The Rim Trail was a nightmare to negotiate. The lattice of spruce roots underfoot felt as if they had been greased. I have never suffered from a fear of heights, but there was something unnerving about the way my feet kept slipping, as if an invisible pair of hands had closed around my ankles and was trying to yank them over the drop-off. I imagined the gorge as a malevolent entity intent upon tossing me to my death in the churning water below.
I found Stacey waiting for me at Billings Falls. She was perched on a rock, massaging her leg; the pained expression on her face made me think at first that she’d sprained her ankle.
“I just realized I left that book I was reading back at Popham,” she said. “It’s a sixty-dollar textbook.”
Stacey had a way of losing things, especially when she was distracted, which was often. We’d once spent the better part of a morning searching for keys that were in her back pocket all along.
“I’ll call the property manager and have him send it to you.”
She stared at me through her dark lenses. “Did that guy strike you as a thoughtful person? I’m sure it’s in the trash. Oh well. It’s only money, right? There are worse things in the world than losing a stupid book. Way worse things. Right?”
She didn’t have to say more for me to understand she was thinking about the missing hikers.
I paused a moment to take in the majesty of the falls beneath my feet. There were a few scraggly trees on the downslope, the last chance for someone falling to save himself, and then thin air for half a hundred feet, until the person shattered his spine on a cluster of boulders. Not that landing in the river would be any better. Anyone who has ever paddled a canoe through Class IV rapids knows that the hydraulics of certain waterfalls make them death traps. The circulating currents can drive capsized swimmers to the bottom and hold them there against the sand until they drown. Some of the most furious falls refuse to give up their dead for weeks. For all we knew, Samantha’s and Missy’s corpses might be spinning beneath the leaf-flecked water, as limp as stockings rotating in a washing machine.
As we started down the trail again, Stacey called to me over her shoulder. “What were their trail names again—Samantha’s and Missy’s?”
“Naomi Walks and Baby Ruth. Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “They’re odd choices.”
“Maybe Missy ate a lot of candy bars.”
She clambered to the top of a big rock, pulling herself up by her fingertips until her head was peeking over the top. She froze there for fifteen seconds and then let go, sliding back on the toes of her hiking boots onto the wet mat of pine needles. She pressed a hand to her mouth to hold in a laugh and motioned with her thumb that I needed to take a look.
“What?”
She held a finger over her lips. Then she doubled over, shaking all over with silent laughter.
I moved around her and took a run up the rock face, catching the top with both hands. Slowly, I raised my head.
A young couple was having sex thirty feet down the path. Both the man and the woman had their pants around their ankles, and he was driving into her from behind while she steadied herself with both arms braced awkwardly against a birch trunk. He had one hand on her shoulder while his round white buttocks thrust back and forth. Every now and again he spanked her bare ass.
I dropped back to earth. “It must be the honeymooners.”
“They don’t look old enough to have gotten married. What’s the age of consent in Maine anyway?”
“Eighteen.”
She pressed a hand flat over her heart. “Young love is such a beautiful thing.”
I peered up into the forest, looking for a detour, but I saw none. The trees were thick as the bristles on a hairbrush, and there were deadfalls everywhere with sharp branches on which you could easily impale yourself.
“We can’t circle around them.”
“Let’s have some fun, then.” She tilted her face up at the boughs overhead, giving me a peek at the mole beneath her chin, and let out a shout at the top of her lungs, “Come on, Officer Bowditch! Buttermilk Falls are just a little ways ahead! Don’t quit on me now!”
“Stacey.”
“We’ll give them a minute to get their clothes back on.” She counted the seconds on her wristwatch. “You go first. I want to see their expressions when they get a load of your badge and gun.”
When I pulled myself up again on the rock, I found myself staring into the startled eyes of two fully dressed young people. The young woman’s brown hair was as wild as Medusa’s, and the fly on the man’s Levi’s was unzipped, revealing the bulge of his tighty-whities. Otherwise, I never would have guessed what they’d just been doing.
I hauled myself over the top.
The man had a wimpy mustache, inflamed whiteheads on his cheeks, and dirty blond hair cut in a style that was almost but not quite a mullet. The outline of a pack of cigarettes showed in the chest pocket of his chamois shirt. He gave a meek wave.
The woman’s cheeks and throat were flushed with blood. She was wearing a yellow shirt, indigo-dyed jeggings that showed off her long legs—she was taller than he was—and muddy sneakers.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“OK,” the man said.
“Nice day for a hike,” said Stacey, sliding over the rock behind me. “It’s so awesome to feel the blood pumping.”
The couple looked at each other, unsure what to make of Stacey’s comment.
“Are you guys on your honeymoon?” she asked, raising her sunglasses and resting them atop her head. Her green eyes were full of merriment.
“How’d you know that?” the man asked. He removed the cigarette pack from his pocket and shook a Marlboro out, trying to affect a composure he clearly wasn’t feeling. I could practically hear his jackrabbit heart.
“Saw your Jeep back in the lot,” Stacey said.
“Yeah, we’re camping down to Katahdin Iron Works.”
I decided that Stacey had indulged her twisted sense of humor enough. “I’m Warden Bowditch, and this is Stacey Stevens, who’s with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. We’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”
“What kind of questions?” the man asked.
“Let’s start with your names,” I said.
“Mr. and Mrs. Ryan Tardiff,” the young woman said, exulting in her new status as a wife.
“What do you think of Gulf Hagas?” Stacey asked.
“It’s pretty awesome, I guess.” The unlit cigarette hung from his lower lip. He’d made no attempt to light it. “Is this some kind of tourist survey?”
I ignored the last question. “Have you two hiked the entire Rim Trail today?”
“No, we turned around about halfway,” Mrs. Ryan Tardiff said. The blush had begun to fade, revealing orange freckles under her eye sockets.
“Did you run into any other hikers?”
“Just a guy at Buttermilk Falls,” Mr. Ryan Tardiff said.
“He’s the reason we turned around,” his new wife said.
Stacey narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean?”
Mrs. Ryan Tardiff glanced to her husband for encouragement, but he didn’t seem to pick up on any of her nonverbal cues. “He was acting kind of weird.”
“Weird how?” I asked.
Mr. Ryan Tardiff brought out a NASCAR-branded lighter and finally fired up his cigarette. “He was crying.”
I retrieved the camera from my pocket and flipped through the saved photographs until I came to the picture I’d taken of Chad McDonough. I held the screen up for them both to see. “Is this the guy? He might have been wearing a sombrero.”
“Maybe,” Mr. Ryan Tardiff said.
His wife let her mouth drop open in disbelief. “Ryan! The guy we saw was old.”
“How old?” Stacey asked.
Mrs. Ryan Tardiff scratched the back of her neck. “I don’t know. Forty?”
“Oh, you mean he was a senior citizen,” Stacey said.
Again, the Ryan Tardiffs seemed uncertain whether she was teasing them.
A crying man on a cliff above a raging waterfall—whoever he was, the possibility of a potential suicide suggested that Stacey and I should haul our asses down to Buttermilk Falls instead of joshing around with the newlyweds. I shoved the camera back in my pocket and found another business card. I gave it to the wife, guessing that her tough-guy husband would never deign to report information to a game warden.
“If you do run across the man I showed you, can you call this number?”
“Is there a reward?” Mr. Ryan Tardiff asked.
“Absolutely,” Stacey said.
“How much?”
“A thousand dollars.”
I glared at her, but she merely smiled as the dollar signs flashed behind the young man’s eyes.
After we’d left the newlyweds, I said to Stacey, “You can’t just lie about there being a reward when there isn’t one.”
“I’m not a law-enforcement officer. I can lie until my nose is a foot long.”
The Pleasant River drops more than three hundred feet as it plummets through Gulf Hagas. My knees were definitely feeling the stress of the descent. For the next fifteen minutes, I clung to that walking stick the way an old man does to his cane.
A sign pointed the way down a narrow path to Buttermilk Falls. We emerged from a grove of cedars onto the most jaw-dropping cliff we’d seen yet. There were treetops below us and three tumbling waterfalls. The opposite cliff was even higher, streaked brown and gray, except where daredevil bushes and saplings had somehow taken root in the rocks and were hanging on for dear life. Downstream, an outcropping, shaped like the bow of a ship, teetered precariously over the abyss. On it sat a man with longish blond hair parted in the center. He was bare-chested and wearing brown cutoffs, but he had exchanged his red Crocs for a sturdy pair of boots.
“Caleb?”
The manager of Hudson’s Lodge couldn’t hear me above the roar of the water, so I called his name again. The jutting ledge he was standing on would have been the perfect diving platform for anyone wishing to jump to his or her death. Maxwell seemed to shake himself out of a trance and then slowly swiveled his head in our direction. He didn’t wave or say hello, just rose to his feet in a single motion without using his hands—a testament to the strength of his leg and abdominal muscles.
When we were close enough to converse, I noticed that his eyes were bloodshot. The redness made the aqua color of his irises all the more vivid. I caught Stacey checking out his long shirtless torso.
“What are you doing here, Caleb?”
He returned my girlfriend’s smile. “Thought I’d hike on over from the lodge and look for McDonut.”
“I take it you didn’t find him.”
“No such luck.” He extended his hand to Stacey. “I’m Caleb.”
“Stacey Stevens.”
I folded my bare arms across my chest. “So I heard McDonough’s sprained knee healed overnight.”
“It was a miracle.”
“And he ran into a woman as he was trying to sneak out of the bunkhouse?”
“He told her he wanted to see Gulf Hagas before he hit the trail again. There’s a cutoff from the AT to the gorge. Lots of thru-hikers make a detour because they’ve heard of Gulf Glen.”
“What’s Gulf Glen?” Stacey asked.
He fingered the necklace around his throat as he looked at her. “You’ve never heard of Simon Garfew? I guess he isn’t exactly a household name. There’s a poem about him called ‘Simon Garfew: A Legend of Gulf Glen,’ which some hikers around these parts like to quote.” He then began to recite the poem.
The Great Spirit comes to the face in the rock,
The moon when the leaves grow red;
And when the round moon shines upon it,
Shines into the Gulf at night,
Shines full and fair upon it, Making it plain and white,—
Whoever waits there, with fasting,
Below the strong face,
With a deer’s blood for offering
Always finds pardon and peace.
“That’s beautiful,” Stacey said. “Have you found pardon and peace here, Caleb?”
His smile was sadder this time. “No, but I’ve never tried bringing deer blood with me. There’s a story about Garfew—I don’t know if it’s true or not—that he used to come to Gulf Hagas each fall with his dog to hunt and fish. One autumn, he ventured down into the canyon after a flash flood and was never seen again. Searchers found his dog waiting for him. They tried to catch it, but they couldn’t. It wasn’t going to leave Gulf Hagas without its master.”
“I suppose there are mysterious sightings of a ghost dog, too,” I said. The skepticism had given an edge to my tone. Mostly, I was uncomfortable with the way Caleb Maxwell was flirting with my girlfriend.
“It wouldn’t be the Maine woods without ghost stories,” he said. “I didn’t realize the search area for Samantha and Missy stretched all the way to the Head of the Gulf.”
“Actually, we’re here because I’ve been assigned to track down Chad McDonough.”
“Well, he doesn’t seem to have come along the Rim Trail,” said Caleb. “I didn’t find any tracks coming this way from the Hermitage.”
“Odds are that he was lying,” I said.
“Chad seemed to have a propensity for embellishing the truth.”
“That’s a polite way of putting it.” I twirled my walking stick in my hands. “I guess it makes sense for us to turn back, Stacey.”
“Maybe we’ll get another peep show starring the Ryan Tardiffs.”
Caleb wrinkled his forehead. “The who?”
“We ran into a couple of newlyweds upriver,” I explained. “We surprised them while they were having sex.”
“Really?”
“They told us they’d seen you down here. They said you were acting weird.”
Caleb Maxwell made a face as if he had gotten a whiff of something foul. “What the fuck?”
“They said you were crying,” I said.
His eyes flicked away from mine and focused on the treetops behind me. “Why would I be out here crying?”
“I don’t know.”
His voice came from a deeper place in his diaphragm. “That’s totally bizarre. I don’t know what they think they saw, but I was just sitting there.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I should probably be getting back to the lodge.”
“Full house again?” I asked.
“I figured I could sneak away for a couple of hours to look for McDonut. It pisses me off that I’m not part of the search for those missing women. I’ve been glued to the scanner since you left last night.” An amusing thought occurred to him, and he showed off a set of very white teeth. “So what was your drive back to Monson like with Nissen?”
I lifted my pack straps to give my shoulders a break, then let the weight settle again. “You can probably imagine.”
“Yes, I can.”
I held out my hand for him to shake. “Take care, Caleb.”
“Nice to meet you,” Stacey said.
“Very nice to meet you,” he replied.
We watched Caleb Maxwell vault over a fallen tree that most people would have chosen to crawl under. The next thing we knew, he was gone. The sound of the river seemed louder than before.
“He’s kind of a dreamboat,” Stacey said.
“We should get back to the truck.”
She grabbed my biceps and gave them a squeeze. “Don’t be jealous, Bowditch. You know you’re my man.”
The truth was, I wasn’t jealous—not very jealous anyway. I was perplexed. Why had Caleb Maxwell lied to us about being the man the newlyweds had seen crying?