After I’d dressed, I sat down at her kitchen table with a pen and a notepad, trying to find the right words to justify my graceless departure.
Again I thanked Stacey for her hospitality but said that I needed to head back to Miami lest unforeseen circumstances cause me to miss yet another plane. It wasn’t the whole truth, nor was it a lie. After a long, silent debate with myself, I signed the note with love.
I had just put down the pen when my phone rang. Stacey’s mother, Ora, smiled up at me from the lighted screen. She had snow-white hair, pale green eyes, and was, honestly, the most beautiful older woman I had ever seen. The coincidence of Ora calling here and now made me shiver. Then I realized it was after midnight, well past her usual bedtime, and I became even more worried.
“Ora?”
“Mike, where are you?”
“Still in Florida. I have a morning flight back to Maine. Has something happened to Charley?” It was the only reason I could imagine for her calling me that late.
“You haven’t heard from him?”
“No, why?”
“He’s gone off without a word of explanation.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s disappeared. I have no idea where or why. Mike, I don’t think he wants me to know where he went.”
6
Five hours later, I boarded an Airbus A321 bound for Portland, Maine. I had sped east across the Everglades and arrived at the Miami airport as the rising sun was prying open a crack between the gray sky and the gray ocean.
I took my seat beside the window and gazed out at the acres of interlocking tarmac strips. Boat-tailed grackles glided down to peck for insects in the grass islands between the taxiways.
I texted Dani to tell her I’d made my flight. I had one hell of a story to share upon my return to Maine. “It involves a Burmese python,” I wrote.
And Stacey.
After we’d taken off, I removed my briefcase from under the seat and retrieved the notes I had taken of my conversation with Ora Stevens. When you become a law enforcement officer, your academy instructors stress the importance of making careful records of important conversations, but it’s a lesson you only learn for real when a defense attorney gets one of your arrests thrown out because you were sloppy with your note-taking. I spread the pages across the tray table.
* * *
“When was the last time you saw him?” I’d asked Ora.
“Yesterday morning. He woke me as he was getting dressed in the dark, but I fell back asleep.”
“How many hours ago specifically was that?”
She paused to count. “Forty-one?”
To civilians, this might have seemed a long time to wait before reporting her septuagenarian husband missing. But Charley had been a game warden for decades, and long absences from home had been a part of their life together. Fatal collisions between moose and cars, search-and-rescue missions, and hunts for armed fugitives happened at all hours. But he was retired now and had been for a while, and even in his active-duty days, he wouldn’t have left home without giving his wife a full explanation.
“Did he say anything about when he’d be back?”
“Not a word.”
“I assume you’ve tried calling his phone.”
“He doesn’t pick up, Mike. I keep getting his voice-mail box.”
I had never known Charley to forget his mobile phone or travel anywhere without it. Granted, cell coverage in Maine is worse than spotty. It is effectively nonexistent except around the larger population centers, but in extremis, we might use the GPS tracker in his phone to triangulate on his location.
“He didn’t leave a note?”
“Just a short one beside my coffee. Charley makes me a cup every morning the way I like. ‘I love you, Ora. I’ll be back as soon as I get a puzzle sorted out.’ He only uses my name when he’s deadly serious. Usually, as you know, he calls me Boss.”
The nickname was a term of affection no younger man could get away with calling his partner in this day and age.
“Did you hear his plane leave the dock?”
“That’s another thing. He didn’t take the Skyhawk. He took his old Ford.”
“Wait, he didn’t fly?”
“No.”
The old pilot was famous for never driving anywhere he could fly even if it was just down to Calais to pick up a chain saw blade from the hardware store. He’d park his Cessna floatplane in the St. Croix River while he ran errands. If Charley had taken his truck, a sap-green Ranger, he’d done so for one reason: because his ultimate destination was inaccessible by air.
“Ora, this next question is difficult. But have you noticed anything unusual about Charley’s state of mind?”
“He’s not showing signs of dementia.”
“I only ask because—”
“He’s getting older. We both are. But the answer to your question is no.”
“Have you reached out to anyone else?”
“You’re the closest thing he has to a son, Mike. If he didn’t tell you, I don’t know who he would have. Nick Francis, maybe.”
Nick was the retired chief of the Passamaquoddy Nation. Before that, he’d been the tribal police chief. And before that, he’d been a game warden who’d worked alongside Charley when they were both young officers, in an era when Native Americans in Down East Maine faced harassment and violence unthinkable to modern Americans.
“Can you call Nick and ask if he’s heard from Charley lately?”
“Yes, but I will have to tell him the truth, given the things they’ve been through together.”
“Hopefully, he’ll have some useful information. Let me backtrack a little. Did anything unusual happen the day before Charley left home?”
“We took the van down to Machias to catch some of the sea breeze and have pie at Helen’s. We ran into lots of people we know at the Dike—you know how social Charley is, how he always makes the rounds among the booths—and then we drove home. Come to think of it, he was awfully quiet on the drive back.”
The Dike was the local name for the wide Route 1 causeway that ran parallel to the Machias River and served as an embankment dam, keeping the Little River from undercutting the road. On pleasant days, antiques dealers and craftspeople set out tables along the side of the road, turning the causeway into a pop-up bazaar.
“Who did he talk to there?”
“I didn’t see. My chapter of Planned Parenthood was gathering signatures, and I covered a shift at the booth while Charley made his rounds.”
“But his change in mood happened after you left the Dike and were headed back to the lake?”
“I think that would be accurate.”
So he either spoke with someone in Machias or saw something there that rattled him. And that event was likely the cause of his decision to drive off without telling his wife where he was going.
“Did you see him talking with anyone in particular—someone who might have set him off?”
“When we parked, he pointed out a table neither of us remembered seeing before. It looked like the dealer had some taxidermy and rusted old junk from the logging camps. You know how interested Charley is in North Woods history.”