Bad Little Falls (12 page)

OUCH!

Ma comes back and she has something in her hand. I can’t tell what. She’s got her eyes closed and she’s moving her lips like she’s praying, but no words are coming out. She sits down next to me again.

What did you forget, Ma?

She holds out her hand and there’s a little green plastic chip. It says UNITY/SERVICE/RECOVERY in a triangle around the words 3 MONTHS.

What’s that? I ask.

My good-luck charm, she says.

12

You can tell a lot about a town from its hospital. The one in Machias was located on a piney stretch of road, not near anything in particular except an abandoned horse-racing track festooned with
NO TRESPASSING
signs. Most people would have driven past the building without realizing it was the local medical center. The low-slung brick structure was smaller than my old junior high in Scarborough.

Whoever decorated the interior had gone for a casual down-home effect, sort of like a country inn. The waiting room was painted a canary yellow, with several blue couches and floral-print chairs arranged around an imitation woodstove. A totally bald man who looked like he might have fought in the Battle of the Bulge sat in a robe and slippers, watching old newsreels play in his head. The only other person in the room was an odd-looking boy who had his legs drawn up beneath him in his chair and was scribbling violently in a notebook.

We met a male nurse, a whip-thin guy in green scrubs, coming down the checkerboard hallway that led to the emergency room.

“Hey, Sheriff,” the nurse said. “What’s up?”

“Who’s on duty in the ER this morning, Tommy?”

“Dr. Chatterjee.”

“Can I speak with him?”

“He’s with a patient—it’s a severe hypothermia case.”

“Yes, I know,” said the sheriff. “The patient’s name is Prester Sewall. We have reason to believe he might be dangerous.”

The nurse nodded as if he understood—although he clearly didn’t—and disappeared down the hall in the direction of the ER.

The last time I’d set foot in a hospital had been a year earlier, when I’d had my skull fractured by the scariest man I’d ever met. He’d beaten me to within an inch of my life, and it was a miracle I’d survived. It was a different hospital, different emergency room, but the memories of that day made the hairs on my neck prickle.

After a few minutes, a doctor in a white coat and scrubs came hurrying along from the ER. He had the darkest skin of anyone I’d met in Washington County, and jet-black hair swept up from his forehead. His plastic-frame glasses didn’t hide the shadows under his eyes.

“Is there a problem?” There was a trace of Bangalore in his inflections.

“Not yet,” said Rhine.

“I’ve been up since last night, Sheriff, so I am in no shape for badinage.” When he spoke, his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a walnut caught in his throat.

“I’m stationing one of my deputies in a chair beside Prester Sewall’s bed.”

Young Dr. Chatterjee gave a high-pitched laugh. “Tell him to bring a good book.”

“Now you’re the one not being clear, Doc.”

The doctor crooked his finger at us. “Follow me.”

He led us to the intensive-care unit, or med-surg unit, as they called it at this hospital. It was an open area—loud with beeping machines, buzzing phones, and snatches of conversation among passing people—where a nurse sat at a central desk, facing a row of glass-walled rooms. In one of these rooms lay Prester Sewall.

If anything, he looked even worse than the last time I’d seen him. He was stretched out on a wheeled bed, with a sheet pulled up around his chest and an IV jammed into his freckled arm. Most of his nose and both of his ears had gone completely black. His blistered cheeks were mauve. His hands were wrapped in bandages that made his arms look like soft white clubs.

“We’ve just moved him here from the ER,” said Chatterjee.

“Can he hear us?” Rhine asked.

“We’ve given him a dopamine infusion, but he’s so exhausted, he keeps slipping back into sleep.”

“This is the warden who treated him,” the sheriff explained.

Chatterjee studied my face. “You did an excellent job of rewarming him. He’s not showing any signs of atrial fibrillation.”

“So it looks like he’s going to make it, then?” Rhine asked.

“His condition is critical but hemodynamically stable,” the doctor said.

I sensed movement behind me.

“Prester!”

Jamie Sewall stood in the door. Her hair was a frizzled mess and her eyes were red as beets, but I recognized the high cheekbones, the wide lips.

“How did you get in here?” the doctor asked.

“He’s my brother!”

“Miss Sewall, please,” implored the sheriff. “You can’t be in here right now. His condition isn’t stable yet.”

“He’s my brother!” She seemed to be on the verge of hyperventilating.

Chatterjee stepped between the young woman and the bed, but she nearly knocked him aside.

“Warden, can you help me with this?” asked the sheriff.

“Miss Sewall.” I put my hand on her arm, but she threw it off. I tried again with more strength.

“Let go of me!”

“Take her outside,” the doctor told me. “There’s a room down the hall—number three. Stay with her.”

“I want to talk with him!”

“He’s sedated,” I said softly, trying to calm her down with my voice while I pulled her from the bedside. “He can’t speak to you.”

“I’ll be there in a moment,” said Chatterjee.

The woman turned her brown eyes up at me, and I felt her resistance give way. “Why can’t I stay here?”

“They’re trying to take care of him.”

It was the only answer I could muster, but it must have sufficed, because she went willingly with me into the examination room the doctor had indicated.

*   *   *

Inside room number three, I sat her down in a plastic chair and stood with my back against the door in case she grew wild again. She had one hand clenched into a small fist, as if ready to throw a punch with it, and she was shaking and crying at the same time.

“Why won’t they let me see him?” She had a smoker’s rough voice, although there was no smell of cigarettes on her clothing, just a touch of faded perfume, musky and sweet in the closed room. “They said when he left the ER, I could go in and see him, but now the nurse at the desk says he’s not permitted to have visitors. Why is the sheriff here? What’s going on?”

“The police are conducting an investigation. Do you know what happened to your brother last night, Miss Sewall?”

“He has hypothermia. The doctor told me he got lost in the storm.” She used her sweater hem to dab at her eyes.

“He was in a car that got stuck on a logging road in Township Nineteen. Do you have any idea what he was doing out there?”

She took a while to respond. “No.”

“Does he own any property in the Heath?”

Jamie Sewall burst out laughing. “Prester? He doesn’t even own a car.”

When she smiled, she became again the beautiful young woman I’d met the previous morning. So far, she had shown no signs of recognizing me from McDonald’s. I was just another guy in a uniform, as far as she was concerned.

“Where does he live?” I asked.

“With me and my son, Lucas, and my sister, Tammi, in Whitney,” she said.

“What does he do for work?”

She laughed again. “Prester doesn’t believe in work.”

I decided to gauge her candor. “Do you know a man named Randall Cates?”

She sat up in her chair and looked at me coldly. “He used to be my boyfriend. We broke up last year.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Yesterday afternoon. He stopped at my house to pick up Prester. Why? What happened to him?”

“Did either of them tell you where they were going or who they might be meeting?”

Her eyes widened. “Randall is dead, isn’t he? I can tell by the way you’re talking about him.”

How had I given myself away? I wasn’t supposed to disclose that information until the state police had notified the next of kin. For all the apparent hysteria, Jamie Sewall was a perceptive young woman.

I remained silent.

She slumped in her plastic chair. “Oh my God. It’s true.” She didn’t seemed shocked by the news so much as relieved but unwilling to get her hopes up prematurely. Her topaz irises were shining with new tears. “Please tell me he’s really dead.”

By all rights, I should have refrained from offering a confirmation. Regulations say you should never disclose a death until the next of kin has been notified. But when Jamie Sewall gazed at me with that pleading expression, I found that I couldn’t stop the words from coming out of my mouth.

“Yes,” I said. “He’s really dead.”

She clapped her hands to her face. When she did, an object she’d been clutching dropped to the ground and skidded across the floor. I knelt to pick it up. It was a green poker chip. I recognized it as one of the tokens they hand out in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to mark the milestones of sobriety.

“Thank you,” she said, accepting it from me with an embarrassed smile.

“You’re welcome.”

We smiled at each other for a while, and then she leaned forward as if to get a closer look at me. “I know you,” she said suddenly. “You came into the McDonald’s yesterday. You ordered an egg McMuffin and a large coffee.”

“That was me.”

“I told you about how Lucas is reading that book on rangers.”

“Is that your son in the waiting room?”

“The kid with the glasses, writing in the notebook? Yeah, that’s my strange little man.”

The door opened behind me. It was Dr. Chatterjee. “How is everyone doing in here?”

Jamie rose to her feet. She was nearly a foot shorter than me. “Is Prester going to be OK, Doctor?”

Chatterjee cleared his throat and adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose. “Can you give us a moment, Warden?”

I stepped outside the room and closed the door. I stood in the antiseptic-smelling hall, thinking about the enigmatic woman inside. Her brother and ex-boyfriend were drug dealers. I suspected she knew why they had been going to Township Nineteen and whom they’d planned to meet there. And yet the relief she’d showed when I’d let slip the news of Randall’s death hadn’t been fake. Nor was the gratitude she’d expressed when I’d handed her the sobriety chip.

Who the hell is this woman
? I asked myself.

I could hear her voice rising as she spoke with Dr. Chatterjee. Washington County wasn’t the most diverse place in the world. What was a young Indian doctor doing in Machias? Another man in exile, I thought.

The door opened and Dr. Chatterjee peered out. “She wants to know if you can check on her son in the waiting room. We’re going to visit with her brother now.”

“The police need to get a statement from him before he talks to anyone else.”

“The sheriff will be there if he wakes up.” His tone suggested that the likelihood of Prester Sewall’s waking up at present was slim.

The door swung open and the doctor came out, followed by Jamie Sewall. Her model-perfect face was dry now, but she was still clutching the sobriety chip for dear life, and when she passed me in the hall, the smile she gave me was heartbreakingly gorgeous.

God help me,
said the voice in my head.

FEBRUARY 14

The last time I was awake all night was when Dad showed up that time outside the house and started yelling for Randle to come out and fight him like a man. Dad could have beat him easy, but Randle went out there in his underwear with his Glock and I thought he might really shoot Dad until Ma ran out, screaming.

After Dad drove off, Randle called the cops and said there was a drunk guy driving on our road, because he wanted them to bust Dad for OPERATING UNDER THE INFLUENCE.

That’s what happened, too.

Dad didn’t know it was Randle who ratted him out until I told him. He didn’t thank me or nothing, though.

13

Lucas Sewall was still seated in the same chair, head bowed, skinny legs drawn up beneath him, lost in his own imaginings.

“Lucas?”

The boy continued to scribble. He was left-handed, so he held the ballpoint pen upside down. His pale little hand was stained with blue ink.

“Lucas?”

The boy stopped and jerked his head up, as if I’d tossed a bucket of cold water on his head. His hair was thin and chestnut-colored like his mom’s, and he had the same cleft in his chin. His head seemed two sizes too large for his scrawny body. He was wearing a hooded gray sweatshirt with abundant ink stains, and blue Dickies tucked into snow boots. A puffy orange vest was slung across the next seat. I had no clue whatsoever how old he was.

I’d been nine when my mom left my dad and we began our gypsy period, moving from apartment to rented house, just the two of us, always on the move.

I towered over the boy. “I’m Warden Bowditch. Your mom asked me to see how you were doing.”

“Are you a ranger?”

“No, I’m a game warden. Rangers work in parks, helping people camp or watching for forest fires. Wardens are like police officers in the woods.”

“Is Prester dead?”

“No,” I said. “But he’s very sick. Your mom is visiting with him now.”

His eyes darted to my holster. “What kind of gun is that?”

“It’s a semiautomatic pistol.”

“Can I see it?”

“I don’t think that would be a good idea. Guns are very dangerous. You should never play with them.”

“Did you ever shoot anybody?”

Unfortunately, yes, I wanted to say. Two people, in fact, and both occurrences haunted me in the predawn hours. But I kept my mouth shut. “What are you writing?”

He closed the front cover and tucked the pen over his outsize ear. There was blue ink on his earlobe. “Stories.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Do you have a dollar and a quarter for a can of Coke?”