She wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me goodbye. The kiss was light but on the lips.
Forty-five minutes later, my GPS announced that I had arrived in Everglades City. Stacey’s rented house stood on elevated pilings to protect it from storm surges. It had a low, pyramidal roof, designed to minimize the impact of hurricane-force winds.
At first glance, the interior also looked like Florida distilled to its essence. Rattan furniture, tile flooring, potted palms. But mementos of Maine peeked out from the shelves. I recognized a box turtle shell I had found on patrol. And there was the edition of Audubon’s Birds of America; we had bought it from an antiquarian bookseller on a rainy afternoon Down East.
On the walls hung Stacey’s framed photographs of Maine animals: a moose and her calf, a lynx on a snowy road, an osprey perched with a fish atop a snag. These same pictures had decorated the house we’d shared for close to two years. She wasn’t a great photographer, but she knew how to creep up on wild animals before they spotted her.
Her finest photograph, though, was a black-and-white portrait she had taken of her father.
Charley Stevens looked sideways at the camera, his big chin raised, laugh wrinkles cutting lines in his weathered skin. His thick white hair stood up as if, seconds before, he had run one of his strong hands through it. His expression was one of faux suspicion.
No wonder she missed him. I did, too, in that moment.
I showered as fast as I could, marveling at the dozens of mosquito bites I had sustained in such a short time. Afterward, I stood before the mirror while the steam lifted from the edges of the glass. I hadn’t expected these feelings.
I needed to leave.
Stacey had texted me from the hospital with an update. Buster was receiving stitches on his nose and jaw for the snakebite. The copious blood had made the wounds appear worse than they were, as she had deduced.
I texted back that I was glad for the good news. I thanked her for the use of her shower. I didn’t tell her that I would be gone before she returned home.
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
