Mysteries in Our National Parks: Out of the Deep: A Mystery in Acadia National Park

Hair stood up on his arms as he watched the deep shadow glide silently across the floor. He could make out the outline of his parents in their bed, so it wasn’t one of them who’d gotten up to go to the bathroom or anything. The shadowy shape, moving so soundlessly through the room, had to be an intruder. A thief! His fingers trembled as he watched the shape move closer. Should he call out and wake his parents or just keep quiet and let the thief take whatever he wanted?

His heart thumping so loudly the thief might hear it, Jack opened his other eye. Whoever the intruder was, he seemed awfully small. Then the shadowy figure bumped into Jack’s cot and muttered, “Ouch!”

That was Jack’s chance. He leaped up and grabbed the person, who wiggled and yelled, “Let go, you dork!”

“Ashley?”

“Who’d you think it was? Freddy Krueger?”

By then Jack was feeling pretty stupid—for the second time in the past six hours—so he grumbled, “What the heck are you doing sneaking around in the dark?”

“What’s going on?” Olivia asked, turning on the bedside lamp. Her dark hair sprang from her head in wild curls. Blinking hard, she asked, “Where’s Bindy?”

“That’s what I came to tell you,” Ashley answered calmly. “She’s gone.”

Steven sat upright. “Gone? Gone where?”

Plunking herself down on the end of Jack’s cot, Ashley replied, “I have no idea. I heard a door close, and at first I thought it was the bathroom door and Bindy had just gone in to…you know. I was kinda sleepy, so I don’t know how much time went by, but then I looked over at her bed and it was empty. I got up and looked into the bathroom, and that was empty, too.”

Both Steven and Olivia were on their feet so fast it was as though they’d been shot out of a cannon.

They practically dove into their jeans and then pulled sweatshirts over their heads, yanking them into place as they ran through the door that connected Ashley’s room to theirs. In less than a minute they were back, looking grim.

“I’ll check at the front desk,” Steven said.

“It’s after hours. I doubt anyone will still be there,” Olivia said.

Jack suggested, “Maybe she just couldn’t sleep. She could have gone out on the beach to look at the waves.” Before he even spoke the last word, Steven rushed out the door. Jack listened for the clatter of his father’s footsteps going from the front deck down the wooden stairs to the parking lot, then remembered that his dad hadn’t bothered to put on shoes. Steven’s feet were going to get awfully sore clambering barefoot over the rocky beach.

Olivia had begun to page through a phone book, muttering, “I’m calling the police.”

“Don’t you think you ought to wait a little while?” Jack asked her. “At least until we look around the motel. Maybe she just went for a Coke in the drink machine.” Or a couple more candy bars, he thought.

Olivia slammed down the receiver, saying, “You’re right. Kids, get dressed. We’ll do a thorough search. Then I’ll call the police. And grab your dad’s shoes on your way out. He’s going to need them.”

After catching up to Steven and handing him the shoes, Olivia and Ashley left to scour the grounds of the motel while Steven and Jack walked along the shore, peering inside weathered boats and searching protruding rock formations that seemed to bubble up from the water’s edge. Lights from a few distant buildings twinkled in the darkness. Jack would have felt cheered if it hadn’t been such a serious situation. Olivia’s faint voice wafted to them. “Anything?”

Steven called back, “No!” Then, to Jack, he grumbled, “This is ridiculous. Where could she be?”

Suddenly, Jack snapped his fingers. “Hey, wait a minute—did you check the pier?”

“Of course I checked the pier.”

“But did you go past the No Trespassing sign? There are steps way at the end of the pier—I could see them from our balcony. Bindy might be sitting at the bottom of the steps just looking at the waves. She said she likes the Atlantic,” he finished lamely.

Steven sighed and ran his fingers through his thinning blond hair. “I went to the point where the chain blocks it off. I couldn’t see too well, but I called for her. Nothing. She’s not there.”

“Except she might not have answered you. She’s really weird. Maybe she’ll answer if it’s me. Dad, you just keep looking around. I’ll be right back.”

“All right. I’ll give you two minutes. Then we’re going back to the motel to get help.”

“Right. Two minutes!” Broken seashells crunched underfoot as Jack made his way to the pier. Tall enough for larger boats to load and unload, the pier had a row of rickety stairs that descended from the far end to the water’s surface. At the halfway point, a metal chain had been strung across to prevent access, with the No Trespassing sign hanging from the links and a smaller sign reading “Enter at your own risk” beneath that. But no signs would keep Bindy out. She did what she wanted to do and went where she wanted to go.

Moving along the creaking, splintery slats, Jack called out her name into the night sky. Only the sound of waves and the groan of the wooden pier echoed back. As he squinted into the darkness, he saw what he thought was a dark shape, a deep patch of black turned toward the sea. “Hey, are you there?” Jack cried. The shape seemed to move farther away, hovering at the pier’s end, then disappearing.

Glancing around quickly to see if his dad was watching, Jack easily climbed over the chain. A sudden wind whipped his face, ballooning out his shirt as though it were a shroud and rocking the pier like a trapeze. For a moment Jack wondered whether there might be any missing boards underfoot that he couldn’t see in the dark. He didn’t want to fall through onto the rocky beach beneath, where waves could grab him and soak him to the skin. With every motion the sun-bleached boards creaked under his feet, as the cold and insistent wind tried to push him backward. But someone was down there. It had to be Bindy.

He cupped his hands again against the wind and called out, “Is that you?” After waiting a beat, he shouted again. The boardwalk stretched into darkness. Jack could hear, rather than see, the water beneath him, rushing against the timbers before receding back to the sea.

The inky night at the pier’s end seemed denser now. As the shape blocked his view of whitecaps on the dark waves, Jack noticed a pale, orange glow. It illuminated the shadowy figure’s head. The shape was bigger than Bindy, taller, broader in the shoulders—or was Jack being deceived by the darkness? He took another step. “Bindy?”

When the shape turned, Jack’s breath sucked into his throat. This wasn’t Bindy. It was a man, dressed in black, with a black wool coat that skimmed the tops of his boots. A rectangular metal box—a suitcase?—rested inches from his feet.

“What do you want?” the man growled. His knit cap had been pulled down onto his thickly featured face. A cigarette hung from his lips, the lit end dancing in the night. The light from the cigarette let Jack see the man’s expression, and the look made his mouth go dry.

“I asked you a question. Are you going to answer me?” The man took a drag from the cigarette, then flicked it into water.

“I want—nothing,” Jack stammered. “I’m looking for a girl. Have you seen her?”

“I dunno. What’s she look like?”

“She’s 14, she has light brown hair, and she’s…uh….” Jack made a half-hearted gesture.

“Kind of chunky?” the man finished.

“Yes! So you saw her?”

“No, I didn’t see anyone like that. I came down here for a private smoke,” he answered, lighting up another cigarette. “No one indulges anymore, so I have to find places where I won’t bother anyone, and no one will bother me. OK?”

“It’s just that she—the girl—is missing. Have you been up here long?”

“No.” Taking another drag, the man blew it between his teeth and asked, “Why?”

“I’m asking just in case maybe you saw her walking along the beach. We’re really worried about her.” Smoke curled toward Jack, and the smell hit him, acrid and pungent. How could anyone suck that stuff into their lungs? It was gross.

Suddenly, the heel of the man’s boot struck hard on the boardwalk as he took a step forward. “Where are you staying?”

The question caught Jack off guard. “At the Seaside Motel. Up there.” He gestured.

“Yeah? What’s your name?”

“I—I don’t think you need to know my name. Anyway, I’d better go.” There was something wrong here, something Jack couldn’t quite put his finger on. The man had only taken a single step toward him, and yet Jack felt his muscles tense in a “flight or fight” reaction.

He was relieved when he saw his father halfway down the beach. Steven spotted him and waved his arms in the air. “Jack!” he yelled. “I told you not to go past the chain. Come back here right now!”

The man snorted. “So it’s Jack, is it? Well, Jack, I guess it’s time for you to go. To answer your question, I didn’t see anything, I didn’t hear anything. And Jack—it’d be smart if you did the same.”

What did that mean? Spinning on the toes of his sneakers, Jack began to climb the stairs. With his back toward the man, he felt exposed, as if something might hit him between the shoulder blades at any moment. Don’t be stupid, he chided himself. The man’s just weird. With Bindy gone, the Landons had bigger problems. Swinging himself over the chain, he hurried along the pier to join Steven, who had a look of panic on his face.

“Dad—there’s this guy up on the pier—”

“Did he see Bindy?”

“No.”

“I can’t find her anywhere. Let’s move it. We need to look around the motel.”

The four Landons checked all the halls, which were strangely empty. “What if she’s gone into someone’s room?” Steven worried.

Olivia groaned, “I can’t even deal with that possibility. I’m calling the police right now!”

CHAPTER THREE

Jack could hear only one side of the conversation as his mother stated, “Her name is Bindy Callister. B-I-N-D-Y. Short for Belinda. Fourteen, blondish hair, a bit overweight.” With her hand over the mouthpiece, she asked Ashley, “Do you know what she had on?”

Ashley shrugged. “The last time I saw her, she was wearing a sleep shirt. She was reading in bed with the light on. Then I fell asleep.”

Olivia had turned all her attention to the phone again, concentrating so hard it looked like she might shoot through the phone lines, like Trinity in The Matrix. “Yes,” she was saying. “Yes, that’s right. Fourteen. She is? You do? Oh thank—We’ll be right there. Uh…where is the police station? We just arrived this afternoon, and we don’t know anything about Bar Harbor.” Grabbing a ballpoint pen from the desk drawer, Olivia began to scribble directions. Then, slowly, she returned the phone to its cradle.

“Good news or bad news?” Steven asked.

“Both. The police have her. But they picked her up in a bar.”

Had Jack heard that right? “Did you say they picked her up in Bar Harbor?” he asked.

“No, I said in a bar. A place that serves alcohol. Oh, Steven,” Olivia cried, reaching for his hand, “maybe we’re in way over our heads with this girl. She was able to sneak out right under our noses. When I imagine what could have happened—maybe she’s too much for us to handle. We’ve never dealt with anything like this before.”

“Now calm down,” he said. “Let’s all pile into the car and find the police station.”

That’s what they did, heading onto the highway that led to Bar Harbor, since the Seaside Motel was located about five miles from the town proper. In the back seat, Ashley held a flashlight while Jack tried to follow the street map of Bar Harbor, and Olivia studied the directions she’d scribbled. The town wasn’t all that big, but it had a lot of quirky little side streets that confused Jack. “I can’t really tell…,” he muttered. “Wait, turn here,” he told his father, who was driving. After a couple more turns they found the police station, a pale brick building, squat and square and plain, as if it, like the state of Maine, would tolerate no nonsense. Lights radiated from inside the building, casting a greenish glow onto the street. What a scary place for Bindy to be! Steven must have been thinking the same thing, because he didn’t even bother to parallel park. He left the car sitting with one tire on the curb and the headlights still on, as the family hurried into the station.

The first thing Jack saw when he walked in was Bindy. She sat alone on a wooden bench, elbows resting on her knees and her head in her hands. Her mousy hair had fallen forward to cover her features. When she looked up, Jack could see fear in her eyes.

A policewoman, stifling a yawn, stood up from behind her desk to approach the Landons. “Sorry to drag you folks in here in the middle of the night. I’m Officer Bartlett. Is this the girl you phoned about?”

“She’s the one,” Steven answered grimly.

“Officer Wilson picked her up in Smokey’s Bar about an hour ago—the bar’s up the hill, not too far from your motel. Anyway, the bartender had called us, saying he had a minor on his premises. He said she was a lot more underage than what he usually gets—which is, you know, 17-or 18-year-olds. That’s why he didn’t want to throw her out alone into the night. So we told him to just leave her there and not say or do anything until we sent an officer.”

Olivia’s brows knit together as she asked, “Is she being charged with a crime?”

“No. She didn’t try to order any alcohol; she said she just went into the bar to use the pay phone. We could charge her with breaking curfew, but…let’s just say she convinced us all that she’ll never do it again. Your girl can be very persuasive.”

Steven and Olivia sat down on either side of Bindy. Jack could tell that his mother was trying to keep her voice calm as she said, “That sounds pretty lame, Bindy. The pay phone? If you wanted to make a call, why didn’t you just use the phone in your room?”

Squeezing her eyes tight, Bindy answered, “I didn’t want Ashley to hear. It was a private call.”

“To whom?” Steven demanded. “Who were you trying to call at midnight?”

“Why should I even answer? I know you won’t believe me. Nobody ever believes me. Except these kind officers here. They listened.”

“Try us,” Steven said. It was Olivia, though, who reached out to cover Bindy’s hand with her own. Maybe she’d noticed the tears welling up in the girl’s eyes. Even from across the room, Jack had noticed that. Real tears? Or part of an act?

Her words came out in a rush. “I wanted to call Aunt Marian, but I never even got to use the pay phone because this jerky man was on it and he wouldn’t hang up—he kept talking to someone about a boat and he was going on and on and on. I was in a booth right behind him, and I waited and waited, and then he turned and looked at me and said—” She stopped for breath, then muttered, “Forget it—it doesn’t matter what he said.

So I went to ask the bartender if I could use his private phone and I’d pay him for the call, but before I could, the policeman came in and arrested me.”

“Why did you want to call your aunt?” Ashley broke in. “You told us she was really mean to you.”

Olivia shook her head, trying to cue Ashley to keep quiet, but too late—Bindy dissolved into tears as she wailed, “Because I want to go home. When we were watching Melissa’s Dream, I started thinking about my mom, and—and I started to miss having a family. Aunt Marian and Uncle Jim and Cole—they’re the only family I’ve got left.” Her voice quivered as she spoke, but she seemed to will herself to go on. “OK, so she loves Cole way more than me, but I can live with that. At least with them I had a home. Now I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. No one wants me. The only one whoever really loved me is dead.”

Both Olivia and Steven put their arms around Bindy and raised her to her feet. “It’s all right,” they were telling her. “You’re with us now. Let’s get back to the motel. It’s late, and we have to check on a dead whale tomorrow.” To the officer, Steven said, “I guess it’s all right for us to take her with us, isn’t it, since she’s not being charged with anything.”

“You have to sign some papers,” Officer Bartlett answered, “and then she can go. Technically, we could charge her with theft, but we’ll let it go—at least this time.”

“Theft!” Steven exclaimed.

“I needed money for the pay phone, so I borrowed a bunch of quarters off a table,” Bindy cried. “I had three dollars in my pocket—I was going to put the bills back on the table to replace the quarters. Honest!” When Olivia looked skeptical, Bindy added quickly, “I just didn’t have time before I was arrested.”

The ride back to the motel was silent, except for Bindy’s sniffles. Jack couldn’t tell if she was still crying or if she was pretending. With Bindy, the actress, it was hard to separate truth from fiction. Yet her tears in the police station, when she’d sobbed that nobody wanted her, had seemed real enough.

Jack was ready to agree with his mother. Bindy Callister might be more than the Landons could handle.

Everyone in the rental car stayed quiet. They’d had less than five hours’ sleep from the time they got back from the police station until the alarm clocks buzzed in both their motel rooms at 7:30 a.m.

That is, everyone but Bindy, who chattered just as much as usual. “…so when I found out they were shooting the movie in New Zealand, I thought maybe I could get a role as a hobbit, just to get away from my aunt. After all, kids at school kept telling me I looked like a hobbit—short and wide. One guy even asked me to take off my shoes so he could see if I had hairy feet. So I did. I took off one shoe and hit him over the head with it. Too bad it wasn’t a spike heel….” And on and on.

If Bindy hadn’t yapped so much, Jack could have enjoyed the scenery more. The park covered 35,000 acres of much larger Mount Desert Island, named by the French explorer Samuel de Champlain, who landed there in 1604. They hadn’t reached the park boundary yet; instead, they drove on a winding two-lane road through hills bedecked with greenery—beautiful but impossible to appreciate because Bindy the Blabber showed no signs of winding down.

Finally, to shut her up, Jack asked, “Mom, what about these marine mammals that are stranding?”

Before Olivia had a chance to reply, Bindy said, “Mammals. That must be where the word ‘mamma’ comes from. Mammals, mamma. Mamma, mammals.”

Olivia answered, “Those words aren’t connected, Bindy. ‘Ma’ is one of the easiest sounds for a baby to make. Proud mothers tell you, ‘Oh, she’s so smart. She’s only four months old, and she’s already saying ‘Mamma,’ but it’s only baby babble. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Bindy smacked her forehead and cried dramatically, “Oh dear! Another illusion smashed!”

Sheesh! Tired and cranky, Jack decided he’d had enough of Bindy’s theatrics. “Will you please keep quiet long enough for my mother to answer my question about the strandings?” he demanded.

“I do talk a lot, don’t I. When I was making movies—”

“Just—shut—up!”

“Jack!” his father warned, frowning at him in the rear view mirror—the three kids were in the back seat of the rented Ford Taurus, crowded tight because of Bindy’s width.

“Sorry,” Jack mumbled. “Mom, please tell us about the strandings.”

His mother twisted around from the front seat to face him. “First, Jack, I don’t like you being rude to Bindy. Second, I want to finish what I was explaining. The word ‘mammal’ comes from the Latin word—”

Oh, crud! Jack knew where the word “mammal” came from, and he knew exactly what the Latin word meant—it had to do with how female animals fed their babies. It would be so embarrassing to listen to an explanation of mammary glands while he was jammed thigh to thigh beside Bindy. “Let her look it up in the dictionary,” he muttered, but his mother ignored him. He covered his ears with his hands and started making soft na-na-na noises inside his throat until Olivia finished her lecture, but he could still feel his cheeks growing hot.

“You are such a dork, Jack,” Ashley told him, reaching across Bindy to smack him on the knee. “You just acted like you were about three years old.”

For once, Bindy said nothing, but Jack could see that she looked a little embarrassed, too.

“Now about strandings,” Olivia went on. “As you know, Bindy—or maybe you don’t know—marine mammals like whales and dolphins and porpoises and seals live in the water, but they have to breathe air.

They stay submerged for a while, then every so often they surface to take a breath. If they didn’t, they’d suffocate, just as you or I would drown underwater if we couldn’t breathe.”

Sitting twisted around like that must have made Olivia uncomfortable, because she turned to face forward again. Since she never missed a chance to teach something to kids, she pulled down the car’s sun visor and spoke into its mirror, looking at the kids’ reflections while she talked.

“To answer your question about the strandings, Jack, marine mammals strand for a variety of reasons—injury or disease or harassment from humans or pollution in the water or getting tangled in nets. And if baby whales become separated from their mothers, they’ll often strand because they can’t find food by themselves.”

Steven added, “Sometimes stranded marine mammals are already dead when they wash ashore. Other times they wash ashore first. And then they die.”

“Do they always have to die? Can’t anyone save them?” Ashley pleaded.

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