I spent the rest of the day of Brodeur’s memorial service washing my patrol truck and completing the last of the paperwork I still owed the Warden Service. In the morning I would report to Lieutenant Malcomb’s office, and unless I convinced him otherwise, he would almost certainly suspend me until a disciplinary hearing could be held concerning my recent behavior. Between the incidents with DeSalle, my confrontation with Bud Thompson, and my attendance at the funeral, I’d pretty well pushed the boundaries of acceptable conduct by an officer as far as they could go. If I still wanted a career as a Maine game warden, I’d need to throw myself on the lieutenant’s mercy and hope for the best.
I said a prayer and turned in early.
But just after I dozed off, I awoke with the terrified conviction that the escaped Nazi POW was standing over my bed in the pitch blackness. Heart hammering, I fumbled for the lamp. But, of course, no one was there.
The phone rang while I was getting dressed for my meeting with Lieutenant Malcomb. I expected it might be Kathy Frost, warning me not to be late, but instead it was Detective Soctomah.
“Mike, we need you to come up to Flagstaff and talk with your father’s girlfriend, Brenda Dean.”
“Me? What for?”
“We’ve been holding her as a material witness, but the A.G. says we don’t have enough evidence to make anything stick, so we’re kicking her loose. She claims she was with your father at Rum Pond at the time of the shootings and says she doesn’t know anything about his current whereabouts.”
“But you think she’s lying?”
“Pretty much.”
I’d been looking for some way, any way, to participate in the investigation, and now, out of the blue, Soctomah was offering me exactly what I’d wished for. There had to be some sort of catch. “What makes you think she’ll talk to me?”
“She says she trusts you.”
“But I don’t even know her.”
“That’s not the way she makes it sound.”
Did Soctomah think I was lying, too? If he suspected me now, I wondered what he’d think if he learned of the phone call my dad made to me. In all likelihood that clandestine conversation would be the final nail in the coffin I was building for my career.
His offer raised another problem. If I went to Flagstaff, there would be no way I could make my mandatory meeting with Lieutenant Malcomb at eleven. So this was the decision before me: Meet with Malcomb and lose my last opportunity to help my father before some hotheaded deputy gunned him down, or go to Flagstaff and kiss my career good-bye.
I made my choice.
“I’ll do it,” I said to Soctomah. “But it’s going to take me four hours to drive up there.”
There was a pause on the other end, and I heard murmuring in the background. After a few seconds Soctomah came back on: “Charley Stevens says he’ll fly down to get you.”
“Can I speak with him?”
I waited for the phone to be passed along. “Hello, there!” said the old pilot.
“You don’t have to fly all the way down here.”
“It’s no trouble,” he said. “Besides, I thought you and I might have a chance to catch up a bit on the ride up. Now where should I meet you?”
“What about the Owl’s Head airport?”
“Don’t need an airport. All I need is a little calm water to put her down. Where might that be in relation to you?”
“There’s the public boat landing over at Indian Pond.”
“And I’ll have you back in time for supper.” He paused, and I heard more background whispering. “Seems the detective wants another word.”
Soctomah came back on the phone. “Mike? There’s one more thing. Don’t wear your uniform. We want Brenda Dean to feel like she’s talking to a friend, not an officer of the law.”
As I hung up, I wondered how many opportunities I’d have after today to wear the warden’s green.
An hour later I was standing at the public boat landing at Indian Pond wondering if Anthony DeSalle and his muscle-bound buddy were going to drive up when I heard a faint drone that grew louder and louder. Suddenly, a white-and-red floatplane appeared over the trees. It banked hard and began a tight circle over the pond. Two canoe paddles were lashed to its pontoon cross braces. The plane appeared to be the same little Piper Super Cub I had seen Charley Stevens set down on Rum Pond eight summers ago.
The airplane sent spray shooting off the lake as it touched down on the water. I watched it turn and taxi in my direction. Then the propeller sputtered to a stop, and the plane drifted in the rest of the way to the ramp. The door swung open, and Charley Stevens stepped onto a pontoon. Being retired, he wasn’t wearing a warden’s uniform, but his outfit still gave him a semiofficial authority-he had on a pair of green Dickies and a matching T-shirt. Cocked at an angle on his head was a green baseball cap with the Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife logo.
“I heard somebody here needed a ride,” he said.
“That would be me.”
“Then climb aboard, young man.” He jumped off into the shallow water and turned the plane slightly so its nose was facing deeper water. Then he held it steady by one of the braces like a groom holding the reins of a horse.
Using a strut to pull myself up, I climbed onto the pontoon. The Super Cub was a little two-seater-about seven feet tall by twenty feet long-and it seemed about as rugged as a child’s kite.
“What’s this thing made out of-balsa wood?”
Charley laughed. “Might as well be.”
I ducked my head and climbed into the cockpit’s cramped rear seat. As I fastened the shoulder harness, I wondered what possible good it would do in a crash.
Charley waded around to the rear of the plane and gave it a shove toward deep water. Then he leaped after it, landed on the pontoon, and walked on it like a river driver walking on a log. He swung into the cockpit and belted himself in, saying over his shoulder, “It gets kind of noisy in here with the engine going, so you’ll need to use that intercom to talk.”
As we skittered along the calm surface of the pond, I watched the wall of trees along the far shore draw nearer and nearer. Then, as if a balloon were inflating inside me, I experienced the lift of the wings via a sudden lightness in my stomach, and we were airborne. I looked down at the jagged treetops and wondered how we’d missed clipping them.
Charley was right about the noise. Between the sound of the throttle and the rush of wind outside the cockpit I was half-deaf. I put on the intercom headset.
“Keep your eyes on the horizon if you get to feeling green about the gills,” said Charley. “There should be a bucket back there, too, if you need it.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“That’s what they all say!”
Beneath the plane the midcoast was spread out in a quilt of blue and green. Behind us were the indigo waters of Penobscot Bay, with its islands scattered about like puzzle pieces. Ahead stretched miles of broadleaf forest and blueberry barrens and pocket farmland, all crosshatched with roads.
To the south I saw the muddy coils of the Segocket River and my own little tidal creek. I glimpsed the Square Deal Diner and the Sennebec Market. But what really struck me, from above, was all the new development-whole neighborhoods being carved out of wooded hilltops, luxury houses sprouting up in lawns of mud. It was a domesticated landscape, growing even more so, and the thought of a few fugitive bears hiding out along the ridgetops and in the remaining cedar hollows filled me with a melancholy ambivalence.
“Jerky?” Charley asked through the intercom.
“No, I’m fine.”
He held up a plug of what looked like withered shoe leather. “I meant moose jerky. The Boss made it.”
“The Boss?”
“My wife, Ora.”
“I’ll pass,” I said.
Charley began gnawing at the plug of dried meat. For some reason my eyes kept focusing on the white line
