Rivard sounded dog-tired on the phone, but he would have mobilized the entire division if I had requested assistance. I had a hard time dissuading him from doing so, in fact. That’s the standard operating procedure for a child who goes missing on a snowy evening.
“I know where the kid is,” I said with confidence I had no right to feel. “His mom told me he has a tree fort behind the house. That’s where his trail goes. I just need to get in there and bring him back. It’ll just take a few minutes.” I withheld the tidbit that the kid I was chasing was armed with a. 22 rifle.
“I take it Prester never washed up,” I said.
“I would have notified you if he had.” His mouth sounded dry from the cold air and chewing tobacco.
“What time are we getting started again with the search?”
“That depends on this snow. The forecast calls for it to end just after dark.”
I flicked my wipers to push the accumulating snow off my windshield. “It’s still snowing here.”
“It’s still snowing everywhere.”
Then he hung up.
I found a halogen headlamp in the glove compartment and snugged it down over my baseball cap so that the light would follow my eyes whenever I turned my head. I removed my snowshoes from the bed of my pickup and strapped the bindings to my boots. The shoes had been fashioned out of white ash and rawhide by a Penobscot Indian craftsman up in Old Town. The modified bear-paw design was oblong in shape, not too long, which made the pair ideal for working in dense cover.
Corbett inspected me from head to foot. “What do you plan on doing if you find him?”
“Mueller wants me to take him into the hospital to get checked out for frostbite and hypothermia. After that, I don’t know. I guess she’ll hand him over to a foster family until his mom gets out of jail.”
“It can’t be any worse than that house.”
I was in no mood to debate. For all of Jamie’s problems-her addictions and self-loathing-I knew she tried to be a good mother. She was a good mother, albeit in ways the bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services would never believe. Lucas was an odd little specimen, but she clearly doted on him and encouraged his preoccupation with writing. Jamie was right to worry that her son might slip from her grip now and tumble into the maw of the state.
I knew people like Magda Mueller did important work. They rescued innocent children from nightmarish situations of abuse and neglect. I also knew that certain bureaucrats considered being poor to be a form of child abuse, no matter how desperately the parents wanted something better for their children. In my experience, multigenerational poverty was a kind of inheritance, impervious to state mandates or meddling, as impossible to change as the color of one’s eyes. My mom had taken advantage of opportunities in the classroom to get her GED and associate’s degree-although mostly she owed her salvation to being beautiful enough to eventually marry a rich man. Then again, she hadn’t fallen into addiction the way Jamie Sewall had.
“See you in a few,” I told Corbett.
“Happy trails,” he replied.
I made my way around the house to the open bulkhead. Snow had tumbled down the concrete steps leading to the basement door. In the blue-white light of my headlamp, I saw the boy’s trail leading across the open yard, past a wood and tar-paper shed that was listing to the right, as if pushed that way by the wind. The light snow had begun to fill in the tracks, but I could see from the jagged treads that Lucas was wearing sneakers.
I removed the notebook from inside my shirt and searched for the map I’d seen earlier. There were no distances marked, but if I remained still, I could hear moving water ahead, so I knew “Injun Brook” wasn’t far.
I tucked the notebook against my chest and followed the tracks. The trail led into a copse of second-growth birch trees that were about as thick around as baseball bats. Snowshoe hares had nibbled the low-hanging buds.
Beyond the shed, the hill sloped steadily, and I could tell from Lucas’s treads-deeper in the heels than in the toes-that he had descended at breakneck speed, nearly losing his balance a couple of times. He’d snapped a dead branch off a decaying tree at one point to keep from falling. I angled my snowshoes to sidestep my way down after him.
The trees grew taller as I approached the hidden stream: a mixed grove of white pines, yellow birches, and northern white cedar. The evergreen boughs had blocked the snow, making it easier to read the trail. The brook at the bottom was about ten feet wide at its narrowest point. It was a gurgling little creek, ice-crusted along the edges, with water that looked like flowing ink in the light of my headlamp and smelled, very faintly-because cold dulls the sense of smell-of the rotting pine needles clumped along the streambed.
Lucas had tried hopping his way across from one rock to the next, but the dislodged snow on one of the boulders showed where he’d lost his footing. His feet would be wet now, which increased the likelihood of frostbite. I needed to find him quickly, before his feet froze.
My snowshoes weren’t made for jumping, so I had to untie them and prop them over my shoulder as I waded across. My boots were waterproof, but the iciness of the creek pierced the leather uppers like repeated jabs from a needle.
When I reached the far side, I shined the lamp along the stream, looking for the point where Lucas had continued on, but I found no other tracks. It took me a few seconds to understand what I was seeing-or rather, what I wasn’t seeing-and then I laughed out loud. The boy had used the stream to disguise his passage. He had waded either up- or downstream.
Upstream, I guessed, and I was correct, although not in the way I’d expected. I rediscovered Lucas’s trail, but it was now on the opposite side of the bank. It looped back toward his house, then stopped suddenly halfway up the hill. You might almost have concluded that a passing UFO had teleported him from the ground into space.
I knelt down, and again I started smiling at my own stupidity. I’d been in such a rush, I hadn’t noticed what should have been plainly obvious to even a rookie warden: Lucas had retraced his steps. The boy had walked backward in his own tracks down to the creek.
This kid is really clever, I said to myself. I’d better read Northwest Passage again.
I located the tracks again on the far side of the brook, even farther upstream. As I snowshoed my way up the bank, I came across a spectacular pine that had been blasted apart; the bark was deeply scarred, torn open to the heartwood down the length of the trunk. Lucas’s map, I remembered, included a “Lightning Tree.” I expected this was it.
According to the notebook, the boy’s fort should have been nearby. I decided to remove my snowshoes to make myself more agile, even if it meant that I would flounder in the deep drifts. I tied the laces together and draped the knot across my left shoulder.
My headlamp had a green lens that I could snap over the bulb. The green light had been designed to protect a hunter or fisherman’s night vision, so that if you switched it off suddenly, you wouldn’t be left completely blind. The lens gave an eerie cast to the trail in the snow.
The footprints dived headfirst into a dense mass of deadfall. The boy was leading me through his own private obstacle course. Fallen and half-fallen trees now formed a barrier to my passage. I peered under the first widowmaker and considered dropping down on my hands and knees to follow, but then I thought better of risking my neck by placing it under a heavy, spiked trunk. I would have to go around, I decided, until I regained his trail.
I crept clockwise around the blowdowns, pushing my way through some low evergreens, which gave me a faceful of snow when the boughs sprang back. It was slow going without the snowshoes. Each step had me sinking down to my knees, if not my thighs.
I stopped several times to listen, but the only sound was the wind rustling through the treetops.
Eventually I located Lucas’s path again. The clues to his ordeal showed in the snow. After wriggling through the blowdowns, he’d scrambled on his forearms and knees up out of a hollow beneath a broken tree. I noticed a wet green dot on the snow. It was a drop of blood turned the color of seaweed by the fairy light. The boy had knocked his head or scraped a limb against one of those cruel spikes. So now he was wet and injured, as well as armed.
The wind shifted, and I smelled wood smoke. There was just a hint of bitterness on the air before it drifted away. I moved cautiously upwind, noting that the prints were headed in the same direction, feeling certain that Lucas had lit a campfire. Glancing ahead, I saw a snowy knoll where two huge boulders, bigger than bulldozers, had been dropped by a passing glacier. At the foot of one was a flickering yellow light.
