The Precipice: A Novel

by Paul Doiron

  The road to Moosehead Lake passed through a series of derelict mill towns. The windswept parking lots outside the factories had weeds growing through the cracks in the asphalt. Apple trees outside one stately house dropped their unwanted fruit onto the sidewalks for the raccoons to eat. Halloween was a month away on the calendar, but the ghosts were already in residence in Piscataquis County.

  I arrived in Monson an hour after leaving the truck stop, my back stiff, my nerves raw from too much caffeine. The town was as dark as the others, but the neon beer lights in the windows of the general store beckoned.

  Toby Dow’s overturned five-gallon bucket sat beside the Dumpster, waiting for the mayor of Monson to return in the morning. Stacey’s IF&W truck wasn’t in the lot, but I hadn’t expected it would be. The shuttle van hadn’t moved since my last visit; I wondered if it was a permanent fixture. I pulled up beside an empty, idling Dodge Neon. My headlights bounced against the cinder blocks.

  The man behind the counter looked up from the register. I recognized him from my prior visit: six-five, gray hair cut straight across his forehead, rhinestone stud, deeply set dark eyes. In his build and affect, he reminded me of Boris Karloff lurching around the set of The Bride of Frankenstein.

  He had been making change for an underaged girl buying cigarettes. She couldn’t have been older than sixteen, but I was not in town to enforce the state’s laws against minors purchasing tobacco. She swiped two packs of American Spirits off the counter when she saw my badge and gun.

  “See you later, Benton,” she said in a squeaky voice, hurrying out the door.

  “Take care, Tasha,” the clerk said.

  When the door closed, I realized that we were alone. The last time I’d been inside the store, country music had been playing over the speakers, but now that he had the place to himself, Benton had opted for the shrill flute of Jethro Tull. I inspected the bulletin board. The missing-persons poster had been torn down, but there was a new notice, emblazoned with the shield of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, advertising the hundred-dollar bounty for coyotes.

  The clerk examined me with the impassivity of a steer.

  “I don’t suppose that girl’s last name is Dow, is it?” I asked.

  “Tasha? How did you know?”

  “Just a wild guess.” I tapped the badge on my belt. “Do you remember me?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “I don’t suppose you know where I can find the wildlife biologist who was here tagging coyotes.”

  “She left in a huff this afternoon.” Benton began chewing his fingernails, or what was left of them.

  “She didn’t say anything about where she was going?” I asked.

  “No, sir.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was slow-witted, lacked all powers of observation, or was lying to me for fun.

  “Thanks.” I turned toward the door.

  “How will you folks know when you find the coyotes that killed those girls?”

  “Excuse me?”

  He spit a piece of keratin out of the corner of his mouth. “Do they do blood tests or something? Or cut open their stomachs to see what’s inside?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not a forensics expert.”

  “A lot of the hikers that’ve come in are scared to go back onto the trail. They keep asking me if it’s safe.”

  “What have you been telling them?”

  He finally showed me a smile. It completely changed the character of his face, almost made him handsome. “I tell them no.”

  “That’s the right answer.”

  “There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s a quote from George Carlin. Have a good evening, Warden.”

  What a flake, I thought on my way out the door.

  I decided to make Ross’s Rooming House my next stop. Stacey had told me she was staying there on the state’s tab. With luck, I would find her holed up in her room, cooling her anger with a six-pack of beer.

  As I cruised through the village, I passed the boarded storefronts and the illuminated sign of the Lake of the Woods Tabernacle with its dire biblical warning. Then I turned left toward the lake. The old Victorians along the side street seemed to be sinking slowly into their own front lawns. Stacey’s truck wasn’t parked outside the hiking hostel, either.

  I sat behind the wheel and considered my next move. The engine made a ticking sound, like a stopwatch counting down the seconds until something exploded. After a minute, I went inside.

  27

  A woman behind the front desk took her eyes away from the two bearded hikers with whom she was talking and watched me as I stepped into the parlor. She was tall and broad-shouldered, with a weathered complexion and hard gray eyes like chips of stone. She had reddish white hair gathered together in a topknot. The sleeves of her orange fleece pullover were pushed up to her elbows, revealing powerful forearms.

  “Can I help you?” Her voice was as deep as I would have expected, and she had a strong German accent.

  “I hope so. I’m Mike Bowditch. I’m with the Warden Service.”

  “Did you stay with us during the search?”

  The two hikers moved aside. One of them smelled so strongly of BenGay it stung my nostrils.

  “I did, but I came in late and left early.” I cleared my throat. “Is Mr. Ross here?”

  “He has gone to bed. I’m Steffi Ross. What can I do for you?”

  She was so much more outdoorsy and vital than her husband—more the kind of person I would have expected to find running a way station on the Appalachian Trail.

  “I’m looking for Stacey Stevens,” I said. “I didn’t see her IF&W truck out front. Did she check out?”

  “Not unless she left without telling me.” Steffi Ross turned to the two hikers listening in on our conversation. Both looked freshly showered. “Have you guys seen her around? The woman in the uniform?”

  One of the guys grinned through his blond beard, his teeth barely visible beneath his brushy mustache. “She wasn’t at dinner.” He had an English accent.

  “I think she might have gone to her room,” said the other Brit.

  “Would you mind if I take a look?” I asked Mrs. Ross.

  She brought one of her big hands to her chin. “Does she know you are coming?”

  I decided a bluff was in order. “She was hoping I could stay the night with her. How much is it for an extra person in the room?”

  She narrowed her eyes, cocked her head, and gave me the once-over with a closemouthed smile.

  “Why don’t you have a look at her room, ja? In case she left. Pay me later for the room if you stay.”

  “Thanks. What room is she in?”

  “Number twelve,” Steffi Ross said.

  I thought I understood the layout of the building, but there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the room numbering system. After two dead ends, I finally found myself outside Stacey’s door. I rapped on the wood and spoke her name.

  I listened but heard only music playing in the adjoining room. Phish.

  When Stacey didn’t respond to my second knock, I tried the knob. It twisted easily in my hand, and the door swung inward. The bedside lamp was ablaze, and clothes were falling out of an unzipped duffel bag on the floor. Her toiletries kit hung from a nail on the wall.

  She hadn’t left Monson yet. So where was she? I couldn’t deny that I found the scene disquieting.

  I sat down on the bed and felt the springs shiver underneath my weight. The duffel bag was red, manufactured by L.L. Bean, with a monogram on the side: SOS. I’d never asked Stacey for her middle name. Was it Ora, after her mother?

  She hadn’t bothered to hang anything up in the closet or put her socks in the drawers of the bureau. Evidently, she hadn’t expected to be in Monson long. I stared at the open duffel, trying to resist the urge to rummage through its contents.

  SOS.

  I
rose to my feet and followed the twisting halls back to the lobby. The bearded hikers had retired to the fireplace, where they had joined half a dozen other tanned and longhaired young people. One of them was tuning a mandolin, which he must have carried on his back all the way from Georgia.

  Mrs. Ross had a wireless phone pinned between her shoulder and her ear. “Listen, I have to go. Someone is here.” She replaced the telephone on its charging stand. “Did you find your girlfriend?”

  “No, but her stuff is still in the room. I don’t suppose you spoke with her this afternoon?”

  She brought her hand to the lower part of her face again. “We talked a bit, sure.”

  “Can you remember anything she said?”

  “You’re not stalking this young woman, are you?”

  “Would I tell you if I was?”

  She let out a laugh that showed me the metal fillings in her molars. “Good point!”

  “I’m worried about Stacey because no one knows where she is. Do you remember what you talked about?”

  Near the fireplace, the traveling minstrel had begun strumming the strings of his mandolin while a woman passed out pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream from a paper bag. The hikers were digging their hooked fingers into the containers and lifting gobs of Cherry Garcia and Chunky Monkey into their mouths.

  Steffi Ross motioned me into the office behind the front desk. I pushed aside a curtain of beads to enter. She crossed her arms and leaned her rear end against a paper-strewn table with a computer monitor, keyboard, and inkjet printer.

  “Your friend was in a bad mood when she came in, ja?” she said. “I had been hearing all day about the scene over at the store. It sounded disgusting. But that is not what we talked about. She wanted to know about that kid who got hit by a truck—McDonut.”

  So news of the hit-and-run was making its way through the village. I shouldn’t have been surprised.

  “What did she want to know?” I asked.

  “Everything.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “I told her McDonut seemed a little strange, but a lot of the people who come through here are odd ducks, you know? He brought in some beer to share. That is something the hikers do. He got a little drunk, you know? But he seemed nice.”

  Her account matched what Chad McDonough had told me about his night at Ross’s.

  “Did he seem nervous or anxious?” I asked. “Like he was afraid of something or someone.”

  “No,” Steffi Ross said. “That kid was the life of the party.”

  “Did she ask you about Samantha Boggs and Missy Montgomery?”

  “Naomi Walks and Baby Ruth? Ja.”

  “You’re using their trail names,” I said.

  “That is our practice here. I feel that trail names are more honest, you know, because they are chosen. They are closer to who a person truly is.”

  “What was yours when you hiked the AT?”

  Her cheeks flushed, whether from embarrassment or anger, I couldn’t tell. “Das Shieldmaiden.”

  I decided to let it go. “What did Stacey ask you about Samantha and Missy?”

  “If I knew the girls were homosexual.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yeah, I could tell right away that they were a couple. They were quite open. They kissed and held hands.”

  Samantha and Missy had been closeted at Pentecost University, afraid the world would learn about the romantic nature of their relationship. Very few of their classmates had known they were secretly lovers. But somewhere along the hundreds of miles of the Appalachian Trail, the women had found the courage to make their feelings for each other public. They really had been on a journey of personal discovery. The revelation seemed to make what had happened to them all the more tragic.

  “What else did Stacey ask you about them?” I said.

  “She asked if I could remember any little details. I thought I’d told the police everything.”

  She removed a tube of lip balm from her pocket. She took a moment to apply it to her heavily chapped lips. I had the impression she was stalling.

  “You left something out of your statement to the police,” I said. “What was it?”

  She let out a sigh that went on for ten seconds. “Naomi Walks and Baby Ruth asked me about churches, ja? I told them about the Community Church and the United Church of Christ. ‘Or you could check out that crazy tabernacle on Main Street,’ I told them.”

  “Do you think they might have visited the tabernacle on their way back to the trail?”

  “I had meant it as a joke. I didn’t think they’d actually go there.”

  “What can you tell me about it?”

  “The preacher is nuts! He calls himself Brother John. My husband thinks he might have been a hiker himself. That is how he found Monson. Me, I’ve never been inside the dump.”

  Out near the fireplace, the hikers had broken into song. They were shouting along to “Free Bird” while the guy with the mandolin played.

  Steffi Ross’s throat flushed from her breastbone to her cheeks. “I don’t understand the point of these questions. I thought coyotes killed those poor girls.”

  “We’re still waiting for the report to come back from the medical examiner. In the meantime, the investigators are looking into all the ways Samantha and Missy might have died.”

  “So now the police think those girls were murdered?”

  “They’re looking at all the ways the women might have died,” I repeated.

  I had the sense that Steffi Ross felt mad at herself for having forgotten to mention the Lake of the Woods Tabernacle to the detectives. She was expressing her embarrassment to me as frustration.

  “But what is your friend’s interest in this? Did she know them?”

  “Not personally.”

  “I do not understand what that means.”

  I wasn’t sure that I could explain. “I appreciate your talking to me, Mrs. Ross.”

  “You might look for her at Shoebottom’s. There is a bar that serves drinks. Ja?”

  A thought occurred to me as I turned to leave. “There is one more thing. Do you ever have outsiders here?”

  “I do not understand what that means.”

  “People who come for supper, who aren’t staying at the inn.”

  “On Saturday nights we serve lobsters for ten dollars. There are some people who come in for dinner, you know?”

  “Did you have any outside guests the night Samantha and Missy were here?”

  “I think not.”

  “Thanks anyway.”

  Lynyrd Skynyrd on the mandolin accompanied me to the front door.

  “Wait!” Steffi Ross called after me. “There was somebody here that night. Nonstop was here.”

  “Bob Nissen was at the inn?”

  Mrs. Ross placed her hands on the desk and leaned forward. “He trades us honey for lobsters, so he comes for dinner. He likes the attention from all the pretty girls, you know? He is a famous figure on the trail.”

  “Did he speak with Samantha and Missy?”

  “I do not know. Sorry.”

  “Thanks anyway.”

  I pulled my collar up as I stepped out into the chilly evening. Somewhere out on the dark waters of Lake Hebron, a loon was giving his eerie, half-crazed call. Why hadn’t Nissen told anyone he had been in the same dining room as Samantha and Missy? It was a significant omission, to say the least. As soon as I tracked down Stacey, I would need to have a talk with the legendary thru-hiker.

  28

  Stacey was a mystery to me in many ways, but I could guess where she had gone after leaving the rooming house.

  I drove up the street and parked in front of the Lake of the Woods Tabernacle. I leaned on the steering wheel and looked up at the ramshackle wooden structure, seeing it as if for the first time. The first floor was an old storefront with plate-glass windows that needed cleaning inside and out. Upstairs seemed to be some sort of meeting space: maybe an old dance hall from the days of the
river drivers. On the third floor, a lamp glowed behind a shade. The clapboards were flaking blue paint onto the cracked sidewalk. A single match could have burned the whole place to the ground.

  Faded lettering on the building identified it as the DOW BLOCK 1894. So the Dows were the original settlers in this neck of the woods. No wonder they acted as if they owned the town. Their ancestors probably had.

  As I climbed out of the patrol truck, I readjusted the holster containing my .357 SIG. Looking up at the darkened sky, I saw a few faint stars veiled by clouds, as well as blinking lights I recognized as airplanes traveling to Europe and beyond. A transatlantic flight corridor passed directly over the state of Maine like a superhighway through the heavens. No matter how deep into the woods you went, no matter how far from civilization you believed yourself to be, you couldn’t escape the sound of jets or the sight of contrails.

  The message on the lighted sign hadn’t been changed since my last visit. It still displayed St. Paul’s warning to the Philippians about dogs and evildoers. Sage advice, I thought.

  I pressed my face to the darkened plate glass, but it was difficult to see more than a few feet inside. The first floor appeared to be some sort of storeroom. I could make out stacks of cardboard boxes and a sagging clothes rack with coats and dresses. Stuffed animals and baby dolls were lined up along a shelf.

  A rickety set of stairs had been built along the side of the building: a jerry-rigged fire escape to bring the place barely up to code. I climbed to the third floor, where I had seen the light. A television murmured inside the apartment. I knocked and waited.

  After a few moments, the door opened a crack, and a young woman in a shapeless cotton dress peered out at me.

  “Hello?” she said with no friendliness.

  She was very thin, except for her very pregnant belly. She had acne scars and limp brown hair, but her features were beautiful. A makeup artist would have viewed her face as an exciting canvas.

  Warm air, scented heavily with garlic, flowed out into the night.

  “I’m Warden Bowditch. I’m looking for Brother John.”

  A man called from the next room. “Teresa, who is it?”

  She slammed the door in my face.