The Precipice (27 page)

Later a message had gone out over the police scanner that we were looking for Chad McDonough. By identifying him over the radio, we had announced to the killer that we knew the kid might have incriminating information. We’d signed his death warrant, I realized. Pinkham said McDonut had been run down by a truck. What if it had been a van?

Nissen was the first man to discover the scavenged bones at the bottom of Chairback Mountain. He’d displayed no anguish at the discovery. In fact, he had relished being the one to have found the corpses.

At every turn in the search, Nissen had been there. This theory explained everything.

Had Stacey come to this same conclusion? I couldn’t believe that she would have been so stupid as to drive out to Nissen’s isolated farmhouse if she suspected he was a murderer. But what else would have led her there after dark?

My pulse was racing as I dialed Wes Pinkham’s home number in Greenville.

“Yeah?” he said.

“It’s Bowditch. We need to get over to Bob Nissen’s house in Blanchard right now.”

“Huh? What are you talking about? Where are you?”

“At Ross’s, in Monson. Listen, I think Nissen might have murdered Samantha Boggs and Missy Montgomery. And there’s a chance he’s connected to the hit-and-run that killed Chad McDonough, too.”

“Slow down.”

“There’s no time,” I said. “I’m pretty sure Stacey Stevens is at his house. If I’m right, she’s in danger, or worse. And I just discovered that she left her phone at the rooming house. I need you to pick me up. I’ll fill you in on what I’ve learned in the truck. You need to trust me, Pinkham. You know I’ve been right about things like this before. We need to go now.”

I heard the warden investigator take a breath. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he said at last.

31

The predawn sky had a fuzzy blue glow that reminded me of a television with no reception. Closer to the ground, the shadows were breaking apart as individual trees sharpened into focus. A goldfinch perched on a wire made its squeaky-toy noise. I waited at the edge of the wet lawn for Pinkham to arrive.

In the empty dining room, I’d wolfed down a bowl of dry Cheerios from a container I’d found on the sideboard. I’d heard Ross puttering in the kitchen but hadn’t wanted to trouble him for milk.

In less than an hour, the sky would turn pink above the ragged horizon, and Charley’s plane would appear. I had thought of calling him with my revelation about Nissen, but he would be here soon enough. Once he arrived, I would tell him to take a look at Breakneck Ridge from the air and see if he spotted Stacey’s pickup.

A truck turned down the road, its headlights slicing the early-morning gloom. When I opened the door, the dome light came on. Pinkham’s thinning hair was sticking up in wisps, and he needed a shave. I really had pulled him out of bed. The investigator was dressed in his usual plain clothes—button-down shirt and chinos—but he’d put on his warden’s jacket with the badge on the front and the red department logo on the sleeve. He wore his SIG openly on his belt.

The inside of the cab smelled of hot coffee. When I saw that he’d picked up a cup for me, I wanted to kiss him. I slung my duffel into the backseat.

“What’s in the bag?” Pinkham asked.

“Guns.”

“Dare I ask why?”

The light above my head dimmed after I locked the door. “My truck is at the garage in town, getting repaired. The Dows slashed all four of my tires last night outside the Cajun restaurant. I appreciate your picking me up.”

He shifted into drive. “How do you know it was the Dows?”

“They invited me to a brawl first.”

“You must have refused,” he said.

“Why do you say that?”

“No stitches.”

Pinkham took a sip from his Styrofoam cup. I had no need for caffeine with all the adrenaline percolating through my bloodstream, but I joined him.

“I listened to the voice mail you left me,” he said. “It’s interesting that Samantha and Missy visited the tabernacle, but what does that have to do with Nissen?”

“Maybe nothing.”

“That clears things up. Thanks for getting me out of bed.”

“Kathy Frost told me that Nissen was born again in prison,” I said. “I saw him with his shirt off, and I think he had his jailhouse tattoos removed. I’m guessing that his name is going to show up on the list of people who attend services at the Lake of the Woods Tabernacle.”

“You’re guessing?”

“For the moment, yes. But here’s something I know for sure: Nissen had supper at Ross’s the same night Samantha and Missy were there. That’s quite a coincidence, don’t you think? The man who volunteered to search the mountain where they died—the same guy who found their bones—had a previous encounter with them he neglected to report to the police.”

Pinkham kept his eyes on the cones of light projected onto the road. He made a right onto the Blanchard Road, following the shoreline of Lake Hebron into the deep woods west of town. The police radio made a gurgling noise.

“All right,” he said, turning down the volume. “You’ve got my attention.”

He listened without interruption as I laid out my theory about Nissen. As I heard myself talking, I kept thinking how much was pure speculation. I was weaving a crazy quilt out of circumstantial threads of evidence. When I finished, I was half-afraid Pinkham would push me out of the truck.

“Has Stacey forgotten her phone before?” he asked.

“She does it all the time.”

“So when was the last time you spoke with her?”

“A couple of days ago. We had an argument. I was letting her cool down.”

When he smiled, he reminded me of a kindly schoolteacher. “I heard she told Tom Waterman to perform an anatomical impossibility on himself.”

“I heard that, too. That’s one of the reasons I raced up here.”

“And you discovered she’d been nosing around town, trying to prove that Samantha and Missy were really murdered?”

“Stacey has a tendency to get single-minded about things.”

“It sounds like you two were made for each other.”

Tell
her
that, I wanted to say.

“I can’t think of any other reason for her to have gone to Blanchard other than to talk with Nissen. And you have to admit there’s cause to be suspicious of him.”

He didn’t answer, but I noticed the speedometer jump ten miles per hour.

*   *   *

The road was like a groove gouged through the forest. Every mile or so, we passed a lighted homestead with trucks and ATVs in their dooryards and often a
BEWARE OF DOG
sign out front. It was the kind of road where you prayed not to break down after dark and be forced to knock on doors.

Fifteen minutes after we left Monson, we came to a crossroads where a handful of homes were clustered together. Robins hopped across the lawn of a white meeting house. Flowers were dying in its window boxes, and a frayed American flag hung limply from a pole. We crossed a bridge over the shallow, quick-flowing Piscataquis River and made a hard right after the municipal sand shed. Then we were plunged into the forest again. That seemed to be the entire village of Blanchard.

“What do you know about Nissen?” I asked.

“I see him selling honey and beeswax candles at the farmers’ market in Greenville,” Pinkham said. “He’s not the most sociable human being I’ve ever met, but I guess that’s not news to you. DeFord tells me Nissen knows every inch of the Appalachian Trail. That’s why Moosehead Search and Rescue lets him volunteer despite his being a convicted felon. As far as I know, he’s never been in trouble since he moved to Maine from down south. I would have heard if he’d ever been pinched for anything.”

“Ever hear anything that would suggest he’s a religious fanatic?”

The warden detective peeked at me from behind his glasses. “What do you mean?”

“Is he known to be a Christian extremist?”

“I go to church every Sunday—Holy Family in Greenville. Does that make me an extremist, too?”

“No.”

We drove on for another few minutes. We had left the last of the streetlights behind.

Without looking at me, Pinkham said, “The worst thing you can do is go into an investigation prejudiced.”

“I’ll try to remember that.”

“We don’t know how the girls died yet, let alone why. I think you’re trying to come up with a motive that fits your personal bias. You don’t like Nissen, and so you want him to be guilty.”

“So what if I do?”

“How is that any different from the folks who believe coyotes killed those girls?”

In my head, I tried to articulate a response—of course it was different—but my thoughts kept sputtering out.

“You’re right,” I said finally. “I don’t like Nissen. And I don’t know if he’s a murderer. What scares me is that Stacey might find out before we do.”

Pinkham had the same government-issue GPS unit mounted to his dash that I used in my truck. I saw Breakneck Ridge appear on the screen as a series of elevation lines. I peered out the window, looking for it. At first I couldn’t see anything. Then I became aware of an elongated hill looming above the treetops like the humped back of a sleeping animal.

The unmarked turnoff came on us quickly. Pinkham cornered too fast, and the force knocked the side of my head against the window. The dirt road climbed in switchbacks up the north face of the ridge.

Near the top, we came to a muddy field that had recently been a forest. The loggers had left some stumps and a few scraggly trees to comply with the state law against wholesale clear-cutting, but they had taken everything else. Torn pieces of bark and wood chips carpeted the dirt road. The treads of heavy machines crisscrossed the property like so many stitched wounds.

I surveyed the injured hillside with disgust. “Is this Nissen’s woodlot? It looks like it’s been scalped.”

“No, this is Dow land.”

“Wait a minute. The Dows live in Blanchard?”

“Not here,” said Pinkham. “Their compound is off the Barrows Falls Road. But the family owns land all over town. Across the line in Monson, too. The Dows settled this whole area back in the 1800s. Every generation sold off a bit more and a bit more. In a few years, they won’t even own the land under their own houses.”

When I had heard that Stacey had been spotted going to Blanchard, I’d jumped to the conclusion that she’d been headed to Nissen’s place. What if she’d been headed for the Dows’ backwoods stronghold? I didn’t dare say anything to Pinkham after he’d just warned me against letting my imagination whip up conspiracy theories.

Pinkham took his foot off the gas pedal and extinguished his headlights.

“I’m going to park here, and we can walk up,” he said.

We followed the road out of the clearing and into an uncut stand of softwoods whose branches interwove above us. One of the oaks decided to bounce an acorn off my head. Far away, I heard the cackle of crows leaving their roost.

Pinkham moved surprisingly softly. His jowls and beer belly had made me forget that he’d been a district warden before becoming an investigator. The man clearly knew how to find his way in the woods.

We emerged into another field, this one rolling and wide. Everywhere I looked I saw white boxes rising from asters, goldenrod, and ragweed. Nissen’s beehives. During daylight hours, the air must have been alive with buzzing, but the insects were asleep now in their wooden frames, waiting for the sun to clear the treetops. Then they would begin their incessant work of harvesting pollen.

Pinkham paused in the middle of the road. “Up there,” he whispered.

A log cabin squatted against the tree line. No lights shone in the windows. No smoke rose from the stainless-steel chimney pipe. In the gloom, I could distinguish an assortment of outbuildings—various sheds and workshops—but there was no sign of a human presence. I saw a bright orange Kubota tractor. Where was Stacey’s truck? Where was Nissen’s van?

There were tire marks on the ground—headed in and out. I knelt down and ran my fingers over the subtle ridges. The Warden Service had trained me to read treads the way fortune-tellers do palms. In the right conditions, I could tell what type of vehicles had driven along a dirt road, whether they had been heavily loaded, and when they had last been through. It was a good party trick to show off to my nonwarden friends. Most of the marks I saw had been left by the same vehicle—obviously Nissen’s van. But there was another set left by a pickup that had recently come and gone. It had to have been Stacey’s.

I took a step toward the darkened cabin, then another. Pinkham called my name as loudly as he dared. I kept walking, my eyes fixed on the ground, following the tracks she had left behind.

She had parked under an old apple tree from which Nissen had harvested the best fruit. In the spring, its blossoms must have trembled with hungry bees. A few misshapen apples still clung to the limbs and other rejects lay scattered about the grass. I kicked aside the rotting cores until an odd-shaped piece of plastic caught my eye. I dropped hard to my knees and cradled Stacey’s broken sunglasses in my hands.

32

Pinkham leaned over my shoulder. “You’re sure those are her sunglasses?”

“What are the odds that Nissen also wears emerald-green Maui Jims?”

The warden investigator studied the crushed patterns left in the grass by the truck. “It looks to me like she might have dropped them without realizing. I’d say they broke when she ran over them on her way out.”

“What if she left them for us as a sign?”

“A sign of what?”

“That she was taken against her will.”

“I know you’re upset,” he said, “but it’s a lot more likely that she was just careless. You said she tends to be forgetful. If Nissen forced her to go someplace, then why is his van gone, too?”

I didn’t have a ready answer for him. I glanced up at the cabin, which I could see better now that the sun was coming up. It appeared to be a new building; the logs were still orange and the green roof shingles hadn’t yet begun to warp or curl. I rose to my feet and handed Pinkham the shattered glasses.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I’m going to have a look inside.”