Free Bad Little Falls by Paul Doiron Page A

dogs.
    Kendrick.
    I twisted the throttle, and a noxious cloud of gasoline fumes rose up beneath my visor. Very quickly, the sound of the engine drowned out the yapping of the malamutes. I prayed my sense of direction wouldn’t fail me, or I would shoot right past them.
    In a few minutes, as I moved east along the trail, my headlights found the phosphorescent eyes of a dog. It stood, legs planted far apart, barking at me with a curled lip. Behind it were others. Kendrick had lashed his team to a tree.
    I cut the engine but left the lights shining, and tilted up the visor on my helmet. Moving at forty-five miles per hour, the windblown snow felt like shards of glass being driven into my face.
    “Kendrick!” I shouted.
    A shadow staggered out of the darkness.
    Because he hadn’t bothered to put on the snowshoes he kept strapped to his dogsled, he was floundering, knee-deep, in the drifts.
    “Have you seen Sprague?” I asked.
    His fur-lined hood and the shoulders of his buckskin parka were crusted with snow. “I met him on the road outside his house. He said there was a car lost out here with a girl in it. I sent him north across Route Two seventy-seven to search.”
    “Did you find anything?”
    He smiled, cracking the ice on his mustache. “Yep.”
    I jumped off the snowmobile into a deep drift. It was like trying to walk in wet cement.
    The light from Kendrick’s headlamp bounced along, leading the way. A huge snowbank rose across the trail. The handle of an entrenching tool protruded from the top of it.
    I watched Kendrick drop to his hands and knees and begin jabbing at the snow with the pointed shovel. I saw that he had already excavated a deep hole, exposing a black car. The door had been ajar when the storm began refilling the crater. Someone had entered or exited the buried vehicle in the past hours, and it was logical to think that person had been John Sewall.
    Kendrick burrowed deeper into the car. Snow had piled up behind the steering wheel and spilled over into the passenger side. From my perspective, standing behind Kendrick, I couldn’t see any farther into the darkened interior.
    I dropped to one knee and squinted into the face-lacerating wind. “Is there anyone inside?”
    Kendrick stopped digging. He propped himself on his elbow and turned to face me. “Not a soul,” he said.

 
     
FEBRUARY 14
     
    Ma shakes my shoulder in the middle of the night. Get up, Lucas! Get up! she says.
    It’s pitch-black. I’m all groggy.
    Prester is on his way to the hospital, she says. He got caught in the snowstorm.
    Is he froze to death?
    Put your clothes on, she says.
    The first time I went to the hospital was when I tripped on the stairs that time. I was so tired, I fell asleep walking up to my bedroom and my bottom teeth bit straight through my lip. The tops of them got stuck on the skin. Ma had to peel them apart and there was blood everywhere.
    They gave me NINE stitches. I still have this scar along my bottom lip.
    That was when I was four years old.
    Aunt Tam is downstairs in her chair. She has her coat in her lap. I want to go with you, she tells Ma.
    Tammi, there’s a blizzard, Ma says. What if the van gets stuck? I don’t know how we would deal with your chair if we had to walk through the snow.
    Tammi starts to cry.
    Ma bends over her chair and gives her a hug. It’s important that you be here in case the hospital calls with news, Ma tells her. You can call me on my cell if there’s an update. I’m relying on you, Lil Sis.
    Tammi smiles, but she’s still kind of crying, too. She used to be a basketball star in high school. In her room Tammi keeps a picture of her team, with her standing next to the other girls. One of them is holding a gold trophy ball.

 
     
    9
     
    “Let me have a look,” I told Kendrick.
    The musher backed out of the hole on his hands and knees. I grabbed the car door and tried to force it open, but it was stuck fast in the snow. I wriggled my way through the narrow