by Paul Doiron
The front door of the house was ajar. A wedge of light streamed through the crack. I kicked snow off my boots and pushed the door open. “Corbett? It’s Bowditch.” My words seemed to bounce off the entryway’s walls.
There was no reply.
The light in the foyer was burning, but the other rooms were dark. The home had seemed so warm and welcoming the first time I’d visited. Now a chill was blowing through some open door or window, and the faint odor of Jamie’s cigarettes hung in the air.
It troubled me how the chief deputy kept appearing around the Sewalls. I didn’t want to feel suspicious and unsafe, but my hand kept drifting down to my sidearm.
The floor creaked beneath my feet. “Corbett?”
The answer came from above my head. “Up here.”
There was a single narrow staircase leading up to the second floor. The house was old and, like many nineteenth-century New England farmhouses, seemed to have been built for a race of ascetic pygmies. I had to duck my head to keep from knocking my brow against an oak beam.
There were three small bedrooms and a single bath on the second floor. The first room was Jamie’s. It had a queen-size mattress beneath a quilt that looked like a family heirloom. The walls had been freshly painted—a soothing lavender—and there was a vase of grocery-store flowers on the bureau, but there were telltale signs of disarrangement if you looked closely. The carnations were beginning to wilt, and the bed was unmade. I hung in the doorway for a moment, breathing in the familiar smell of her perfume and feeling a pang at the thought that I would never share this bed with her.
I found Corbett in the next room, sitting on Prester’s Sewall’s narrow bed. In his hands he was holding a quart-size Ziploc bag filled with dried herbs. His high, scarlet forehead was furrowed, but the turn of his lips suggested amusement.
“What have you got there?” I asked.
“It ain’t oregano,” said Corbett.
Unlike Jamie’s, this room was a mess. It seemed more like the sanctuary of a hormone-crazed teenager than that of a man in his mid-twenties. Posters showing women in bikinis, cupping their heavy naked breasts in their hands, beckoned from the walls. Empty cans of Milwaukee’s Best, a plate with congealed grease in the shape of a pizza slice, a pile of dirty jeans and undershirts on a chair—these were the dead man’s personal effects, all that he had left behind.
“So you just found that lying in the open?” I asked, half wondering if he’d planted the pot for reasons I couldn’t guess at the moment.
“Exigent circumstances,” he said. “I was looking for the boy.”
“In Prester’s bureau?”
“Kid could have been hiding anywhere.”
“Jesus, Corbett. The guy’s already dead. What do you plan on doing, busting his corpse for intent to distribute?”
“No, but I’m sure the sheriff is going to have some pointed questions for the sister.”
“This is her brother’s room!”
“But it’s her house.”
I couldn’t bring myself to argue with him. The entire situation was more than I could wrap my head around. “I take it you didn’t find Lucas.”
Corbett tilted his razor-burned chin toward the window. “His footprints lead off into the trees. Unless the snow picks up, you shouldn’t have any trouble following them.”
I exhaled loudly, trying to dispel the depression from my soul. “I need to look in his room first.”
“Why? What for?”
I didn’t answer. Lucas’s room was at the end of the hall. It was nearly as dirty as his uncle’s, although not quite, thanks to the ministrations of his mother, no doubt. The poster on his wall showed Bruce Lee flexing every muscle in his fat-free body. Books were scattered everywhere: detective novels and comics, science fiction and strange histories of Stonehenge and the Loch Ness monster.
I lifted the bedspread from the floor and discovered the stash of notebooks his mother had mentioned. There were at least a dozen of various colors and styles: Some were big and spiral-bound; others reminded me of old college exam booklets. I recognized the most recent notebook immediately, with its lemon cover and violent illustrations.
Corbett stood in the doorway. “What are you looking for?”
I didn’t feel like explaining myself. Jamie had mentioned that her son wrote constantly in his notebooks and that if he had a secret hideout, I might find evidence inside. Standing over his bed, I read the kid’s most recent entry. It was dated that morning:
Mom never came home for the second night in a row!
It’s all my fault.
I can’t believe Uncle Prester is DEAD.
What if they never find his body?
What if Ma never comes home AT ALL?
What if the social lady takes Tammi to some mental home and Dad decides he don’t want me to come live with hiim?
I will be all ALONE!
I hadn’t realized that the notebook contained Lucas’s diary. When I had looked at it before, I’d focused only on the disturbing drawings and assumed the rest were imaginary stories or schoolwork. Now I understood that the odd little boy had been keeping a journal, and I wondered if some of the answers I was seeking—about Jamie and Mitch, Randall and Prester—might be found inside. I’d had this notebook in my possession for days without realizing what it was.
“What is that?” Corbett asked, showing more interest than usual.
“The kid’s diary,” I said. “I am hoping it will lead me to him.”
I leafed through the pages and happened on a map that showed what looked like the forest behind the house. It was stylishly rendered—Lucas had a talent for drawing—and showed a few of landmarks linked by a single dotted line that must have been a trail. The path crossed a stream labeled “Injun Brook” and detoured around a tangle of fallen trees besides which he’d scrawled “Widowmakers.” It ended at a cartoonish-looking building he called “Fort Knox.”
I wasn’t certain if the map was purely fanciful or whether it would be of help locating the boy, but I decided to take the notebook with me in case I wanted to refer to it again during the search. I spent a moment inspecting the strange images inked on the cover—the demonic owl, the feathered woman—and shook my head sadly. Lucas, I decided, was a deeply troubled kid, and why shouldn’t he be, an intelligent and imaginative child growing up in a rancid drug den?
“What kind of diary does a twelve-year-old keep? Is it like a record of how many times he jerks off in a day?” Corbett’s tone was light, but I could sense that he wanted to have a look for himself.
I unbuttoned my shirt and tucked the notebook against my ballistic vest. It seemed the only way to carry it securely.
I clicked off the light and went downstairs. Corbett took the hint and followed.
In the entryway, I nearly had a heart attack when the social worker stepped through the front door.
“I take it you haven’t found him yet,” she said.
“I thought you were going to wait outside.”
“I got tired of sitting in the car.”
“It would be better if you did,” said Corbett.
Snow had accumulated atop her hair, as if someone had sprinkled her with powdered sugar. “Do you think the boy is dangerous?”
“If he’s scared, he might be dangerous,” I said.
“Look,” she said. “I can’t keep the engine running, or I’m going to run out of gas. I’m going to take Tammi over to Lubec to that foster home I mentioned. I can’t just wait around all evening for you to find the boy. Why are you looking in the house? I thought the kid ran off into the woods.”
“I want to have a look in the basement,” I said.
“Can’t you just follow his tracks? I thought you game wardens were supposed to be expert trackers.”
“I’m just gathering some information.” I didn’t feel like explaining my search techniques to this woman, or to Corbett, for that matter. “When I find Lucas, what would you like me to do?”
“If he’s been outside t
his whole time, take him to the hospital. The poor kid could have frostbite or hypothermia. Isn’t a lost kid supposed to be like a super high-level priority?”
“There’s a difference between lost and hiding,” I said.
“Hiding from what?” Corbett asked.
I focused on the social worker. “If you give me your phone number, I’ll call you when I find him. To be on the safe side, I’ll take him to the hospital. Please just take care of Tammi.”
Mueller gave me her cell number. Muttering to herself, she wandered outside.
Standing at the mudroom door, I took a look at the backyard. In the twilight, the snow outside appeared a luminous blue. I could just make out the footprints staggering away into a hedgelike row of small pines that were about the size of Christmas trees. Beyond it were taller evergreens and birches. I would need my snowshoes, I decided.
“I’ve got to agree with the lady,” said Corbett. “You don’t seem like you’re in much of hurry.”
“I know this kid,” I said. “He’s not the type to go running off in a panic. I have a good idea where he is from the map he made in his notebook. What I don’t know is whether he took his grandfather’s rifle with him. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a second, I’m going to look in the basement.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“If you need something to do, call the sheriff and tell her about that pot you found. I’m sure that’ll make her day. You certainly have a nose for the stuff. The psychic connection you have with these drug dealers is uncanny. It defies all belief.”
Corbett tightened his mouth, not quite sure what to make of my veiled accusation. The truth was that I would never be able to prove that the chief deputy had been on the take from Randall Cates. Everyone who could testify to that effect was conveniently deceased.
The cellar was pitch-black, and the light switch didn’t seem to do anything when I gave it a try. Probably there was some sort of naked bulb with a pull cord down there. I trained my flashlight on the steps and carefully descended.
The air felt damp but not as cold somehow. I crouched down and shined the light around the corners of the room. There were boxes everywhere, plus a tool bench, a dusty old television, a girl’s bicycle, a brace of canoe paddles—the usual detritus of a family’s life. An ancient oil tank squatted against the fieldstone wall, an open box of rat poison beside it.
I couldn’t stand up without knocking my head against a pine rafter or getting a faceful of cobwebs. Hunched forward slightly, I picked my way through the junk to have a look at the door that opened onto the bulkhead steps. On the dirt floor there was a small drift of snow that must have tumbled in when Lucas turned the doorknob and took off into the wild.
The next question was whether he had taken his dead grandfather’s .22 with him. Dusty tools hung from a Peg-Board over a wooden workbench. I saw a hammer, various wrenches, an electric drill—all dusty, and some showing signs of rust—and I had the feeling somehow that none of these tools had been used since the death of the Sewall parents.
I saw an antique advertisement hanging on the mossy fieldstone wall in the corner above the workbench. Someone must have clipped it from an old magazine and stuck it inside a picture frame. It showed an attractive woman in a strange white outfit made of feathers. She wore a sort of cowl that hid her hair from view, and she had her finger extended straight at the viewer, in imitation of the famous recruiting poster featuring Uncle Sam. Her eyes were heavily made up in 1960s fashion, but there was nothing alluring, or even friendly, about them in the least. Beneath her picture, the poster said I WANT YOU FOR THE DIPLOMAT CORPS.
Below the command, or the threat, or whatever it was, was some explanatory fine print about the corps, along with a picture of an open cigar box.
It was an ad for White Owl cigars.
The scary drawings on the covers of Lucas’s notebook made a certain sense now. He’d been terrified of this poster above his dead grandfather’s tool bench. The image had entered into his nightmares in that inexplicable way that things do when you are a child—or an adult.
“You and Lucas have a lot in common,” Jamie had said. I’d rejected the suggestion as absurd at the time, but now I could begin to understand what she’d meant.
My moment of empathy didn’t last long. It ended the second my flashlight beam picked out the open box of Winchester .22 long-rifle ammunition on the pallet. Lucas Sewall was armed.
34
When a child disappears in the forest in the winter, especially after dark, you don’t want to waste time, since hypothermia can take hold so quickly. But my sixth sense told me Lucas Sewall was in no immediate danger. As I’d said to the social worker, there is a difference between lost and hiding.
“His mother said he has a tree fort about half a mile from here,” I told Corbett as we returned to our vehicles. I needed a pair of snowshoes if I was going to wade out into that snowy forest. “There’s a map of it in his diary. I think that’s where he went.”
“What else is in that diary?”
“Kid stuff,” I said.
The chief deputy raised the collar on his parka against the chill. “I want to go with you.”
The last thing I needed was a man I didn’t trust trailing after me through snowdrifts and deepening shadows. “Do you have snowshoes in your vehicle?”
“No.”
“Then you’ll just slow me down.”
“The kid doesn’t have them, either.”
“Do me a favor,” I said, “and just wait here until I get back. Call the sheriff for me and ask her if anyone’s questioned Mitch Munro about what he was doing on the Heath the night Cates was murdered.”
Corbett gave me a sad shake of the head. “You won’t let that one go, will you?”
“Call it a character defect,” I said. “Excuse me for a minute. I’ve got to talk to my sergeant.”
Rivard sounded dog-tired on the phone, but he would have mobilized the entire division if I had requested assistance. I had a hard time dissuading him from doing so, in fact. That’s the standard operating procedure for a child who goes missing on a snowy evening.
“I know where the kid is,” I said with confidence I had no right to feel. “His mom told me he has a tree fort behind the house. That’s where his trail goes. I just need to get in there and bring him back. It’ll just take a few minutes.” I withheld the tidbit that the kid I was chasing was armed with a .22 rifle.
“I take it Prester never washed up,” I said.
“I would have notified you if he had.” His mouth sounded dry from the cold air and chewing tobacco.
“What time are we getting started again with the search?”
“That depends on this snow. The forecast calls for it to end just after dark.”
I flicked my wipers to push the accumulating snow off my windshield. “It’s still snowing here.”
“It’s still snowing everywhere.”
Then he hung up.
I found a halogen headlamp in the glove compartment and snugged it down over my baseball cap so that the light would follow my eyes whenever I turned my head. I removed my snowshoes from the bed of my pickup and strapped the bindings to my boots. The shoes had been fashioned out of white ash and rawhide by a Penobscot Indian craftsman up in Old Town. The modified bear-paw design was oblong in shape, not too long, which made the pair ideal for working in dense cover.
Corbett inspected me from head to foot. “What do you plan on doing if you find him?”
“Mueller wants me to take him into the hospital to get checked out for frostbite and hypothermia. After that, I don’t know. I guess she’ll hand him over to a foster family until his mom gets out of jail.”
“It can’t be any worse than that house.”
I was in no mood to debate. For all of Jamie’s problems—her addictions and self-loathing—I knew she tried to be a good mother. She was a good mother, albeit in ways the bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services would never believe. Lucas w
as an odd little specimen, but she clearly doted on him and encouraged his preoccupation with writing. Jamie was right to worry that her son might slip from her grip now and tumble into the maw of the state.
I knew people like Magda Mueller did important work. They rescued innocent children from nightmarish situations of abuse and neglect. I also knew that certain bureaucrats considered being poor to be a form of child abuse, no matter how desperately the parents wanted something better for their children. In my experience, multigenerational poverty was a kind of inheritance, impervious to state mandates or meddling, as impossible to change as the color of one’s eyes. My mom had taken advantage of opportunities in the classroom to get her GED and associate’s degree—although mostly she owed her salvation to being beautiful enough to eventually marry a rich man. Then again, she hadn’t fallen into addiction the way Jamie Sewall had.
“See you in a few,” I told Corbett.
“Happy trails,” he replied.
I made my way around the house to the open bulkhead. Snow had tumbled down the concrete steps leading to the basement door. In the blue-white light of my headlamp, I saw the boy’s trail leading across the open yard, past a wood and tar-paper shed that was listing to the right, as if pushed that way by the wind. The light snow had begun to fill in the tracks, but I could see from the jagged treads that Lucas was wearing sneakers.
I removed the notebook from inside my shirt and searched for the map I’d seen earlier. There were no distances marked, but if I remained still, I could hear moving water ahead, so I knew “Injun Brook” wasn’t far.
I tucked the notebook against my chest and followed the tracks. The trail led into a copse of second-growth birch trees that were about as thick around as baseball bats. Snowshoe hares had nibbled the low-hanging buds.
Beyond the shed, the hill sloped steadily, and I could tell from Lucas’s treads—deeper in the heels than in the toes—that he had descended at breakneck speed, nearly losing his balance a couple of times. He’d snapped a dead branch off a decaying tree at one point to keep from falling. I angled my snowshoes to sidestep my way down after him.
