The Precipice: A Novel

by Paul Doiron

  “The families are already in anguish without being insulted, too,” he said.

  “I’m sure Ms. Stevens didn’t mean to offend anyone,” DeFord said.

  “Then she needs to apologize.” Mott seemed to expand in size as he drew in his breath. “And then she needs to leave.”

  Pinkham raised his arm to block my way. “Go back inside, Bowditch.”

  As the person who had brought Stacey to Greenville, I felt responsible for her, but I needed to know what was happening before I intervened. Not that she ever seemed to need rescuing.

  “Stacey’s with me,” I said.

  Pinkham’s high forehead shone with perspiration. “Then you need to get her out of here.”

  “I am not going to apologize, because there’s nothing wrong with what I asked,” Stacey told DeFord.

  The lieutenant hissed something at her.

  Stacey turned to the families, her arms open, her tone pleading. She had a red mark on her cheek, probably from where the reverend had slapped her. “There’s nothing wrong with your daughters. They’re not sinners. They’re not going to hell.”

  Suddenly, I knew the question she’d asked the parents—and why the reverend was so incensed.

  Beside me, Troy Dow muttered, “This is awesome.”

  I wanted to slug him, but DeFord caught my eye.

  “Stacey?” I said. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  She hadn’t noticed me until that second, but I was the only person present to whom she could turn for support. Her only ally. Her mouth tightened, and she began opening and closing her hands, working the blood into her fingers.

  “I’m sorry,” she told the Boggses and the Montgomerys. “I hope you find your daughters. I will be praying for you.”

  She put her head down and started off across the lot.

  “That isn’t good enough!” Samantha Boggs’s father called.

  I hurried to catch up with her. I hadn’t realized that one of the television camera crews had been photographing the confrontation from a discreet distance. A man dressed in a polo shirt and khakis was trying to press a microphone on Stacey, but she practically elbowed him aside.

  “Get away from me!”

  I followed her through the open gate. She stopped abruptly before she reached my truck, as if she’d reached the end of a leash.

  “I don’t believe this shit,” she said.

  “What did you say to them, Stacey?”

  “I asked them if anyone had reason to hurt their daughters,” she said. “They said no. So I asked if there was somebody who might have hated them for being gay.”

  “Did Mott actually slap you?”

  She touched her rosy cheek. “Can you believe it? He acted like I was some mouthy kid. I would have slapped him back if I hadn’t been so shocked.”

  I glanced back at the lunch wagon and saw Mott and the families glaring in our direction. I knew DeFord expected me to return Stacey to her vehicle back in Monson. It would be better for everyone, herself included, if she didn’t stick around the search area tonight. “I think we should get moving.”

  She yanked the pickup door open and slammed it shut behind her.

  I circled around to the driver’s side and got in.

  “Missy’s mom knows, Mike. She knows that her daughter is gay. I could see it in her eyes when I asked about them. The woman is horrified. She thinks Missy is going to hell.” She began fighting with the seat belt. “Goddamn it!”

  I reached over and helped ease the strap across her torso. It snapped into place.

  “It’s so sad and so infuriating,” she said. “Samantha and Missy had to hide who they were from their own parents, and now they’re probably dead and will never get to tell them.”

  “I know.”

  I found myself thinking about Stacey’s friend Kendra. She had ink black hair, tattoo rose branches circling her biceps, and a ring in her nostril. To my knowledge, she was the only woman with whom Stacey had ever had a romantic relationship.

  “How did you know Samantha and Missy were gay?” I said at last.

  “I just knew.”

  “So you have some sort of gaydar?”

  Seconds after the words had come out of my mouth, I regretted them.

  “You can mock me if you want. I get a vibe from certain people. I can’t explain it, but it’s real.”

  “I’m not mocking you. It was the wrong word. I apologize. I’m just having trouble understanding how you saw that in one photograph. Especially when no one else picked up on it.”

  “Yeah, because male game wardens are so sensitive to the presence of lesbians in their midst.”

  “Now who’s the one doing the mocking?”

  She fell silent. We were climbing the road out of Greenville, passing the Indian Hill Trading Post. Then the forest closed in around the highway and became a blur again.

  Black lines squiggled across the gray asphalt before us. Some of the tire marks were the work of hot-rodders who used their vehicles as paintbrushes. Others had been left by inattentive drivers who had lost control of their cars or had veered into ditches to avoid animals. An automated yellow sign sensed our approach and began to flash its amber lights. ATTENTION: HIGH RATE OF MOOSE CRASHES NEXT 6 MILES.

  “I’m sorry, Mike,” Stacey said after a long silence. “I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at the whole fucked-up situation.” She gazed off through the dirty windshield at nothing in particular. “It’s just that I see so much of myself in them, you know?”

  I wasn’t sure if this was a confession. “You mean when you were with Kendra?”

  “Yeah. It took me a long time to find myself. I’m still not sure I have.”

  “Join the club.”

  “It wasn’t just the photo,” she said. “It was their trail names, too. A lot of the names people pick are based on private jokes. But the names they chose were just weird. Baby Ruth and Naomi Walks. Both biblical, both humorous. And then I remembered that some people believe Ruth and Naomi were actually lovers.”

  “I thought Naomi was Ruth’s mother-in-law.” My knowledge of the Old Testament was spotty at best.

  “Yeah, but some of the verses can be read in a way that suggests their love for each other went beyond that. I have no idea if it’s really true. I just remember some of my friends saying that there were passages in the Bible that condoned being a lesbian. My reaction was, why should it even matter?”

  “The Bible matters to billions of people.”

  She sighed and slid down in the seat. “My mouth has always gotten me in trouble.”

  “You’re not afraid of speaking your mind.”

  “Maybe I should be.”

  Because of the incident with the reverend, I realized we’d never gotten lunch. I didn’t like the thought of saying good-bye again, either. “Do you want to grab something to eat?”

  “Where?”

  “There’s that good Cajun place.”

  “You didn’t see the sign out front as we were driving by this morning? It said ‘Closed, Out of Food.’”

  “I guess all the thru-hikers cleaned them out.”

  “Fuck it, Mike. I don’t want to go home, especially now.”

  “DeFord will castrate me if I let you stick around. You don’t want that, do you?”

  “No, I don’t.” She reached over and rested her hand on my knee. “You can stop worrying about my orientation, by the way. That’s one thing I’ve figured out, at least.”

  “What do you mean?” I tried to sound convincingly confused.

  “I’ve seen the look on your face since we started talking about Samantha and Missy being gay.”

  “Who’s worrying?”

  “Men always worry. They just never admit it.”

  Busted, I thought.

  21

  We sped along through birch and spruce woods. Faded asters and goldenrod grew in the ditches beyond the guardrails. White puffs drifted from the late-blooming fireweed and were swept skyward on the breeze.

&n
bsp; Just as we were about to enter the dead zone between Greenville and Monson, Stacey got a phone call from her father. Charley was somewhere in the air. His weak cell signal was boosted by the mobile antenna the state police had towed into the Hundred Mile Wilderness.

  “Mike and I are driving south on Route 15,” Stacey told him. “Lieutenant DeFord kicked me off the search team.… No, I deserved it. What’s going on?” Her face went white. “Ravens? Where?”

  I eased my foot off the gas.

  “You’re breaking up,” she said. “Say that again. Dad?”

  I pulled the truck over to a sandy strip along the side of the road.

  “Did you lose him? Do you want me to turn around?”

  “We need to go back into the Hundred Mile Wilderness.” She closed her hand around the iPhone and pressed it to her heart. “He sees a flock of ravens circling a cliff on the east side of Chairback Mountain.”

  “Has he reported it to the lieutenant?”

  “DeFord’s sending search teams on the ground to those coordinates.”

  “It could be anything.” My palms began to sweat on the steering wheel. “A dead deer, a dead moose.”

  My reassurances sounded as hollow to my ears as I knew they did to hers.

  As I swung the Sierra around and accelerated back up the hill, I found myself trying to remember the folk name for a flock of ravens. I’d memorized all of those colorful collective nouns as a kid. A group of hawks in flight was called a kettle. A group of crows was a murder. The plural for ravens was on the tip of my tongue. The word finally came to me as we passed the flashing moose warning.

  An unkindness of ravens.

  I pressed the gas pedal to the sand-strewn carpet.

  * * *

  I had to brake as we came through Greenville to avoid hitting a lonely tourist wandering across the street between the Maine Indian Store and Northwoods Outfitters. But as soon as we’d cleared the downtown and rounded the sharp turn at the end of the airstrip, I kicked it into high gear again.

  My police radio chattered nonstop. For fear of alerting the media, no one wanted to give away what Charley had found or where the search was now being focused, so the conversations remained vague. But any experienced reporter listening to a scanner would have known something big was happening.

  The gatekeeper stood on her little porch at the checkpoint, watching the emergency vehicles speed past. Her wrinkled face was grim. I knew she kept a police scanner on a shelf in her office.

  Stacey tried raising her father again, but he was on the line with someone else, probably the Greenville command post. An unmarked Warden Service truck raced up behind me—Wesley Pinkham’s silver Sierra—and kept pace as we passed the turnoff to the Head of the Gulf parking lot.

  The radio squawked. “Ten-forty-seven,” a fuzzy voice said.

  Stacey let out a gasp. Charley must have taught his daughter the meaning behind the codes used by state of Maine emergency personnel. The right half of her face was lit by the setting sun; the other half remained in shadow. She was blinking as if she’d just been slapped by an invisible hand.

  10-47: Medical examiner needed.

  “That shouldn’t have gone out across the radio,” I said. “Now all those reporters are going to be rushing out here.”

  “As if this doesn’t suck already.”

  Pinkham flashed his high beams, and I let him pass. His spinning tires sent a piece of gravel flying into my grille. The metal ping caused me to wince. I felt embarrassed at myself for caring about something as unimportant as my truck’s paint job.

  I followed Pinkham’s dust cloud into the darkening Hundred Mile Wilderness. We passed a field of stumps where a logging skidder and a dump truck with the Wendigo logo were parked. I wondered if this clearing was the place Troy Dow had been working earlier in the day.

  The sign for Hudson’s Lodge loomed ahead, but we kept going, past the place where the Appalachian Trail emerged from the trees, past the wading ford across the Pleasant River, and around the base of Chairback Mountain. It was the same route Nissen and I had followed the previous afternoon, but I was stopped from retracing my steps by a state trooper standing in the middle of the road.

  I rolled down my window. “Where am I going?”

  “Pinkham wants everyone to park down here. You’ll have to walk along the tote road. Your guys are about half a klick.”

  Stacey leaned past me. “What did you find?”

  But the trooper had already stepped away from my window, giving his attention to the big-wheeled Toyota Tundra that had come up with his lights on behind me.

  I swung the Sierra around and parked it as far as I could off the road, hearing twigs clawing at the passenger door as I scraped the wall of evergreens.

  “You’re going to have to climb out on this side,” I told Stacey.

  As I swung my legs down onto the hard road, my eyes traveled upward. The mountain loomed between us and the setting sun. Across the river valley, the hillside was illuminated—splashed with gold, orange, red, and green—but here we were in the dark. Far above our heads, a tiny plane with shining wings circled. I watched for ravens but saw none.

  Stacey began hiking up the logging road without waiting for me. I hurried along in pursuit. My sore calf muscles had stiffened up again after an hour behind the wheel. The steep rock face above us was still holding on to the heat it had absorbed during the day, before the sun dipped behind the mountain. The air was warm, almost balmy, but it held an acrid odor, which I associated with autumn in the Maine woods: the smell of rotting vegetation.

  “Christ.” I stopped suddenly and gazed around at the trees.

  Ten paces above me, Stacey heard me and paused. “What?”

  “Nissen and I drove past this spot yesterday. The access trail to the Chairback Gap lean-to is at the end of this road.” I squinted ahead into the premature dusk and made out a white shape. “That’s Nissen’s van right there!”

  “What’s he doing here?” she asked.

  The simple answer was that he was one of the searchers. I knew that wasn’t what she meant.

  “Mike! Stacey!”

  Both of us glanced down the road. Caleb Maxwell came striding toward us. He had changed clothes since we’d seen him at Gulf Hagas and was wearing a fishing shirt with the sleeves rolled to his biceps, board shorts, and his signature red Crocs. His hair looked wet, as if he’d just gone swimming or taken a shower. On his back he carried a military-surplus rucksack with a Red Cross badge—a souvenir from his days with Moosehead Search and Rescue.

  “I heard the ten-forty-seven at the lodge,” he said. “What have they found?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Stacey replied. “We just got here.”

  I heard a heavy rattling noise and saw headlights come around the bend. It was a Department of Transportation utility truck pulling a trailer equipped with the powerful lights that road crews use for night work. Caleb coughed from the sandstorm it raised.

  Nissen stood apart from the other members of his team. They all wore reflective vests, but he was dressed as he had been the day before: in safari shorts, a University of West Virginia baseball jersey, and overlarge hiking boots. We made eye contact, but there was no glimmer of recognition; I might as well have been a total stranger. He took a drink from his canteen, filled his cheeks until they bulged, then spit the liquid onto the fallen leaves.

  I spotted Pinkham rummaging around the backseat of his truck. The warden investigator was still dressed like a bank manager on casual Fridays, but he’d exchanged his loafers for a pair of rubber Xtratuf boots. He removed a roll of yellow barricade tape from his backseat. So this was a death scene, just as I’d feared.

  He raised his balding head and squinted in my direction. “Bowditch? Good. You can help me with this.”

  He handed me the roll of tape. The first protocol at a crime scene is always to secure and isolate it.

  “Is it them?” I asked. “Is it Samantha and Missy?”

  “I nee
d you to chase everyone out of the road,” he said. “Push them back to the edge of the clearing. We’re going to need prints from everybody here. Tire prints, too, from all the vehicles. This clearing is already pretty well contaminated, but who knows?”

  The warden investigator wanted boot prints from every person who had tramped in the soft ground. That way he could focus on unidentified tracks.

  “What about me?” Stacey asked.

  Pinkham pushed his eyeglasses back up on the bridge of his nose. “You’re still around, Stevens? Maybe it’s just as well. How much do you know about coyotes?”

  “I did my master’s thesis on them,” she said. “I studied the impact of coyotes on deer populations.”

  Stacey was lying in order to get a closer look at the death scene, I realized. At the University of Colorado, she had done graduate work researching mountain lions but had never received her degree. She’d been asked to leave the program after coldcocking a tenured professor who’d put his hand on her ass. I felt that I should say something to Pinkham about the deception, but she silenced me with a look.

  “Do you have a flashlight?” Pinkham asked her.

  “I have a headlamp.”

  “Come with me then. Follow my trail.”

  She didn’t even glance back as she entered the dense poplars and willows. I saw her headlamp flick on, bob a few times, and then disappear into the puckerbrush. I had to fight the impulse to charge after them, I was so desperate to see the scene myself. I stretched out a length of tape so I could read the printed words: POLICE LINE. DO NOT CROSS.

  How exactly did Pinkham suspect Samantha and Missy had died? Was it a homicide or something else?

  “Are they dead?” a voice said.

  Caleb Maxwell stood ten yards behind me. His arms hung limp at his sides. He was working his hands as if they’d fallen asleep and he needed to get the blood pumping again.

  “It looks like it,” I said.

  “Jesus. How?”

  I didn’t have an answer, so I didn’t give him one.

  “Listen, I need to string up this tape along the tree line. Can you tell Nissen and those other guys to back off to the edge of the clearing?”