“That’s horseshit,” I told Sergeant Rivard.
We were standing on the south bank of the Machias River in Machiasport the following afternoon. A housewife had glanced out her frosted window, and a beam of weak midwinter sunlight had touched something red in the tidal flats below. It was a bloody, bandaged foot sticking up out of the tacky mud.
Rivard called for the airboat team to extract the body of Prester Sewall from the stinking mire where it had become wedged. Now the two of us, along with about fifty other onlookers-some fellow officers and SAR volunteers, the rest just garden-variety voyeurs-were watching Warden Mack McQuarrie lean over the side of the boat and tug with all his might at the dead man’s leg.
Prester didn’t want to come out.
Rivard tucked a fresh wad of Red Man chewing tobacco in his cheek. “What’s horseshit?” he asked.
“The Spragues’ story.”
Sheriff Rhine had been phoning me with recaps all day. She must have figured it was the least she could do, given that my crackpot theories about Randall Cates’s death hadn’t proven so cracked after all. She’d given me a detailed account of the state police interrogation of the Spragues in Houlton, and she’d listened patiently as I vented my frustration at the roadblock investigators faced, at least until the Mounties hunted down Kevin Kendrick on their side of the border, if they ever managed to hunt him down. She’d even offered to buy me breakfast at McDonald’s some morning.
“Ben and Doris Sprague are lying,” I told Rivard. “They knew damn well that Kendrick was on the run last night, and they knew why. They should be charged with aiding and abetting.”
“How’s the AG going to prove that, exactly?”
It was the same question Rhine had asked me, and I still had no good answer.
“Their son, Joey, was friends with Trinity Raye,” I said. “Both kids had been good students at UMaine Machias, but their grades had gotten worse and worse. That screams drug abuse. Then the Raye girl dies, and a few months later, Joey Sprague tries to commit suicide. What does that suggest to you?”
I answered my own question before he could. “It suggests guilt,” I said. “Maybe Joey bought the heroin from Cates and gave it to Trinity. For all we know, Randall and Prester might have done their deals in the Heath all the time. They might have driven past the Spragues’ house regularly on the Bog Road. Maybe that’s how Joey became one of their customers.”
Rivard was wearing his sunglasses, as always, so I couldn’t see his eyes, but he seemed focused on Mack McQuarrie and the activity around the airboat.
I continued thinking out loud. “I still think it was dumb luck that they got stranded there in the storm. And I don’t think the Spragues recognized Prester when he showed up on their doorstep. His driver’s license says his name is John, and his face was disfigured. That was why they called Doc for help. It was only later, when they came upon Randall in the Heath, that they realized he was the man responsible for one girl’s death and for their own son’s turning himself into a vegetable. You’re a father, Marc. What would you have done in that situation? You could kill the bastard-and no one would ever know.”
I wasn’t sure if my sergeant had been listening until he turned his head. “What are you suggesting?”
“I think Ben Sprague was the one who really killed Randall Cates. He had the means, motive, and opportunity. Or maybe he and Kendrick did it together. I could see Kendrick goading him into doing it. He can be quite persuasive. If the two men were mutually involved, that would explain what happened back at the house.”
“What happened back at the house?”
“After Kendrick and Ben came back, they wanted to kill Prester, too. Or at least Kendrick did. He tried to persuade Doc that it would be for the greater good if he put a pillow over Prester’s face. But Doc wouldn’t do it. He’s a veterinarian, but he sees himself as a medical man, the Hippocratic oath and all that. It was only the fact that the EMTs showed up that stopped things from getting violent.”
Rivard spat a stream of tobacco juice on the crusted snow. “That’s quite a story.”
“It’s the only interpretation of events that makes sense.”
“Good luck convincing the attorney general.”
With Kendrick on the lam in Canada, suspicion had naturally fallen on the fugitive dogsled racer. He was the one who had told Doc to let Prester die. He was the one who had threatened me via e-mail and killed Doc’s dog as a warning to keep his mouth shut. He was the one who kidnapped Lucas Sewall and nearly sent us all to the bottom of Bog Pond. Just as the investigators had focused on Prester, to the exclusion of other suspects earlier, now they had shifted their attention to Kendrick.
“The state police need to keep leaning on the Spragues,” I said. “If they do, the truth will come out.”
“Not necessarily,” said my sergeant. “If you haven’t figured it out by now, Bowditch, some people are wicked good liars.”
There was a shout, and then the crowd groaned. Out on the airboat, Mack McQuarrie had managed to muscle Prester Sewall’s naked body loose. I saw him wrestle the pale, mud-streaked corpse on board. The bloodless color of the skin reminded me of the underbelly of a frog.
Instantly I found myself thinking of Lucas.
Some people are wicked good liars.
Rivard had been talking about the Spragues, but his remark seemed to be a broader statement about the untrustworthiness of human beings in general. I’d known from my first meeting with Lucas Sewall that he was prone to wild exaggerations. His own mother had called him a liar.
But even I hadn’t taken him for a killer.
The confession came in his notebook, which I discovered a few days later under the passenger seat of my truck as I was vacuuming it out. I had wanted to visit the boy in the hospital, but Rivard cautioned me against having any conversations with him until after the state police got a formal statement. It was enough to hear that he was going to make a full recovery.
I’d also heard from the sheriff that Jamie was out of jail. Mitch Munro had ponied up the bail money by selling his prize snowmobile. The karate champ was still denying he had been on the Heath during the blizzard, the sheriff told me, and so far, Jamie had refused to repeat the story she’d told me about how her ex-husband had waylaid Randall Cates. While it was almost certain that Jamie would be convicted of driving under the influence, the drug case against her was falling apart fast. The Adderall found in the van had indeed belonged to her sister, Tammi, as Jamie had stated all along. Even a mediocre defense lawyer could argue that the pills had fallen into her purse in the course of driving her invalid sister to physical therapy (or wherever). The marijuana Corbett had found in her brother’s room made it Prester’s property when Jamie produced a canceled check in the amount of one dollar for “rent.”
As for Jamie and her ex-husband’s rekindled relationship (if that was what it was), I realized it was none of my business. Word around town was that they were hitting the bars together again. She’d lost her job at McDonald’s. I couldn’t bring myself to drive past her house, lest I see Munro’s Tundra out front.
I did have a keen interest in knowing whether Mitch was indeed the man Randall and Prester had gone to meet in the Heath that snowy day, as seemed likely. But trying to factor Munro into a murderous equation that already included Kendrick and the Spragues was a leap even my own overly active imagination refused to make.
But it was an equation, of sorts, that revealed the truth about Trinity Raye. More like a code, actually. After I found Lucas’s notebook, I took it back inside my malodorous trailer and sat down at my kitchen table and began flipping through the pages.
I’d made myself a cup of instant coffee, but it tasted, like everything in the damned house, like skunk. Rivard had told me that Joe Brogan had fired Billy Cronk because he’d been gossiping too much about what his employer had done to my living quarters. Rivard thought I might be able to wangle a trade out of Cronk: testimony about how Brogan had released a live skunk into my trailer in exchange for my dropping the firearm charge against the gentle Viking.
It was a deal I would make, I decided.
Picking up Lucas’s notebook, I stopped on a jumbled series of letters that I had noticed before on the cover. I hadn’t given them any attention then, but after everything I had subsequently learned about Lucas’s big brain, I now found my curiosity engaged.
DORT OSNZ CNAP IOZZ
It took me a few minutes to realize that what looked like gibberish was actually a simple cipher of the kind that had fascinated me when I’d read the Hardy Boys books as a kid.
I turned on my computer with the familiar sense of anticipation that now greeted me every time the screen lit up. But there was no new message from George Magoon, and perhaps there would never be another one. I went looking for “secret codes” in the Google search menu.
I found the key quickly enough:
DORT OSNZ CNAP IOZZ
Reading the first letter of the top word, followed by the first letter of the bottom word, followed by the second letter of the top word, followed by the second letter of the bottom word, and so on in a zigzag pattern, I ended with this:
DCON RAT POISON ZZZ
I put down my pen and stared at the words. Then I began reading carefully through the pages, looking for an actual confession. But Lucas had been coy throughout.
He didn’t know what I did to the pills, neither… and wasn’t he in for a wicked surprise when someone swallowed one of them Oxycottons?
What had he done to the OxyContin pills? Sprayed them with some chemical? What had he done with the rat poison? I thought back to my search for the boy in the Sewall house. Down in the cellar, I remembered a rusted oil tank with an open box of d-Con rat poison on the dirt floor beside it.
Trinity Raye had died from snorting heroin cut with baking powder and brodifacoum. People called it an overdose, but in truth the girl had also suffered an esophageal hemorrhage, causing her to bleed out. The active ingredient in d-Con is brodifacoum.
“What happens if a kid kills somebody?” Lucas had asked me.
The boy knew what he’d done. That was why he’d asked the sheriff if we were there to arrest him the night Rhine and I delivered Prester’s death notification. It was the reason he kept asking if I was taking him to jail. No wonder he was being chased in his nightmares by an avenging angel dressed like a white owl.
I grabbed the notebook and hurried out to my truck. What was I going to say to Lucas? What would I tell Jamie? I’d been so worried about seeing her lose custody. Now I found myself in possession of circumstantial evidence that linked her son to the accidental death of a young woman. But who would believe me if I turned it in? Everyone knew about Mike Bowditch and his wild imagination.
Lucas had contaminated Randall Cates’s stash of drugs to get even for the pain the dealer was inflicting on his mother. Maybe he hoped someone would get sick, so the blame would fall on Randall. With the boyfriend out of the picture, his mother and father might finally reunite, as had seemingly happened. Had he expected someone to die? I hoped to God he hadn’t.
If Lucas hadn’t tampered with the heroin, Trinity Raye might still be alive, and if so, Joey Sprague would not have pressed a handgun against his temple and flinched at the moment he pulled the trigger. Kendrick and Ben Sprague would never have had a reason to kill Randall Cates. Prester might not have committed suicide. The whole chain of fatal events, I realized, began with a brilliant, bitter boy who just wanted his daddy back.
You and Lucas have a lot in common.
The drive was a blur. One poor old geezer nearly went off the road when I zoomed past his puttering Buick.
My cell phone rang in my pocket. I dug it out and looked at the number.
“Charley,” I said. “I’m in the middle of something.”
“Hot pursuit?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“I was just calling to invite you up to the Ponderosa for Saturday dinner,” he said. “The Boss said it was past time I offered you a formal invitation.”
It had been too long since I’d eaten Ora Stevens’s fresh-baked bread or shared a hot cup of coffee with Charley while he told me one far-fetched but invariably true yarn after another. And maybe my wise old friend could advise me what to do about Lucas and his notebook. Should I turn it over to the state police with my unprovable suspicions, and if so, to what end? So that the boy would be shunted off into some facility for troubled children? More than ever, I realized, I wanted the benefit of Charley’s considerable wisdom.
The only hesitancy I felt in saying yes to his invitation came when I remembered those jade-green eyes, the most beautiful I’d ever seen.
Charley, as always, was three steps ahead of me. “Stacey will be joining us.”
“What about her fiance? Will he be there, too?”
I could hear the smile in my friend’s voice. “No, I believe Matt is working that night.”
“I’ll be there,” I said, cresting a hill. “But I’ve really got to go. I’ll explain why on Saturday.”
“You damn well better!”
I tucked the cell phone into my shirt pocket, feeling unreasonably hopeful. Stacey might have a fiance, but who knew what was truly possible and impossible?
I braked when I came around the corner, and I braked even harder when I saw the FOR SALE sign in the yard outside Jamie’s house. My patrol truck slid on its brand-new wheels and tires across a sanded stretch of asphalt before it came to rest in front of the driveway.
In the past, Jamie had barely bothered to shovel out a space to park her van, but someone had plowed out a vast expanse of the dooryard to make way for whatever big truck had hauled away her furniture and other possessions. You could tell from the dark, curtainless windows that the Sewall family was long gone. Jamie had sworn to me she’d do anything to hold on to her troubled son, even if it meant spiriting him away in the dead of night. What reason did they have to stay in that haunted house anyway? Who wouldn’t want to escape from this snowbound wasteland?
I tried to remember the story Jamie had told me when we were lying in bed in the motel, the one about Prester John and his legendary African kingdom: “But someday I’m going to take off south, and I’m not going to stop until I find my own golden city in the sun.”
I wondered if she would find it.
Does anyone ever?