Bad Little Falls

by Paul Doiron

  “That feller down there let a skunk loose in Mike’s abode.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “He’s mad because I pinched him for discharging a firearm too close to a house, so he’s been pulling pranks on me,” I said. “He calls himself George Magoon, after a famous poacher who liked to torment game wardens.”

  “What kind of pranks?”

  “First, he nailed a coyote pelt to my door, and then he broke into my trailer and released a skunk, which sprayed all over the place. I’ve been sleeping in a motel the past two nights.”

  Other men emerged from the cabins to join Cronk. They watched us with generally perplexed expressions, their heads back.

  “Are you sure it was the same person both times?” Charley asked.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “You don’t want to leap to the wrong conclusion.”

  It never occurred to me that the incidents might have been unrelated. Now that I thought about it, I realized the skunk had not been accompanied by a note from Magoon. Charley had always warned me against making assumptions in my investigations.

  “Can you pass me a bottle of water from the cooler?” asked Stacey.

  The tight spirals were making me nauseous. A drink sounded like a good idea, but there was only a single Poland Spring in the little Igloo Cooler. I wiped the moisture off with my sleeve and handed it to Stacey. She untwisted the cap, took a swig, and set it between her thighs. Then, very quickly, she lifted the window. A blast of arctic air tore through the cockpit.

  “Stacey,” warned her father.

  Before I could ask what was going on, she hurled the nearly full bottle straight into the cluster of men beneath us. Cronk leapt nimbly backward, but one of the others, a tubby brown-bearded character, fell flat on his ass in the snow. The plastic bottle struck a patch of rock and exploded like a liquid bomb among them.

  “Assholes!” Stacey called out the window before she latched it shut again.

  “You could have beaned one of those guides.” Charley did his best to suppress a chuckle.

  “That was the idea.”

  “I appreciate the gesture,” I said.

  “I didn’t do it for you. I have no problem with hunting if the animal is taken fairly and doesn’t suffer, but turning the Maine woods into a private shooting gallery for lazy jerks who just want to fire their guns and pose with a trophy steams me.”

  Her feelings were almost exactly my own, although my job prohibited me from saying so too loudly, let alone dropping water bombs on the heads of hunting guides.

  “You’re going to get Mike in trouble with his superiors,” Charley said.

  “He’s a big boy,” she said. “And it’s not like it will be the first time, according to Mom.”

  I wondered what stories Ora had told her daughter about me. I knew that Charley’s wife cared deeply for me, but I also suspected she worried that I brought out her husband’s daredevil side. Ora didn’t blame me for the violence I had brought into their life, but the same couldn’t necessarily be said for Stacey.

  My cell phone rang on my belt. I barely heard the ringtone over the engine. The number on the display belonged to Sergeant Rivard. I removed the headset.

  “Yeah?” I said, holding the phone to one ear and covering the other with my hand. The noise inside the plane was deafening.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “In a plane.”

  “What?”

  “In a plane with Charley Stevens and his daughter. We’re flying over Narraguagus.”

  “Can you head over to Machias? Prester Sewall just escaped from the hospital.”

  “What?”

  “A school bus hit a snowplow. He escaped during the Code 66.”

  Code 66 is hospital jargon for an all-hands-on-deck emergency, such as a natural disaster or a school-yard shooting. In other words, it means any event requiring every staff member to drop what they are doing, even if they are off duty, and assist with triage. A bus loaded with kids striking a plow definitely qualified. I thought of Jamie’s son, Lucas, and felt a surge of worry.

  “Can Stevens help with the search?” Rivard shouted.

  I held the phone against my leg and rearranged the headset to explain to Charley and Stacey what had happened.

  Before I could finish asking for help, Stacey had turned the nose of the Cessna in the direction of the coast and reached for the throttle. The plane banked to the right until we caught sight of the Narraguagus River itself, and then we turned southeast across a no-man’s-land of peat bogs and frozen beaver flowages without a house to be seen.

  Prester Sewall and Randall Cates had sought out one of these heaths for their drug deal. They’d wanted isolation and had found it in spades. Now Cates was dead, and Sewall was on the run. An escape attempt would be interpreted by the court as an admission of guilt. It surprised me that Prester had been capable of flight in his condition. Unless he’d found a ride—a difficult task to accomplish when you had a mug like that of the walking dead—he wouldn’t get far.

  Snow streaked by the windows, and Charley scraped off frozen condensation from the windshield with the heel of his hand.

  “So much for counting moose today,” he said.

  “I should have figured something like this would happen,” said Stacey.

  I raised my binoculars at an angle to the window. Peering through the scud, I could make out hills forested with leafless trees that made me think of thinning hair on a balding man. Every once in a while, a black rooftop would pop into view along a gray line of asphalt.

  Stacey picked up the half-frozen Machias River and followed it downstream through the impoverished little village of Whitneyville, where Route 1 crossed over the new bridge. I saw the conjoined roofs of the hospital, steam rushing up out of stacks from the power plant inside. The parking lot looked like pandemonium: cars everywhere, police cruisers arranged at checkpoints, blue lights flashing in the snowy morning.

  I called Rivard back and had another shouted conversation with him above the Cessna’s engine. He wanted us to scout across the road, in the wooded area between Sylvan Park and the riverbank. There was an oval harness-racing track there, long abandoned, bordered by evergreens that bore a resemblance, from above, to a thick shag carpet. A man could hide from view handily in all that greenery.

  “Cody Devoe is here with Tomahawk,” Rivard said. “He’s trying to find the scent.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Look for tracks.”

  There were plenty of those, crisscrossing the snow-covered fields. The high school was just down the road, and kids no doubt sneaked into the woods to smoke pot and make out on a daily basis, no matter how cold it got. A deceptive coating of ice covered the slow water above the park; from the air, you could see how wafer-thin it was and how the crust broke apart as the river approached the rapids. Eventually, you came to a place where there was no ice at all. There were white streaks in the tea-stained water where the current tumbled over submerged boulders and dropped down hidden cascades before it picked up serious speed above Bad Little Falls.

  I wondered if anyone had contacted Jamie. The panic I knew she’d feel when she heard the news was like a punch to the heart.

  The phone rang again. “He’s headed for the river!” Rivard said. “Bowditch, do you see him?”

  Not on my side of the plane. I unstrapped myself and leaned across the cabin. In the open fields to the north, searchers were converging and moving en masse toward the water’s edge. With my binoculars, I scanned the ragged tree line, trying to draw a bead.

  “There!” said Stacey.

  Prester Sewall staggered out from beneath the cover of the evergreens. He lurched through the snow like a wounded soldier. Another man—this one in uniform—was thirty yards behind and closing fast. The pursuer had Prester trapped against the frozen river, with nowhere left to run.

  The other man must have called something to him, causing Prester to pause for a moment along the
stony riverbank. They seemed to be having a shouted conversation across the space between them. The police officer raised his hands in a gesture of peacefulness. Prester swayed uncertainly, hugging himself against the biting wind.

  And then, as we watched helplessly from above, he turned and took a tentative step onto the ice.

  26

  During the Code 66, when doctors, nurses, and techs had been scrambling to meet the bus carrying the injured children, and the deputy who was guarding the ward had slipped away to help, Prester Sewall had pulled the IV from his arm and stumbled on wounded feet out of the med-surg unit. How exactly he had escaped detection, no one could say. With his bandaged nose and wine-colored cheeks, he was hardly inconspicuous. Someone suggested he might have found a stray coat to pull on over his pajamas.

  Given that it was snowing at a rate of half an inch an hour and the temperature was in the low twenties, Sergeant Rivard calculated that Prester couldn’t have gotten far. To Rivard, who had conducted a fair share of searches for escaped prisoners in his time, this line of thought led irresistibly across Route 1A into the locked and abandoned grounds of the old Sylvan Park racetrack.

  The hospital staff had provided Warden Devoe’s K-9 assistant, Tomahawk, with a hearty whiff of Prester’s bedclothes, and sure enough, it took only a few minutes of patrolling along the roadside snowbank before the dog indicated. She nearly pulled her handler over as she took off into the woods.

  The searchers found a trail staggering off into the trees. Rivard said the prints were unmistakably those of a man wearing small-size hospital slippers. All available units—wardens, troopers, and deputies—converged on the overgrown park.

  Prester had cut across the windy field where horses had once raced, making a beeline for the birch and pine forest to the south. The falling snow hadn’t yet obscured his footprints, and the dog was hard on the scent. Excitement built as the wardens and police closed in on the fugitive. Devoe and Rivard heard the Machias River before they saw it. The tracks made straight for the ice-clotted riverbank and then veered east, paralleling the channel as it rushed downstream into town.

  The searchers were amazed at Prester’s endurance, having forgotten the tremendous survival instinct he had shown the night of the blizzard. The wardens radioed for police cruisers to cordon off Water Street, blocking Prester’s escape into the small riverfront neighborhood above Bad Little Falls. Rivard said that you could read his mounting desperation in the meandering tracks. He was in a panic and didn’t know where to go.

  A call went out over the air: Corbett had cut him off at the river. Moving independently of the other searchers, the chief deputy had found his man by taking a different vector on the Machias, closing off any escape. According to Corbett’s written report on the matter, which I later read, he had shouted at Prester to stop. The fugitive had paused at the riverbank and responded inaudibly.

  “Suspect seemed to be on the verge of giving up,” the chief deputy had written.

  Which is why we were all caught off guard when the escaped prisoner decided instead to step to his death.

  * * *

  It happened so slowly, like a movie playing at half speed. When Prester first set foot on the ice, I didn’t believe what I was seeing. From aloft, you could see how thin the ice was. Even at ground level, he must have recognized that the crust was nothing but a lie.

  Then he took a second step.

  “What’s he doing?” Stacey asked over the intercom. “Is he nuts?”

  Three more steps, and Prester broke through. It reminded me of a horror movie in which an actor is crossing a cemetery and skeletal arms reach up from the ground to pull him down into the grave. He disappeared just like that. His head jerked back, and his bandaged arms went flying skyward—for a moment he seemed to be looking right at us—and then he was gone. A hole in the ice, brown with churning water, was all that was left of him.

  My first thought was of Jamie.

  Instinctively, Stacey turned the plane downriver. We hoped to see his head pop up in the open water below Sylvan Park, thought we might spot his green pajamas bobbing along. But we never did.

  Rivard returned to the line, asking me what I could see.

  “Nothing” was my answer.

  Nevertheless, we kept looking—and followed the river to Bad Little Falls. As it cascaded into the bay, the Machias was such a raging torrent—with so many plunging waterfalls and swirling eddies capable of sucking entire logs to the bottom without a trace—it seemed futile even to hope. Eventually, I stopped trying. I lowered my binoculars and buckled myself back into my seat.

  “Do you think it was a suicide?” I asked Rivard. “Or did he have some crazy idea about getting across?”

  “We’ll never know.”

  After I hung up, I put on the headset and told Stacey to set me down near my truck at the Gardner Lake boat launch.

  “You mean that’s it?” she asked. “Shouldn’t we keep looking?”

  “If we haven’t seen him now, it means he’s probably stuck on something beneath the surface, or the hydrodynamics of the falls are keeping him submerged.”

  “The wardens will recover the body,” said Charley. “You can’t send divers anywhere near those falls, though, so that’s going to complicate things. The river’s tidal below the waterfall. They might have to look all the way down the bay before they find him.”

  At least I knew what I would be doing for the near future: scouting the river for a corpse.

  “It seems anticlimactic,” said Stacey.

  “Not everything has a neat ending,” I replied.

  Where is Jamie at this moment? I wondered. Does she know? Has anyone told her? It felt very urgent and important for me to be the one to break the news.

  Stacey brought the plane around for an approach on Gardner Lake. Once again, the ice fishermen all paused in their chitchatting to watch the Cessna drop down out of the white sky and skate across the frozen pond. The propeller roared as we slid to a stop just yards from the boat ramp.

  Both Charley and Stacey got out of the plane to bid me good-bye.

  Stacey, I discovered, was taller than her father, nearly six feet, and slender. Her legs were long and her shoulders were broad for a woman. Physically and, I suspected, in most other ways, she was the opposite of shapely little Jamie Sewall.

  Charley clapped one hand on my shoulder and patted my chest with the other. “This was a sad day, so let’s make plans for a happier one. Ora will be heartbroken if you don’t join us for supper soon. We could go ice fishing for some of those big salmon we’ve got up at West Grand Lake.”

  Stacey folded her arms above her breasts and studied us. She had propped her sunglasses atop her head. I finally had a good look at her face. Her eyes were almond-shaped and as green as Chinese jade. Those are the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen, I thought with some discomfort.

  “I’m sorry I dragged you into this,” I said.

  “Just let me know when you recover his body.”

  “Your father will hear about it first,” I said. “Somehow he gets all the news before anyone else in the Warden Service.”

  “That’s because he’s the biggest gossip in the North Woods.”

  Charley lifted his chin and grunted. I don’t think he cherished his daughter’s relentless teasing.

  In preparation for takeoff, she lowered her glasses back to the bridge of her nose. Until that moment, I hadn’t noticed the engagement ring on her finger. The diamond was the size of a pea.

  I extended my right hand to Stacey. “Thanks for the plane ride.”

  She had her father’s iron grip. “Good luck,” she said.

  I saw my dopey reflection again in her mirrored sunglasses.

  * * *

  In my truck, I tried to decide what to do about Jamie. Should I call her on my cell? And tell her what? If she hadn’t yet heard, then I couldn’t very well inform her over the phone that her beloved brother was now dead. My sixth sense told me she had already rushed to
the scene. Machias was such a small town. News of a dangerous prisoner escaping from the hospital was the sort of information that moved from person to person with the speed of electrical impulses flashing between neurons.

  My phone rang, settling the question. It was Rivard, asking me to meet him where Sylvan Street dead-ended. It was a little riverside neighborhood, near the spot where Prester had disappeared.

  As I drove into town, it dawned on me that, in all likelihood, Zanadakis would be closing his case now. Prester’s flight from the hospital seemed a self-incriminating act. Why run if he wasn’t guilty of killing Randall Cates? Then there was the manner of Prester’s death. Whether or not you could brand his actions as suicidal, at the very least they suggested the mind-set of a man who would prefer drowning over a lifetime spent behind bars.

  The whole episode flew in the face of everything Jamie believed. She had been so vehement about her brother’s innocence. How would she process the information that he was, in fact, (a) a murderer and (b) dead? I was having trouble accepting these realities myself, and I barely knew the guy. The twin bombshells would blow Jamie to pieces.

  By the time I arrived at the end of Sylvan Street, there were only a few police vehicles left: Rivard’s patrol truck, the sheriff’s Crown Vic, and two white cruisers with the Washington County star on the door. Deputy Dunbar stood in the street with his hands raised, indicating I should stop.

  I rolled down my window. “Any news?”

  “I’m looking for a new job,” he said. “Does that count?”

  “Seriously?”

  “How the hell was I supposed to know he was strong enough to run away? I was just trying to help the kids who got hurt in that school bus.”

  I didn’t particularly like Dunbar, but I sympathized with his plight. In his shoes, with the hospital in such a state of chaos and everyone focused on the injured children, I probably would have left Prester unguarded, as well.

  “Have you seen Jamie Sewall?”

  He sneered at me. “I thought that was your department.”

  I found my capacity for sympathy diminishing rapidly. “Just tell me, Dunbar.”