The Precipice: A Novel

by Paul Doiron

  Tempest Dow wiped the soda from her thin lips. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Mike Bowditch, with the Maine Warden Service.”

  “That gun you got looks familiar.”

  “I took it off your son Trevor when I arrested him.”

  “Arrested on what charge?”

  “Assaulting an officer. You seem pretty relaxed here. You didn’t notice an explosion just now?”

  When she smiled, she showed how few teeth she had left. “My hearing ain’t as good as it used to be.”

  “One of the bombs on your property just killed a game warden investigator. That’s first-degree murder, Mrs. Dow.”

  “I ain’t never been married.”

  “You and your family are in a lot of trouble, and that’s before we start searching your buildings. God only knows what we’re going to find. You can help yourself by answering some questions for me.”

  Her manner was utterly relaxed, as if a man hadn’t just been blown to bits outside her fence and a building wasn’t going up in flames a hundred feet away.

  “I don’t know nothing about no bombs,” she said. “It ain’t my property, neither.”

  “Whose is it, then?”

  “Everything’s in my grandson’s name. Lawyer down in Dover-Foxcroft said I should transfer it over to him for tax purposes. Keep the government from taking it all when I croak. What will you give me if I answer your questions?”

  “I’ll put in a word for you with the attorney general,” I said.

  Tempest Dow knew enough about the criminal justice system to realize how much my word would be worth.

  “I’m looking for a young woman,” I said.

  “You must be hard up if you came here for a date.”

  I ignored her joke. “Thin, brown hair, driving a green IF&W truck. Have you seen her?”

  “Oh, yeah. I know the one you mean. The biologist in Monson. My boys told me about her, said she was a real bitch.”

  My hands tightened around the rifle, but I did my best to stay cool. “She hasn’t been here?”

  “No,” Tempest Dow said. “What else do you want to know?”

  “Where can we find your son Troy?”

  She took another pull from the Mountain Dew can, then let out a burp. “He’s down in Massachusetts on business.”

  “I just saw him. He took off on an ATV seconds after Warden Investigator Pinkham was killed.”

  “You must be confused about who you saw, Warden. Troy’s been gone since last night. Everyone here’ll swear to it.”

  I had just about reached my breaking point. “Where’s your grandson Toby?”

  For the first time, a flicker of worry showed in her expression. “What do you want with that retarded boy?”

  “Is he inside the house?” With the tip of the AR-15, I pointed at the door. “How about we go find him together.”

  She scratched the bottom of her chin with cracked fingernails. Then she tilted back her head. “Tara!”

  An obese woman opened the screen door and peered angrily out at me. She had the same pink skin as her mother; her hair was the color and texture of rusted steel wool. She wore a nightgown that revealed cleavage deep enough to hide a kitten.

  “What is it, Mumma?”

  “Go get your boy. The warden here wants to talk with him.”

  The breeze shifted and I could smell the smoke again. “You’ve got a building on fire, you know?”

  She turned her head but showed no real interest. “Really? Where?”

  “Near the fence. I hope there’s nothing precious inside.”

  She showed me the gaps between her teeth again.

  After a minute, the younger woman, Tara, threw open the screen door and shoved Toby Dow onto the porch. “You answer the warden’s questions, Toby!”

  The doughy young man stood there in his Monson T-shirt, which was a size too small, stretch jeans rolled up half a foot around the ankles, and Velcro sneakers. His thin hair fell into his upslanted eyes.

  “Here you are, baby!” Tempest Dow took his soft hand. “How’s my little man this morning?”

  He opened and closed his mouth soundlessly, like a fish.

  The old woman twitched her nose. “What do you got to ask my grandbaby?”

  “Toby,” I said. “Do you remember me?”

  He gazed at the gun in my hands with fear. “We met at the Monson General Store last week. I gave you a Snickers bar.”

  “Answer the man, Toby!” his mother commanded from behind the ripped screen.

  “You were sitting on your bucket,” I said. “Talking on a phone.”

  “What’s your question?” Tempest Dow demanded.

  “Toby, can you tell me where you got that phone? Did you find it somewhere? Did someone give it to you?”

  “It’s mine,” he said.

  “I know it’s yours. I just want to know where you got it.”

  “Phone?” Tempest Dow said. “What phone?”

  Suddenly, Toby’s face went apple red and tears started streaming down his cheeks. “I don’t want to go to jail, Gram.”

  “You ain’t going to jail, baby.” The old woman leaned forward suspiciously. “Why are you asking him about a telephone? What’s this all about? Why are you trying to trick this poor boy?”

  “I’m not trying to trick him. It’s just a simple question.”

  Tempest Dow started to massage her grandson’s arm with both of her hard little thumbs. “Tell the truth, baby. It’s OK.”

  “Who gave you the phone, Toby?” I asked again.

  “No one!” He was blubbering so hard, the words melded together. “I found it!”

  “Where?”

  “In the big trash.”

  “You found it in the Dumpster, you mean?” I said. “At the general store?”

  He blinked but didn’t speak. But I could tell that was what had happened.

  How had Missy’s phone ended up at the Monson General Store? She had used it to take that photograph with Samantha at the trailhead sign. Unless she lost it later and someone found it on the AT. They might have tossed it into the Dumpster after the fact. But that still wouldn’t explain why Samantha’s Galaxy was also missing.

  “Is that all?” Tempest Dow said.

  A siren wailed and a car rumbled to a stop behind me. I turned to look and saw a state police cruiser. Both doors opened and a trooper—not Chamberlain, but a man who could’ve been his body double—got out from the driver’s side. Fitzpatrick emerged from the passenger door.

  “What the hell are you doing, Bowditch?” the state police detective asked, more confused than angry.

  “Did the boy answer your question or not?” the old woman barked at me.

  I had an answer all right. The problem was that I didn’t have a clue as to what it meant. Nor did I know how to explain myself to Sergeant Fitzpatrick.

  36

  The compound swarmed with state police troopers, deputies, and game wardens. Some of the officers were charged with rousting the Dows out of their holes for questioning. Others were searching the property for unexploded bombs and assorted booby traps. A team of firefighters had arrived from Greenville to extinguish the burning drug lab.

  I handed Trevor Dow’s AR-15 to a female state police detective who had spilled coffee on herself speeding up from Augusta. We sat in her car, and I gave her a preliminary statement, with the understanding that I would submit a written report in the next twenty-four hours. Afterward, I directed a trooper with a bomb-sniffing dog along the path I had blazed from the road to the field. In the process, we discovered the game camera that had given away my position to Trevor Dow. It was a well-camouflaged Bushnell unit with night-vision infrared and wireless capability to transmit pictures to a remote computer. Aside from the IED I had almost stumbled over earlier, we discovered no more explosives. When I was done, I went looking for DeFord.

  The lieutenant was watching the medical examiner take notes with a digital recorder over the remains of Wes Pin
kham. An evidence technician in a blue uniform waited nearby to begin his work. There was nothing left of the device to fingerprint or swab for DNA. There was barely anything left of Pinkham.

  DeFord looked even more haggard than he had during the search for Samantha and Missy. There were razor nicks on his jaw. He kept rubbing his hand back and forth through his honey-brown crew cut, the way one might stroke a nervous animal.

  “There are kids here,” he said absently.

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “How is it possible they never blew up one of their own children?”

  “Maybe they don’t let them outside the fence.”

  “Or maybe there’s a kid’s skeleton buried in the family graveyard.”

  A cache of weapons, a concealed locker filled with drugs, the bones of missing persons—God only knew what we were going to find hidden in this hellhole.

  “Where’s Fitzpatrick?” I asked him.

  “Interrogating Trevor Dow.”

  I would have thought the lieutenant would have insisted on participating in the questioning. Then I realized that DeFord wasn’t going anywhere until his friend was loaded into the ME’s van for transport to the Augusta morgue. Anything less would have felt like an offense to the memory of Wesley Pinkham.

  “Has anyone picked up Troy Dow yet?” I asked.

  “We’ve got an alert out for him, but he knows these woods too well. My guess is that it’s going to be one of the biggest manhunts since—”

  He stopped himself, but I knew how the sentence ended: It was going to be one of the biggest manhunts since my father, Jack Bowditch, took off into the Boundary Mountains after being accused of murder. And I knew how that sad story had turned out.

  “Charley Stevens is up there somewhere in his Cessna,” I said. “He’s looking for Stacey’s truck.”

  “She still hasn’t turned up?”

  “No, sir. Maybe Charley can help us track Troy Dow down from the air. Do you want me to call him?”

  “Do it.”

  “He’ll need someone on the ground if he sees anything. You have plenty of men up here now. I’d like permission to assist Charley in the search for Troy Dow.”

  DeFord studied my face. He understood that my desire to get on the road was tangled together with my concern for Stacey.

  “All right,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “And Bowditch?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let me know when you find her.”

  * * *

  The first responders had dragged aside the cedar log at the bottom of the drive, but no one had removed the rotting steer head from its spike. I paused a moment to stare into the empty eye sockets and had the stomach-churning sensation of falling headfirst into a pit. Maybe if we had taken the ghoulish warning more seriously, a good man would still be alive.

  I wanted to let out a howl of rage, but what was the point? I’d never believed in the idea that a person could die before his time—as if there was some sort of cosmic plan for a soul that could be foiled. You die when you die. Wes Pinkham was gone, and that was all that mattered.

  I dug my cell phone out of my raincoat pocket and tapped in Charley’s number.

  The connection was poor.

  “What’s going on down there?” he asked. “I heard the commotion on the radio.”

  “Wes Pinkham is dead. He tripped a wire on the Dows’ land, and a bomb blew him up. He lost both of his legs in the explosion. I’m sorry. I know he was your friend.”

  He fell silent.

  “Charley?”

  “Wes was a good man.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  His voice disappeared again. I listened to the sound of his engine coming through the speaker.

  “Charley?”

  “I was thinking about the day his first daughter was born. Wes and I were up on the Allagash, looking for a lost canoeist. That was before there were pocket phones. The colonel had to send another warden down the rapids with the good news. I never saw a happier man than Wes Pinkham that day.”

  Sometimes I forgot that my old friend was a combat veteran, that he had seen many friends die in the worst-possible ways imaginable. The experience had hardened him to death. He responded to horrible circumstances with a stoicism that might have seemed like coldness if you didn’t know how big his heart was.

  “Where are you now?” I asked.

  “Up over the Hundred Mile Wilderness, looking down on Hudson’s Lodge. I’m checking everywhere you and Stacey went in your travels. I was just about to buzz Gulf Hagas.”

  He didn’t have to tell me he hadn’t found her.

  “DeFord is hoping you can shoot down our way,” I said. “Troy Dow took off on a four-wheeler. He was headed north, toward Monson. He might have looped back to the Moxie Pond Trail.”

  “He’ll get into some dense country pretty quick if he goes that way. There’s plenty of places to hide himself around Shirley Bog.”

  “Why don’t you backtrack the Moxie Pond Loop on your way south? I’m going to ride back into Monson and ask questions. I’m guessing the Dows have secret deer camps all over the county.”

  “Good idea. A wounded partridge always goes into a hole.”

  I’d never heard the expression before. “Is that an old saying?”

  “Well, it’s my saying—and I’m old—so I guess you could call it that.”

  I wished I had Charley’s ability to maintain good humor in the face of bad news. With any luck, I would live long enough to develop that capacity. For the moment, it remained an open question.

  “Keep your eyes open for a VW van and a green IF&W truck,” I said.

  “Will do.”

  I was about to sign off, when a random question pushed itself into my head. “Whatever happened to the canoeist?”

  “Say again?”

  “The man you and Pinkham were looking for on the Allagash.”

  “Oh, he drowned,” Charley said. “We found his body wedged under a rock below Chase Rapids. It had been there awhile. The poor bastard looked like he prit’near drank the whole river.”

  * * *

  In small Maine towns, convenience stores are the principal hubs of gossip, even more so than post offices and churches. If you want to know anything about anybody, you start at the place that sells tobacco, caffeine, and alcohol.

  The Monson General Store was even busier than it had been when Pinkham and I had left. I had to look for a spot on the street because the parking lot was full. I could barely believe that a few short hours ago, the even-tempered warden investigator had been alive, cracking jokes with Pearlene. What a waste. What a stupid, meaningless waste. I caught sight of my reflection in the rearview mirror. My ragged emotional state revealed itself in my overbright eyes and stubbled jaw.

  Five people stood in line at the register while Pearlene, still wearing her hairnet and gloves, tried to fix the paper tape. I stepped out of the way of a rotund woman in a hurry. She slammed her bottle of diet soda on the counter.

  “Just a minute!” Pearlene said.

  “I can’t wait no more. I got an appointment at the beauty salon.”

  After the woman left, I heard Pearlene mutter, “It’s going to take more than one appointment.”

  Until she could get the line moving, I occupied myself by reading the bulletin board. Someone in Guilford had lost a twelve-year-old black Lab named (ugh) Jigaboo. The high school kids at Foxcroft Academy were performing Once Upon a Mattress in October. The tear-off flyer offering goats for sale was missing another tag. There was a conspicuous blank spot in the middle of the corkboard. I tried to recall what had been there previously, but I drew a blank.

  A man shuffled past with a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon tucked under his arm. It was the old guy from the Cajun restaurant. For the moment, he seemed to be sober. At least he didn’t reek of alcohol.

  “Roland,” I said.

  He blinked his crusted eyelashes at me and parted his cracked lips. “Yes?
”

  “You don’t remember me?”

  He made a motion to the holstered gun on my belt. “You’re a game warden.”

  “We met last night at Shoebottom’s. The Dows were trying to bully you into cutting down some of your trees.”

  There was no spark of recognition in his milky eyes. He sucked at his dentures, deep in thought. I had a sense that sobriety had ceased to be a natural condition for him. “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember.”

  “Roland, I could use your help,” I said. “Troy Dow has committed a crime and is on the run. It’s vital that I find him as soon as possible. I don’t suppose you’d know if he has any deer camps in the area?”

  He shook his head violently. “I wouldn’t know.”

  I could tell he was lying. “If I apprehend him, he’ll go to prison, and you’ll never have to worry about him again. His brother, Trevor, is already in custody.”

  A shiver ran through him. “It’s a big family.”

  “Warden!” Pearlene had finally spotted me.

  I stepped up to the counter. “Good morning again, Pearlene.”

  She frowned at me from behind the lottery-ticket display. “Good? This morning has gone from bad to worse. I’ve got an employee who didn’t show up for work. And now I hear you and Wesley Pinkham have gotten the Dows all riled up. Is it true there’s a SWAT team up there?”

  So word hadn’t yet reached the store about Pinkham’s death. I was relieved not to have to answer questions about that subject at least.

  “There are a lot of officers at the scene.”

  “Why aren’t you up there, then?”

  “I’m looking for Troy Dow. I was just asking Roland here if Troy might have some places he goes when—”

  “When what?”

  I turned back to the bulletin board. “What poster used to be in this blank spot?”

  “Christ, I don’t know. You think I keep track of every flyer someone tacks up in my store?”

  “It was for a shuttle service,” Roland said over my shoulder.

  “Do you mean like giving rides to hikers out to the Hundred Mile Wilderness trailhead?”

  “That and dropping cars off at Abol Bridge.”

  “There was a blue Ford shuttle van parked outside the store last night,” I said. “But it isn’t there this morning.”