“Where’s your visitor?”
“In Joey’s room.”
She led Doc into the back of the house while I struggled to escape my snowshoes. I tried kicking off as much of the powder as I could in the mudroom, but a wet white trail followed me down the hall.
The house didn’t seem dirty so much as unkempt. On the walls hung amateur oil paintings in the style promoted by those learn-to-paint television shows. But they were all crooked. The odor of an uncleaned litter box drifted from some hidden place.
In a boy’s bedroom, Doris Sprague leaned against one wall while Doc bent over a young man stretched on top of a narrow bed. He wore a faded denim jacket with a shearling collar, an untucked flannel shirt, baggy jeans, and motorcycle boots with silver buckles. His wet chestnut hair was plastered over his ears and across his forehead. He might have been handsome once, but now his face was horribly splotched and swollen. Waxy yellow patches of frostbite covered his entire nose and both cheeks. His fingers were bent into steel-gray claws.
“Young man,” said Doc. “Can you hear me?”
He snapped open his eyes. The pupils were the size of dimes. “No.”
“I’m a doctor,” Larrabee said calmly. “I’m going to help you.”
Doc had a pretty good bedside manner, considering his patients were mostly cows and horses.
“I’m calling an ambulance,” I said.
“Ben already did,” said Mrs. Sprague.
“Do you know who this man is?”
“I’m not sure. His face is so…” She hugged herself and shivered, as if the man’s hypothermia were contagious. “His wallet is over on the table. I tried to cover him with a blanket, but he keeps saying he’s hot.”
“Press,” said the man.
“What’s that?” asked Doc. “Press what?”
“Presster,” said the man.
“Is that your last name or your first name?” Doc asked.
I opened the wallet and pulled out the driver’s license. The picture showed a good-looking version of the disfigured face before us. He had high cheekbones and feathered chestnut hair cut like a disco dancer’s from the 1970s.
“His name is John Sewall,” I said.
FEBRUARY 14
It’s snowing wicked hard out tonight. I’m writing this under the covers with the headlamp Aunt Tammi gave me for my birthday.
THIS IS MY LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT
I bequeath everything to Ma except my Bruce Lee poster. Give that back to Dad.
And Tammi should get my headlamp, I guess.
I want to be buried at sea or burned like a Viking. Either way is fine.
On my tombstone it should read-
I hear something.
WHISPERING!
It ain’t the wind. That’s a voice speaking. A woman’s voice.
SHE’S HERE!
8
Should I have made the connection between the face on the driver’s license and the incident I’d witnessed at McDonald’s? It’s easy now to say yes. In my defense, I hadn’t focused on the smaller of the two men. My attention had been fixated first on the jaw-droppingly beautiful woman behind the counter and later on the tattooed thug. I’d barely noticed the big one’s sidekick, and the name Sewall-like Beal, Cates, or Sprague-is common in eastern Maine.
From his knees beside the bed, Doc looked up at Mrs. Sprague. “Doris, I need you to bring me all the blankets and sleeping bags you have in the house.”
The solid little woman embraced herself tightly. Her eyes had a glassy sheen. She seemed to be in a trance. “What did you say?”
“We need to wrap this man up in as many warm layers as possible. I’m barely getting a radial pulse.”
“Should I run a hot bath?” she asked.
“Christ no. He could have a heart attack from the shock.”
She began blinked rapidly. “I’m sorry! I didn’t know.”
“It’s all right, Mrs. Sprague,” I said. “Let me help you.”
Hypothermia is a decrease in the body’s core temperature to the degree where the entire cardiovascular and nervous systems collapse. The only way to treat it is to warm the afflicted person up gradually. Hospitals pump humidified air into the lungs and irrigate body cavities with warm liquids, but these methods were beyond our capabilities in the little Swiss chalet. The best we could do was wrap up Sewall like a burrito in as many layers of insulation as we could find.
I followed the woman from room to room, gathering up every Navajo blanket, down sleeping bag, and cotton sheet in the place. Doris Sprague found a hot-water bottle for me and began to fill it with water from the kitchen tap. We would apply it to Sewall’s armpits or his groin, above the femoral artery.
I brought the accumulated bedclothes into the room with the frozen man. It was obviously a teenage boy’s bedroom. A bureau held various sports trophies (baseball and basketball) and assorted animal teeth and skulls. There was a picture of the pop singer Katy Perry on one wood-paneled wall; on another was a poster of an airbrushed-looking wolf, which was staring out at the room with the same intensely blue eyes as
Ms. Perry’s. The poster bore the slogan IN WILDNESS IS THE PRESERVATION OF THE WORLD.
“How’s our patient?”
“Not good. He needs to get to a hospital. I don’t know how long the EMTs will take to get here-if they can get here-but we have our work cut out for us. At best, he’s going to lose some fingers and toes from the frostbite.”
“It’s the worst case I’ve seen,” I said.
“Can you find some fluids for him?”
I went into the kitchen and found Doris Sprague standing beside the still-running kitchen tap. She wasn’t making a sound, but tears were sliding down her cheeks. I turned the faucet off and gently set my hand on the woman’s shaking shoulder.
“Do you have any Jell-O?” I asked.
She gazed up at me and her mouth opened. “Are you hungry?”
“No, ma’am. It’s for our patient. If we can get him to drink some hot liquid Jell-O, it would help.”
“Is raspberry OK?”
“Any flavor is fine.”
I looked around the kitchen. There were two dirty plates with chicken bones on the counter beside the sink, two sets of dirty silverware, four empty Moxie cans. In our circuit through the sad rooms of the house, I realized, we hadn’t encountered another person-neither this “Joey” nor the man of the house himself.
“Where’s your husband, Mrs. Sprague?”
“Out looking for the other one.”
“What other one?”
“This one’s friend.”
I tried to make my voice soft and reassuring. “Mrs. Sprague, can you tell me what happened here tonight? From the beginning.”
As she spoke, she seemed to regain her presence of her mind little by little. “Ben and I had finished eating and were listening to the radio when we heard a thud at the front of the house. At first we thought it was snow falling off the roof, but it sounded too heavy for that. So Ben took a look outside and he found the young man collapsed against the window. He’d just stumbled into the glass like a confused bird. Ben got him inside-my husband’s not very tall, but he’s rugged-and we put him down in the guest room. He was mumbling the whole time, the young man.”
“What did he say?”
“Something about a car. We figured he must have gone off the road somewhere. There’s a whole maze of logging roads between Bog Pond and the Heath, and none of them is marked, and if he’d gone in before the snow started to fall, he might’ve gotten turned around pretty easy. So Ben went to call Doc Larrabee, and I covered the boy with a blanket. He kept saying a name. It sounded like ‘Kate.’ I asked him if he’d been with someone else out there named Kate, and he said, ‘In the car.’”
I glanced at the kitchen window, which was spackled with frost. “And your husband went out in the storm to look for this Kate?”
“He took the plow.”
“Does he have a phone with him?”
“Yes, but if he’s down in the Heath, he won’t get reception.”
“Can you heat up that Jell-O for me, Mrs. Sprague? I need to speak with Doc Larrabee for a moment.”