The Precipice (2 page)

“Very funny.” Stacey and I were both hunters. “I gave it to the Wounded Warrior Project.”

“Because of your friend who was wounded in Afghanistan?”

I didn’t like to think about Jimmy Gammon, who had come home from war disfigured beyond recognition and in constant agony, or the way he had chosen to die. “The way this country treats its veterans is a disgrace.”

She came over, grabbed the back of my head with both hands, and slipped her tongue into my ear. Her breath was hot against my neck. “Have I ever told you how sexy your righteous indignation is?”

I cocked an eyebrow. “Are you teasing me, Stacey?”

“No, but I’m about to. Come with me.”

That moment, as if on cue, the manager appeared at the screen door. He was a slow-moving and seemingly unapologetic character, and he banged around in the crawl space beneath the building for ten minutes before emerging with a wrench in his hand and a head wispy with spiderwebs.

“You’re all set here,” he said in a heavy Maine accent.

“So how about knocking a couple hundred dollars off the rent for the inconvenience?” said Stacey.

“Do you want me to leave the wrench?” the man replied.

“I’m serious, champ,” she said. “How about a discount?”

“Enjoy your stay.”

“Gotta love the customer service in this place,” Stacey said with a full-body laugh after the manager had driven off in his minivan. “Now, where were we?”

She took my hand and pulled me into the little bedroom. It was wallpapered in seashell patterns and painted in soft beach colors.

I sat down on the mattress, and the springs made a rusty, complaining sound. “At least the bed isn’t broken.”

She tugged her T-shirt over her shoulders and head. “Not yet,” she said.

*   *   *

The first time Stacey and I had slept together was the most intense sexual experience I’d ever had. The second time was even more exciting. By this point in our relationship, however, I’d begun to realize that our physical intimacy was fast outpacing our emotional intimacy.

I tried to make a joke out of it as we lay together now, listening to the pounding waves through the open window.

“You know, Stacey, sometimes I wonder if you’re just using me for sex.”

She ran a hand through my crew cut. “Oh, poor you.”

“I’m not complaining!”

“You’d be the first man in history who ever did, Bowditch.”

Before I could say another word, she slid off the mattress and disappeared into the shower.

I lay on my back, watching the breeze ruffle the thin cotton curtain. The midday sun angled in through the window and touched my groin and bare legs with its warmth. I could taste the salt air on my lips.

I was so positive that she was the love of my life, that the two of us were meant to be together, and yet she seemed content that we remain intimate strangers. Even her playful habit of calling me by my last name seemed like an attempt to hold me at bay.

My cell phone rang in the living room. I grabbed my jeans from the floor and pulled them on.

It was my new sergeant, Jason Ouellette, apologizing for interrupting my weekend. He said that two hikers had gone missing on the Appalachian Trail and asked if I could make myself available to assist with the search. The Hundred Mile Wilderness was a solid three hours’ drive north of Popham Beach, in the remote Moosehead Lake region. While it wasn’t unusual for wardens to be summoned to far-flung locales, the sergeant’s request suggested a need for extra manpower that went well beyond the ordinary.

I heard the shower stop in the bathroom and felt a pang, not so much at the thought of losing hundreds of dollars on the beach-house rental as for the missed opportunity to make inroads with Stacey.

“Can you come?” asked Ouellete.

“Of course,” I said.

Stacey stepped out of the bathroom with a terry-cloth towel wrapped around her body. I signed off with the sergeant and tucked the phone in the back pocket of my jeans.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Two women disappeared in the Hundred Mile Wilderness. They’re thru-hiking the AT, and they were supposed to talk to their parents in Georgia three days ago. It doesn’t sound good.”

Some of the color seemed to drain from Stacey’s suntanned face and she sat down, almost as if her legs had given way, on the edge of the pale sofa.

“They just graduated from Pentecost University,” I said. “Have you heard of it? I never have.”

“It’s a Christian school down south. How old are they?”

“Twenty-one and twenty-two.”

Her hair was dripping in her face, but her almond-shaped eyes had glazed over, as if she had fallen into a trance.

“What is it?” I asked. “Are you OK?”

“I was twenty-one when we hiked the Long Trail in Vermont, my friends and me.”

I had a feeling that she was referring to the three women I’d met earlier that spring in the village of Grand Lake Stream, including her former girlfriend, Kendra. “Did something happen to you?”

Her pupils tightened into focus, but she still seemed shaken. “No.”

“Then what is it?”

“We met some creepy men that week. But there were four of us. I can’t imagine what would have happened if it had just been me and Kendra.”

Stacey was a pilot and a scuba diver, a crack shot with a rifle or a pistol, and she could track the blood trail of a dying moose through an impenetrable swamp. As a wildlife biologist, she went alone into all sorts of dark places, and it had never occurred to me to worry about her. But her wavering tone made me wonder if something bad really had happened to her on the Long Trail and that for some reason she was unwilling to admit it. The thought that she might be keeping a secret troubled me.

“I don’t have to volunteer for this,” I said. “I can stay here with you.”

She frowned, as if I’d just uttered some drunken nonsense. “You have to go, and you know it.”

I glanced at our luggage, which was sitting where we’d left it beside the door. At least we hadn’t unpacked. “I’ve already paid for the cottage. You can stay if you want.”

“Not while those girls are missing.”

“Maybe they’ll show up tonight and I’ll be able to turn right around and come back here.”

She pushed the wet strands of hair out of her eyes and stood up, clutching the towel tightly above her breasts so it wouldn’t drop. She returned to the bedroom without meeting my gaze again.

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” she said, her voice hard with certainty.

2

About five hundred people are reported missing in Maine each year. Most of them are found somewhere between twenty-four and forty-eight hours later. The Bible students—as the media ended up referring to them—had been missing for nearly two weeks when we got the call.

Two weeks. Too late.

Those four words were running in a loop in my head as I adjusted the sweaty straps on my canvas rucksack and looked up the forested mountainside at the rapidly receding back of my search partner—an improbably able-bodied volunteer whom I’d met earlier that afternoon at the command post. The two of us had driven in my patrol truck from the North Woods village of Monson to a distant logging road where we could intersect the trail closer to the midsection of the Hundred Mile Wilderness. Despite my best efforts at making conversation, he’d barely spoken a word to me on the hour-long drive, preferring to stare out the window at the blur of green trees through which we were traveling.

I assumed my youthful athleticism was why I’d been assigned the legendary Bob “Nonstop” Nissen and sent to check the remote Chairback Gap lean-to for signs the women might have stopped there. But as soon as the two of us had set off on the access trail to the shelter, I knew this middle-aged man was going to kick my ass. He was well past fifty, but he could scramble up a sheer cliff like a Barbary ape. Most wilderness rescue volunteers use trekking poles, or even climbing axes, to steady themselves, but Nissen preferred to use his big calloused hands to pull himself up the mountain, going on four limbs at times. He had skin so sun-browned, it seemed to be turning to leather; and he was wearing safari shorts, which showed off calf muscles the size of grapefruits. His climbing boots were made by La Sportiva, one of the best and most expensive brands in the world, which told me a lot about the man’s priorities.

Now I watched him disappear around a clump of lichen-crusted boulders.

Since we’d started climbing an hour earlier, Nissen hadn’t so much as glanced back in my direction. He seemed to view our assignment less as a search-and-rescue mission and more as a personal competition. His sole purpose seemed to be getting to the top of Chairback before me.

Back in Monson, while we were packing our supplies, the officer in charge had told me how Nissen had gotten his unusual nickname. For more than two decades, he’d held the record for the fastest “unsupported” thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail—sixty-one days from south to north, carrying his own supplies, without the assistance of another human being. He’d recently lost his title to a young trail runner from Virginia, but I could easily imagine Nonstop coming out of retirement to regain his former glory.

Perspiration had soaked the brim of my black duty cap and was now streaming freely into the corners of my eyes. I’d left my olive green ballistic vest and button-down shirt back at the truck. I was now dressed in green cargo pants and a black T-shirt with the words
GAME WARDEN
printed on the back. In place of the L.L. Bean hunting shoes I normally wore, I’d put on a pair of Danner climbing boots. I’d even locked my SIG Sauer .357 pistol in the glove compartment. It felt unsettling to be in the wild unarmed.

The skies were gray and darker in the west; the forecast called for late-afternoon thunderstorms. The hot, humid air surrounded me like a damp towel thrown over my head. The September woods were still lush and green on certain north-facing hillsides but sunburned and dry as kindling in other places. Both the thermometer and the calendar indicated that this was a summer day, but I had noticed a swamp maple glowing red in one of the wet ravines—a harbinger of autumn soon to come. A broad-winged hawk soared high above the treetops, crying its thin cry. The raptors had begun their southbound migration.

Stacey teased me about being a “compulsive noticer.” I was like a cat, she said, easily distracted by every crawling bug and fluttering leaf. What could I do? It was who I was. And I thought it made me good at my job.

Five hours earlier, I’d been relaxing in bed beside her, feeling the cool sea air on my skin and listening to the rhythmic crashing of the waves. Now here I was in the sweltering mountains, trying to keep pace with a freak of nature. As much as I loved the forest, the appeal of mountain climbing for its own sake had always eluded me. I could understand why some people—especially those who lived in cities or suburbs—might feel the urge to hike the Appalachian Trail, but for someone who essentially lived in the Maine woods, as I did, there was no need to embark on a two-thousand-mile journey to commune with nature.

On the drive up, I’d kept picturing the dazed look in Stacey’s eyes when she’d told me about hiking Vermont’s Long Trail with her friends. I was more and more certain that she was withholding something from me about that experience. She’d mentioned meeting “creepy men” in the woods. God knows, there are plenty of them out here, I thought. My search partner among them.

When I had finally worked my way around the clump of boulders, I was surprised to find Nissen seated on a log, waiting for me. He had taken off his shirt, displaying a brown torso so venous and devoid of fat that it looked like a textbook illustration for the human circulatory system. There was a small crucifix tattooed in green ink between his pectoral muscles. And he was eating a banana that he had removed from the fanny pack he wore slung around his narrow hips.

“You hanging in there?” he asked with an expression that didn’t seem overly concerned with my answer.

I nodded, unable to utter an actual sentence in reply. My lungs burned as if I’d inhaled smoke from a campfire. It annoyed me that I couldn’t keep pace with a man old enough to have been my father.

Nissen had interesting hair: dark brown in color and cut in a style that fell somewhere between Moe of the Three Stooges and early Paul McCartney. His head was triangular in shape, narrowing to a stubbled chin. He had enormous brown eyes, like an arboreal creature that had evolved to see in the dark.

“I’m used to hiking alone, so sometimes I go too fast,” he said.

“Wouldn’t it have been easier to come up the AT rather than bushwhacking like this?” I reached for one of my water bottles and unscrewed the lid.

“Easier, yeah. But this shortcut is faster. Besides, I thought you’d prefer slabbing.”

“Slabbing?”

“Going around the summit. There’s a precipice near the top that’s a bitch to climb.”

I didn’t appreciate the insinuation that I wasn’t up to the challenge. “We should be looking for signs of Samantha and Missy rather than just racing to the top. Blowing our whistles, too.”

He stuffed the remainder of the banana into his mouth and then carefully rolled up the peel and tucked it into his fanny pack. “Until we get a look at the logbook in the Chairback Gap lean-to, we won’t even know if those girls made it this far. First order of business is narrowing down the PLS, right?”

The abbreviation stood for “point last seen.” In the jargon of search-and-rescue, it indicated the place on a map where a missing person had last been positively identified. I hated to admit it, but Nissen was right about the futility of examining every rock and leaf for signs of the two college kids. The reason we’d been sent on this quick ascent up Chairback Mountain was to help refine the search area. Normally, we would have been part of a bigger group, but the officer in charge—Lt. John DeFord—had deployed teams to do quick checks, called “hasty searches,” of the trail registers. Other squads were rushing to inspect the lean-tos at Logan Brook and Potaywadjo Spring, farther north, in hopes that Samantha and Missy might have left messages there.

Nissen sprang like a jack-in-the-box to his feet. He was probably no taller than five-seven. “Do you want to rest some more while I go ahead?”