About five hundred people are reported missing in Maine each year. Most of them are found somewhere between twenty-four and forty-eight hours later. The Bible students—as the media ended up referring to them—had been missing for nearly two weeks when we got the call.
Two weeks. Too late.
Those four words were running in a loop in my head as I adjusted the sweaty straps on my canvas rucksack and looked up the forested mountainside at the rapidly receding back of my search partner—an improbably able-bodied volunteer whom I’d met earlier that afternoon at the command post. The two of us had driven in my patrol truck from the North Woods village of Monson to a distant logging road where we could intersect the trail closer to the midsection of the Hundred Mile Wilderness. Despite my best efforts at making conversation, he’d barely spoken a word to me on the hour-long drive, preferring to stare out the window at the blur of green trees through which we were traveling.
I assumed my youthful athleticism was why I’d been assigned the legendary Bob “Nonstop” Nissen and sent to check the remote Chairback Gap lean-to for signs the women might have stopped there. But as soon as the two of us had set off on the access trail to the shelter, I knew this middle-aged man was going to kick my ass. He was well past fifty, but he could scramble up a sheer cliff like a Barbary ape. Most wilderness rescue volunteers use trekking poles, or even climbing axes, to steady themselves, but Nissen preferred to use his big calloused hands to pull himself up the mountain, going on four limbs at times. He had skin so sun-browned, it seemed to be turning to leather; and he was wearing safari shorts, which showed off calf muscles the size of grapefruits. His climbing boots were made by La Sportiva, one of the best and most expensive brands in the world, which told me a lot about the man’s priorities.
Now I watched him disappear around a clump of lichen-crusted boulders.
Since we’d started climbing an hour earlier, Nissen hadn’t so much as glanced back in my direction. He seemed to view our assignment less as a search-and-rescue mission and more as a personal competition. His sole purpose seemed to be getting to the top of Chairback before me.
Back in Monson, while we were packing our supplies, the officer in charge had told me how Nissen had gotten his unusual nickname. For more than two decades, he’d held the record for the fastest “unsupported” thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail—sixty-one days from south to north, carrying his own supplies, without the assistance of another human being. He’d recently lost his title to a young trail runner from Virginia, but I could easily imagine Nonstop coming out of retirement to regain his former glory.
Perspiration had soaked the brim of my black duty cap and was now streaming freely into the corners of my eyes. I’d left my olive green ballistic vest and button-down shirt back at the truck. I was now dressed in green cargo pants and a black T-shirt with the words GAME WARDEN printed on the back. In place of the L.L. Bean hunting shoes I normally wore, I’d put on a pair of Danner climbing boots. I’d even locked my SIG Sauer .357 pistol in the glove compartment. It felt unsettling to be in the wild unarmed.
The skies were gray and darker in the west; the forecast called for late-afternoon thunderstorms. The hot, humid air surrounded me like a damp towel thrown over my head. The September woods were still lush and green on certain north-facing hillsides but sunburned and dry as kindling in other places. Both the thermometer and the calendar indicated that this was a summer day, but I had noticed a swamp maple glowing red in one of the wet ravines—a harbinger of autumn soon to come. A broad-winged hawk soared high above the treetops, crying its thin cry. The raptors had begun their southbound migration.
Stacey teased me about being a “compulsive noticer.” I was like a cat, she said, easily distracted by every crawling bug and fluttering leaf. What could I do? It was who I was. And I thought it made me good at my job.
Five hours earlier, I’d been relaxing in bed beside her, feeling the cool sea air on my skin and listening to the rhythmic crashing of the waves. Now here I was in the sweltering mountains, trying to keep pace with a freak of nature. As much as I loved the forest, the appeal of mountain climbing for its own sake had always eluded me. I could understand why some people—especially those who lived in cities or suburbs—might feel the urge to hike the Appalachian Trail, but for someone who essentially lived in the Maine woods, as I did, there was no need to embark on a two-thousand-mile journey to commune with nature.
On the drive up, I’d kept picturing the dazed look in Stacey’s eyes when she’d told me about hiking Vermont’s Long Trail with her friends. I was more and more certain that she was withholding something from me about that experience. She’d mentioned meeting “creepy men” in the woods. God knows, there are plenty of them out here, I thought. My search partner among them.
When I had finally worked my way around the clump of boulders, I was surprised to find Nissen seated on a log, waiting for me. He had taken off his shirt, displaying a brown torso so venous and devoid of fat that it looked like a textbook illustration for the human circulatory system. There was a small crucifix tattooed in green ink between his pectoral muscles. And he was eating a banana that he had removed from the fanny pack he wore slung around his narrow hips.
“You hanging in there?” he asked with an expression that didn’t seem overly concerned with my answer.
I nodded, unable to utter an actual sentence in reply. My lungs burned as if I’d inhaled smoke from a campfire. It annoyed me that I couldn’t keep pace with a man old enough to have been my father.
Nissen had interesting hair: dark brown in color and cut in a style that fell somewhere between Moe of the Three Stooges and early Paul McCartney. His head was triangular in shape, narrowing to a stubbled chin. He had enormous brown eyes, like an arboreal creature that had evolved to see in the dark.
“I’m used to hiking alone, so sometimes I go too fast,” he said.
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to come up the AT rather than bushwhacking like this?” I reached for one of my water bottles and unscrewed the lid.
“Easier, yeah. But this shortcut is faster. Besides, I thought you’d prefer slabbing.”
“Slabbing?”
“Going around the summit. There’s a precipice near the top that’s a bitch to climb.”
I didn’t appreciate the insinuation that I wasn’t up to the challenge. “We should be looking for signs of Samantha and Missy rather than just racing to the top. Blowing our whistles, too.”
He stuffed the remainder of the banana into his mouth and then carefully rolled up the peel and tucked it into his fanny pack. “Until we get a look at the logbook in the Chairback Gap lean-to, we won’t even know if those girls made it this far. First order of business is narrowing down the PLS, right?”
The abbreviation stood for “point last seen.” In the jargon of search-and-rescue, it indicated the place on a map where a missing person had last been positively identified. I hated to admit it, but Nissen was right about the futility of examining every rock and leaf for signs of the two college kids. The reason we’d been sent on this quick ascent up Chairback Mountain was to help refine the search area. Normally, we would have been part of a bigger group, but the officer in charge—Lt. John DeFord—had deployed teams to do quick checks, called “hasty searches,” of the trail registers. Other squads were rushing to inspect the lean-tos at Logan Brook and Potaywadjo Spring, farther north, in hopes that Samantha and Missy might have left messages there.
Nissen sprang like a jack-in-the-box to his feet. He was probably no taller than five-seven. “Do you want to rest some more while I go ahead?”
“No, I’m good.”
“I don’t want to push you too hard.”
I clenched and unclenched my fists. I couldn’t tell if he resented being partnered with an inferior climber or if he was just an arrogant son of a bitch. Anyone who hikes two thousand miles alone isn’t likely to be a people person.
When he turned around, I observed that his bare back was heavily scarred between the shoulder blades, the skin pink and welted, whereas the rest of his skin was brown. It was almost as if he’d suffered a bad burn in the distant past. Or maybe he had a tattoo removed, I thought.
I was about to remind him that the Warden Service was running this search, when the breeze brought the sound of a distant engine to my ears. Squinting into the sunshine, I caught sight of a small floatplane flying over the summit of Chairback Mountain. It was a private Cessna—not part of our Aviation Division—but I recognized the two canoe paddles lashed to the pontoon cross braces.
“You know who that is?” Nissen asked.
“A friend of mine,” I said with a smile.
Stacey must have called her father after I’d left the beach house. I should have known the old pilot would have gassed up his plane the moment he heard two young women were missing in the wilderness. The thought of Charley Stevens joining the search filled me with new hope and gave my heart a much-needed jolt of adrenaline. I matched Nonstop Nissen step for step the rest of the way up the mountain.