Perhaps I was reading too much into his incoherent mutterings, but John Sewall had told us that his friend was “in the car,” which suggested that Cates had remained in the vehicle while his passenger went for help. Maybe the two men had gotten stuck and then tried to wait out the storm, until finally the subzero temperature drove them to take action.
I could understand the desperation. Waves of powder washed like lines of surf along the frozen road. After fifteen minutes of tromping around, I paused in the shelter of a big hemlock until a sudden gust knocked an enormous clump of snow off the heavy boughs and down onto my head.
I decided to expand my search. Back at the Spragues’ snowmobile, I struggled to remove my snowshoes. I could barely see through the ice-painted visor of my helmet. More and more, my fingers were feeling like they’d been carved from sticks of fatwood.
Fortunately, the sled’s engine sprang to life with the first turn of the key. Half standing, with one knee resting on the seat, I rode for maybe a hundred yards into the swamp, calling for the lost man the entire time. The headlights showed no footprints or vehicle tracks. The snow was as pure as a newly washed sheet.
After a while, I gave it up and reversed course. By the time I passed the Grand Am again, the storm had nearly filled the hole that Kendrick had shoveled. If Sewall and Cates had been stuck inside their car for hours, they might have run the engine to keep warm until the gas tank was empty. People who try this maneuver often forget to crack their windows and so expire from carbon monoxide poisoning. Or their tailpipe gets plugged with snow and they die that way from the odorless and colorless gas. Had Sewall gone for help after his friend lapsed into unconsciousness? I was convinced that Cates must have been incapacitated in some way when Sewall had set off on his snow-blind journey into the void. Why else stay behind?
I was traveling through a landscape as sharp as a black-and-white photograph. The greens of the pines looked black. The shadows beyond my headlights were gray. The only brightness was the white of the blowing snow.
I had entered a world of ghosts.
Along that spectral road, I met no living thing.
Around 2:30 A.M., I decided to return to the car. It had been two hours, give or take, since I had sent Kendrick off on his mission; four hours since I had arrived at the Spragues’ house.
With any luck, Ben Sprague had cleared a passage for the ambulance and John Sewall was en route to the 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 was like a NUCLEAR BOMB went off and killed everybody or maybe turned them into zombies.
Now we’re in the hospital parking lot.
I wonder how many people die at the hospital every year. Probably a lot.
All hospitals must be haunted.
10
I was inside the Grand Am, shivering, my teeth clenched to keep from chattering. The gym bag lay open beside me on the seat. I was trying to reconstruct in my imagination the drug deal that had taken place in this frozen swamp when I heard a loud scraping sound. I clambered out of the car and stood knee-deep in the snow, watching as powerful lights tore through the storm.
There were two vehicles: a hefty pickup outfitted with a V-shaped plow and a green warden’s truck following behind. I hoped the trucks hadn’t just flattened the buried body of Randall Cates in an attempt to reach me.
Over the idling engines I heard truck doors bang open. Three silhouettes came toward me through the headlights.
“Bowditch!” It was Rivard, wearing his green warden’s parka with the hood up.
Behind him came a shorter, thicker man: the plow driver.
And then another person with a dog.
Kathy Frost? No, she was two hundred miles away tonight in Greenville. It was her protege from the K-9 team, Cody Devoe. He had been the warden in my old district before being transferred to Washington County at his own request. Devoe is one of those natural woodsmen whose idea of heaven is being stationed in the wildest, least populated outposts imaginable, the kind of warden who spends his vacations fishing for arctic char in Labrador. He is a big bruiser with a perpetual five o’clock shadow even at five o’clock in the morning. His friends call him Fred Flintstone. His German shepherd is named Tomahawk.