“Nothing” was my answer.
Nevertheless, we kept looking-and followed the river to Bad Little Falls. As it cascaded into the bay, the Machias was such a raging torrent-with so many plunging waterfalls and swirling eddies capable of sucking entire logs to the bottom without a trace-it seemed futile even to hope. Eventually, I stopped trying. I lowered my binoculars and buckled myself back into my seat.
“Do you think it was a suicide?” I asked Rivard. “Or did he have some crazy idea about getting across?”
“We’ll never know.”
After I hung up, I put on the headset and told Stacey to set me down near my truck at the Gardner Lake boat launch.
“You mean that’s it?” she asked. “Shouldn’t we keep looking?”
“If we haven’t seen him now, it means he’s probably stuck on something beneath the surface, or the hydrodynamics of the falls are keeping him submerged.”
“The wardens will recover the body,” said Charley. “You can’t send divers anywhere near those falls, though, so that’s going to complicate things. The river’s tidal below the waterfall. They might have to look all the way down the bay before they find him.”
At least I knew what I would be doing for the near future: scouting the river for a corpse.
“It seems anticlimactic,” said Stacey.
“Not everything has a neat ending,” I replied.
Where is Jamie at this moment? I wondered. Does she know? Has anyone told her? It felt very urgent and important for me to be the one to break the news.
Stacey brought the plane around for an approach on Gardner Lake. Once again, the ice fishermen all paused in their chitchatting to watch the Cessna drop down out of the white sky and skate across the frozen pond. The propeller roared as we slid to a stop just yards from the boat ramp.
Both Charley and Stacey got out of the plane to bid me good-bye.
Stacey, I discovered, was taller than her father, nearly six feet, and slender. Her legs were long and her shoulders were broad for a woman. Physically and, I suspected, in most other ways, she was the opposite of shapely little Jamie Sewall.
Charley clapped one hand on my shoulder and patted my chest with the other. “This was a sad day, so let’s make plans for a happier one. Ora will be heartbroken if you don’t join us for supper soon. We could go ice fishing for some of those big salmon we’ve got up at West Grand Lake.”
Stacey folded her arms above her breasts and studied us. She had propped her sunglasses atop her head. I finally had a good look at her face. Her eyes were almond-shaped and as green as Chinese jade. Those are the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen, I thought with some discomfort.
“I’m sorry I dragged you into this,” I said.
“Just let me know when you recover his body.”
“Your father will hear about it first,” I said. “Somehow he gets all the news before anyone else in the Warden Service.”
“That’s because he’s the biggest gossip in the North Woods.”
Charley lifted his chin and grunted. I don’t think he cherished his daughter’s relentless teasing.
In preparation for takeoff, she lowered her glasses back to the bridge of her nose. Until that moment, I hadn’t noticed the engagement ring on her finger. The diamond was the size of a pea.
I extended my right hand to Stacey. “Thanks for the plane ride.”
She had her father’s iron grip. “Good luck,” she said.
I saw my dopey reflection again in her mirrored sunglasses.
In my truck, I tried to decide what to do about Jamie. Should I call her on my cell? And tell her what? If she hadn’t yet heard, then I couldn’t very well inform her over the phone that her beloved brother was now dead. My sixth sense told me she had already rushed to the scene. Machias was such a small town. News of a dangerous prisoner escaping from the hospital was the sort of information that moved from person to person with the speed of electrical impulses flashing between neurons.
My phone rang, settling the question. It was Rivard, asking me to meet him where Sylvan Street dead-ended. It was a little riverside neighborhood, near the spot where Prester had disappeared.
As I drove into town, it dawned on me that, in all likelihood, Zanadakis would be closing his case now. Prester’s flight from the hospital seemed a self-incriminating act. Why run if he wasn’t guilty of killing Randall Cates? Then there was the manner of Prester’s death. Whether or not you could brand his actions as suicidal, at the very least they suggested the mind-set of a man who would prefer drowning over a lifetime spent behind bars.
The whole episode flew in the face of everything Jamie believed. She had been so vehement about her brother’s innocence. How would she process the information that he was, in fact, (a) a murderer and (b) dead? I was having trouble accepting these realities myself, and I barely knew the guy. The twin bombshells would blow Jamie to pieces.
By the time I arrived at the end of Sylvan Street, there were only a few police vehicles left: Rivard’s patrol truck, the sheriff’s Crown Vic, and two white cruisers with the Washington County star on the door. Deputy Dunbar stood in the street with his hands raised, indicating I should stop.
I rolled down my window. “Any news?”
“I’m looking for a new job,” he said. “Does that count?”
“Seriously?”
“How the hell was I supposed to know he was strong enough to run away? I was just trying to help the kids who got hurt in that school bus.”
I didn’t particularly like Dunbar, but I sympathized with his plight. In his shoes, with the hospital in such a state of chaos and everyone focused on the injured children, I probably would have left Prester unguarded, as well.
“Have you seen Jamie Sewall?”
He sneered at me. “I thought that was your department.”
I found my capacity for sympathy diminishing rapidly. “Just tell me, Dunbar.”
He made a hitchhiking motion over his shoulder. “Why don’t you ask the sheriff?”
Dunbar stepped away to avoid being clipped by the door of my truck. I brushed past him and headed down the unplowed street. I found Rivard, Sheriff Rhine, and Chief Deputy Corbett standing in a snow-covered yard fifty feet from the river. A few snowflakes drifted past on the breeze.
“Just the person we were talking about,” said the sheriff.
“Where’s Jamie?”
“She showed up at the hospital during the search,” Rhine said. “I had a deputy escort her home.”
Jamie didn’t strike me as the sort of person who would follow police orders, especially when they involved separating her from someone she loved. “How did you accomplish that feat?”
“We told her he might try to call home,” Corbett said.
Rhine fiddled with her turquoise ring. “I’m headed over to her house now.”
“And you want me to go with you,” I said.
“How’d you guess?”
Rivard moved a wad of tobacco around in his cheek. “You didn’t tell me you were dating the suspect’s sister, Bowditch.”
“I’m not dating her.” Technically, this was not a lie.
“Whatever you want to call it,” said the sheriff, “I’d like you to come with me to break the news.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“I’m not doing it for you, I’m doing it for her. This kind of news is always better coming from someone you trust.”
Rivard tried to work some stiffness out of his neck by moving his head around. “When you’re done with the sheriff, give me a call, and we’ll talk about the recovery efforts. I need to talk with the dive team and airboat guys. I have no clue how they’re going to tackle this one.”
“Maybe they should just string a net at the base of the falls,” said the sheriff.
“Crazier ideas have been tried,” replied Rivard.
