by Paul Doiron
“Not necessarily,” said my sergeant. “If you haven’t figured it out by now, Bowditch, some people are wicked good liars.”
There was a shout, and then the crowd groaned. Out on the airboat, Mack McQuarrie had managed to muscle Prester Sewall’s naked body loose. I saw him wrestle the pale, mud-streaked corpse on board. The bloodless color of the skin reminded me of the underbelly of a frog.
Instantly I found myself thinking of Lucas.
* * *
Some people are wicked good liars.
Rivard had been talking about the Spragues, but his remark seemed to be a broader statement about the untrustworthiness of human beings in general. I’d known from my first meeting with Lucas Sewall that he was prone to wild exaggerations. His own mother had called him a liar.
But even I hadn’t taken him for a killer.
The confession came in his notebook, which I discovered a few days later under the passenger seat of my truck as I was vacuuming it out. I had wanted to visit the boy in the hospital, but Rivard cautioned me against having any conversations with him until after the state police got a formal statement. It was enough to hear that he was going to make a full recovery.
I’d also heard from the sheriff that Jamie was out of jail. Mitch Munro had ponied up the bail money by selling his prize snowmobile. The karate champ was still denying he had been on the Heath during the blizzard, the sheriff told me, and so far, Jamie had refused to repeat the story she’d told me about how her ex-husband had waylaid Randall Cates. While it was almost certain that Jamie would be convicted of driving under the influence, the drug case against her was falling apart fast. The Adderall found in the van had indeed belonged to her sister, Tammi, as Jamie had stated all along. Even a mediocre defense lawyer could argue that the pills had fallen into her purse in the course of driving her invalid sister to physical therapy (or wherever). The marijuana Corbett had found in her brother’s room made it Prester’s property when Jamie produced a canceled check in the amount of one dollar for “rent.”
As for Jamie and her ex-husband’s rekindled relationship (if that was what it was), I realized it was none of my business. Word around town was that they were hitting the bars together again. She’d lost her job at McDonald’s. I couldn’t bring myself to drive past her house, lest I see Munro’s Tundra out front.
I did have a keen interest in knowing whether Mitch was indeed the man Randall and Prester had gone to meet in the Heath that snowy day, as seemed likely. But trying to factor Munro into a murderous equation that already included Kendrick and the Spragues was a leap even my own overly active imagination refused to make.
But it was an equation, of sorts, that revealed the truth about Trinity Raye. More like a code, actually. After I found Lucas’s notebook, I took it back inside my malodorous trailer and sat down at my kitchen table and began flipping through the pages.
I’d made myself a cup of instant coffee, but it tasted, like everything in the damned house, like skunk. Rivard had told me that Joe Brogan had fired Billy Cronk because he’d been gossiping too much about what his employer had done to my living quarters. Rivard thought I might be able to wangle a trade out of Cronk: testimony about how Brogan had released a live skunk into my trailer in exchange for my dropping the firearm charge against the gentle Viking.
It was a deal I would make, I decided.
Picking up Lucas’s notebook, I stopped on a jumbled series of letters that I had noticed before on the cover. I hadn’t given them any attention then, but after everything I had subsequently learned about Lucas’s big brain, I now found my curiosity engaged.
DORT OSNZ CNAP IOZZ
It took me a few minutes to realize that what looked like gibberish was actually a simple cipher of the kind that had fascinated me when I’d read the Hardy Boys books as a kid.
I turned on my computer with the familiar sense of anticipation that now greeted me every time the screen lit up. But there was no new message from George Magoon, and perhaps there would never be another one. I went looking for “secret codes” in the Google search menu.
I found the key quickly enough:
DORT OSNZ
CNAP IOZZ
Reading the first letter of the top word, followed by the first letter of the bottom word, followed by the second letter of the top word, followed by the second letter of the bottom word, and so on in a zigzag pattern, I ended with this:
DCON RAT POISON ZZZ
I put down my pen and stared at the words. Then I began reading carefully through the pages, looking for an actual confession. But Lucas had been coy throughout.
He didn’t know what I did to the pills, neither … and wasn’t he in for a wicked surprise when someone swallowed one of them Oxycottons?
What had he done to the OxyContin pills? Sprayed them with some chemical? What had he done with the rat poison? I thought back to my search for the boy in the Sewall house. Down in the cellar, I remembered a rusted oil tank with an open box of d-Con rat poison on the dirt floor beside it.
Trinity Raye had died from snorting heroin cut with baking powder and brodifacoum. People called it an overdose, but in truth the girl had also suffered an esophageal hemorrhage, causing her to bleed out. The active ingredient in d-Con is brodifacoum.
“What happens if a kid kills somebody?” Lucas had asked me.
The boy knew what he’d done. That was why he’d asked the sheriff if we were there to arrest him the night Rhine and I delivered Prester’s death notification. It was the reason he kept asking if I was taking him to jail. No wonder he was being chased in his nightmares by an avenging angel dressed like a white owl.
I grabbed the notebook and hurried out to my truck. What was I going to say to Lucas? What would I tell Jamie? I’d been so worried about seeing her lose custody. Now I found myself in possession of circumstantial evidence that linked her son to the accidental death of a young woman. But who would believe me if I turned it in? Everyone knew about Mike Bowditch and his wild imagination.
Lucas had contaminated Randall Cates’s stash of drugs to get even for the pain the dealer was inflicting on his mother. Maybe he hoped someone would get sick, so the blame would fall on Randall. With the boyfriend out of the picture, his mother and father might finally reunite, as had seemingly happened. Had he expected someone to die? I hoped to God he hadn’t.
If Lucas hadn’t tampered with the heroin, Trinity Raye might still be alive, and if so, Joey Sprague would not have pressed a handgun against his temple and flinched at the moment he pulled the trigger. Kendrick and Ben Sprague would never have had a reason to kill Randall Cates. Prester might not have committed suicide. The whole chain of fatal events, I realized, began with a brilliant, bitter boy who just wanted his daddy back.
You and Lucas have a lot in common.
The drive was a blur. One poor old geezer nearly went off the road when I zoomed past his puttering Buick.
My cell phone rang in my pocket. I dug it out and looked at the number.
“Charley,” I said. “I’m in the middle of something.”
“Hot pursuit?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“I was just calling to invite you up to the Ponderosa for Saturday dinner,” he said. “The Boss said it was past time I offered you a formal invitation.”
It had been too long since I’d eaten Ora Stevens’s fresh-baked bread or shared a hot cup of coffee with Charley while he told me one far-fetched but invariably true yarn after another. And maybe my wise old friend could advise me what to do about Lucas and his notebook. Should I turn it over to the state police with my unprovable suspicions, and if so, to what end? So that the boy would be shunted off into some facility for troubled children? More than ever, I realized, I wanted the benefit of Charley’s considerable wisdom.
The only hesitancy I felt in saying yes to his invitation came when I remembered those jade-green eyes, the most beautiful I’d ever seen.
Charley, as always, was three steps ahead of me. “Stacey will be joinin
g us.”
“What about her fiancé? Will he be there, too?”
I could hear the smile in my friend’s voice. “No, I believe Matt is working that night.”
“I’ll be there,” I said, cresting a hill. “But I’ve really got to go. I’ll explain why on Saturday.”
“You damn well better!”
I tucked the cell phone into my shirt pocket, feeling unreasonably hopeful. Stacey might have a fiancé, but who knew what was truly possible and impossible?
I braked when I came around the corner, and I braked even harder when I saw the FOR SALE sign in the yard outside Jamie’s house. My patrol truck slid on its brand-new wheels and tires across a sanded stretch of asphalt before it came to rest in front of the driveway.
In the past, Jamie had barely bothered to shovel out a space to park her van, but someone had plowed out a vast expanse of the dooryard to make way for whatever big truck had hauled away her furniture and other possessions. You could tell from the dark, curtainless windows that the Sewall family was long gone. Jamie had sworn to me she’d do anything to hold on to her troubled son, even if it meant spiriting him away in the dead of night. What reason did they have to stay in that haunted house anyway? Who wouldn’t want to escape from this snowbound wasteland?
I tried to remember the story Jamie had told me when we were lying in bed in the motel, the one about Prester John and his legendary African kingdom: “But someday I’m going to take off south, and I’m not going to stop until I find my own golden city in the sun.”
I wondered if she would find it.
Does anyone ever?
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Bad Little Falls is a real waterfall in the town of Machias. For the purposes of this story, however, I have taken liberties in describing it and certain other locations around eastern Washington County. There is no Sabao River, for instance; no game ranch in the fictional town of Narraguagus. The Down East Community Hospital occupies an actual hillside on the Bangor Road, but it employs no doctors named Chatterjee. Similarly, there is a McDonald’s Cafe on Route 1, but no Jamie Sewalls have ever worked there, as far as I know. Any resemblance between the characters in this book and any persons, living or dead, is entirely accidental.
It’s true that George Magoon was an actual poacher who lived from 1851 to 1929. To those who would read more about his exploits, I highly recommend Edward Ives’s excellent George Magoon and the Down East Game War: History, Folklore, and the Law. The murder of two Maine game wardens, Lyman O. Hill and Charles W. Niles, in 1886 remains unsolved and bears remembering. No law-enforcement organization in Maine has suffered more deaths in the line of duty than the Warden Service.
As always, I am grateful to those who assisted me in the researching of this book: Corporal John MacDonald of the Maine Warden Service, for answering my blunt questions about search and rescue procedures and other protocols; Donna Maritato, RN, of Penobscot Bay Medical Center, for teaching me about the medical treatment of frostbite and hypothermia; Ron Joseph, formerly of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, for sharing with me his unmatched knowledge of Maine’s flora and fauna; and Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Tillman, USMC (Ret.), for putting me behind the controls of a Cessna 172 Skyhawk. Any factual errors in the text are the result of my failure to absorb the information they so patiently aimed to provide. Ben Thomas, author of Code Breaker, showed me the cipher Lucas Sewall uses in his notebook.
I am grateful to my colleagues at Down East: The Magazine of Maine for the support they have given to the writing of these novels. I owe a debt to the readers of my early drafts for their expert editorial advice: Cindy Anderson and Monica Wood. Thank you to my agent, Ann Rittenberg, who is so smart about so many things, and to all the people at Minotaur, especially my wonderful editor, Charlie Spicer, publicist Hector DeJean, and publisher Andrew Martin.
My family continues to be a source of strength and solace in my life. Thank you, everyone. And to my wife, Kristen, this and everything for you.
ALSO BY PAUL DOIRON
Trespasser
The Poacher’s Son
About the Author
Bestselling author PAUL DOIRON is the editor in chief of Down East: The Magazine of Maine. A native of Maine, he attended Yale University and holds an MFA from Emerson College. His first book, The Poacher’s Son, is the winner of the Barry Award, the Strand Award for best first novel, and a finalist for the Edgar and Anthony Awards. Paul is a Registered Maine Guide and lives on a trout stream in coastal Maine with his wife, Kristen Lindquist. Please visit his Web site at www.pauldoiron.com.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
BAD LITTLE FALLS. Copyright © 2012 by Paul Doiron. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover photograph @ Erik Meylemans Photography
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Doiron, Paul.
Bad Little Falls : a novel / Paul Doiron.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-312-55848-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-01091-9 (e-book)
1. Game wardens—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 3. Wilderness areas—Maine—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3604.O37B33 2012
813'.6—dc23
2012007787
e-ISBN 9781250010918
First Edition: August 2012
