Bad Little Falls (3 page)

There was static on the other end of the line. “You should talk to Rivard about that coyote,” she said. “He might have some idea who the local jokers are.”

“OK.”

Rivard and I were scheduled to meet later that morning. My new sergeant had woken me at dawn, saying that he needed me to accompany him to a nearby school to confront some teenagers who might or might not have broken into several vacated summer cabins on the shores of Bog Pond.

“How you holding up down there, Grasshopper?” Kathy asked.

“Fine.”

“Liar. You’ll be all right once you get laid.”

“Jesus, Kathy.”

“We’re breaking up here,” she said before we finally lost the signal.

*   *   *

Washington County has lots of nicknames.

It’s sometimes called the Bold Coast because of its wave-washed cliffs. Others refer to it as the Sunrise Coast because, as the easternmost stretch of land in the continental U.S. it is supposedly the first place to see the sunrise—provided there’s no mist, rain, or snow, which is almost never. There are stony capes and islands here that see more fog than San Francisco or the entire Olympic Peninsula.

But the most common term people use to refer to Washington County is
Down East.

In Maine, you might say that up is down. You travel
down
the coast from New Hampshire to New Brunswick—not up it—despite the fact that you’re heading north the whole time. Down East is an old nautical term from the age of sail, when schooners sailed downwind from Boston, carrying passengers and rum to Maine’s eastern ports and the Canadian Maritimes.

The windjammer trade might have blown south, but the contraband was still flowing freely in Washington County, although rum had largely been replaced by coffee brandy (Maine’s unofficial state liquor), crystal meth, heroin, locally grown marijuana, and illegal prescription drugs, many of which were smuggled in from Canada. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the border with New Brunswick had hardened. There were more checkpoints, more Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, more unmanned surveillance of the boundary woods and waters. Certainly there were more hassles for anyone who wished to drive from one nation to the other. None of these impediments seem to thwart smugglers.

By most measures, the state of Maine has the worst prescription-drug-abuse rates in America. The Maine Drug Enforcement Agency had given wardens a list of commonly abused medications, which included Dilaudid, Lorcet, Lortab, OxyContin, Percocet, Percodan, Tylox, Librium, Valium, Xanax, Adderall, Concerta, Vicodin, and Ritalin. Cross-border smuggling was only part of the problem. Addicts also forged prescriptions and conned multiple doctors into writing multiple scripts. They stole pills from the medicine cabinets of sick friends and relatives. Occasionally, some drugstore cowboy would even hold up an actual pharmacy. Painkillers were easy to obtain in Down East Maine—provided you had the money.

The problem was, nobody had any money. The street price for an Oxy 80—an eighty-milligram tablet of oxycodone—was eighty dollars. Very few jobs in depressed Washington County paid half that much for a day’s work. As a result, burglaries and home invasions were epidemic. Aside from the drug dealers themselves, the only entrepreneurs thriving in my district were the backwoods fences who dealt in stolen electronics and Grandma’s heirloom jewelry.

After I showered and shaved, I buttoned my uniform up over the thin ballistic vest I was required to wear each day. The uniform was olive-colored, like the fatigues worn by soldiers in Korea or Vietnam, with
POLICE
stenciled across the back. The trousers tucked into black combat boots. My P226 rode low on my gun belt, counterbalancing a holster containing Cap-Stun pepper spray. Every day I dressed like a man going to war.

I opened the fridge to see what I had for breakfast. Inside was a single blue can of Foster’s, half an onion in a plastic bag, and a box of baking soda. I’d purchased the beer the night I’d moved in as a housewarming gift to myself but had decided against opening it. Toward the end of my relationship with Sarah, I’d been drinking way too much, and I worried that living alone, I might fall into bad habits. Seeing that can of Foster’s every day and not opening it had become a personal test of will.

I was still studying my bare cupboards when Rivard’s GMC pulled up to my trailer. He gave the horn a honk, scattering a flock of Bohemian waxwings from the crabapple tree across the right-of-way.

I zipped my parka and stepped outside into the barbarous cold. Instantly, my eyes began tearing up and my cheeks burned as if I’d been smacked in the face with a bag of ice.

I slid into the passenger seat. “Jesus, how cold is it?”

“Minus four.”

As usual, he was wearing dark sunglasses despite the overcast sky. Marc Rivard wasn’t that much older than I was—I would have guessed thirty or thirty-one—but he seemed to have suffered an early onset of middle age. The black hair along his temples was edged with gray strands, and he had a developed a paunch, which bulged over the top of his gun belt. Rivard had grown up in a Franco-American household outside Lewiston, and his speech reminded me of my mom’s French uncles and aunts. You didn’t hear many people of my generation with that singsong accent.

“So where are we headed?” I asked.

“SAD seventy-seven,” he said. “Whitney High School.”

SAD stood for school administrative district, but the acronym seemed sadly fitting in this part of the state.

“And what are we doing, exactly?”

He pulled the truck out onto the road that led down to the coast. The asphalt was lined with five-foot-tall snowbanks. A week of subzero temperatures had hardened the drifts into rock-solid ice. If an ambulance came speeding along behind us, there would be no room to pull over, I realized.

“There’s a kid I want to talk to named Barney Beal. My snitch says he’s the one who broke into those cabins over on Bog Pond, the ones with satellite dishes.”

“He was stealing TVs?”

“No, there’s this microchip inside the relay that connects to the television. It goes for one hundred dollars a pop. It’s small and easy to hide in your pocket. It’s like stealing hundred-dollar bills.”

“Why do you need me for this?”

When he turned his head, I saw my fun-house reflection staring back from the bronze lenses of his sunglasses. “What’s with you and all the questions today?” he said. “It’s more intimidating if there are two of us showing up in his classroom.”

Rivard was in a foul mood again. He had gotten divorced and remarried the previous summer, and many of our “conversations” were long monologues by him on the inequities of the state’s laws concerning alimony and child support. His new wife was already pregnant, too, but he didn’t seem to see it so much as a blessing as another expense he couldn’t afford.

He removed his hand from the wheel to sip coffee from an aluminum mug. It occurred to me this was yet another difference between my two sergeants. Kathy would never have come to my house without also bringing me a cup of coffee.

“Do you mind if we get some breakfast first?” I asked.

He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. “The McDonald’s in Machias has a drive-through.”

Ever since I’d moved to Whitney, I’d been in search of a regular breakfast joint. Back in my old district, I’d become a fixture at the Square Deal Diner. Just about every day, I’d stop in for a molasses doughnut and some good-natured ribbing from the owner, Dot Libby, or her plainspoken daughter, Ruth. They’d been among the first people to welcome me into what had started out as an unfriendly community. Over the course of the two years I’d spent in Sennebec, I’d formed an unexpected attachment to the restaurant. It surprised me, thinking about the Libbys, to feel such intense homesickness.

We drove along, listening to the fuzzy chatter on the police radio. I turned my head to take in the view.

The road into town was hardly beautiful. The snowbanks outside my window were black with soot and impacted grit. The bigger pines and birches had all been cut within the past fifty years, and so you were left with nothing but adolescent trees elbowing one another for sunlight. The scattered houses were a mix of rusty trailers, farmhouses with advanced cases of osteoporosis, and newer modular homes that looked like they had come out of the same cereal box. The residents tended to hang their laundry even in the dead of winter: faded bedsheets, spit-stained onesies, stretch pants, and a surprising amount of thong underwear.

Back on the midcoast, we’d had hidden pockets of poverty amid the splendid rows of summer cottages. Here, the poverty was proudly on display for the world to see. Whenever it snowed, everything would look pure and white again, but only for a few hours, until the first plow came along or the first pink panties got pinned to a clothesline.

After ten minutes of not conversing, I tried again. “So tell me about Joe Brogan.”

“Kind of a dick—but his business is good for the local economy.”

“I’m not a fan of game ranches.”

“Yeah, well, they’re legal, so you’d better get over it.”

“What sorts of problems have you had with him and his guides?”

“One of his buffaloes got loose a year ago, and we spent a month looking for it in the woods. Freaked-out people kept calling us after it ran through their yards, asking us if there were bison in Maine. A guy finally shot it the first week of moose season, thinking it was an obese moose or something.”

“What about Billy Cronk?” I asked.

“Good guide. Grew up in the woods. Are you still going to send that night hunting charge against him to the DA?”

Rivard had never told me to let the matter drop, but I could decode his sentiments easily enough. And the truth was that I was conflicted about the matter myself. Brogan might have been a jerk, but Cronk seemed like a decent guy, and the thought of ruining his life rubbed my ethics the wrong way. But Kathy had warned me against seeming soft. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“Well, it’s your call.” My sergeant took another sip of coffee. “That zebra thing is pretty crazy shit.”

“It gets crazier,” I said. “When I got home from Brogan’s last night, there was a coyote skin nailed to my front door.”

He didn’t turn his head, but his mouth twitched. “No shit?”

“There was a note on it, saying, ‘Welcome to the neighborhood.’ It was signed, ‘George Magoon.’”

“Probably kids,” he said. “When we get to school, I’ll show you the kinds of punks you’re dealing with around here.”

We rode the rest of the way in silence. Obviously Rivard would be no help in my search for this “George Magoon” character. Kathy had called it a prank, but the pelt had struck me more as a warning than a joke. Impaling it on my door was the kind of thing I could imagine Billy Cronk, or one of Brogan’s other disgruntled guides, doing. It didn’t seem like the stunt a random teenager would pull. Then again, Rivard knew the area better than I did.

Still, I had my doubts.

FEBRUARY 13

Uncle Prester didn’t come home last night. That ain’t the first time. Once we found him curled up asleep under the mailbox, drunk.

Ma’s worried on account of how frigging cold it’s been. She don’t like him hanging around with Randle, neither.

If he tried sleeping outside again, he’d turn into one of them cavemen scientists dig out of glaciers.

Ma’s late for work because she’s worrying about Prester. Ma’s a shift leader over to McDonald’s.

I tell her I’m sick because I want to stay home and read that Ranger book Mrs. Greenlaw gave me, but Ma ain’t buying it.

Once I pressed my head to the radiator to get it all hot and then told her I had a fever and she could feel my head to prove it.

She still didn’t let me stay home.

Ma makes sure Tammi’s all set in her wheelchair with the TV remote and everything. Sometimes I think she’s lucky because she don’t have to work or go to school or nothing. Then I think how much it must suck not being able to walk.

Outside, it’s REAL cold. I’m worried it’s going to snow again.

Mrs. Greenlaw says Maine was buried under a mile of ice during the last ice age. She says the glaciers crept down from Canada and nobody knows why. It just snowed and kept snowing for thousands and thousands of years.

I bet there were Abnormal Snowmen all over the place back then.

I seen one of their tracks one time in the woods behind the house. It looked like this …

I told Ma what I seen, but she didn’t believe me about that one, neither.

Maybe the Yeti got Prester.

4

After twenty minutes of frost heaves and potholes, Rivard and I found ourselves on the outskirts of Machias, the county seat and what passed for a metropolis in this part of the world, if you could even use the word
metropolis
to describe a place with a population that barely nudged two thousand.