Out of the Deep Page 3

  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.

  Olivia hesitated. “Seals are easiest to save; dolphins and porpoises, maybe half the time. Whales are harder to save. Very hard.”

  She paused then, as though she didn’t know whether to get specific.

  “They can be pushed back to sea, can’t they?” Jack asked. “I’ve read about that. And then they’ll make it OK, won’t they? They’ll live?”

  Olivia was shaking her head again, more slowly this time. “Rescuers do try to haul them back into the water, and sometimes it works, especially with the smaller whales. But usually they’re just too huge to move. Time is really critical when a whale is stranded. If it can’t be refloated quickly….”

  In a very small voice that didn’t even sound like her, Bindy asked, “What happens then?”

  “Well, nobody likes to see a whale die an agonizing death, its body crushed under its own weight on a beach. So they’re often euthanized—put to death as humanely as possible. They’re so huge, it takes massive doses of euthanizing agent.”

  Bindy gasped. Jack guessed she didn’t know about the bad things that could happen in the animal world, the way he and Ashley did. They’d traveled with their mother and father to a number of national parks where species were in trouble, and sometimes animals died—the condors at Grand Canyon; the manatees at Everglades; the cougar at Mesa Verde that had to be put down because it had attacked a child. Nature could be brutal, yet all too often the damage to animals was caused by humans. Usually it happened because people were just careless, but other times it was because they were criminals, like the men in Glacier National Park who kidnapped bear cubs.

  “I think we’re here, guys,” Steven announced after turning onto a side road. He swung into a parking lot and pulled up near a building marked Visitor Center Acadia National Park. “OK, everybody out!” he ordered, but even before he said it, Jack had flung open the car door to escape, glad to get some space again.

  Bindy got out more slowly. From the curb, she pointed to the Visitor Center and asked, “Do they sell candy bars in there? I’m starved.”

  “Well, if you hadn’t caused so much trouble last night,” Jack snapped, “we could have had time for a real restaurant breakfast.” Instead, they’d settled for oatmeal bars Olivia had brought from home.

  “Everything’s always my fault,” Bindy muttered.

  “Never mind,” Steven told her. “When it’s time for lunch, I’ll see that you get a decent meal.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The park resource manager, Greg, impressed Jack. He was tall and muscular, with thick salt-and-pepper gray hair, and he looked good in his National Park Service uniform. At every national park the Landons had visited, Jack had felt admiration for the rangers, biologists, naturalists, and law enforcement people who seemed to care so much about the jobs they were doing to preserve the best part of America—its wildlands, history, and natural beauty. He’d started to think he might like to work for the Park Service himself, after he grew up and finished college.

  “My office is pretty small,” Greg was apologizing, “so I thought we’d better meet here in the conference room. I didn’t know there’d be so many of you Landons,” he added, laughing.

  “I’m not a Landon,” Bindy announced, shaking Greg’s outstretched hand. “I’m Bindy Callister, a problem child the Landons are stuck with for a while.”

  Greg looked a little surprised, but he smiled and said, “Well, have a chair then. You can sit next to me, Bindy Callister, problem child.” When he pulled out the chair, Bindy plunked onto it and grinned up at him.

  The Landons seated themselves around the table, with Olivia opposite Greg. Immediately getting down to business, she said, “Just to review the facts, you had 12 marine mammals strand at Isle au Haut a week ago. All of them were dead, or died shortly after stranding, correct? There were 5 seals, including 3 mature animals and 2 pups; 6 porpoises, all mature; and one humpback whale, a mature female 40 feet long and weighing approximately 37 tons.” Dropping her professional manner, Olivia exclaimed, “You must have had some job getting that body off the beach.”

  Greg nodded. “Even after the head was cut off and sent to Harvard Medical School for examination, that still left a lot of whale carcass to remove. Fortunately, we had a large group of volunteers helping us do the job, and the weather has been cool for May. If it had been hot and sunny, the smell would have made us all gag. It was bad enough as it was.”

  “Where are the other carcasses?” Steven asked.

  “In an ice storage unit in Bar Harbor. We’ll drive over there later, Olivia, so you can examine them.”

  Bindy wrinkled her nose as though the thought of examining dead animals was disgusting. She was just about to say something when Steven gave her “the look,” a forbidding expression he’d perfected with his own kids. It worked on Bindy, too. She kept quiet.

  “The first thing that crossed my mind was sonar testing,” Olivia continued. “After that case in the Bahamas where 16 whales and a dolphin beached….”

  “Olivia, refresh my memory about that case, will you?” Greg asked. “I know that acute auditory trauma and the intense pain connected with it can really mess up a whale’s navigation system. Maybe you didn’t hear about it, but just north of here, off the coast of Newfoundland, there were some explosions from an underwater drilling operation that could have interfered with the navigational skills of a bunch of humpback whales. They blundered into fishing nets.”

  Steven commented, “Getting tangled up in nets can be as bad for whales as strandings.”

  “Definitely. Still, in the 11 years I’ve been here,” Greg went on, “we’ve had a couple of whales that were already dead come floating ashore, but we’ve never had anything like the mass stranding that happened this week. It sounds more like the case in the Bahamas.”

  Olivia shuffled some papers before she said, “I’ll tell you what I’ve been able to research so far, Greg. The Bahamas stranding involved 16 whales and 1 dolphin.” She went on to explain that just before the whales washed up on the beach, the U.S. Navy had been testing mid-frequency sonar in the ocean, not too far away. The stranded whales were a smaller species that weighed only about 2 tons each, so volunteers could push most of them back into the water. “But 7 of the whales died right on the beach, and none of the others have been seen since then.”

  “So they died, too,” Ashley whispered softly. “Except they died out in the ocean.”

  Greg asked, “Did you read the necropsy report? I managed to get a copy of it. Biologists examined the tissue and bones around the whales’ ears and found that they’d hemorrhaged.”

  “Right. Since whales live in a world of sound, they need their hearing for communicating with each other—and for finding their way around, locating food, and avoiding predators. In other words,” she said, explaining it for Bindy’s benefit, “they make sounds and listen to the sounds echoing back t
o them. That’s how they tell where objects are in the water.”

  Steven added, “It’s the same principle as the sonar the Navy was testing—they send out a signal and listen for its echo.”

  “Right. Anyway, it seemed pretty certain that the Navy’s sonar testing confused the whales and caused the stranding in the Bahamas.” Olivia picked up the report and waved it. “As things turned out, the necropsies—that means autopsies on animals, Bindy—proved that the sonar had done more than just confuse them, it had actually damaged the whales’ ears. Three of them showed signs of bleeding in their inner ears, and one showed signs of bleeding around the brain.”

  “That’s bad,” Jack declared. “I hope the Navy stopped doing the sonar testing after that.”

  Greg looked a bit uncomfortable. Drumming his fingers on the tabletop, he said, “You know, I was in the military myself before I joined the Park Service. Quite often, the military has to walk a fine line between defense measures and environmental harm.”

  “Yeah, I read about the decision in this particular case,” Steven agreed. “The Navy said it would protect marine mammals as much as possible—during peacetime. But they also said that national security comes first. And right now, since the war against terrorism began, this is no longer considered peacetime.”

  “Correct. And the sonar they were testing is used to detect enemy submarines,” Greg added. Standing up for emphasis, he declared, “However, I am absolutely sure that the Navy has not been testing low-frequency, mid-frequency, or any range frequency of sonar in these waters this week or the week before. I personally spoke to a high-ranking officer in the Navy Department, and he assured me of this. I believe him.”