Bad Little Falls

by Paul Doiron

  I heard voices in the dark. People were shouting.

  Suddenly we began to move. Someone was tugging on the rope. I had no idea who it was, but I saw lights and heard engines.

  “Hang on, dude!” someone said.

  I felt my body being reeled in like a fish. Without having to exert myself at all, Lucas and I were suddenly lying on the snow-dusted ice, shivering violently and gasping for air.

  “Are you guys OK?”

  Above us loomed several people in snowmobile suits. The one who’d spoken to me had taken his helmet off. He was a hulking kid with a flattop haircut and a wide oval face.

  “I know you,” I sputtered.

  “You came to my school,” said Barney Beal.

  39

  My heart felt like a lump of ice in my chest. I couldn’t feel my feet.

  The boys helped us into the truck, where I could run the heater and call for an ambulance. I found a wool blanket to wrap Lucas in, and another one for myself. I left the blue lights spinning so the responding units would have an easier time finding our location out on the lake.

  The boys giggled at my chattering teeth, proving they were as stoned and drunk as I had suspected when I first saw them speeding in front of Doc Larrabee’s house. Later, I would need to talk to them about the inadvisability of snowmobiling under the influence. But not now.

  Barney Beal brought me my gun belt without my asking for it. The snaps were all open on the leather holsters, so I knew he’d been looking at the secret things inside, the spare magazines and handcuffs.

  “That fucker is heavy,” he said. “How much does it weigh?”

  “Forty pounds.” I was having a hard time getting the words past my spastic tongue. “Did you guys see anyone else … when you … rode up?”

  “Like who?”

  “Older guy … with a beard. Went into the water, too.”

  “Shit, he must have drowned.”

  I wasn’t so sure. My last sight of Kendrick was of him swimming confidently to the edge of the hole. Maybe he had been unable to climb out and had slipped beneath the surface while I was fighting for my life. Or maybe he had staggered away into the night. One way or another the Maine Warden Service would find him. At the moment I was having a hard time caring if it was alive or dead.

  After a few minutes, the teenagers grew bored listening to my castanet teeth and wandered off to sit on their snowmobiles and smoke cigarettes. I saw the orange tips floating in the darkness like fireflies surprised from their hibernation.

  Lucas closed his eyes and his head lolled. I felt his pulse beneath his chin. It was scarily slow. I pushed his wet hair back off his forehead and wrapped the blanket more tightly around him, and I put my arm around his shoulders, trying to share some of my own negligible body heat.

  What would happen to him now? It would depend on his mother’s court case. If she was convicted on the drug charge, then she’d be given a mandatory sentence of not less than two years. Despite Munro’s criminal history, a softhearted judge might feel obliged to award him custody. I thought of this weird, intelligent boy in my arms growing up with a violent felon for a father, and I wondered if he would be as lucky as I had been and would somehow escape his doom.

  Emergency vehicles rolled across the ice; their lights flashed red and blue.

  I squeezed his shoulders. “Lucas?”

  His eyes fluttered open. “Am I dead?”

  “No,” I said. “You’re not.”

  * * *

  The first officer I talked to was a state trooper. Like most of his brethren, he stood about seven feet tall and had a jaw carved from solid marble. Trooper Belanger listened attentively as I unspooled my story, staring from beneath the shadowed brim of his Smokey the Bear hat.

  “Someone needs to check in on Doc Larrabee.” I had the blanket wrapped around my shoulders, but it wasn’t doing much against the chill of the night.

  “You got it.”

  “I don’t know what happened to Kendrick. He might have gone under, but I think he got himself out of the hole. We’ll need a dog to track him if he went into the Heath. I’m not sure how far he can run if he’s as cold and wet as I am. But I believe he’s carrying at least one firearm, so whoever’s tracking him needs to treat him as dangerous. He already killed one man and kidnapped a child.”

  “Understood.”

  “We should get those dead dogs out of the water. It doesn’t seem right to leave them down there.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No, I can brief Rivard and the sheriff when they get here.”

  “Can I make a suggestion?”

  “Sure.”

  “Get your ass to the hospital. You’re shivering like a half-drowned rat.”

  For once, I took somebody else’s advice. I rode in the back of the ambulance with Lucas. The emergency medical technicians had him lie down atop the folding stretcher and covered him with blankets. He responded with just grunts and nods to the questions the female EMT asked him.

  “Do your fingers and toes hurt?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Can you wiggle them for me?”

  “No.”

  “No because you can’t, or no because you don’t want to?”

  “Wiggle your fingers, Lucas,” I said.

  He did as I asked. He had lost his glasses in the lake, so he was forced to squint constantly. I don’t think his unfocused gaze left me once during the entire trip. It was as if he feared I might vanish like a genie into a puff of smoke if he looked away.

  “Did Kendrick force you onto the sled?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “The man with the dogs.”

  Suddenly this boy whom I had never seen cry burst into sobs. “He said he would let me drive them.”

  I clutched his hand and held on tight.

  After he approached the truck, Kendrick must have seen my cell phone in the cup holder and decided to use it to call Doc. Then, when he realized he needed to lure me onto the ice, he had promised the boy a ride.

  I replayed the telephone conversation I’d had with Kendrick, searching for answers. There had to have been a connection between Randall Cates and the professor. If it wasn’t the dead girl, Trinity Raye, then what was it?

  At the hospital, I climbed stiffly out of the ambulance and asked the EMT if I could borrow her cell phone. My energy was beginning to sag as my adrenal glands decided they had done their work for the evening and needed a two-week vacation. The EMTs carried Lucas on the stretcher. He squinted ahead into the brightly lit ambulance bay, his features contorted in alarm, as if he expected to discover a vivisectionist’s laboratory behind the secured door.

  “Don’t be afraid, Lucas.”

  “Will you come with me?”

  “I’ll see you inside,” I promised him.

  His expression said he didn’t believe me. He was right not to.

  Those were the last words I would speak to Lucas Sewall, although I didn’t know it at the time.

  I dialed Sheriff Rhine’s mobile phone. I caught her on the road to Bog Pond.

  “I’m at Down East Community Hospital,” I said. “I didn’t want to leave the poor kid alone. I also thought it would be a good idea for a doctor to sign off on my fitness for duty after going into the water like that.”

  “That’s uncharacteristically prudent of you.”

  “I don’t want anyone complaining that I refused to follow protocol. My personnel file is thick enough already.” My whole body felt like it had been pummeled by a sadistic Swedish masseuse. “I think you should send one of your deputies to the Spragues’ house.”

  “What for?”

  “If Kendrick is alive, I’m guessing he might be heading to Ben and Doris for help. Their house isn’t far from the lake, and I’m wondering if, somehow, they might be the key to this whole thing. Can you think of any link between the Sprague family and Randall Cates?”

  Her voice couldn’t cover her skepticism. “Like being drug customers of
his? They’re both Jehovah’s Witnesses, for crying out loud. Ben and his son, Joey, knocked on my door once with a pamphlet.”

  I remembered that bedroom in the Spragues’ house where we had ministered to Prester—there had been a vacant feel to it, as if its teenaged occupant had long since died or moved away—and then something Doc said earlier came back to me. “You can’t let them convict the wrong man,” his dead wife’s ghost had told him, “no matter what those men did to those young people.”

  Those young people.

  For a moment, I felt like the fog was lifting and I was beginning to see things clearly for the first time. Kendrick had told me that they were the last ones who would say anything against him. They must have a reason to keep quiet, I realized.

  “Where is the Spragues’ son now?”

  “Massachusetts. At some sort of long-term care unit, I think. He’s still in a coma, the last I heard.”

  “Was it a drug overdose?”

  “Gunshot wound to the head. He tried to kill himself last summer.”

  Just like that, the fog closed in again. “What? Why?”

  “He was an unhappy teenager. I don’t know the particulars.”

  “You need to find out,” I said. “I’m betting that there’s a connection between him and Cates. Or a connection between him and Kendrick.”

  The sheriff fell silent.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Rhine said, “Joey Sprague was a freshman at the University of Maine at Machias.”

  My adrenal glands woke up. “Was he one of Kendrick’s students?”

  “I’ll find out.”

  “See if he was a friend of Trinity Raye’s, too.”

  “Can I put you on hold?” said the sheriff. “I’m thinking it might be a good idea for me to send one of my deputies to the Sprague house.”

  * * *

  Ben and Doris Sprague’s little chalet was dark and the curtains were drawn when Chief Deputy Corbett arrived outside their door. The fire road had been recently plowed, and Ben’s truck was gone. Corbett phoned in, asking what to do. He wanted to head over to Bog Pond, where all the excitement was.

  Sheriff Rhine told him to suck it up and wait.

  The chief deputy was still waiting two hours later when Warden Cody Devoe and Tomahawk followed the scent trail from the hole in the ice, along the edge of the Heath, straight to the Spragues’ doorstep.

  By then, it was already too late to alert the Canada Border Services Agency and request that its agents detain a blue GMC with a Fisher snowplow should it attempt to cross from Calais, Maine, into St. Stephen, New Brunswick. Later, the Canadian guards would verify that such a vehicle, carrying a middle-aged man and woman and another man, had been waved through without a search. Like most Washington County residents, the Spragues traveled frequently across the border to go grocery shopping or catch a movie, and they were well known to the Canadian guards on duty. No one suspected that the friendly little couple’s companion was a fugitive from justice.

  But the next day, after the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents picked them up, the Spragues claimed they didn’t even know Kendrick was a fugitive.

  “Kevin didn’t tell us he was on the run,” Doris Sprague told the men at the Houlton checkpoint, nearly one hundred miles from Calais. “He showed up at our house, saying he needed a ride over to New Brunswick.”

  “Why?” asked one of the agents.

  “He said a Canadian friend of his had been badly injured in an accident,” said Ben.

  “Why not drive himself, then?”

  “His truck had a blown head gasket.”

  “So then what happened?”

  “We drove him across the bridge into St. Stephen,” said Ben. “He told us to drop him outside Charlotte County Hospital.”

  “And that was the last time you saw him?”

  “Yes.”

  “So why did you wait six hours before returning across the border?”

  “We decided to take a moonlight drive.”

  When asked by the ICE agents and the Maine State Police detectives why they would perform such a charitable service for a man they barely knew, the Spragues admitted that Professor Kendrick wasn’t a total stranger. He had been their son Joey’s favorite teacher at the university, but they continued to profess their ignorance of any crimes he might have committed. While it was true that their son had known Trinity Raye, his suicide attempt had nothing to with drugs, they insisted. Joey suffered from depression but he would never have taken heroin. Neither of the Spragues had ever seen Randall Cates or Prester Sewall before the night of the blizzard. They had no prior relationships with the dead men, in other words, although they would not mourn their passing. They didn’t know why God, in His wisdom, had chosen to deliver those evildoers to their doorstep in that blizzard, but they swore they had nothing to do with what had happened to Randall Cates out in the Heath.

  Prester Sewall had obviously murdered his friend, and then he had killed himself. The facts spoke for themselves.

  40

  “That’s horseshit,” I told Sergeant Rivard.

  We were standing on the south bank of the Machias River in Machiasport the following afternoon. A housewife had glanced out her frosted window, and a beam of weak midwinter sunlight had touched something red in the tidal flats below. It was a bloody, bandaged foot sticking up out of the tacky mud.

  Rivard called for the airboat team to extract the body of Prester Sewall from the stinking mire where it had become wedged. Now the two of us, along with about fifty other onlookers—some fellow officers and SAR volunteers, the rest just garden-variety voyeurs—were watching Warden Mack McQuarrie lean over the side of the boat and tug with all his might at the dead man’s leg.

  Prester didn’t want to come out.

  Rivard tucked a fresh wad of Red Man chewing tobacco in his cheek. “What’s horseshit?” he asked.

  “The Spragues’ story.”

  Sheriff Rhine had been phoning me with recaps all day. She must have figured it was the least she could do, given that my crackpot theories about Randall Cates’s death hadn’t proven so cracked after all. She’d given me a detailed account of the state police interrogation of the Spragues in Houlton, and she’d listened patiently as I vented my frustration at the roadblock investigators faced, at least until the Mounties hunted down Kevin Kendrick on their side of the border, if they ever managed to hunt him down. She’d even offered to buy me breakfast at McDonald’s some morning.

  “Ben and Doris Sprague are lying,” I told Rivard. “They knew damn well that Kendrick was on the run last night, and they knew why. They should be charged with aiding and abetting.”

  “How’s the AG going to prove that, exactly?”

  It was the same question Rhine had asked me, and I still had no good answer.

  “Their son, Joey, was friends with Trinity Raye,” I said. “Both kids had been good students at UMaine Machias, but their grades had gotten worse and worse. That screams drug abuse. Then the Raye girl dies, and a few months later, Joey Sprague tries to commit suicide. What does that suggest to you?”

  I answered my own question before he could. “It suggests guilt,” I said. “Maybe Joey bought the heroin from Cates and gave it to Trinity. For all we know, Randall and Prester might have done their deals in the Heath all the time. They might have driven past the Spragues’ house regularly on the Bog Road. Maybe that’s how Joey became one of their customers.”

  Rivard was wearing his sunglasses, as always, so I couldn’t see his eyes, but he seemed focused on Mack McQuarrie and the activity around the airboat.

  I continued thinking out loud. “I still think it was dumb luck that they got stranded there in the storm. And I don’t think the Spragues recognized Prester when he showed up on their doorstep. His driver’s license says his name is John, and his face was disfigured. That was why they called Doc for help. It was only later, when they came upon Randall in the Heath, that they realized he was the man resp
onsible for one girl’s death and for their own son’s turning himself into a vegetable. You’re a father, Marc. What would you have done in that situation? You could kill the bastard—and no one would ever know.”

  I wasn’t sure if my sergeant had been listening until he turned his head. “What are you suggesting?”

  “I think Ben Sprague was the one who really killed Randall Cates. He had the means, motive, and opportunity. Or maybe he and Kendrick did it together. I could see Kendrick goading him into doing it. He can be quite persuasive. If the two men were mutually involved, that would explain what happened back at the house.”

  “What happened back at the house?”

  “After Kendrick and Ben came back, they wanted to kill Prester, too. Or at least Kendrick did. He tried to persuade Doc that it would be for the greater good if he put a pillow over Prester’s face. But Doc wouldn’t do it. He’s a veterinarian, but he sees himself as a medical man, the Hippocratic oath and all that. It was only the fact that the EMTs showed up that stopped things from getting violent.”

  Rivard spat a stream of tobacco juice on the crusted snow. “That’s quite a story.”

  “It’s the only interpretation of events that makes sense.”

  “Good luck convincing the attorney general.”

  With Kendrick on the lam in Canada, suspicion had naturally fallen on the fugitive dogsled racer. He was the one who had told Doc to let Prester die. He was the one who had threatened me via e-mail and killed Doc’s dog as a warning to keep his mouth shut. He was the one who kidnapped Lucas Sewall and nearly sent us all to the bottom of Bog Pond. Just as the investigators had focused on Prester, to the exclusion of other suspects earlier, now they had shifted their attention to Kendrick.

  “The state police need to keep leaning on the Spragues,” I said. “If they do, the truth will come out.”