The light from Kendrick’s headlamp bounced along, leading the way. A huge snowbank rose across the trail. The handle of an entrenching tool protruded from the top of it.
I watched Kendrick drop to his hands and knees and begin jabbing at the snow with the pointed shovel. I saw that he had already excavated a deep hole, exposing a black car. The door had been ajar when the storm began refilling the crater. Someone had entered or exited the buried vehicle in the past hours, and it was logical to think that person had been John Sewall.
Kendrick burrowed deeper into the car. Snow had piled up behind the steering wheel and spilled over into the passenger side. From my perspective, standing behind Kendrick, I couldn’t see any farther into the darkened interior.
I dropped to one knee and squinted into the face-lacerating wind. “Is there anyone inside?”
Kendrick stopped digging. He propped himself on his elbow and turned to face me. “Not a soul,” he said.
FEBRUARY 14
Ma shakes my shoulder in the middle of the night. Get up, Lucas! Get up! she says.
It’s pitch-black. I’m all groggy.
Prester is on his way to the hospital, she says. He got caught in the snowstorm.
Is he froze to death?
Put your clothes on, she says.
The first time I went to the hospital was when I tripped on the stairs that time. I was so tired, I fell asleep walking up to my bedroom and my bottom teeth bit straight through my lip. The tops of them got stuck on the skin. Ma had to peel them apart and there was blood everywhere.
They gave me NINE stitches. I still have this scar along my bottom lip.
That was when I was four years old.
Aunt Tam is downstairs in her chair. She has her coat in her lap. I want to go with you, she tells Ma.
Tammi, there’s a blizzard, Ma says. What if the van gets stuck? I don’t know how we would deal with your chair if we had to walk through the snow.
Tammi starts to cry.
Ma bends over her chair and gives her a hug. It’s important that you be here in case the hospital calls with news, Ma tells her. You can call me on my cell if there’s an update. I’m relying on you, Lil Sis.
Tammi smiles, but she’s still kind of crying, too. She used to be a basketball star in high school. In her room Tammi keeps a picture of her team, with her standing next to the other girls. One of them is holding a gold trophy ball.
9
“Let me have a look,” I told Kendrick.
The musher backed out of the hole on his hands and knees. I grabbed the car door and tried to force it open, but it was stuck fast in the snow. I wriggled my way through the narrow gap.
It took me a moment to realize that everything was pitched at a slight angle. The car had slid halfway off the road before the storm buried it. The halogen glow of my light turned the scene in front of me a bluish white. When I exhaled, my breath sparkled. I felt like I was deep inside the cold heart of a glacier.
Turning my head slowly from side to side, I swept the beam of my headlamp around the inside of the vehicle. A thin layer of hoarfrost, like a dusting of baker’s flour, covered the interior. The car was a Pontiac; I saw the arrowhead logo on the steering wheel. Someone had used pieces of duct tape to stitch up a gash in the seat. There was the odor of old cigarettes badly masked by a pine-shaped air freshener suspended from the rearview mirror. There were empty Budweiser cans, some crushed, scattered across the backseat. There was a handful of twelve-gauge shotgun shells in the console. But no shotgun.
I found the auto registration tucked above the driver’s sun visor. The car was a 2004 Grand Am, registered to one Randall Scott Cates.
“Holy shit,” I said aloud.
The image of a sneering, tattooed face hovered in front of my eyes. And suddenly I realized who the hypothermic, frostbitten man was back at the Sprague house and why his face had seemed vaguely familiar.
“What’s the story in there?” Kendrick said over my shoulder.
I braced myself against the steering wheel and climbed awkwardly out into the open air. A blast of icy wind nearly pushed me back. Several of the dogs were yowling.
“I know the person who owns this car. It’s not a girl named Kate; it’s a man named Cates. Randall Scott Cates. I saw him this morning at the McDonald’s in Machias.”
Kendrick didn’t speak. I couldn’t make out his expression through the blowing snow. “So where is he?”
“I don’t know. I don’t suppose any of your dogs can run a track.”
Kendrick gave a scornful laugh. “They’re sled dogs.”
If Randall Cates was wandering around in this blizzard, the odds were heavily stacked against our finding him before he froze to death. If he was already passed out inside a snowbank, we wouldn’t find his body until the April thaw.
Almost a year earlier, I had found a deserted car on a darkened road. For a variety of lame-ass reasons, I hadn’t exerted myself to find the missing driver. A woman ended up dead. Maybe she would have died anyway, but I didn’t need another what-if question hanging over my pillow.
I found my cell phone and tried to get a signal, but the screen showed only a single bar. I tried the GPS instead. Our location came up as a logging road that dead-ended at Bog Stream. I marked a waypoint and handed Kendrick the receiver.
“What’s this for?”
“Go back to the Spragues’ house and call the state police,” I said. “Tell them where I am and that I need assistance locating a lost person. Give them these coordinates. Make sure they notify Warden Marc Rivard. We need a search dog here.” I reached into my shirt pocket and found the auto registration. “The state police should also make sure Randall Cates isn’t asleep in his bed back in Machias.”
The wind tore Kendrick’s breath from his open mouth when he laughed. “I don’t need GPS coordinates. I know exactly where we are.” He tucked the registration in his parka. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to look for him.”
“No offense, Bowditch, but I guarantee you that I am better at it than you are. I know this bog like the back of my hand. Go back to the house. I’ll search the Heath.”
“No offense, Kendrick, but this is my job.” I zipped up my parka and raised the hood over my ears. “See if you can find Ben Sprague while you’re at it. Tell him to clear the Bog Pond Road with his plow so the ambulance can get to his house.”
Kendrick pulled his goggles down over his eyes. “Suit yourself.”
I watched him check his team’s harnesses, his body illuminated in the shaky beam of my headlamp. The animals’ coats were matted with clumps of snow. They looked at their master with bright, enthusiastic eyes. The dogs were eager to run.
Kendrick stepped onto the runners of his sled. Then he gave a single sharp whistle. The lead dogs barked and took off. There was a pause, and then the sled was yanked forward into the night. In no time at all, Kendrick had disappeared through gauzy curtains of snow.
After the last barks of the dogs had faded and all that was left was the howling of the wind in the tops of the cedars, I sat down on the seat of the snowmobile and strapped my snowshoes to the bottoms of my boots. My bare fingers smarted as I secured the buckles. Kendrick was right about the absurdity of my plan: I was alone, at night, in a blizzard in a pathless forest. I was trying to find a lost, perhaps already dead and buried man. And somehow I was going to accomplish this feat without succumbing to hypothermia myself. Where to even begin?
With a spiral search, I decided.
Starting at the driver’s door, I began walking in an expanding circle around the car.
If Randall Cates was indeed dead, my best chance of finding him was somewhere near his encased vehicle. I could imagine the tattooed man lurching off into the dark in his panic or confusion and very quickly collapsing from the cold, especially if he had been dressed as inadequately as his companion was.