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the 1980 Olympic Village is now a prisoncamp, and that being a prison guard is considered a great job here because it pays so well.
    I do love this area—I’ve lived here nearly five years now. You can walk your kayak to a clear lake for a paddle before breakfast and hike up a mountaintop after lunch. Saranac Lake has a spectacular Winter Carnival, with an amazing ice palace and a parade the whole town turns out to watch no matter how cold it is, and Lake Placid has the best July 4 fireworks I’ve ever seen.
    I’d come here as sports editor on the daily newspaper in Saranac Lake, covering three area high schools and two community colleges, plus all the Lake Placid events: horse show competitions, boxing, luge and bobsled, biathlon, ski jumping, and more—and community sports: softball, bowling, dart tournaments, sled dog races, and ice fishing. On a small paper the editor is the editor, writer, photographer, and layout person—you’re it, the whole department. After spending too many nights sleeping on the couch in the newspaper office because I didn’t have either time or energy to drive home, I’d known it was time for a change.
    Now I do freelance writing and editing and some computer and website consulting. I write press releases for the area chambers of commerce and theater reviews for the paper, and sell articles about sled dog races, rugby tournaments, three-day canoe races, and ski jumping to magazines like
Southwest Spirit
and
Scholastic Scope
. It’s not a huge income, and it’s sporadic. But my expenses are few, and I like the freedom. It had suited me fine.
    I had the feeling that was about to change. And maybe it already had.

O NCE OUT OF LAKE PLACID, IT’S ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES to Baker’s house.
    Baker is just this side of plump, sort of a heavier, freckled, younger Maura Tierney, with a round friendly face that spells Mom, apple pie, and meat loaf. The corners of her mouth twisted at the sight of Paul’s odd outfit, but she just led us to the stack of clothes she had set aside. Paul shyly picked out a Batman T-shirt and jeans, and I helped him change. The clothes were slightly big, but he seemed to like them, and gave Baker his wistful half smile. She popped a construction-paper headdress on him and pointed him toward the backyard where the kids were playing. He looked at me with a mixture of eagerness and nervousness, and I gave him an encouraging nod. “I’ll just be inside,” I called out as he took a step toward the play set.
“Je serai juste là, à l’intérieur … dans la maison de Baker.”
    Baker gave me a look.
    “Uh, he doesn’t speak English—did I forget to mention that?” I asked as I followed her back into the house.
    She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Kids all speak the same language.” Through the kitchen window I could see Paul being coaxed up a slide by a pigtailed, overall-clad kid with a dirty smear on her cheek, one of the neighbor’s daughters. “He’ll be fine,” Baker said. “What, are you adopting a French-Canadian kid?”
    I shrugged. “I found him. Literally. In Lake Champlain.”
    She stared at me for a long second, reading more in my face than I wanted her to. “Okay, you’re staying for lunch. We’ll eat first andthen I’ll feed the horde.” As she made sandwiches I watched Paul through the window, going down the slide and then marching around and climbing back up to do it again.
    “So tell me,” Baker said as she plopped tuna sandwiches and carrot sticks on the table, with a Coke for her and iced tea for me.
    “Mmm. I honest-to-God found him in Lake Champlain. I was on my way to see Thomas yesterday, and I saw him, well, fall in from the other ferry.”
    She stared at me. I took a sip of iced tea and made a face. Too strong, as usual. Nobody in the North Country knows how to make iced tea. Most of them think it comes from a jar of powder from the grocery store. I was lucky Baker brewed it for me. I pushed my chair back, the skittering