Bad Little Falls (31 page)

I unbuttoned my shirt and tucked the notebook against my ballistic vest. It seemed the only way to carry it securely.

I clicked off the light and went downstairs. Corbett took the hint and followed.

In the entryway, I nearly had a heart attack when the social worker stepped through the front door.

“I take it you haven’t found him yet,” she said.

“I thought you were going to wait outside.”

“I got tired of sitting in the car.”

“It would be better if you did,” said Corbett.

Snow had accumulated atop her hair, as if someone had sprinkled her with powdered sugar. “Do you think the boy is dangerous?”

“If he’s scared, he might be dangerous,” I said.

“Look,” she said. “I can’t keep the engine running, or I’m going to run out of gas. I’m going to take Tammi over to Lubec to that foster home I mentioned. I can’t just wait around all evening for you to find the boy. Why are you looking in the house? I thought the kid ran off into the woods.”

“I want to have a look in the basement,” I said.

“Can’t you just follow his tracks? I thought you game wardens were supposed to be expert trackers.”

“I’m just gathering some information.” I didn’t feel like explaining my search techniques to this woman, or to Corbett, for that matter. “When I find Lucas, what would you like me to do?”

“If he’s been outside this whole time, take him to the hospital. The poor kid could have frostbite or hypothermia. Isn’t a lost kid supposed to be like a super high-level priority?”

“There’s a difference between lost and hiding,” I said.

“Hiding from what?” Corbett asked.

I focused on the social worker. “If you give me your phone number, I’ll call you when I find him. To be on the safe side, I’ll take him to the hospital. Please just take care of Tammi.”

Mueller gave me her cell number. Muttering to herself, she wandered outside.

Standing at the mudroom door, I took a look at the backyard. In the twilight, the snow outside appeared a luminous blue. I could just make out the footprints staggering away into a hedgelike row of small pines that were about the size of Christmas trees. Beyond it were taller evergreens and birches. I would need my snowshoes, I decided.

“I’ve got to agree with the lady,” said Corbett. “You don’t seem like you’re in much of hurry.”

“I know this kid,” I said. “He’s not the type to go running off in a panic. I have a good idea where he is from the map he made in his notebook. What I don’t know is whether he took his grandfather’s rifle with him. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a second, I’m going to look in the basement.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“If you need something to do, call the sheriff and tell her about that pot you found. I’m sure that’ll make her day. You certainly have a nose for the stuff. The psychic connection you have with these drug dealers is uncanny. It defies all belief.”

Corbett tightened his mouth, not quite sure what to make of my veiled accusation. The truth was that I would never be able to prove that the chief deputy had been on the take from Randall Cates. Everyone who could testify to that effect was conveniently deceased.

The cellar was pitch-black, and the light switch didn’t seem to do anything when I gave it a try. Probably there was some sort of naked bulb with a pull cord down there. I trained my flashlight on the steps and carefully descended.

The air felt damp but not as cold somehow. I crouched down and shined the light around the corners of the room. There were boxes everywhere, plus a tool bench, a dusty old television, a girl’s bicycle, a brace of canoe paddles—the usual detritus of a family’s life. An ancient oil tank squatted against the fieldstone wall, an open box of rat poison beside it.

I couldn’t stand up without knocking my head against a pine rafter or getting a faceful of cobwebs. Hunched forward slightly, I picked my way through the junk to have a look at the door that opened onto the bulkhead steps. On the dirt floor there was a small drift of snow that must have tumbled in when Lucas turned the doorknob and took off into the wild.

The next question was whether he had taken his dead grandfather’s .22 with him. Dusty tools hung from a Peg-Board over a wooden workbench. I saw a hammer, various wrenches, an electric drill—all dusty, and some showing signs of rust—and I had the feeling somehow that none of these tools had been used since the death of the Sewall parents.

I saw an antique advertisement hanging on the mossy fieldstone wall in the corner above the workbench. Someone must have clipped it from an old magazine and stuck it inside a picture frame. It showed an attractive woman in a strange white outfit made of feathers. She wore a sort of cowl that hid her hair from view, and she had her finger extended straight at the viewer, in imitation of the famous recruiting poster featuring Uncle Sam. Her eyes were heavily made up in 1960s fashion, but there was nothing alluring, or even friendly, about them in the least. Beneath her picture, the poster said
I WANT
YOU
FOR THE DIPLOMAT CORPS
.

Below the command, or the threat, or whatever it was, was some explanatory fine print about the corps, along with a picture of an open cigar box.

It was an ad for White Owl cigars.

The scary drawings on the covers of Lucas’s notebook made a certain sense now. He’d been terrified of this poster above his dead grandfather’s tool bench. The image had entered into his nightmares in that inexplicable way that things do when you are a child—or an adult.

“You and Lucas have a lot in common,” Jamie had said. I’d rejected the suggestion as absurd at the time, but now I could begin to understand what she’d meant.

My moment of empathy didn’t last long. It ended the second my flashlight beam picked out the open box of Winchester .22 long-rifle ammunition on the pallet. Lucas Sewall was armed.

34

When a child disappears in the forest in the winter, especially after dark, you don’t want to waste time, since hypothermia can take hold so quickly. But my sixth sense told me Lucas Sewall was in no immediate danger. As I’d said to the social worker, there is a difference between lost and hiding.

“His mother said he has a tree fort about half a mile from here,” I told Corbett as we returned to our vehicles. I needed a pair of snowshoes if I was going to wade out into that snowy forest. “There’s a map of it in his diary. I think that’s where he went.”

“What else is in that diary?”

“Kid stuff,” I said.

The chief deputy raised the collar on his parka against the chill. “I want to go with you.”

The last thing I needed was a man I didn’t trust trailing after me through snowdrifts and deepening shadows. “Do you have snowshoes in your vehicle?”

“No.”

“Then you’ll just slow me down.”

“The kid doesn’t have them, either.”

“Do me a favor,” I said, “and just wait here until I get back. Call the sheriff for me and ask her if anyone’s questioned Mitch Munro about what he was doing on the Heath the night Cates was murdered.”

Corbett gave me a sad shake of the head. “You won’t let that one go, will you?”

“Call it a character defect,” I said. “Excuse me for a minute. I’ve got to talk to my sergeant.”

Rivard sounded dog-tired on the phone, but he would have mobilized the entire division if I had requested assistance. I had a hard time dissuading him from doing so, in fact. That’s the standard operating procedure for a child who goes missing on a snowy evening.

“I know where the kid is,” I said with confidence I had no right to feel. “His mom told me he has a tree fort behind the house. That’s where his trail goes. I just need to get in there and bring him back. It’ll just take a few minutes.” I withheld the tidbit that the kid I was chasing was armed with a .22 rifle.

“I take it Prester never washed up,” I said.

“I would have notified you if he had.” His mouth sounded dry from the cold air and chewing tobacco.

“What time are we getting started again with the search?”

“That depends on this snow. The forecast calls for it to end just after dark.”

I flicked my wipers to push the accumulating snow off my windshield. “It’s still snowing here.”

“It’s still snowing everywhere.”

Then he hung up.

I found a halogen headlamp in the glove compartment and snugged it down over my baseball cap so that the light would follow my eyes whenever I turned my head. I removed my snowshoes from the bed of my pickup and strapped the bindings to my boots. The shoes had been fashioned out of white ash and rawhide by a Penobscot Indian craftsman up in Old Town. The modified bear-paw design was oblong in shape, not too long, which made the pair ideal for working in dense cover.

Corbett inspected me from head to foot. “What do you plan on doing if you find him?”

“Mueller wants me to take him into the hospital to get checked out for frostbite and hypothermia. After that, I don’t know. I guess she’ll hand him over to a foster family until his mom gets out of jail.”

“It can’t be any worse than that house.”

I was in no mood to debate. For all of Jamie’s problems—her addictions and self-loathing—I knew she tried to be a good mother. She
was
a good mother, albeit in ways the bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services would never believe. Lucas was an odd little specimen, but she clearly doted on him and encouraged his preoccupation with writing. Jamie was right to worry that her son might slip from her grip now and tumble into the maw of the state.

I knew people like Magda Mueller did important work. They rescued innocent children from nightmarish situations of abuse and neglect. I also knew that certain bureaucrats considered being poor to be a form of child abuse, no matter how desperately the parents wanted something better for their children. In my experience, multigenerational poverty was a kind of inheritance, impervious to state mandates or meddling, as impossible to change as the color of one’s eyes. My mom had taken advantage of opportunities in the classroom to get her GED and associate’s degree—although mostly she owed her salvation to being beautiful enough to eventually marry a rich man. Then again, she hadn’t fallen into addiction the way Jamie Sewall had.

“See you in a few,” I told Corbett.

“Happy trails,” he replied.

I made my way around the house to the open bulkhead. Snow had tumbled down the concrete steps leading to the basement door. In the blue-white light of my headlamp, I saw the boy’s trail leading across the open yard, past a wood and tar-paper shed that was listing to the right, as if pushed that way by the wind. The light snow had begun to fill in the tracks, but I could see from the jagged treads that Lucas was wearing sneakers.

I removed the notebook from inside my shirt and searched for the map I’d seen earlier. There were no distances marked, but if I remained still, I could hear moving water ahead, so I knew “Injun Brook” wasn’t far.

I tucked the notebook against my chest and followed the tracks. The trail led into a copse of second-growth birch trees that were about as thick around as baseball bats. Snowshoe hares had nibbled the low-hanging buds.

Beyond the shed, the hill sloped steadily, and I could tell from Lucas’s treads—deeper in the heels than in the toes—that he had descended at breakneck speed, nearly losing his balance a couple of times. He’d snapped a dead branch off a decaying tree at one point to keep from falling. I angled my snowshoes to sidestep my way down after him.

The trees grew taller as I approached the hidden stream: a mixed grove of white pines, yellow birches, and northern white cedar. The evergreen boughs had blocked the snow, making it easier to read the trail. The brook at the bottom was about ten feet wide at its narrowest point. It was a gurgling little creek, ice-crusted along the edges, with water that looked like flowing ink in the light of my headlamp and smelled, very faintly—because cold dulls the sense of smell—of the rotting pine needles clumped along the streambed.

Lucas had tried hopping his way across from one rock to the next, but the dislodged snow on one of the boulders showed where he’d lost his footing. His feet would be wet now, which increased the likelihood of frostbite. I needed to find him quickly, before his feet froze.

My snowshoes weren’t made for jumping, so I had to untie them and prop them over my shoulder as I waded across. My boots were waterproof, but the iciness of the creek pierced the leather uppers like repeated jabs from a needle.

When I reached the far side, I shined the lamp along the stream, looking for the point where Lucas had continued on, but I found no other tracks. It took me a few seconds to understand what I was seeing—or rather, what I
wasn’t
seeing—and then I laughed out loud. The boy had used the stream to disguise his passage. He had waded either up- or downstream.

Upstream, I guessed, and I was correct, although not in the way I’d expected. I rediscovered Lucas’s trail, but it was now on the opposite side of the bank. It looped back toward his house, then stopped suddenly halfway up the hill. You might almost have concluded that a passing UFO had teleported him from the ground into space.

I knelt down, and again I started smiling at my own stupidity. I’d been in such a rush, I hadn’t noticed what should have been plainly obvious to even a rookie warden: Lucas had retraced his steps. The boy had walked backward in his own tracks down to the creek.

This kid is really clever, I said to myself. I’d better read
Northwest Passage
again.

I located the tracks again on the far side of the brook, even farther upstream. As I snowshoed my way up the bank, I came across a spectacular pine that had been blasted apart; the bark was deeply scarred, torn open to the heartwood down the length of the trunk. Lucas’s map, I remembered, included a “Lightning Tree.” I expected this was it.

According to the notebook, the boy’s fort should have been nearby. I decided to remove my snowshoes to make myself more agile, even if it meant that I would flounder in the deep drifts. I tied the laces together and draped the knot across my left shoulder.