become a fixture at the Square Deal Diner. Just about every day, I’d stop in for a molasses doughnut and some good-natured ribbing from the owner, Dot Libby, or her plainspoken daughter, Ruth. They’d been among the first people to welcome me into what had started out as an unfriendly community. Over the course of the two years I’d spent in Sennebec, I’d formed an unexpected attachment to the restaurant. It surprised me, thinking about the Libbys, to feel such intense homesickness.
We drove along, listening to the fuzzy chatter on the police radio. I turned my head to take in the view.
The road into town was hardly beautiful. The snowbanks outside my window were black with soot and impacted grit. The bigger pines and birches had all been cut within the past fifty years, and so you were left with nothing but adolescent trees elbowing one another for sunlight. The scattered houses were a mix of rusty trailers, farmhouses with advanced cases of osteoporosis, and newer modular homes that looked like they had come out of the same cereal box. The residents tended to hang their laundry even in the dead of winter: faded bedsheets, spit- stained onesies, stretch pants, and a surprising amount of thong underwear.
Back on the midcoast, we’d had hidden pockets of poverty amid the splendid rows of summer cottages. Here, the poverty was proudly on display for the world to see. Whenever it snowed, everything would look pure and white again, but only for a few hours, until the first plow came along or the first pink panties got pinned to a clothesline.
After ten minutes of not conversing, I tried again. “So tell me about Joe Brogan.”
“Kind of a dick-but his business is good for the local economy.”
“I’m not a fan of game ranches.”
“Yeah, well, they’re legal, so you’d better get over it.”
“What sorts of problems have you had with him and his guides?”
“One of his buffaloes got loose a year ago, and we spent a month looking for it in the woods. Freaked-out people kept calling us after it ran through their yards, asking us if there were bison in Maine. A guy finally shot it the first week of moose season, thinking it was an obese moose or something.”
“What about Billy Cronk?” I asked.
“Good guide. Grew up in the woods. Are you still going to send that night hunting charge against him to the DA?”
Rivard had never told me to let the matter drop, but I could decode his sentiments easily enough. And the truth was that I was conflicted about the matter myself. Brogan might have been a jerk, but Cronk seemed like a decent guy, and the thought of ruining his life rubbed my ethics the wrong way. But Kathy had warned me against seeming soft. “I haven’t decided yet.”
“Well, it’s your call.” My sergeant took another sip of coffee. “That zebra thing is pretty crazy shit.”
“It gets crazier,” I said. “When I got home from Brogan’s last night, there was a coyote skin nailed to my front door.”
He didn’t turn his head, but his mouth twitched. “No shit?”
“There was a note on it, saying, ‘Welcome to the neighborhood.’ It was signed, ‘George Magoon.’”
“Probably kids,” he said. “When we get to school, I’ll show you the kinds of punks you’re dealing with around here.”
We rode the rest of the way in silence. Obviously Rivard would be no help in my search for this “George Magoon” character. Kathy had called it a prank, but the pelt had struck me more as a warning than a joke. Impaling it on my door was the kind of thing I could imagine Billy Cronk, or one of Brogan’s other disgruntled guides, doing. It didn’t seem like the stunt a random teenager would pull. Then again, Rivard knew the area better than I did.
Still, I had my doubts.
FEBRUARY 13
Uncle Prester didn’t come home last night. That ain’t the first time. Once we found him curled up asleep under the mailbox, drunk.
Ma’s worried on account of how frigging cold it’s been. She don’t like him hanging around with Randle, neither.
If he tried sleeping outside again, he’d turn into one of them cavemen scientists dig out of glaciers.
Ma’s late for work because she’s worrying about Prester. Ma’s a shift leader over to McDonald’s.
I tell her I’m sick because I want to stay home and read that Ranger book Mrs. Greenlaw gave me, but Ma ain’t buying it.
Once I pressed my head to the radiator to get it all hot and then told her I had a fever and she could feel my head to prove it.
She still didn’t let me stay home.
Ma makes sure Tammi’s all set in her wheelchair with the TV remote and everything. Sometimes I think she’s lucky because she don’t have to work or go to school or nothing. Then I think how much it must suck not being able to walk.
Outside, it’s REAL cold. I’m worried it’s going to snow again.
Mrs. Greenlaw says Maine was buried under a mile of ice during the last ice age. She says the glaciers crept down from Canada and nobody knows why. It just snowed and kept snowing for thousands and thousands of years.
I bet there were Abnormal Snowmen all over the place back then.
I seen one of their tracks one time in the woods behind the house. It looked like this…
I told Ma what I seen, but she didn’t believe me about that one, neither.
Maybe the Yeti got Prester.
4
After twenty minutes of frost heaves and potholes, Rivard and I found ourselves on the outskirts of Machias, the county seat and what passed for a metropolis in this part of the world, if you could even use the word metropolis to describe a place with a population that barely nudged two thousand.
Unlike many of my fellow wardens, I’d studied history rather than conservation law, and while the degree served no useful purpose in my current job, it made me see shadows of the past everywhere. I knew that the first naval battle of the Revolutionary War-nicknamed the “Lexington of the Seas”-had been fought at the entrance to Machias Bay in 1775. There was even a commemorative plaque down by the water. With crushing unemployment, a row of shuttered storefronts, and a rampant drug culture lurking behind locked doors, I couldn’t blame the good people of Washington County for wanting to celebrate their past glory, such as it was.
Route 1 crossed the Machias River above Bad Little Falls, where a torrent of coffee-colored water-stained brown from pine needles-plunged down a steep terrace of granite shelves, dropping from one swirling pool to the next. It was so cold that the waterfall had partially frozen, forming a jagged crust of ice along the edges and a coating of rime on everything else from the frozen spray. Long icicles hung from the footbridge strung across the falls.
We passed the little university-a huddle of brick dorms and classrooms-on its lovely hillside, heading south along the Machias “strip.”
The McDonald’s was located in a mall across from the one and only grocery store. It advertised itself as a cafe, although I didn’t understand what made it one. You couldn’t order a McCroissant or anything. Several ring- billed gulls perched atop the roof, waiting to grab a dropped hash brown or whatever fried thing people ate at this hour of the morning.
There were five vehicles waiting in line at the drive-through. “Let’s just go inside,” I said.
Rivard groaned. “I knew this would happen.”
Inside, a group of old men sat around a series of adjacent tables. Across the room, a group of old women sat similarly. In Machias, as in so many Maine towns, the neighborhood McDonald’s doubled as the local senior center.
I waited for my turn to order and stepped to the counter.
“Good morning,” said a young woman with an incandescent smile.
