,” he said, and hung up.

  At least I had a few hours to take a shower and guzzle coffee. I yawned and stretched my arms above my head, experiencing once more all my exertions of the previous day in my aching joints and sore muscles.

  The phone rang again.

  I thought it might be the detective calling back, but this time it was a woman. “Mike? This is Jamie Sewall. You gave me and my son a ride home from the hospital.”

  How had she found me? Had I given her my business card? I couldn’t recall.

  “Hi, Jamie. How are you doing? Is everything OK?”

  “This is going to sound funny, but you know how you offered to drive me back to the hospital? My friend said he can’t do it, and it would be like sixty bucks for a taxi from Machias, and I really need my car to go to work in the morning. I hate to ask and all, because you were so nice before, and I feel embarrassed for losing my keys, but can you possibly give me a lift?”

  I glanced at my watch again, making quick calculations. If I left in ten minutes, that would give me fifteen minutes to get to her house, half an hour for us to ride into town, some time together at the hospital. Yes, it was totally doable.

  “It’s no trouble,” I said. “I’ll be right over.”

  “You’re my hero.”

  I took the fastest shower of my life and put on the last clean uniform in my closet.

  * * *

  It was a crystal-clear night—the kind you only get far from the light pollution of the big cities. The sky was as hard as an obsidian desert. The Milky Way flowed across it like a river of light.

  Someone had done a half-assed job of shoveling a parking spot in the Sewalls’ driveway. A narrow path wound through the snow to the house. Above the wheelchair ramp, a weak porch light glowed like a dying star. I stayed in the truck with the engine going until it became clear that Jamie wasn’t waiting in the wind
ow for me to arrive. I needed to knock, in other words.

  The subzero air was bracing as I pulled it into my lungs. I never felt more alive than when I was outdoors on a Maine winter night. The cold made me hyperaware of my existence as a hot-blooded animal, part of and yet apart from the natural world. I pushed the glowing orange doorbell and waited with excitement for an answer.

  There was no response.

  I tried the bell again, this time with more persistence.

  Finally the knob turned and I found myself looking down at a haggard woman in a wheelchair. She had shoulder-length brown hair that looked freshly washed, brown eyes that seemed to have trouble focusing, and a cleft chin I recognized as a Sewall family trait. She wore a faded gray-and-red flannel shirt, stonewashed jeans, and white tennis shoes.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Wow,” she said, giving me a lopsided smile. “Jamie didn’t tell me you were a hunk. I’m Tammi. Come on inside.”

  She wheeled herself in reverse away from the door. I stepped over the threshold.

  I knew another woman who lived in a wheelchair; Ora Stevens, the wife of my friend Charley, had broken her spine in a plane crash, but although she could no longer walk, she radiated good health and good cheer. I didn’t know Tammi’s affliction—multiple sclerosis or cerebral palsy?—but she seemed broken in a way that went beyond malfunctioning nerves and muscles.

  Outside, the house looked to be a wreck, but inside there wasn’t a hint of dust or disrepair to be seen. The hardwood floors gleamed beneath the overhead light fixture. The air had a pleasant floral smell, as of a scented candle flickering in some distant bathroom. Framed family photos hung neatly on the walls.

  “You want a Moxie or something?” Tammi asked me. “We don’t have any beer in the house anymore.”

  “I’m on duty anyway. But no, thank you.”

  “Jamie says you’re the one who found Prester.” She twitched her nose like a rabbit. In her hollow lap was a clump of wadded tissues. She dabbed the corner of an eye with one.

  “I just helped get him to the hospital,” I said.

  “Jamie says Randall is dead, too.” She framed the sentence as a statement, but I sensed that she’d hung an invisible question mark at the end.