Bad Little Falls

by Paul Doiron

  Lucas began rummaging around the console between the front seats. “Do you got a pen?”

  The inside of my truck cab was as dimly lit as a dive bar. “We can’t drive with the overhead light on.”

  “Why not?”

  “It makes it harder for me to see the road, and besides, it’s against the law.”

  “That’s a stupid law,” he said. “Do you got a pen anyway?”

  I removed the ballpoint I kept in my uniform pocket. “What are you going to do, write in the dark?”

  He produced a child-sized headlamp from his overstuffed backpack. He yanked it down over his stocking cap and switched on the beam. It needed new batteries, but the grayish illumination was enough for him to begin scribbling.

  His empty stomach made a liquid gurgling noise, like water being pulled down a drain.

  “If you’re hungry,” I said, “there’s a Ziploc bag with some beef jerky in that pack basket.”

  “Is it made out of bear meat?”

  “No.”

  “Moose meat?”

  “No, it’s just regular meat. I bought it at a gas station.”

  “I don’t like regular jerky.”

  “What do you think Rogers’s Rangers used to eat?”

  Lucas swung around toward me, and I was nearly blinded by his headlamp. “You did read my notebook!”

  I raised my elbow to shield my eyes. “Just the part about the Ranger Code.”

  “That’s how you found my fort. You followed the map that I drawed.” His voice was heavy with disappointment, as if using a map was cheating. A real ranger would rely on footprints alone.

  I had been feeling that I was gaining Lucas’s trust, but now I saw how fragile the bond between us was. Not that I could blame him for being suspicious, given the men he’d grown up around.

  I decided to make a fresh attempt at conversation. “My dad was a real-life army ranger, just like the men in Northwest Passage. He fought in the Vietnam War. That’s near China.”

  “I know where Vietnam is,” he said.

  The police radio crackled and popped. The dispatcher wanted to know my location. “Twenty-two fifty-eight,” I said into the mic, giving my call number. “I’m ten-twenty on the New County Road.”

  There was some additional chatter, and I heard Corbett identify himself. It sounded as if he was on the scene of a fender bender near Bog Pond. At least his whereabouts were accounted for.

  I waited for Dispatch to come back: “Twenty-two fifty-eight, disregard.”

  A false alarm, evidently. It happened from time to time.

  “Speaking of rangers,” I said, “here’s something you might find interesting. In Vietnam, the rangers called the jungle ‘Indian Country.’”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was the area controlled by the enemy.”

  “Were there Indians living there?’

  “No. It was a metaphor. Do you know what a metaphor is?”

  He crossed his scrawny arms over his chest and slumped as far away from me as he could into the shadows. “It’s a word that don’t mean what you think it means.”

  I decided not to quibble with his definition.

  Once I dropped Lucas with the social worker, there was a chance I might never see him again. If his mother was sentenced to prison and his father was denied custody, if the aunt vanished into some state custodial institution in Bangor or Augusta, this would be our last conversation, and I’d barely gotten to know him at all. It seemed one more sad thing dropped onto a mountainous pile of sad things.

  “Lucas, why did you steal my binoculars before?”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “You’re telling me that you accidentally stole them?”

  “I was just looking at them. I put them on my neck and I forgot to take them off. That’s what happened. If you don’t believe me, too bad.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. “And a judge wouldn’t believe you, either.”

  He sat up abruptly. “You said you weren’t taking me to jail!”

  The boy was certainly paranoid on that score. “I’m just trying to explain that you shouldn’t steal things. Right now, you’re just a kid, so you think the worst thing that will happen is you’ll have to apologize if you get caught. But if you steal something expensive, they send you to a detention facility until you turn eighteen.”

  After I’d finished, I realized how much I’d sounded like Sergeant Rivard when he was trying to put the fear of God into Barney Beal, and I regretted bringing up the subject. I wasn’t going to change Lucas Sewall’s destiny in one interaction.

  “What happens if a kid kills somebody?” he asked.

  I tried to lighten my tone. “Who exactly are you planning on knocking off?”

  My cell phone vibrated. I didn’t have to look at the screen to know it was Larrabee again.

  “It’s just a question,” said the boy.

  “Hold on a second, Lucas.” I brought the cell to my ear. “Hey, Doc.”

  “I’ve been trying to reach you all night.” His words were slip-sliding into one another in a way that suggested he’d been drinking.

  “I’ve been on duty.” I didn’t feel I owed him any further explanation. “What’s the emergency?”

  “I have a dead animal here!”

  “What animal?”

  “Duchess! My dog!”

  “What happened to her?”

  “It’s my fault; it’s my fault. I should have—when you asked me—you need to get over here immediately.”

  To do what, bury the dog in a snowdrift? The veterinarian wasn’t making any sense. “Explain to me what’s going on.”

  He sounded exasperated. “I can’t explain—not over the phone. I did something I shouldn’t have. I violated my oath. Do you understand?”

  I could feel Lucas watching me through those heavy glasses. “How much have you had to drink tonight?’

  “Not enough.” He made a wet throaty noise that might or might not have been laughter. “How far away are you? When can you be here?”

  A stop sign glowed red in my headlights. “I’m coming into Township Nineteen now.”

  “Good!”

  “But I’m not going to be able to get to your house for at least a couple of hours. I’m taking a little boy to the hospital in Calais.”

  “Is he all right?” he asked, slurring.

  “He’s fine.”

  “Then you can stop on the way. My house is right on the road to Calais.”

  “I can’t just take the boy with me to your house.”

  “My dog is dead! Don’t you understand what that means?”

  “Are you saying someone killed it?”

  He must have dropped the phone. I heard a jarring, breaking noise that sure sounded like a receiver striking hardwood and then the signal cut out. It didn’t stutter or fizzle; it just ended.

  “Doc? Doc?”

  After a long interval of not hearing a response, I tucked the cell in the cup holder.

  “Who was that?” Lucas asked.

  “A friend of mine.” It seemed easier to characterize our problematic relationship in these terms than explain what a pain in my ass the old veterinarian had become.

  “What got killed?”

  “His dog passed away.”

  “You said someone killed it.”

  Despite his affected lack of interest, the boy had been listening closely. “I don’t know what happened to the dog.”

  “You’re going to his house?”

  “After I drop you off.”

  “Can I go with you? I want to see the dead dog.”

  “No way.”

  But sure enough, as I left the shelter of the birches and white pines and came out into the windswept blueberry barrens, my conscience began to gnaw at me. I thought about the abrupt manner in which Doc’s call to me had ended. He’d sounded pretty wasted before, and despite his generally good health, I needed to remember that he was an elderly man. He was definitely i
ntoxicated. What if he had fallen and injured himself? I tried his number again and got no answer. I tried his cell and got voice mail.

  Doc Larrabee’s farm was just a few miles up the road. What if the old man was bleeding to death from a head wound? I took my foot off the gas and hit my blinker.

  “Where are we going?” asked Lucas.

  “To check on my friend.”

  “The one with the dead dog?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That one.”

  37

  A line of kids on snowmobiles crossed the road just before we reached the farmhouse. I counted five of them, all going too fast. I watched them shoot away into the night, their lights growing dim as they followed the groomed trail across the barrens.

  Atop its low hill, beneath the leafless elms that had somehow survived a century-long blight, sat the farmhouse. The porch light was turned off, but a yellow glow showed in the mudroom window, and I saw Doc’s pickup parked outside the yawning barn. I unbuckled my chest belt. Lucas fiddled with his, but I caught his arm.

  “Stay here,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

  “I want to see the dead dog.”

  “No way.”

  I swung open the driver’s door and a strong gust of wind nearly pushed it closed on my leg before I could get out. I braced the door with my arm. “Don’t fool around with anything in my truck, please. I’ll know if something’s missing.”

  He didn’t say anything in response, just reached inside his backpack and drew out his notebook.

  As I trudged through the snow up to the farmhouse, I felt the hairs in my nostrils begin to bristle from the cold. The temperature was plunging again, headed back below zero, but at least the clouds were breaking. Every now and again, the moon showed its pale, pockmarked face before ducking out of sight. The last time I’d visited this farm, the blizzard had hidden most of the surroundings from view. Now I saw snow-covered blueberry barrens tumbling down the rocky hillside toward Bog Pond. In the moonlight, I spotted a couple of shadowy shapes that must have been ice-fishing shacks on the frozen lake.

  I rapped with my knuckles on the old door, hearing the glass windows rattle in the wood frame, then resorted to my fist when no one answered. Maybe the old guy really had passed out. I gave a glance down the drive and saw Lucas’s headlamp flickering inside my truck.

  The door opened when I twisted the knob. Given the near panic in Doc’s voice earlier, I was surprised to find it unlocked.

  The house was cold, and it smelled bad—not just that mustiness that I remembered from the night of the dinner party but the reek of food scraps beginning to rot in the garbage, and a sharp vinegar odor that made me think of spilled wine.

  “Doc?”

  A moan came from the interior. I switched on the hall light and made my way down the cramped passage to the living room. Doc was slumped across the horsehair sofa in the dark. I flicked the switch. He squeezed his eyes shut and jerked his head away, as if he couldn’t bear the brightness.

  There were several empty bottles on the side tables and the window seat—wine bottles, a bottle of Maker’s Mark, and even some bottles of fancy liqueurs I associated with his late wife. It was as if the old widower had raided his cabinets, looking for every last remaining intoxicant in the house. Was all this chaos over a dead dog?

  I folded my arms across my chest, pressing the armored vest I wore beneath my shirt against my rib cage. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “I must have tripped.” He tried to prop himself up on the couch arm but seemed to lack the strength. When he turned his head to me, I saw that his lip was swollen.

  “Your phone went dead while we were talking.”

  He glanced around at the floor, looking for his cordless phone. “It’s around here somewhere.”

  “I was worried about you. What’s so important that you had me rush over here?”

  “I made a mistake. I should have told you before.”

  “Told me what?”

  “What really happened.”

  “You’re not making any sense, Doc.”

  There was dried blood and food in his beard. “You were right about Prester Sewall. He didn’t kill his friend.”

  I felt my beating heart push against my sternum. “How do you know that?”

  Doc sat up and reached for the nearest liquor bottle. He tilted it over his open mouth, but nothing dripped out. “I just know.”

  “You have to stop drinking and tell me what happened.”

  “The night of the blizzard…”

  “Yes?”

  “I didn’t know who he was,” he said. “Not at first. His face was too swollen, and I didn’t recognize his name from the license; none of us did.”

  “Are you talking about Prester Sewall?”

  He nodded. “After they came back to the house—you were still out there in the Heath—Kendrick told me who the frozen man was.”

  “Kendrick?”

  “I told him I couldn’t do it. I’m just an old vet, but I was a medic in the army, and I took an oath!” He coughed into his closed fist. “You should have seen him, the look on his face. He would have done it himself. He tried to push me aside. But then the ambulance arrived, and it was too late.”

  I could feel my pulse throbbing in my neck. “Why would Kendrick want you to kill Prester Sewall?”

  “He wanted them both dead.”

  “Both of them? Are you saying Kendrick was the one who murdered Cates?”

  In my mind’s eye I saw the sled-dog racer coming across Randall in the storm—hypothermic, stumbling, unable to defend himself—then holding Randall’s face down in the snow until he could no longer breathe.

  Doc Larrabee nodded his whiskered chin. “Kendrick said they deserved to die.” He began to shake, as if on the verge of tears. “But I kept dreaming about Helen. She wouldn’t have wanted me to lie. ‘You can’t let them convict the wrong man,’ she told me, ‘no matter what those men did to those young people.’”

  The wind howled outside the house. It sounded like a living thing now, some sort of choral voice of animal spirits.

  “So you told Kendrick you were going to the police?”

  “I tried to convince him. I tried everything to reason with him, but he wouldn’t listen. It was poetic justice, he said. The police already had their suspect. Then he heard that you were asking questions.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That you showed me a picture of a snowmobile. I said you didn’t believe it was Prester who killed his friend. He got really worried. He knows about your history.”

  I remembered running into Kendrick outside the Spragues’ Laundromat, how inquisitive he’d been. And later, during the search for Prester’s body, I’d thought I spotted his pickup parked near the Machias River.

  “Did Kendrick have something to do with Prester’s disappearance from the hospital?”

  He hung his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Think!”

  “He didn’t tell me. But I know what he did to Duchess!”

  “Kendrick killed your dog?”

  “I let her outside today, same as I always do, and she didn’t come back. Then I found her body in the road, like she’d been hit by a car. She never went in the road! Kendrick did it—as a warning to keep my mouth shut.” He started sobbing. “She was Helen’s dog—my last link to Helen.”

  Thoughts were darting around my head like quick-moving birds. Doc was rambling and nearly incoherent, but his condition seemed to vouch for his troubled conscience. He sounded like a man haunted by a past misdeed. The problem was that I was missing a key piece of information, without which everything Larrabee had told me was just useless hearsay.

  A dog was howling. At first I thought it was the wind again. Then I realized there was a mournful undertone that could only have come from a living creature. I stepped to the nearest window, parted the dusty curtains, and looked out. The light from inside the room made it impossible to see anything but my own tro
ubled expression.

  “What’s wrong?” Doc asked. “Is someone out there?”

  Ever since I’d arrived in Washington County, people had been invoking the name of poor dead Trinity Raye. Even I had wondered if she’d been one of Kendrick’s favorite students, but the sheriff had said she wasn’t even in his class. Would the professor really have committed one murder, and attempted a second, to avenge the death of a girl he barely knew? It was possible, but as an explanation it seemed insufficient.

  The phone rang. The sound—shrill and insistent—seemed to be coming from Doc himself. He turned his head, slowly and stupidly, and patted the cushions.

  I bent down on one knee and reached beneath the couch. My blind hand found the cordless receiver embedded in an inch of dog fur and dust.

  “Hello?”

  “Warden Bowditch! What a surprise.”

  “Kendrick?”

  “Hell no. It’s your old buddy George Magoon.” The reception had that slightly overloud distortion that indicates the person on the other end is speaking from a cell phone. “Is Doc there?”

  “You know he’s here, Kendrick.” Doc was staring at me with wide, glassy eyes, and I could see that he was genuinely afraid. “Where are you?”

  “Here and there. I tend to move around a lot.” There was a rustling on the line that sounded like wind. “Doc has been telling you some of his crazy stories, I imagine.”

  “He thinks you killed Duchess.”

  “He must be drinking again. Why would I kill my good friend’s dog?”

  “As a warning to keep quiet.”

  “Keep quiet about what?”

  “He says you’ve been lying about what happened the night of the blizzard. He says you killed Randall Cates out in the storm and wanted him to kill Prester Sewall before the EMTs arrived.”

  “That’s quite a story! His imagination really runs wild when he’s hammered.”

  “You’re saying it’s a lie?”

  “I’ve never killed anyone in my life. Besides, the state police have already determined that Prester Sewall murdered Cates.”