Bad Little Falls

by Paul Doiron

  The trees grew taller as I approached the hidden stream: a mixed grove of white pines, yellow birches, and northern white cedar. The evergreen boughs had blocked the snow, making it easier to read the trail. The brook at the bottom was about ten feet wide at its narrowest point. It was a gurgling little creek, ice-crusted along the edges, with water that looked like flowing ink in the light of my headlamp and smelled, very faintly—because cold dulls the sense of smell—of the rotting pine needles clumped along the streambed.

  Lucas had tried hopping his way across from one rock to the next, but the dislodged snow on one of the boulders showed where he’d lost his footing. His feet would be wet now, which increased the likelihood of frostbite. I needed to find him quickly, before his feet froze.

  My snowshoes weren’t made for jumping, so I had to untie them and prop them over my shoulder as I waded across. My boots were waterproof, but the iciness of the creek pierced the leather uppers like repeated jabs from a needle.

  When I reached the far side, I shined the lamp along the stream, looking for the point where Lucas had continued on, but I found no other tracks. It took me a few seconds to understand what I was seeing—or rather, what I wasn’t seeing—and then I laughed out loud. The boy had used the stream to disguise his passage. He had waded either up- or downstream.

  Upstream, I guessed, and I was correct, although not in the way I’d expected. I rediscovered Lucas’s trail, but it was now on the opposite side of the bank. It looped back toward his house, then stopped suddenly halfway up the hill. You might almost have concluded that a passing UFO had teleported him from the ground into space.

  I knelt down, and again I started smiling at my own stupidity. I’d been in such a rush, I hadn’t noticed what should have been plainly obvious to even a rookie warden: Lucas had retraced his steps. The boy had walked backward in his own tracks down to the creek.

  This kid is really clever, I said to myself. I’d better read Northwest Passage again.

  I located the tracks again on the far side of the brook, even farther upstream. As I snowshoed my way up the bank, I came across a spectacular pine that had been blasted apart; the bark was deeply scarred, torn open to the heartwood down the length of the trunk. Lucas’s map, I remembered, included a “Lightning Tree.” I expected this was it.

  According to the notebook, the boy’s fort should have been nearby. I decided to remove my snowshoes to make myself more agile, even if it meant that I would flounder in the deep drifts. I tied the laces together and draped the knot across my left shoulder.

  My headlamp had a green lens that I could snap over the bulb. The green light had been designed to protect a hunter or fisherman’s night vision, so that if you switched it off suddenly, you wouldn’t be left completely blind. The lens gave an eerie cast to the trail in the snow.

  The footprints dived headfirst into a dense mass of deadfall. The boy was leading me through his own private obstacle course. Fallen and half-fallen trees now formed a barrier to my passage. I peered under the first widowmaker and considered dropping down on my hands and knees to follow, but then I thought better of risking my neck by placing it under a heavy, spiked trunk. I would have to go around, I decided, until I regained his trail.

  I crept clockwise around the blowdowns, pushing my way through some low evergreens, which gave me a faceful of snow when the boughs sprang back. It was slow going without the snowshoes. Each step had me sinking down to my knees, if not my thighs.

  I stopped several times to listen, but the only sound was the wind rustling through the treetops.

  Eventually I located Lucas’s path again. The clues to his ordeal showed in the snow. After wriggling through the blowdowns, he’d scrambled on his forearms and knees up out of a hollow beneath a broken tree. I noticed a wet green dot on the snow. It was a drop of blood turned the color of seaweed by the fairy light. The boy had knocked his head or scraped a limb against one of those cruel spikes. So now he was wet and injured, as well as armed.

  The wind shifted, and I smelled wood smoke. There was just a hint of bitterness on the air before it drifted away. I moved cautiously upwind, noting that the prints were headed in the same direction, feeling certain that Lucas had lit a campfire. Glancing ahead, I saw a snowy knoll where two huge boulders, bigger than bulldozers, had been dropped by a passing glacier. At the foot of one was a flickering yellow light.

  I shut off the headlamp and waited for my pupils to expand. As I drew closer, the boulders gained gigantic proportions. They reminded me of ancient monoliths from the barrow downs of England. At their base, I could make out a boxy shadow wedged in the crack between the glacial erratics. The campfire light leaked out from between the planks, and a spiral of pine-flavored smoke—light gray against the darker gray of the evening—corkscrewed up into the sky.

  Lucas was inside.

  The question was how to pry him out. He had nowhere to run. The fort was pressed tightly into the vee formed by the leaning rocks. The structure seemed to be about the size of an ice-fishing shack, turned on its side and reinforced with plywood and Typar siding.

  Then I remembered the backtracking footprints and the maze of deadfall, and I recalled something Jamie had told me about her son: “Lucas loves puzzles and riddles and secret codes.” On a hunch, I decided to creep around the boulders and have a look at them from behind.

  In the nearly pitch-darkness, I almost speared my eye on a sharp branch. Every sound I made seemed amplified to my ears. I worried that my awkward movement through the snow might alert him to my presence.

  After a while I came through the birch saplings and the hedge of cedars on the far side of the rise. As I had expected, there was a receding shadow between the boulders: the fort’s secret back door. I moved to one side of the opening and flattened myself against the cold granite.

  I lifted my snowshoes gently off my shoulder and pressed them together in my left hand. Then, with all my strength, I hurled them up over the tops of the boulders. I heard the wood frames clatter off something—maybe the rock, maybe the fort—and then a hurried movement that reminded me of a squirrel in an attic.

  Faster than I would have dreamed, a rifle emerged from the crack between the two boulders beside me. As soon as I saw it, I grabbed the barrel and gave it a yank, dragging the boy out from the hole. He sprawled forward, landing on his scrawny chest. His glasses fell into the snow and disappeared beneath the surface powder. Half blind, he flipped himself over, waving his arms and kicking out his legs and screaming something unintelligible. It might have been a plea for mercy.

  “Relax, Lucas,” I said. “No one’s going to hurt you.”

  But he kept screaming.

  35

  Once I had gotten him to stop howling, I unloaded the .22 and put the cartridges in my pocket. Then I flicked on my headlamp and helped him dig for his Coke-bottle glasses. He rubbed the lenses with his thumbs before he put them on again. He blinked at me through the wet plastic, blinded by the halogen glow emanating from my forehead.

  “Lucas, why did you run off like that?”

  “That lady was going to confiscate me.”

  Where did he come up with that word? I wondered. “She was just going to take care of you until your mom comes homes.”

  “That lady told Tammi that Ma’s in jail.”

  I considered my response. “That’s right. She is in jail.”

  “What did she do?”

  I felt very reluctant to offer him any information. It wasn’t just my usual uneasiness communicating with children; there were legal issues involved. I figured my best bet would be to hand him over to the DHHS woman before I said something that would get me into trouble in Augusta. “She drove a car when she shouldn’t have.”

  “How long is she going to be there?”

  “That’s for the judge to decide.”

  I lifted the .22 by the sling. It was attached to the barrel and screwed into the wooden stock. “You shouldn’t be playing with firearms, Lucas. You could have s
hot yourself—or me.”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  “Have you taken a gun safety course?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t touch this rifle again until you’ve had some instruction in how to use it safely.”

  “That’s my grandpa’s gun. I inherited it.”

  The boy was dressed in a camo green sweatshirt and wet jeans. He wasn’t wearing a coat, gloves, or a hat. All at once he started to shiver.

  “Where did you cut yourself?” I asked. “I saw blood on the snow.”

  He pressed a hand to his hairline, beneath a long, loose bang. “It ain’t nothing.”

  “Let me have a look.” I reached out my hand, but he recoiled from my touch. “Stand still.”

  I lifted the flap of wet hair. There was a cut there, but it was nothing worse than the kind of scrape that kids got on the playground every day.

  “Do I need stitches?” he asked.

  “Just a Band-Aid. But I’m thinking a doctor should have a look at you anyway.”

  He repositioned his glasses on the bridge of his nose. “What for?”

  “Well, your feet are wet, so you might be getting frostbite in your toes.”

  “Are they going to amputate?”

  “I highly doubt it. Let’s get you back to the house and into some dry clothes.” The smell of smoke drifted past. “First, though, we need to put out that fire.”

  We circled the two boulders. I made Lucas walk in front in case he decided to take off again, but in truth, he didn’t look like he had the energy. I found my snowshoes on the tar-paper roof of the fort. As I inspected the structure, I realized that it was indeed an old ice-fishing shack that someone had remodeled into a boy’s playhouse.

  Smoke billowed out through the plywood door when I gave it a tug. Inside, there was a hibachi grill under a piece of PVC piping that angled through the side wall. Lucas had lighted a small fire in the grill out of broken twigs, birch bark, and wadded newspaper. I was surprised he hadn’t expired from carbon monoxide poisoning, but I decided that I had already given him enough lectures.

  There were stacks of water-warped paperbacks in one corner—the Conan books and Stephen King—and a moldy sleeping bag. It reminded me of a fort I had built the year we’d lived in North Anson, before my mom and dad split up that last time. I decorated it with the skulls of animals—raccoons and crows—I’d scavenged from the leaf litter. Every night I’d begged my parents to let me sleep out, where I would read myself to sleep by candlelight, until finally the snow began to fall and my mother decided that I might freeze to death.

  I found an empty Maxwell House coffee can and told Lucas to fill it with snow. When I dumped it on the fire, a puff of steam exploded into the air, followed by a sizzling sound. I used a stick to stir the coals until they were cold and damp enough to touch with my bare hand. Then I backed out of the sideways shack.

  “Who built this fort?” I asked.

  “Me.”

  “It’s very impressive.”

  “My grandpa helped a little.”

  I bent down to strap on my showshoes again.

  Lucas watched me with fascination. “How did you find me?” he asked.

  “It’s my job to find people in the woods. You were challenging to track, though. It was very clever how you used the stream to disguise your direction, and you almost fooled me backtracking in your own footprints. You would have confused lots of people who aren’t professional trackers like me.”

  He grinned, almost literally from ear to ear. The expression made him look even more than usual like a species of large-mouthed amphibian. “Thanks!”

  “You’re welcome.” I straightened up and repositioned the sling across my chest. The leather pressed against my hidden ballistic vest.

  “Are you sure you ain’t a ranger?” he asked.

  * * *

  As is usually the case, the return journey seemed shorter because I knew where I was going this time and didn’t need to scout for tracks.

  I held Lucas’s hand going across the stream again. He pouted and told me he could do it on his own, but I distrusted the footing and grabbed his wrist to steady his balance on the snow-slick rocks. As soon as we were across, he shook me loose and started fiercely up the hill.

  Corbett’s cruiser was gone. I checked my pager and cell phone but there were no messages. His unexpected absence unnerved me.

  We entered the house through the basement. I wanted to return the rifle to its place above the tool bench, but Lucas hung back, shivering. It wasn’t until I spotted the framed White Owl advertisement that I remembered his strange phobia about the feathered woman. He went leaping up the stairs as soon as I gave him leave to do so.

  I followed him up to the bathroom so I could have a look at the scrape on his forehead under the 100-watt lightbulb. I soaked a wad of toilet tissue in hydrogen peroxide and blotted the wound. Lucas squirmed and moaned as if being tortured while the disinfectant bubbled down his brow.

  I sat him down on the edge of the bathtub and untied his wet sneakers. His feet were as pale as thin-skinned subterranean animals that lived in total darkness. None of his toes or fingers were blue, which was a healthy sign, but he complained of sharp pain when I tried to massage blood back into the epidermis.

  “Ouch! Ouch!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I don’t like people touching me.”

  “This is not the highlight of my evening, either.”

  I found dry clothes for him in his bureau and let him change in private. While he was getting dressed, I put a phone call into the Washington County jail and asked to speak to the matron on duty. I waited a long time for one to be fetched, wondering whether Lucas might have something problematic hidden inside his bedroom, a bazooka or crossbow or God only knew what.

  “Yeah?” said a woman with a deep voice.

  “This is Warden Bowditch,” I said. “I was in there earlier tonight. The sheriff wanted me to speak with Jamie Sewall. Can you give her a message for me?”

  “I’m not supposed to do stuff like that.”

  “Just tell her I found her son and that he’s safe.”

  “I’m not supposed to do stuff like that.”

  “Her son ran away. She’s been worrying that he might have fallen through the ice. Imagine if it was your child.”

  “I don’t have kids.” She fell silent, and I worried we’d lost the connection, but then she added, “OK. I’ll let her know.”

  My next call was to the social worker, Magda Mueller.

  “This is Warden Bowditch,” I said. “I wanted to let you know that I found Lucas Sewall.”

  “How is he?”

  “Cold but otherwise fine, I think. He got a cut on his forehead from running into a tree branch, and his feet showed signs of frostnip, but they seem better now that he’s warmed up a bit.”

  “You should take him to the ER as a precautionary measure. How about I meet you at the Calais Regional Hospital?”

  The city of Calais, on the Canadian border, was nearly an hour’s drive away. “Why not Machias?”

  “The foster family lives in Calais.”

  I heard the bedroom door open. When I spoke again into the phone, I dropped my voice. “What’s going to happen to him now?”

  “I’ve been trying to reach the father all evening, but there’s been no answer. I have questions about placing the boy with him even temporarily, based on his criminal record, but I’m required to exercise due diligence. Unless I can track down a family member who isn’t incarcerated, Lucas will stay with a foster family until a judge can schedule a hearing. We have seventy-two hours.”

  “What if his mother is still in jail at the time of the hearing?” Given the drug charges against her, it didn’t seem likely she’d get out in time.

  “I’d rather not speculate on the outcome.”

  Lucas emerged from his bedroom, shoulders sagging. He had made a clumsy attempt at combing his own hair. He loo
ked tired and sad and resigned to his unhappy fate.

  “Should I pack a bag for him?” I asked Mueller.

  “That would be a good idea.”

  After we hung up, I saw that I’d received two missed calls from Doc Larrabee. He’d tried to reach me while I’d been on the line with the jail matron and then again while I was speaking with the DHHS caseworker. Neither time had he left a voice mail. Maybe he’d had a change of heart and could testify to having seen Mitch Munro’s sled on the Heath. I thought about how curt and unhelpful he’d been the last time we’d spoken—letting me freeze on the doorstep—and decided to ignore him for the moment.

  “Where’s Tammi?” Lucas asked.

  “That woman who was here before took her to stay at a guesthouse until your mom gets home.” It felt like a lie to say the words aloud.

  “So she got ‘confiscated,’ too.”

  “It’s just temporary,” I said. “Do you have a gym bag or backpack?”

  “What for?”

  “We need to take along some socks and clean underwear for the trip.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “First, I’m going to take you to a hospital so a doctor can make sure your fingers and toes are OK, and then I’ll take you someplace where you can spend the night.”

  His eyes widened behind the plastic glasses. “Am I going to jail?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “Why can’t we just stay here? I thought you were Ma’s new boyfriend.”

  I was no longer sure what I was, but I was fairly certain it wasn’t Jamie Sewall’s boyfriend. Before I could formulate an answer suitable for a twelve-year-old, my phone vibrated in its belt holster. It was Doc Larrabee calling for a third time. I let it go to voice mail. Once again, he chose not to leave a message.

  36

  I waited until we were on the road to give Lucas his notebook. He snatched it out of my hand without so much as a thank-you.

  “Did you read it?”

  I decided to tell a fib. “Why would I?”

  “You better not have.”

  The plow hadn’t passed along this stretch of winding country road in hours. As I crested hills and rounded curves, heading toward Route 277, I felt the tires slide on the new coating of snow. I had a vision of my pickup bouncing like a pinball from one snowbank to another if I didn’t watch my speed.