The Precipice

by Paul Doiron

  “That’s Benton’s van,” Pearlene said. “He drives hikers around for extra cash.”

  “And you said he didn’t come in for work this morning?”

  “Son of a bitch closed early last night, too. I had to hear it from customers who came looking for beer. Now he won’t answer his phone. Next time he shows his face, I’m going to tell him he’s fired.”

  It can’t be a coincidence, I thought. Benton ran a shuttle service for hikers who needed someone to transport their vehicles to Abol Bridge. Hikers like Chad McDonough. Had he also driven Samantha and Missy to the trailhead the morning they set off into the Hundred Mile Wilderness? Was he the one who had taken their final picture?

  The phone.

  Toby Dow said that he’d found Missy’s Samsung Galaxy in the Dumpster. The boy seemed too simple to fabricate a story like that. At every turning point in the drama, the mysterious clerk had been present, looming in the shadows, watching and listening.

  “Hey, can I pay for my breakfast?” a man in line said.

  I pushed myself against the checkout counter. “Tell me about Benton.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you know about him? Is that his first name or his last name?”

  Her mouth trembled. “His name is Benton Avery. He’s only been working here since June. Came from New Hampshire, he said, but that accent of his sure sounds chicken-fried to me. Told me he moved up here to the middle of nowhere because he likes to hike on the AT. He’s a strange guy. I still couldn’t tell you if he’s a genius or a moron.”

  A rootless man who lied about where he was from, whose entire being seemed to be a disguise, who haunted the most godforsaken stretches of the Appalachian Trail. Benton Avery isn’t a moron, I thought with horror. Not at all.

  “Where can I find him? This is important, Pearlene, please.”

  “He’s got a place on Slate Street. It’s just outside of town, near the old mines. Just what is it you think Benton’s done?”

  It wasn’t what he’d done. It was what I feared Benton might do if I didn’t stop him first.

  37

  Pearlene said to take the Monson Pond Road north of town until I passed the active quarries of the Sheldon Slate Company and to keep driving into the woods toward the village of Willimantic. Slate Street would be on the left, she told me. Benton’s place was at the end.

  I picked up the phone and called Charley again.

  “Change of plans,” I said. “I need you to take a swing over the Monson slate mines.”

  “Did you get a tip?”

  “Do you remember the creepy clerk at the general store? Benton? I think he’s the missing link that ties everything together: Samantha and Missy, McDonut, Nissen, the Dows.”

  “You think Stacey is there?”

  “We’ll see. I’m driving out to his house now. It’s located at the end of a road called Slate Street—you’ll see it on your GPS. Look for my truck.”

  “Roger.”

  Despite what I’d told Charley, I was having trouble seeing a pattern in the dots. What was the connection between Nissen and Benton? As far as I knew, they weren’t friends; Nissen didn’t seem to have any. The store sold his honey and beeswax candles, but that hardly seemed like the basis for the two loners to begin a partnership murdering people together.

  I thought back to my brief conversation with Benton the previous night at the general store. He had closed up early, Pearlene had said, not long after we’d spoken together. Had I said something to panic him? What was that strange quote he’d spouted? “There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.”

  Maybe he thought he’d given himself away.

  What about Stacey, though? It seemed unlikely that Nissen could have persuaded her to accompany him to Benton’s house in the middle of the night. The alternative was that she hadn’t driven herself because she was incapacitated—or worse. I didn’t want to contemplate that possibility.

  As Pearlene had said, the road took me past Monson’s working slate mines. From my truck window, the pits didn’t look as deep as the limestone quarries that pockmarked the face of midcoast Maine. The stone here wasn’t powder gray the way it was back in Rockland, but shiny black, and it sloughed off the walls in flat sheets, some as large as tabletops, or broke into sharp chips like primitive arrowheads and hand axes when it fell to earth. The precipices of Gulf Hagas, miles to the north, were formed of these same minerals.

  Soon the mines were behind me, and I was back in the birch and maple forest. Tent caterpillars had hit the trees hard, spinning vast webs to protect themselves from hungry birds and to devour the leaves. The insect army had left behind acres of skeletonized branches to mark their relentless march through the woods. Where the sunlight hit them, the gray silk cones seemed to writhe with the undulations of the larval moths inside.

  On the GPS display, Slate Street seemed to be little more than an abbreviated fire road. I slowed as the turnoff appeared on the map, hoping that I would hear a plane and that it would be Charley winging his way to the rescue. Every other law-enforcement officer in the county was occupied, sweeping up members of the Dow family. Had I not been so desperate to find Stacey, I might have waited for backup, but I would never have forgiven myself if something happened to her while I dithered around.

  Ahead, I saw a green-and-silver sign with the logo of the Maine Forest Council. As I drew closer, I could read the words: MONSON STREAM PRESERVE. APPALACHIAN TRAIL 1.5 MILES. I began punching buttons on the DeLorme. I zoomed out on the digital map to get my bearings. Beyond the abandoned pit mines at the end of Slate Street, a dotted line indicated a northbound path. It was a shortcut from the village limits of Monson into the Hundred Mile Wilderness. If you were pursuing someone who had started on the AT at the Route 15 parking lot (as Samantha, Missy, and Chad had done), you might intercept them between Big Wilson Stream and Barren Mountain. At the very least you could count on catching them at Cloud Pond, provided they camped at the lean-to for the night.

  I passed a trailer with two ATVs in the yard and a cat sleeping on the warm hood of a Volvo station wagon. A burned-down house appeared next, its scorched fieldstone foundation all that was left of someone’s farm. Then the woods became as dark as a jungle, and I realized it was because the resident maples and oaks were being choked to death by invasive bittersweet. Green vines crawled up the trunks and constricted the branches. The metastasizing leaves pushed skyward, blocking the sun from reaching the lower limbs, until the parasitic plants finally caused the trees to wither and die. The bittersweet would die, too, eventually, but it couldn’t stop itself from killing its hosts.

  Stacey’s truck was parked beneath the tangled mass of vegetation, as invisible from the air as if it were covered by camouflage netting. In front of her Sierra was Nissen’s VW van. It, too, was concealed by the canopy. If they had come here together, it appeared they had chosen to approach Benton’s home in secret and on foot. Had Nissen been leading her into a trap? And was I about to step into it myself?

  I called Dispatch and told the man on the other end where I was and what I’d found.

  “You want to wait for me to send someone else out there?” he asked.

  “I need to go in now.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  I opened and closed the truck door as quietly as I could. Then I removed my service weapon from its holster.

  I moved in a crouch along the edge of the road, keeping as much in the green shadows as possible, until I was at the passenger window of Stacey’s truck. I peered through the dusted glass but saw nothing amiss inside. The usual half-empty iced-tea bottles and trail-bar wrappers were littered on the floor. I tried the handle, but the vehicle was locked.

  Three robins fluttered out onto the road. They had the distinctive bloodred breasts and black bodies of birds moving south out of the Canadian Maritimes in advance of winter. One of them let out a startled yeep, an
d they all took off into the brush. I listened for the sound of Charley’s plane engine but heard nothing but the breeze ruffling the bittersweet leaves.

  Nissen had stripped the interior of his van of all furniture and cabinets, leaving just a boot-stained carpet and a mattress stripped from a bunk bed. His white beekeeping hood and suit were bunched in the corner beside a blackened smoker and stacked hive frames. A large cardboard box in the back was printed with his company name: Breakneck Ridge Apiary.

  With my shoulders hunched, I ran forward until I caught sight of the trail for the AT cutoff. Judging from the undisturbed leaves on the ground and the absence of household garbage in the small lot, the path didn’t look like it got much use.

  I kept going through the tunnel of vine-strangled trees. There were dark shards of slate all over the road. I began placing my feet softly, heel to toe, the way I did when I stalked deer. Watch for motion, I told myself.

  The tangled bittersweet formed a web between two oaks. There were enough holes in the foliage for me to see the house beyond. At first glance, it looked abandoned. The clapboards were mildewed where they weren’t altogether rotten, and most of the windows were covered with plastic to keep the wind from finding the cracks.

  In the dooryard, I spotted the same blue Ford E-450 shuttle bus I had seen outside the Monson General Store. The bus’s automatic door stood open, and on the ground beside the front wheel was a heap: cardboard banker’s box, polyester duffel bag, European rucksack. Someone looked to be leaving in a hurry.

  I pressed my body against the snaking vines until I was half-submerged in the leaves. I began regulating my breathing, trying to bring down my racing heart rate. If I could just be patient, I might get an opportunity to draw a bead without having to charge out into the open.

  From my hiding place, I could see an old metal gate blocking the end of the road beyond the house and then an overgrown field that dropped below the horizon, as if into a pit. In the hazy distance the land rose again: a bank of bright-colored trees that climbed into rolling hills.

  A trickle of salt water rolled down my forehead and into my eye. If I could maneuver a ways to my left, it seemed that I might be able to make a dash for the van without being seen from the house.

  I was just starting to move again when I heard the howl.

  For a moment, I thought I was hallucinating. Then I heard it again. The bloodcurdling noise was more like a man impersonating a werewolf than an actual wild animal’s cry. As I listened, the howl transformed into a series of distinctly human laughs. The echoes continued even after the man shut up again.

  I straightened up and made a break toward the gate that blocked the road to the slate pits. Concrete Jersey barriers had been set on either side of the gate to prevent access onto the land by motorized vehicles. There was no room to slip between them, so I used my momentum to throw myself over the top and landed hard on my rib cage in the weeds.

  I hadn’t seen anyone in the field while I was sprinting. I hoped that no one had seen me.

  The plants in my face had been crushed beneath human feet. Wet blood clung to the blades.

  “Woof! Woof!” was followed by laughter. The barks were deliberately cartoonish. Someone seemed to be playing a sick game.

  I raised my head, trying to see above the frayed goldenrod. I crawled forward on my forearms and knees. Some of the weeds had sharp edges that cut the skin on my hands and cheeks.

  There was another long howl, followed by a different noise: rock against rock.

  “Fuck you!” I heard Stacey scream.

  I leaped to my feet. Up ahead a tall man stood atop a berm at the edge of a cliff. His back was to me, but I recognized his profile. In his left hand, raised above his head, he held a stone the size of an orange. In his right hand, hanging relaxed by his side, he held a Ruger .38 revolver.

  “Police!” I shouted. “Put down the gun, Benton!”

  He opened his hand, and the rock dropped to the ground. But not the pistol.

  “Drop the gun!”

  “Mike?” Stacey called, her voice reverberating up from somewhere below. “Mike, is that you?”

  Benton turned around. One of his eyes looked like a smashed plum.

  “Put the gun on the ground!” I said.

  I’d only seen him dressed in the blue uniform he’d been made to wear at the store. At home, he had changed into hiking boots, olive drab pants, and a plaid shirt, which was unbuttoned, revealing his gray-haired chest. His posture seemed different, too. His shoulders were no longer stooped. His body appeared lithe and powerful.

  I advanced on him, holding my pistol in a Weaver stance, left foot forward, gripping the gun with both hands. “Get on your knees!”

  He smiled, took a step backward, and disappeared, as if he’d stepped through a trapdoor.

  Stacey shouted my name again, and I rushed forward to the edge of the slate pit.

  Beyond the raised berm, the quarry tumbled down thirty feet, a sloping wall of black scree that plunged at the bottom into a dark pond covered, from shore to shore, with dead leaves.

  My mind struggled to take in the scene before me. Benton was riding the mini rock slide as if his boots were skis. He had his arms spread wide, the gun still gripped tightly in his hand, and was expertly dancing along the skidding stones, as agile as a mountain goat.

  He threw himself into the waist-deep water as I raised my pistol. Stacey had been on her feet, but now she lunged away from him, falling with a splash and kicking out with her legs, trying to swim. A man’s shirtless body floated facedown beside her in the pool. I recognized the burned-looking skin on the shoulders where the tattoo had been removed. There was a red hole, larger than a fist, in the middle of the spine, and bloody pulp where his toes had been. The waves Benton created when he hit the surface caused Nissen’s corpse to bob up and down like a boat at anchor.

  Before I could squeeze off a shot, Benton whipped halfway around and fired. I heard the bullet crack against the slate at my feet. Reflexively, I dropped down onto one knee. It was just enough time for Benton to fall on top of Stacey and spin her over like a man wrestling an alligator. He got his left arm around her throat and held the pistol to her temple. Her body was almost completely shielding him from me; her legs kicked and thrashed beneath the rippling mat of leaves.

  Both of them raised their faces to me. His was ecstatic. Hers was contorted in pain. Blood flowed from Stacey’s hairline down to her chin, and her shirt had been ripped open, the buttons pulled off, so that I could see her flesh-colored bra. She tried driving her elbow into his ribs, but Benton seemed not to notice the blows.

  “Shoot him!” Stacey screamed.

  Grinning, he pressed the barrel of the revolver painfully into the side of her wounded skull. She cried out in agony.

  “There’s no way out of this, Benton!” I said.

  “I know,” he replied.

  The nerves in my gun hand refused to obey the impulses traveling from my brain. I’d missed my chance to take a clean shot and now risked hitting Stacey, if Benton didn’t kill her first. Just thirty feet away—and yet it seemed like a mile.

  Stacey stared up at me. How to describe the emotions that passed across her face? Anger? Disappointment? Fear? Then her body seemed suddenly to go limp, as if she was deliberately trying to sink herself.

  Defeat, I thought.

  Benton let out another of his coyote yells, this one directed at me. He wanted me to live with this memory.

  “Don’t do it!” I shouted.

  Stacey lifted her face, as if she were warming herself one last time in the sun. Then I became aware of the buzzing noise in the air above me. Benton’s chin tilted up. A plane was flying low above the treetops, headed toward the slate mines.

  I saw Stacey slide farther down into the water. One of her shoulders began to flop. Was she trying to give me a shot at his throat? I sighted down the length of my pistol, aiming for the exposed half of Benton’s head. My arm began to jerk as I tried to aim past Sta
cey’s ear. Hunters call it “buck fever”: the jumpiness that ruins the kill shot.

  Then Charley’s plane banked hard around the open pit. For a split second, I thought the old pilot was making a kamikaze run into the quarry.

  Benton forced the revolver against Stacey’s head as he craned his neck to follow the diving plane.

  I had a chance now. Steady, I told myself.

  Before I could squeeze the trigger, Stacey twisted around. She brought her submerged right arm up from beneath the floating leaves. I saw something black clenched in her fist. It was a piece of slate she’d found at the bottom. She thrust the sharp point into Benton’s neck.

  Dark blood spurted from his throat. He cried out, let go of Stacey, and dropped his weapon. With a look of wide-eyed disbelief, he clamped his hands against the wound and fell backward into the water.

  Charley’s plane pulled up, but one of the pontoons tore the top off a spruce at the edge of the vast clearing. The impact caused the wings to shake back and forth, but somehow he maintained control, lifted the nose, and regained altitude.

  Stacey began wading toward the scree cliff beneath me. The water seemed to be holding her back, the way it does in a nightmare when you can’t move. I could see her clenched teeth between her open lips.

  “What are you waiting for?” she shouted up at me. “Shoot him!”

  A red stream issued from between Benton’s fingers. If Stacey had cut his carotid artery, he’d be dead in three minutes.

  I thrust my SIG back into its holster and leaped onto the sloping cliff. The slate slid out from beneath my boots. Knees bent, hands at my sides, I skied down the cascading black rocks.

  I landed feet first in the water just as Stacey made it to the edge. Little waves lapped at our knees. She held one palm up to her scalp to stanch the trickle of blood. I reached out for her, but she recoiled.

  “Shoot him! What’s wrong with you?”

  “He’s already dead, Stacey.”

  “No, he isn’t!”

  She glanced back at Benton’s spasming body. Her pants were plastered with yellow and green leaves. I wanted to hug her, but she kept her distance.