Bad Little Falls by Paul Doiron Read Free Book Online

gift of some sort. I had always relied on Sarah to take care of my manners. At twenty-six, I still had no feel for even the most basic social graces.
    Even going slowly, I almost drove past Doc’s farm. His mailbox, already knocked off-kilter by a plow, sprang up like a ghostly apparition out of the frozen mist. I pressed the brake and felt the Jeep shudder and fishtail before it slid safely to a halt. When I looked again, the mailbox had disappeared into the gathering night. Peering through the flurries, I detected a fuzzy yellow glow on the hillside above me. It was Doc’s porch light. I turned the wheel and headed up what I hoped was the driveway—the paved way was indistinguishable beneath the drifts—toward the beacon.
    I didn’t hear the dogs until I opened the door. Their cries were carried along on the howling wind, so that they seemed part of the storm itself. Larrabee had mentioned that he was also inviting his musher friend, Kendrick, to dinner, but I never imagined that the man would drive his sled here on a crappy night like this. I squinted into the side yard, where a few snow-laden fir trees were huddled against the cold, but I saw neither dogs nor sled. There was something eerie about that disembodied baying in the night.
    I rapped hard on Doc’s side door and waited, shivering, for my host to let me in. After an eternity, he appeared. “I thought we might need to send a Saint Bernard looking for you with a cask of brandy,” he said.
    “Sorry I’m late.”
    “The snow’s supposed to stop later, so you should have a safer drive home.”
    “Not if it keeps blowing like this.”
    I stepped into the mudroom and stamped my boots to clean off the clumped snow. Doc had so many coats hanging from the hooks, there was no place for mine. After a moment, he realized my distress and said, “Let me take your parka. You can put on those moccasins, if you don’t mind removing your wet boots.”
    I had never seen Doc without a coat, so this was my first gander at his spectacular belly. He looked as if he had swallowed a watermelon whole and it had lodged somewhere between his upper and lower intestines.
    I sat down on a hardwood bench and began untying my laces. “Those must be Kendrick’s dogs I heard.”
    “A storm like this is nothing to Kendrick. I think he’s half polar bear.”
    A gray-snouted mutt came waddling on bad hips down the length of the hallway. Its tail swung slowly back and forth, and it held my gaze with two rheumy eyes. “Who’s this?” I asked, scratching its chin.
    “This is Duchess.”
    “How old is she?”
    “Fourteen. Helen and I got her when she was just a puppy.”
    A call came from the interior. “Hey, Doc! Where’s the hooch?”
    “Excuse me,” Doc said, and with that, he disappeared down the darkened hall. The dog followed like his four-legged footman.
    The moccasins Larrabee had offered to me were high-topped, flat-soled, and fashioned from bleached deerskin. They looked Indian-made, which would have made sense. The Passamaquoddies owned reservation land that brushed up against the eastern edge of my district.
    I found Doc and Kendrick in a dimly lit room at the end of the hall. With its hooked rugs, birch rocking chairs, and horsehair sofa, it had more of the the feel of an old-time sitting parlor than a modern living room. Doc had the woodstove cranking, but its efforts were in vain. The storm was pulling heat from the building through every crack and seam.
    I seemed to have caught Kendrick declaiming in mid-speech.
     
    “There are strange things done in the midnight sun
    By the men who moil for gold;
    The Arctic trails have their secret tales
    That would make your blood run cold;
    The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
    But the queerest they ever did see
    Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
    I cremated Sam McGee.”
    Kendrick paused and took a sip from a cocktail glass filled to the brim with amber liquid and ice. He was something to behold: a