by Paul Doiron
I slid my hand into my briefcase and pinched the letter I’d received from Mariëtte Chamberlain (née Van Rooyen). Her linen stationery included her phone number. I tried not to veer off the road as I keyed it into my cell phone.
“Yes?” came a woman’s voice.
“Is this Mrs. Chamberlain?”
“I should think you’d know who it was since you’re the one who rang me up.” She had an accent I couldn’t place. Australian? Zealander? “With whom am I speaking, please?”
“Mike Bowditch. I’m an investigator with the Maine Warden Service. You sent me a note about your father’s case.”
“Are you driving?” She pronounced the last word drrroyving.
“Yes, I am.”
“Would you do me the courtesy of pulling over and calling when you are no longer a danger to other drivers.”
“Ma’am?”
She had hung up.
I pulled into the boat launch at Lake Saint George. Ice extended in a silver ring from the shore, but most of the lake was open water. Some tiny ducks, buffleheads, bobbed in the blue chop. They disappeared beneath the surface for minutes at a time before popping up like corks.
I removed the folder from my briefcase and opened it across my lap. In addition to the official report, the file 14D, and the medical examiner’s findings, I had printed dozens of other documents: transcribed interviews, maps showing search grids, river flow information, and hydraulic diagrams.
“Mrs. Chamberlain, I am no longer driving,” I said into the phone.
“Thank you for responding to my letter, Warden Investigator Bowditch.”
Definitely Australian, I decided.
“Mike is fine.”
“I’d like to keep our relationship professional. Your colleagues presented themselves as advocates, but we discovered that it was just an act, or, in the case of the lead investigator, utter rubbish.”
“To whom are you referring?” I asked, although I already knew.
“A shifty fellow by the name of Rivard.”
Marc Rivard and I were old frenemies. At one time, he had been my sergeant, then briefly my lieutenant. In both roles he had made my life miserable. His career arc had been a sharp rise, followed by an even sharper fall. After he’d botched a case involving the slaughter of some moose on the land of the richest woman in Maine, he’d been “encouraged” to leave the service. It hardly surprised me that Mariëtte Chamberlain had reached the same conclusion about the man that I had.
“I am afraid I don’t understand what you’d like me to do,” I said into the phone.
“Reopen the case!”
Definitely a New Zealand accent.
“Your father-in-law’s body was recovered. The medical examiner’s report noted water in the lungs which indicated he drowned. Excuse me for being blunt, but what is there left to investigate?”
“His head was bashed in!”
“According to the autopsy, the damage to his skull occurred post-mortem.”
“His body was in the water six days before he was found—how can the doctor be sure?”
I was no expert in forensic medicine, but I suspected she had a small point. Our longtime chief medical examiner had a history of blunders.
“Are you suggesting he was bludgeoned and then tossed into the river? I’m looking at a sworn affidavit by an eyewitness who saw him alone in his boat.”
“This won’t do!” Mariëtte Chamberlain said. “I refuse to have this conversation over the telephone. I require your presence.”
“My presence?”
“What time can you meet me this afternoon? At two o’clock? Let’s say two o’clock. I will see you at my father-in-law’s farm in Stratford. The address is 2 Riverlands Road. I will expect you at two o’clock.”
Mariëtte Chamberlain demanding my attendance annoyed me enough that I considered blowing her off. But I knew myself well enough to admit that I wouldn’t. Curiosity would always trump my petty resentments, let alone my better judgment.
The tomcat who climbs to the top of a tree with no plan on returning safely to the ground—that would always be me.
* * *
An hour later, I got my first look at the Androscoggin River, the third longest in Maine. The “Andro” has its headwaters in the Boundary Mountains that separate northern New England from Canada. Its watershed marks the border between Maine and Quebec. The river then tumbles 1,245 feet—the steepest drop of any comparable watercourse in the state—and flows east across 164 miles before it enters the vast, brackish estuary of Merrymeeting Bay.
For centuries, the hydraulic muscle of the Androscoggin had powered dozens of mills, making paper and shoes, textiles and electricity. Communities had grown up along its banks and prospered, until the end of the twentieth century, when seemingly overnight, the world had gone topsy-turvy. The factories had been closed and the pulp machines had been sold and shipped to third-world nations in the Global South. Capital flows like a river to the lowest level.
Livermore Falls was one of the casualties of globalization. Like my destination of Pennacook, the town had once been a capital of the American papermaking industry. Now there was a park where a factory had once stood, complete with baseball diamonds and tennis courts, none of which were in use on this blustery morning. There was actual snow here, a foot of it. I saw a couple of heavily bundled people walking their dogs across a well-trodden field. Their heads were wreathed in clouds of steam and their hands clutched plastic bags full of shit.
I entertained a perverse thought of giving Shadow the freedom of the park. Which of his fellow canines would he eat first, I wondered: the black-and-white mutt or the young boxer?
Maybe he would maximize his calorie intake and go for the owners.
It was necessary to have a sense of humor around the half-wild animal. Otherwise his captivity afflicted me with too much sadness and guilt.
“How’re you doing back there, big guy?”
He answered with a grunt.
Professor Chamberlain had died on this same river, in this same month. Stratford was twenty or thirty miles downstream, above the man-made reservoir of Gulf Island Pond. I decided I needed a better look at the river that had killed him.
I followed Foundry Road to Mill Street, drove to the end, and parked above a dam that had outlived its reason for being. An off-white sheet of ice stretched across the pond above the impoundment, but only a suicidal fool would have ventured onto that eggshell surface.
Below the falls, there was a maw of open water. It was very dark, with a tea-brown tint from the conifer needles decomposing at its bottom. A mist rose from the plunge pool, and where the beige spray had splashed the concrete levee, it had frozen in translucent layers to form an almost-beautiful ice cliff. Downstream, the river bubbled in the fast-flowing channels before it disappeared again beneath a patchwork of ice.
I doubted a man could last five minutes in those lethal currents.
What a horrible way to go.
5
On the snowy bank of the river I pull the parka’s hood over my wet head and empty my pockets. To avoid losing anything I might need, I lay everything onto a blaze orange bandanna that I’d tucked inside a pocket during deer-hunting season and forgotten. Now that square of bright cotton feels like a godsend.
It turns out I am better outfitted than I’d first imagined.
Just barely.
I have the Beast, of course, and that’s already proven its worth twice.
“A man without a knife is a man without a life,” Charley Stevens always says. I don’t know if it’s some old proverb or a rhyme of his own creation. But the wisdom behind the saying reminds me to keep a tight grip.
Somehow I didn’t lose my pocket flashlight: a SureFire Tactical that fits in my palm. It has a maximum output of 1,500 lumens—roughly equivalent to a 100-watt incandescent light bulb—all of which I would need to get me out of this mess.
Also I have a pair of leather gloves with a layer of Thinsulate insulat
ion. Soaked as they are, I wonder if they might incline me to frostbite more than no gloves at all. But I put them on nonetheless.
My kit includes other items for which I see no immediate use: a dead cell phone. Two magazines of .357 SIG cartridges but no means of discharging them. A waterlogged notebook with blurred notes from my interviews. A Bic ballpoint pen. My wallet and badge. My leather belt. My bootlaces.
No matches. No lighter.
No hat or scarf to warm my throat.
My gun lies at the bottom of the Androscoggin, forever in its holster.
But when I push the button on my SureFire, a white beam shimmers from the end. The gaskets prove to be as watertight as promised. I shine it at the river and see only shimmering curtains of snow between me and the far shore. As a means of signaling for help, it is useless—at least from this location.
I try the phone again. The water has bricked the damned thing, as the tech geeks say. Or maybe the cold did it. Or the impact from the crash.
I check my watch, a vintage Seiko Marinemaster (fortunately still running) that is one of my stepfather’s hand-me-downs. Since his recent remarriage, Neil has increased the value of his gifts to me while decreasing the time he’s made himself available for phone calls and visits. The glow-in-the-dark indices tell me the time is 5:05, and I know that is correct because the watch is insanely accurate, despite my ill treatment of it.
Ten minutes before stage three hypothermia sets in: the kind that is irreversible outside a hospital. I am already shivering. It is my body’s reflexive attempt to generate additional heat. The time to worry is when the shivering stops. I need to make a plan and fast.
One trick to staying warm in the open is to make yourself small. So I kneel and sit down on my calves. I unzip my parka and tuck my gloved hands in my armpits and press my forearms against my chest, feeling the hard ballistic vest beneath the sweater. The order of business is to keep my core warm. My limbs will take care of themselves.
Where am I?
I have a rough sense, of course. A dim red light high in the air across the river has to be the cell tower at the summit of Pill Hill. I spent most of my afternoon at the trailer park there. It was because I stayed too long—“leave the hill before it gets dark,” people had warned me—that I am in this predicament.
Again I check my watch. My sense of time is distorted. It can’t have been more than fifteen minutes since I left the cluster of mobile homes. Driving out of that bad place, I kept my eyes on the rearview mirror. It never occurred to me that the real danger lay ahead.
If I’d come ashore on the western bank, I would’ve known what to do. Scramble up to the road and begin jogging to the glowing farmhouse at the bottom of the hill. Mariëtte Chamberlain might still be there, or her daughter at least. Hadn’t Bibi Chamberlain said she was the sole occupant of the professor’s old manse?
But there is no way across the Androscoggin, not here at least. The nearest bridge is at least two miles north through heavy cover, too far to run in my deteriorating condition. I might try crossing the ice downstream. It will likely be thicker in the calmer waters above Gulf Island Pond. But there are no guarantees I can find safe passage before hypothermia consumes me.
I have to find shelter here, wherever here might be.
Somewhere within the town boundary of Leeds, I think. The municipal line follows the main channel of the Androscoggin. I wish I knew the area better, but I’ve never had cause to work this district as a warden. I try to recall the map in my gazetteer. One thing I remember is seeing islands in the stream. Acres and half-acres of forest too insignificant to have names.
A fresh fear grips me. What if, instead of being on the Androscoggin’s eastern bank, I am on one of those islets, cut off from the mainland by ice all around?
With no shelter in sight and no means of making a fire, my only choice is to move.
I gather up my things, careful to put everything of potential use in the zipped pockets of my parka, even my dead phone.
Thank you, God, for eiderdown.
Thank you for Gore-Tex, W. L. Gore.
Thank you for the lambswool sweater, Leon Leonwood Bean.
As I turn to face the pitch-black woods, I wonder if Shadow is nearby. If I were him, I would have run as far from his cage-keeper as possible. At least he is alive, though. And his chances of staying that way—creature of the north that he is—are better than mine.
There is a small copse of balsams before me, perfect Christmas trees for anyone still in the market. Emma Cronk would have found one of them ideal to decorate my lonesome house. The boughs of these are clumped with fresh snow like cake frosting. I’d rather not try to bull my way through the bristling branches.
I turn back to the river, and that is when I see the vehicle atop the low cliff. Headlights shimmer into space, illuminating the dancing snowflakes. It has to be parked where I went off the road. I wasn’t carried as far downstream as I thought. Maybe the driver has seen my tracks going off the edge.
My first impulse is to hope the puny beam of my SureFire is strong enough to be spotted from a distance of a hundred yards.
But then the memory of the spiked objects in the road returns. I quickly turn off the light.
I remain still.
I can’t hear much above the sound of the river. The creaking of ice floes and murmuring current. A breath of wind.
My chattering teeth.
Seconds pass and a handheld spotlight snaps on. A figure stands at the edge of the cliff and shines the beam down at the river. Whoever he is, he doesn’t call out. He just uses the searchlight to scan the ice, starting with the place where my Jeep crashed through and continuing methodically downstream.
The light touches the eastern bank fifty feet north of me. Slowly it moves my way. If I step forward and wave for help, he will surely see me.
Instead I step backward into the firs.
The head-high trees aren’t as densely packed as I’d thought. As the spotlight touches them, the needles turn from black to dark green to emerald. I clench every muscle in my body to stop from shivering. It takes a terrific effort to force my jaws shut to keep my teeth from chattering.
Step into the light, you idiot. Paranoia is a sign of hypothermia. Do you want to freeze to death out here?
No, Mike. Don’t do it, Mike.
The light continues down the bank, and my entire body begins convulsing again.
A minute later the spotlight winks off, but the high beams from the vehicle continue to shine off the cliff into a space alive with snowflakes. I think I glimpse the driver’s silhouette. Then he disappears into the shadows of the road, leaving his engine idling.
What is he doing?
The realization hits me like a punch. He’s collecting the metal spikes he’d scattered across the asphalt. He’s removing the evidence.
I shiver harder, but this time it isn’t just from the cold.
6
Dr. Elizabeth Holman, I noticed, had gotten a new tattoo. As she leaned over the sedated wolf, his massive body slung along the steel table, his red tongue lolling from his mouth, I spotted an indefinite mark at the base of her neck. I peered closer and saw that it was a tasteful dove with a tasteful olive branch in its tasteful beak.
It was the first truly Christian tattoo I could remember seeing. I had come across many crosses, of course, often flaming or aglow with what looked like radiation, and biblical quotes, sometimes just chapter and verse numbers, other times full quotations, but none of those tats had impressed me as genuine expressions of faith. One reason: most of the religious tattoos I’d seen belonged to people I had arrested for violent crimes.
Lizzie Holman had always given me the impression that she was a true believer. She radiated a serenity that calmed even the most neurotic animals under her care. As someone who had always struggled with the Catholic religion in which I was raised, I envied her faith. I might have resented it a little, too.
I had no tattoos, nor did I have need of artific
ial mementos; my body was adorned with scars. There was the permanent starburst of capillaries on my torso where a .45 ACP round had flattened itself against my bulletproof vest. There was the red line on my arm from when I’d fended off a crazed woman with a butcher knife. There was the white stitching along my hairline where a biker had broken a beer bottle over my head. These half-healed wounds told the story of my life more than a tapestry of inked images ever could.
“His heartbeat is fantastic, Mike,” Lizzie said, moving her stethoscope around Shadow’s furred chest. She was a competitive runner, with those narrow shoulders and twiggy limbs that some marathoners get. “His breathing, too. I’d never know he’d suffered a pierced lung.”
The wolf, during his brief sojourn in the wild, had been shot by a crossbow. The bolt had nearly killed him. Lizzie Holman had saved his life. And he had been with me ever since.
“That’s good to hear.”
“What about the damage to his ligaments? Do you ever see him limping or having trouble jumping up?”
“Sometimes his foreleg gives him problems. That’s never going to get better, will it?”
“Not until someone invents a program of physical therapy for wolves.”
Lizzie’s eyes were sunken, but bright and clear with good health and the serenity I mentioned. “I understand you brought a stool sample. We also need to draw blood and extract some urine. The usual tests. And I assume you want the full complement of shots. Unfortunately, most of them require a second dose be given in a couple weeks. How did he handle the trip today?”
“Those meds you gave me helped. He complained a lot in wolf-speak. I’m pretty sure he used foul language. I’m trying to get him reacquainted with the kennel.”
“You mentioned that you’ve been entering his pen more?”
“I have this idea he’ll be able to come inside my house eventually. I’m probably kidding myself. I doubt he’ll ever trust me enough. And I can’t say I wouldn’t have misgivings. I’ve watched him tear apart a road-killed deer in five minutes.”