CHAPTER 3
Owen Garrison wasn’t one for suntan lotion and picnic baskets and lazy days on a beach. After forty-five minutes on Sand Beach, he was restless. The horseshoe-shaped beach was a rare stretch of sand carved out of Mt. Desert Island’s granite coastline, the water turquoise on the sunny early July afternoon.
Compared to Maine’s more expansive beaches to the south-York, Ogunquit, Wells-it wasn’t crowded at all.
But Owen paced in the sand, which clung to everything, as he kept an eye on Sean and Ian Alden, eleven and nine, towheaded boys who’d known no other home but the fourteen-mile-wide island. Their father was the local police chief. Owen had complicated Doyle and the boys’lives when he’d asked KatieAlden to head up the proposed Fast Rescue field academy in Bar Harbor. He wanted it up and running by fall, and Katie, a paramedic and search- and-rescue specialist, had taken on the challenge. She’d left for six weeks of training in London two days ago. The boys were doing fine, but Doyle was still sulking about not having her around for most of the summer.
Owen was just off a two-week operation in South Asia following a 7.5-magnitude earthquake and figured the least he could do was help watch the boys once in a while.
A kid-maybe Sean or Ian-squealed. Before Owen realized what was happening, he was jerked back into the past, remembering his sister on this same beach, running into the water and out again, squealing in delight, flapping her arms against the power of the waves and the shock of the cold water.
But you didn’t, he knew. You might not feel it, but the cold would wear on your body, weaken it.
The day his sister drowned, the water temperature was fifty-five degrees. Early-stage hypothermia had tired her more quickly, shortening the time she could tread water amid the waves and wait for rescue.
Owen, helpless to save her, had watched Doe slip under the water.
He snatched up two towels from the heap of stuff the Alden boys had insisted on carting down to the beach. He waved to them. “Time to warm up.”
They didn’t argue, although Owen had no idea whether they cooperated because of something they heard in his tone or because they’d had their fill of waves. Unlike most of their fellow beachgoers, Sean and Ian were wet from head to toe-and they were blue-lipped and shivering. Owen draped towels over them and opened up a blanket, spreading it out on the sticky sand.
“Sit. Wrap up good. Give yourselves a chance to warm up.”
Ian, the younger boy, skinnier than his brother, sat on the blanket and tucked his knees up under him, encasing his entire body in the oversized towel.
“Do you boys know what to do if you get stuck out in cold water?” Owen asked. He was in jeans and a polo shirt. Nice and dry.
Sean, his teeth chattering, sat cross-legged on the blanket. “Yell for help?”
“You should have a whistle with you if you’re out in the woods or on the water, kayaking, canoeing, whatever. If you get into trouble, you blow the whistle to alert people you need help. You should also have a life vest when you’re in any kind of boat. You almost never want to try swimming to shore.”
“Why not?” Sean asked.
“Swimming uses up your body’s heat faster. You want to conserve heat.”
Ian frowned. “Why?”
“So you don’t get hypothermia. That’s when your body temperature drops. At first you get blue lips and start shivering. But it gets worse-you get confused, you slur your words, your muscles get weak. You end up in a world of hurt.”
“Oh, right.” Sean nodded knowledgeably. “Mom told us. She says people don’t dress right on a hike, and they end up dying of the cold. Even in summer.”
“And in water, your body loses heat even faster. Try to keep as much of your body out of water as you can. If you can reach an overturned boat, hang on to it. If you can’t, keep your head out of water and stay as still as possible. Tread water if you’re in a life vest, get into the ‘heat escape lessening position’ or H.E.L.P.-you cross your arms high up on your chest and draw your legs up toward your groin. Huddle with other people in the water.”
“Have you ever been stuck in cold water?” Sean asked.
“No.”
“Have you ever rescued anyone who had hypo-” Ian frowned. “What is it?”
“Hypothermia. Yes. I’ve rescued lots of people with hypothermia.”
And he’d recovered bodies of people who’d died of it, too.
Both boys’ color had improved, and they’d stopped shivering. Owen knew they’d warm up fast, but he probably shouldn’t have let them stay out in the chilly Maine water that long. Their father, though, wouldn’t care-Doyle had grown up on Mt. Desert Island and had a healthy respect for the elements, but he wasn’t afraid of them. And he wouldn’t want his boys to be afraid.
Sean and Ian pulled on sweatshirts and sweatpants but balked at wearing shoes because of the sand stuck between their toes. They ran ahead of Owen up to the parking lot and his truck. He wrapped the extra stuff in the blanket-untouched chocolate bars and water, sunscreen, bug spray, shoes, extra towels-and followed the boys. He could still feel the adrenaline that had sustained him through the past two weeks of nonstop work. It’d be a while before he could relax.
This had been a long year of disasters. He knew he needed to rest.
He tossed the blanket in the back of his truck. He had a full range of emergency supplies and equipment there. If anything had happened down on the beach, he’d have been prepared.
He liked being back on Mt. Desert. A third of the island’s 82,000 acres formed the bulk of Acadia National Park, protecting its glacial landscape of pink granite mountains, finger-shaped ponds, evergreen forests and rockbound coast. Owen was a part-time resident, often away for long stretches, but he knew a part of his soul would always remain there.
The boys had fallen asleep by the time Owen reached the private drive off Route 3 where his great-grandfather, a visionary and an eccentric, had built a stunning “cottage” in 1919 that burned in the great fires of 1947. The mammoth conflagration consumed thousands of acres and hundreds of summer mansions, its path still marked by younger deciduous forests. After the fire, Owen’s grandparents built a smaller house on the ledge behind the original site, above the Atlantic. Now it was eccentric Ellis Cooper’s summer home. But when his family sold their Mt. Desert property after Doe’s death, Owen had talked his grandmother into saving a chunk of waterfront for him. It was where he’d built his own Maine place, working on it on and off over the past ten years.
He turned down the narrow gravel road that led to his house and, up the headland, the Browning house. Will Browning had often helped Owen work on his house. When he was home, Chris would pitch in. He’d lost his parents to the sea as a toddler, and his grandfather, a solitary man, had raised him.
Originally, the Browning house had been a guest cottage, but Owen’s great-grandfather had sold it to Will after he’d worked tirelessly, for days, trying to save the island during the great fires.
Now, the house belonged to Chris’s widow.
Owen pushed her out of his mind and parked at his house. The boys, re-energized from their car nap, ran down to the rocks to investigate what the outgoing tide had left behind in the quiet pools of periwinkles, mussels, lichens and seaweed. But the temperature was even cooler out on his granite point, and Owen filled up the woodbox and rummaged in the cupboards for something hot for the boys to have for dinner.
No one believed he’d last the summer in Maine. If a disaster didn’t call him away, Owen would usually find something that did.
Doyle Alden arrived at dusk to collect his sons. A big, fair-haired man, he and Owen had become friends as boys, when they’d go off hiking and fishing together, when where they were from and who their families were didn’t matter. Sometimes, Chris Browning would join him and Doyle. Chris had always been driven, determined not to live the life his father and grandfather had. As much as Owen knew he respected his family, Chris didn’t want to be a lobsterman or a handyman, and he’d worked hard to have a different future. He’d gone to law school and become an FBI agent, and he’d married the daughter of a man everyone had known would become the next director of the FBI.
And if Chris had chosen another spot for their honeymoon, he might still be alive. Instead, he’d taken his bride
