Chapter One : Part 2

Here If You Need Me: A True Story
by Kate Braestrup

(Page 2 of 4)

By my lights, a one is when they find the lost person alive. Ones are good. A ten is - well, a ten is a dead warden, I suppose. Still, line-of-duty deaths are rare, if not quite rare enough. (The Maine Warden Service has the highest number of line-of-duty deaths of any agency in the state, a total of fourteen in the 125 years of the service's existence.)

Where is the Masquinongy Pond search going to fall on that Colorado detective's scale of one to ten? If the child is dead, it's going to be up there around seven or eight for all the wardens as well as for me.

Peace.

My children are all alive and well, if not well behaved. I can count on a solid little hit of adrenaline to clear my head when I arrive on scene. So I kick idly at the gravel, take some deep breaths, blow on my hands, wonder whether Peter and Woolie's issues merit intervention by a shrink, fantasize idly about sailing to the islands in the sky.

Those ducks had better get a wiggle on; winter is definitely on its way. There are ice crystals forming around the woody stems of the cattails. Turtles, their metabolisms slowed to geologic speed, have hunkered down in the mud for six months of cold coma. It won't be long before the surface of the lake freezes into a solid pane of ice, and anyone who wants to walk on water can. By January it will be thick enough to drive a truck onto, in theory at least. (Every few years, the dive team is called out to retrieve the body of a driver whose estimate of the ice's thickness proved tragically inaccurate.) When the ice is that thick, I'll be willing to let my children skate, maybe.

Right now, my four children are sitting at the kitchen table, eating the cookies they were supposed to save for after supper, doubtless still arguing over the pencil sharpener or, if they've finished with that, arguing over which video they will watch tonight if Mom is still away and unable to enforce the "no videos on school nights" rule.

"It would be nice if this little girl turns out to be alive," I suggest out loud.

Barely audible at first, above the adenoidal agreement of the ducks, a faint buzz grows steadily louder. The warden service seaplane suddenly pops up above the high blueberry barrens at the far end of the lake. Its appearance breaks the island illusion; the clouds are clouds again. The plane gives a friendly wing-waggle and swings toward the water. It is aimed at the wrong shore, but I know by now not to jump and wave. The pilot has to land the plane nose into the wind. When the pontoons have made contact, flinging up twin plumes of white spray and carving sleigh tracks in the lake's silvery surface, Charlie will turn the plane around, and it will grumble gently to my shore.

Once I'm installed in the passenger seat, Charlie drives the plane hard into the wind, the pontoons skid off the water, and we ascend over the peak of Ragged Mountain.

"The lieutenant is going to meet us at Masquinongy Pond," Charlie says. "I guess it's not looking so good."

I nod, looking carefully out the window at distant objects to forestall nausea. Penobscot Bay lies to our right, gleaming blackish blue around the shreds of land that form Islesboro, Northaven, Vinalhaven, Isle au Haut, and myriad little islands. I can pick out details: Owl's Head Light, the break-water in Rockland Harbor, the square hull of the ferry backing out of the slip at Lincolnville Beach. Old mountains, smoothed by glaciers and time, roll off to the north and west. Charlie turns westward and flies behind the sun.

Charlie's hands rest lightly on the plane's steering wheel. I have an identical yoke in front of my seat that tilts in tandem with his as Charlie makes small adjustments to the variable air. Charlie's father was a warden service pilot too. Charlie grew up flying all over the state, and his relationship with an airplane seems at least as natural as my relationship with my feet.

And so, though I am prone to motion sickness of all varieties, I do like flying with Charlie. I like to look at Maine from this new angle and from the sky rediscover its familiar features - seacoast, church spires, winding roads, huge tracts of forest, silver lakes, trailer parks, rolling meadows. The tree-lined edges of the pastures below us are accented with a startling yellow, as if a giant artist used his thumb to smudge the vivid dust of a pastel landscape. It takes me a little time to realize that the dusty smudge is where the fallen yellow leaves of the maples have drifted.

"It's harder when it's a child," Charlie is saying, and I remember again the warmth of my daughter's cheek.

The parents of the missing girl are standing, stage lit, within a cone of lamplight at the far end of the Masquinongy Pond Recreation Area parking lot. Insects whirl drunkenly above their heads, and among them I note the disconcerting, flitting motion of little brown myotis bats taking their evening meal.

Perhaps thirty yards away, a modified RV belonging to the Salvation Army casts its own circle of light and supports its own rave of light-drugged insects, its own dance of bats. Through the open back door of the vehicle, I can see Brian Clark, a plump, walleyed veteran of many search scenes, washing pots. He will have spent a long afternoon cheerfully dishing up coffee, doughnuts, and Dinty Moore beef stew to search crews as they came in from the woods. Most of the volunteer searchers have reluctantly gone home for now. In the darkness, they can do no more than spread their scent, contaminating the area that the K-9s will continue searching through the night.

"I'm Reverend Braestrup," I announce. "I'm the chaplain for the Maine Warden Service."

"Ralph Moore," the child's father says. "This is my wife Marian. We're not churchgoers." The woman smiles apologetically as if I might have been offended by her husband's abrupt tone.

"I'm not a church minister." I shrug and smile. His face does not relinquish its skepticism, but Mr. Moore tugs once on my proffered hand, like a man testing the strength of a knot.

"Actually, I should probably tell you: we're atheists."

"Ah."

"No offense."

"I'm not offended," I say. "What a long, hard day you two have had."

"Yes," he says.

"I'm so sorry this has happened to you."

Copyright © 2007 by Kate Braestrup

About the Author

Braestrup's novel Onion was published by Viking in 1990, and she has since published a series of magazine articles in Mademoiselle, Ms., City Paper, Hope and Law and Order. She lives in Maine.