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.”
In the bedroom, Doc had succeeded in swaddling John Sewall in about eight inches of goose down, wool, and linen. We needed to keep the blood moving through his arteries until the EMTs arrived, and then hope he would hang on long enough to reach the hospital in Machias. Every few minutes, Sewall’s eyelids would begin to flutter, and Doc would give his shoulder a gentle shake and whisper to him in the same tone I bet he used with skittish horses.
“So I’m thinking I should go out there,” I said.
Doc gave me a frown. “The man’s delirious, Mike. There’s no reason to believe anything he says.”
“All the more reason to find Ben Sprague, then.”
“Can’t Doris just call him?”
“She says there’s a dead zone in the Heath.”
Doc pulled a wrinkled handkerchief from his shirt pocket and blew his nose forcibly into the cloth. “Well, it’s up to you. There’s not much you can do here except spell me on bathroom breaks. And I guess you’re right to worry about Ben. But I seem to remember that your Jeep’s stuck in a snowbank about a hundred yards up the road.”
“I was thinking of borrowing one of the Spragues’ sleds.”
Doc called my bluff. “So who’s going to rescue the rescuer?”
“I’ll be all right.”
“I’m sure that’s what Ben told Doris.”
“Didn’t you say that Kendrick was headed over this way with his dog team?” I said. “Your house is just up the hill and across Bog Pond.” He should have beaten us here by nearly half an hour, and Doris hasn’t mentioned seeing him.”
“Maybe he ran into Sprague out there,” said Doc. “I wouldn’t worry about Kendrick. This kind of weather is his natural element.”
“It’s my job to worry, Doc.”
I stepped into the TV room to call the state police. “The EMTs are never going to make it down this hill unless they’re driving a military half-track,” I told the dispatcher in Augusta. “Can you arrange for DOT to send a plow over this way to help out the ambulance?”
“Anything else?”
“Contact Sergeant Rivard and tell him I need assistance searching for a lost person.”
Call me chicken, but rousing my surly new sergeant in the middle of this snowstorm wasn’t a task I cared to do myself.
The Spragues’ sleds were Yamaha RS Ventures in the same colors: blue and white. They were touring machines, built for long-distance rides along well-manicured trails. Their meticulous Japanese engineers had never intended them to be ridden into the teeth of a full-on blizzard.
At first the snowmobile floated atop the powder. I gave the engine a half handful of throttle and felt myself pulled along as if by actual horses given their head. The tracks bit into the snow and pushed the runners through the scattering spray.
The conditions didn’t seem so bad until, going around a curve, I turned the handlebars and everything went wobbly. The sled rolled to the outside and dug into a drift, throwing cold mist up into the visor of my helmet. I stood up, leaned hard against the inside, and pulled the machine level for all of ten seconds before it pitched away from me again. I needed to find my balance quickly or I’d be wallowing in a snowbank with a quarter ton of steel on top of me. The last time something like that had happened, I snapped two bones in my hand. I planted both feet on the outside running board and let my body weight pull against the roll. Soon I was swaying back and forth down the trail.
Doris Sprague had called the frozen swamp behind her house the Heath. There were about a hundred places with that name in my district. Most were raised peat bogs from which, every now and then, someone dug up a tea- stained mammoth tusk. The word heathen is derived from these prehistoric wetlands because heaths were home to criminals, outcasts, and lepers. Bogeymen dwelled in bogs. In northern Europe, they were the sites of ritual human sacrifices.
This one was pretty much just a trackless wasteland. No virgins had ever been sacrificed here except by accident. Beneath the blowing snowdrifts, the sphagnum moss was hardened into permafrost. Stunted pines and swamp maples clustered together on islands of rock. Along the edges of the Heath, loggers had carved a rat’s maze through the laden evergreens. Every way you turned, there was another trail that dead-ended against a white wall of trees.
Why had John Sewall been lurking in this swamp on a subzero day? And how had he found his way out?
