The Precipice (15 page)

“We’ll give them a minute to get their clothes back on.” She counted the seconds on her wristwatch. “You go first. I want to see their expressions when they get a load of your badge and gun.”

When I pulled myself up again on the rock, I found myself staring into the startled eyes of two fully dressed young people. The young woman’s brown hair was as wild as Medusa’s, and the fly on the man’s Levi’s was unzipped, revealing the bulge of his tighty-whities. Otherwise, I never would have guessed what they’d just been doing.

I hauled myself over the top.

The man had a wimpy mustache, inflamed whiteheads on his cheeks, and dirty blond hair cut in a style that was almost but not quite a mullet. The outline of a pack of cigarettes showed in the chest pocket of his chamois shirt. He gave a meek wave.

The woman’s cheeks and throat were flushed with blood. She was wearing a yellow shirt, indigo-dyed jeggings that showed off her long legs—she was taller than he was—and muddy sneakers.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“OK,” the man said.

“Nice day for a hike,” said Stacey, sliding over the rock behind me. “It’s so awesome to feel the blood pumping.”

The couple looked at each other, unsure what to make of Stacey’s comment.

“Are you guys on your honeymoon?” she asked, raising her sunglasses and resting them atop her head. Her green eyes were full of merriment.

“How’d you know that?” the man asked. He removed the cigarette pack from his pocket and shook a Marlboro out, trying to affect a composure he clearly wasn’t feeling. I could practically hear his jackrabbit heart.

“Saw your Jeep back in the lot,” Stacey said.

“Yeah, we’re camping down to Katahdin Iron Works.”

I decided that Stacey had indulged her twisted sense of humor enough. “I’m Warden Bowditch, and this is Stacey Stevens, who’s with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. We’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

“What kind of questions?” the man asked.

“Let’s start with your names,” I said.

“Mr. and Mrs. Ryan Tardiff,” the young woman said, exulting in her new status as a wife.

“What do you think of Gulf Hagas?” Stacey asked.

“It’s pretty awesome, I guess.” The unlit cigarette hung from his lower lip. He’d made no attempt to light it. “Is this some kind of tourist survey?”

I ignored the last question. “Have you two hiked the entire Rim Trail today?”

“No, we turned around about halfway,” Mrs. Ryan Tardiff said. The blush had begun to fade, revealing orange freckles under her eye sockets.

“Did you run into any other hikers?”

“Just a guy at Buttermilk Falls,” Mr. Ryan Tardiff said.

“He’s the reason we turned around,” his new wife said.

Stacey narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean?”

Mrs. Ryan Tardiff glanced to her husband for encouragement, but he didn’t seem to pick up on any of her nonverbal cues. “He was acting kind of weird.”

“Weird how?” I asked.

Mr. Ryan Tardiff brought out a NASCAR-branded lighter and finally fired up his cigarette. “He was crying.”

I retrieved the camera from my pocket and flipped through the saved photographs until I came to the picture I’d taken of Chad McDonough. I held the screen up for them both to see. “Is this the guy? He might have been wearing a sombrero.”

“Maybe,” Mr. Ryan Tardiff said.

His wife let her mouth drop open in disbelief. “Ryan! The guy we saw was
old.
”

“How old?” Stacey asked.

Mrs. Ryan Tardiff scratched the back of her neck. “I don’t know. Forty?”

“Oh, you mean he was a senior citizen,” Stacey said.

Again, the Ryan Tardiffs seemed uncertain whether she was teasing them.

A crying man on a cliff above a raging waterfall—whoever he was, the possibility of a potential suicide suggested that Stacey and I should haul our asses down to Buttermilk Falls instead of joshing around with the newlyweds. I shoved the camera back in my pocket and found another business card. I gave it to the wife, guessing that her tough-guy husband would never deign to report information to a game warden.

“If you do run across the man I showed you, can you call this number?”

“Is there a reward?” Mr. Ryan Tardiff asked.

“Absolutely,” Stacey said.

“How much?”

“A thousand dollars.”

I glared at her, but she merely smiled as the dollar signs flashed behind the young man’s eyes.

After we’d left the newlyweds, I said to Stacey, “You can’t just lie about there being a reward when there isn’t one.”

“I’m not a law-enforcement officer. I can lie until my nose is a foot long.”

The Pleasant River drops more than three hundred feet as it plummets through Gulf Hagas. My knees were definitely feeling the stress of the descent. For the next fifteen minutes, I clung to that walking stick the way an old man does to his cane.

A sign pointed the way down a narrow path to Buttermilk Falls. We emerged from a grove of cedars onto the most jaw-dropping cliff we’d seen yet. There were treetops below us and three tumbling waterfalls. The opposite cliff was even higher, streaked brown and gray, except where daredevil bushes and saplings had somehow taken root in the rocks and were hanging on for dear life. Downstream, an outcropping, shaped like the bow of a ship, teetered precariously over the abyss. On it sat a man with longish blond hair parted in the center. He was bare-chested and wearing brown cutoffs, but he had exchanged his red Crocs for a sturdy pair of boots.

“Caleb?”

The manager of Hudson’s Lodge couldn’t hear me above the roar of the water, so I called his name again. The jutting ledge he was standing on would have been the perfect diving platform for anyone wishing to jump to his or her death. Maxwell seemed to shake himself out of a trance and then slowly swiveled his head in our direction. He didn’t wave or say hello, just rose to his feet in a single motion without using his hands—a testament to the strength of his leg and abdominal muscles.

When we were close enough to converse, I noticed that his eyes were bloodshot. The redness made the aqua color of his irises all the more vivid. I caught Stacey checking out his long shirtless torso.

“What are you doing here, Caleb?”

He returned my girlfriend’s smile. “Thought I’d hike on over from the lodge and look for McDonut.”

“I take it you didn’t find him.”

“No such luck.” He extended his hand to Stacey. “I’m Caleb.”

“Stacey Stevens.”

I folded my bare arms across my chest. “So I heard McDonough’s sprained knee healed overnight.”

“It was a miracle.”

“And he ran into a woman as he was trying to sneak out of the bunkhouse?”

“He told her he wanted to see Gulf Hagas before he hit the trail again. There’s a cutoff from the AT to the gorge. Lots of thru-hikers make a detour because they’ve heard of Gulf Glen.”

“What’s Gulf Glen?” Stacey asked.

He fingered the necklace around his throat as he looked at her. “You’ve never heard of Simon Garfew? I guess he isn’t exactly a household name. There’s a poem about him called ‘Simon Garfew: A Legend of Gulf Glen,’ which some hikers around these parts like to quote.” He then began to recite the poem.

The Great Spirit comes to the face in the rock,

The moon when the leaves grow red;

And when the round moon shines upon it,

Shines into the Gulf at night,

Shines full and fair upon it, Making it plain and white,—

Whoever waits there, with fasting,

Below the strong face,

With a deer’s blood for offering

Always finds pardon and peace.

“That’s beautiful,” Stacey said. “Have you found pardon and peace here, Caleb?”

His smile was sadder this time. “No, but I’ve never tried bringing deer blood with me. There’s a story about Garfew—I don’t know if it’s true or not—that he used to come to Gulf Hagas each fall with his dog to hunt and fish. One autumn, he ventured down into the canyon after a flash flood and was never seen again. Searchers found his dog waiting for him. They tried to catch it, but they couldn’t. It wasn’t going to leave Gulf Hagas without its master.”

“I suppose there are mysterious sightings of a ghost dog, too,” I said. The skepticism had given an edge to my tone. Mostly, I was uncomfortable with the way Caleb Maxwell was flirting with my girlfriend.

“It wouldn’t be the Maine woods without ghost stories,” he said. “I didn’t realize the search area for Samantha and Missy stretched all the way to the Head of the Gulf.”

“Actually, we’re here because I’ve been assigned to track down Chad McDonough.”

“Well, he doesn’t seem to have come along the Rim Trail,” said Caleb. “I didn’t find any tracks coming this way from the Hermitage.”

“Odds are that he was lying,” I said.

“Chad seemed to have a propensity for embellishing the truth.”

“That’s a polite way of putting it.” I twirled my walking stick in my hands. “I guess it makes sense for us to turn back, Stacey.”

“Maybe we’ll get another peep show starring the Ryan Tardiffs.”

Caleb wrinkled his forehead. “The who?”

“We ran into a couple of newlyweds upriver,” I explained. “We surprised them while they were having sex.”

“Really?”

“They told us they’d seen you down here. They said you were acting weird.”

Caleb Maxwell made a face as if he had gotten a whiff of something foul. “What the fuck?”

“They said you were crying,” I said.

His eyes flicked away from mine and focused on the treetops behind me. “Why would I be out here crying?”

“I don’t know.”

His voice came from a deeper place in his diaphragm. “That’s totally bizarre. I don’t know what they think they saw, but I was just sitting there.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I should probably be getting back to the lodge.”

“Full house again?” I asked.

“I figured I could sneak away for a couple of hours to look for McDonut. It pisses me off that I’m not part of the search for those missing women. I’ve been glued to the scanner since you left last night.” An amusing thought occurred to him, and he showed off a set of very white teeth. “So what was your drive back to Monson like with Nissen?”

I lifted my pack straps to give my shoulders a break, then let the weight settle again. “You can probably imagine.”

“Yes, I can.”

I held out my hand for him to shake. “Take care, Caleb.”

“Nice to meet you,” Stacey said.

“
Very
nice to meet you,” he replied.

We watched Caleb Maxwell vault over a fallen tree that most people would have chosen to crawl under. The next thing we knew, he was gone. The sound of the river seemed louder than before.

“He’s kind of a dreamboat,” Stacey said.

“We should get back to the truck.”

She grabbed my biceps and gave them a squeeze. “Don’t be jealous, Bowditch. You know you’re my man.”

The truth was, I wasn’t jealous—not very jealous anyway. I was perplexed. Why had Caleb Maxwell lied to us about being the man the newlyweds had seen crying?

17

The honeymooners must have found another secret spot for their lovemaking, because their Jeep was still parked in the lot when we returned. Stacey paused to draw a heart on the dirty back window.

The faint but fast-moving sound of a plane engine came from the sky. Seconds later, a red-and-white Cessna appeared, flying high above the treetops. I caught sight of the canoe paddles tied to the pontoon cross braces before it disappeared above Gulf Hagas Mountain.

“There goes the World War One flying ace,” said Stacey, gazing up at the empty sky where his plane had been.

“I bet you wish you were up there.”

She punched me in the shoulder. “And miss all this excitement? No frigging way.”

My cell phone rang as we were scraping the mud off our boots. The state police “cell on wheels” tower was such a godsend. The call was from a trooper I didn’t know but who spoke in a friendly manner that suggested he knew me. He identified himself as Chamberlain.

“I found McDonough’s car,” he said. “It’s parked at Abol Bridge.”

“Are you sure it’s his?”

“Kia Soul? Mass vanity plates? Tag reads
MDONUT
?”

“That’s the guy.”

“Looks like the car’s been here awhile. There are pine needles stuck all over the top.”

From the start, I had been fairly certain that the story Chad McDonough had told the woman at Hudson’s had been a ruse. He’d never had any intention of visiting Gulf Hagas. He must have feared that, given his criminal record, he would be a prime suspect in Samantha’s and Missy’s disappearance. We weren’t going to find McDonut on the trail. We needed to start looking along the KI Road and beyond.

“What should I do with the car?” Trooper Chamberlain asked.

“Can you put a boot on it? I don’t want him driving off before we have a chance to interview him again.”

“I don’t have one in the cruiser, but there’s a guy in Millinocket I can call. You sure this is kosher?”

“The Warden Service will take responsibility. You have my personal guarantee.”

He laughed loudly enough for me to hear it over the airwaves. “I’m not sure what your personal guarantee is worth, Bowditch! But let me see what I can do. It wouldn’t be the first time a car got booted ‘by mistake,’ right?”

After Chamberlain had signed off, I told Stacey about McDonough’s abandoned car. “I’m going to report in to DeFord. But I want to drive back over to the gatehouse and talk with the woman there again.”

“What for?”

“There’s a question I forgot to ask her.”

She twisted her torso around and leaned back against the passenger door, arching one eyebrow. “Are you going to tell me what it is?”

“You’ll see.”

She slid back around and snapped her seat belt. “Has anyone ever told you what a tease you are, Bowditch?”

I put my shades on. “A pain in the ass, yes. A tease, no.”

*   *   *

The old woman sat behind a desk in the gatehouse, writing down the registration information for a Mercedes SUV out front, her white braids hanging down on either side of her face. Three middle-aged men in Simms fishing shirts stood before her. Doctors or lawyers, by the looks of them. They politely backed off when I entered the little building.