Read Online Bad Little Falls by Paul Doiron - Free Book Online Page B

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