Bad Little Falls by Paul Doiron Page A

hospital in Machias. With any luck, Sergeant Rivard was on his way to my location and searchers were assembling from across the snowbound county to help scour the woods. With any luck, Randall Cates was still alive.
    I wasn’t feeling all that lucky.
    My lungs hurt from shouting and breathing subzero air. My fingers had begun to throb and cramp. There was no sensation in the tip of my nose.
    Back in the glade, there was no sign of Randall Cates. No sign of help. I parked the Yamaha beside the car’s open door to block the wind and then crawled inside the vehicle. Once again, I snapped on my headlamp and inspected the inside of the four-wheeled igloo.
    If I could figure out what Cates and Sewall had been doing in this isolated place, I might have a better chance of finding my missing person. Under the seat, my stiff fingers encountered something that felt like a magazine but turned out to be a battered copy of The Maine Atlas, a staple-bound gazetteer that just about everyone I knew kept stashed in their cars or trucks. Maine was a big state, or at least a largely empty one with too many unmarked roads. It was easy to lose your way.
    On a hunch, I turned to the page that corresponded to my present location. The topographical map showed vast white expanses that indicated wetlands. Logging roads and jeep trails zigzagged through these empty places. I followed a curving line down from the Spragues’ house, about two miles away. A pencil scratch marked the spot where I was sitting. So Sewall and Cates had come to this specific place for a reason? Was it a drug deal? They’d done something here and then gotten stuck trying to drive out on the snowy road.
    I tried the glove compartment again, but it was locked.
    What about the trunk?
    I loosened the latch. Behind me came a click, but the lid was weighted down with snow. I slid out into the biting night and grabbed Kendrick’s shovel. It took me five minutes to clear off enough snow to get the trunk open.
    I found the shotgun inside. It was a Remington 870 pump. Someone had recently cleaned the barrel—the metal gleamed blue under my headlamp—and carefully rubbed linseed oil into the hardwood stock. The trunk also contained a spare tire, a jack, a few ice-fishing tip-ups, and a blue school gym bag emblazoned with the Whitney High mascot, a stern-faced and politically questionable Indian chief. I unzipped the bag. There must have been five thousand dollars in cash rolled up in rubber bands. Someone had thrown in a loaded Glock 9 for good measure.

 
     
FEBRUARY 14
     
    There wasn’t another car on the road.
    The trees were all thrashing around like those evil trees that almost ate the Hobbits. The electric wires kept swinging like jump ropes. I thought maybe one of them would snap. You can’t get electrocuted in a car, on account of the rubber wheels, Mr. Mason told us.
    I kept expecting to see the White Owl around every corner, perched on a fence post.
    Ma had to lean over the steering wheel to see anything.
    What happened to Prester? I asked.
    The police say he showed up at somebody’s house in the middle of the storm.
    Whose house?
    I don’t know. Somebody who lives in Township Nineteen. Way out in the boondooks.
    Where does the word boondocks come from?
    I have no clue.
    Is there a real place called East Gish?
    Lucas, she said. Will you PLEASE stop asking questions! I’m trying to concentrate on the road.
    Where’s Randall, though? He and Prester said they was going coyote hunting, not last night but the night before.
    Lucas! I’m freaking out here!
    Before she started going to her Don’t Drink meetings, back when she was with Randle, she used to get all weird and dopey, but now she’s nervous or angry all the time.
    We drove over the causeway in the dark. Usually there are cars parked along it, people hanging out—but not during the Storm of the Century.
    We passed Helen’s and the Bluebird Ranch and they were both closed. Even the gas station was closed. It