“Oh Shane,” I say, knowing what’s coming.

“Yeah,” he says. “It was bad. Next thing I know, I’m waking up in a wreck and I’m the only survivor. While I was asleep Jean got sideswiped by a tractor-trailer and we got dragged under his rear wheels.”

I hug the big guy, but he doesn’t really hug me back. Too tense, too focused on the pain.

“So that’s my story,” he says. “Why I resigned from the FBI.”

“What did you do?”

“What can you do? I buried them. Then, see, I was so afraid of forgetting, so unable to let go, that I spent a year or so working on a family scrapbook. Which turned out not to be such a good idea for me, mental health-wise. That house in New Rochelle? Must have looked like Howard Hughes was living there. I wasn’t saving my own toenail clippings, or worse, but I was obsessing on assembling the perfect family scrapbook that would somehow take us all back to our happy boring life together. That was my purpose in life, culling through snapshots of dead people.”

“So what happened?” I want to know. “How did you get through it? How did you survive?”

He shrugs. “Ran into someone more desperate than me. This lady in the neighborhood, she came to me because she knew I used to be FBI. Short version—she had a problem with her missing daughter and I agreed to help her if I could, and it turns out I could, and I sort of kept going from there.”

“I’m glad you did. No matter how this turns out.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t even think it.”

“Can’t help it. Sorry.”

“Try this,” he suggests. “Show me yours. The secret of who fathered Kelly. Get it off your chest.”

I want to share, really I do, but as usual, something holds me back. Something deep and veiled puts a cautionary finger to my lips and says, no, not now, not yet.

“If we get her back,” I tell him. “If Kelly survives she deserves to know what happened to her father. Knew I’d have to tell her someday. I’ll tell her first, and then I’ll tell you, promise.”

“Not if,” he says agreeably. “When.”

At that moment a gun blasts in the distance. I’m no expert on gunshots, but when you hear one go off in the middle of the Everglades you know what it is. Not a firecracker, not a backfire. A gunshot, no doubt.

Shane grips my hand, doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t need to.

Two more shots fire, and I know in my heart that someone just died.

15. Something Rises From The Black Water

Minutes go by, jagged little shards of eternity.

We’re at the edge of the hardwood island, facing the sunrise, because the thudding sounds came from that direction.

“Shotgun,” Shane decides. “Fish had a rifle, so it’s not him.”

Thing is, I’m not thinking about our guide, or what he might or might not have done. I’m thinking about an execution at dawn, because that’s what it sounded like to me. The final, deliberate, carefully aimed shots that turn a living human being into something lifeless and ugly.

“Hard to say how far,” Shane muses. “Less than a mile, that’s for sure.”

As I stare, something separates itself from the brightening horizon and begins to fly back and forth, relentless and buglike.

“Helicopters are up,” Shane says approvingly. “Resuming their pattern. Remind me to ask Fish if he’s got a flare gun.”

I’m hearing Shane but not fully processing his words—helicopters, pattern, flare. I’m concentrating on the stillness in my heart, wondering if it will ever resume beating. Of course it never stopped, not really, it’s just a symptom of unbearable anxiety, thinking your heart has ceased beating.

Shane says lots of other stuff, probably reassuring things, but I’m not listening.

We never do see Leo Fish coming back. All of a sudden he’s there in front of us, soaking wet from the armpits down, and looking especially grim.

“Best follow me,” he says, retrieving his little boat from the bushes.

“Is it my daughter?” I ask, mouth dry.

“Can’t say,” Fish says, turning away.

Back to the taciturn hermit. As Shane and I clamber into the little boat, it feels like gravity has doubled. Everything is much heavier, even the air. I’m at the point where breathing is no longer automatic; I have to concentrate on expanding my lungs, sucking in the syrupy air. The mosquitoes so thick you have to breathe through a tightened mouth or risk drawing them into your lungs.

Fish, not a young man, poles the boat with fierce concentration, shoving us rapidly along, and the blood-tinted sky ripples in the wake. The blood color gives way to garish, neon-orange and by the time Fish nudges the little boat up on dry land—five minutes? ten? my inner clock no longer functions with clarity—the sky has become a thin wash of blue with a few stars or planets still showing.

I realize, with a sickening shock, that darkness made the wilderness smaller. With the blooming light comes a sense of vast distance. The tiny helicopters are miles and miles away, too far to make any sound. They say the horizon is only about three miles away when you’re at ground level, but from here it looks a thousand miles and a million years, with distance and time hopelessly entangled. Vast but hardly silent—a million birds are screaming bloody murder and things are splashing in the water, disturbed by our presence.

Before I quite know what is happening, Fish has grabbed the rope and he’s running across the grass, dragging the boat. Moving with urgency, as if he knows that some terrible thing awaits us. Which he must. He came this way, right? He’s already been here. He knows but won’t say because he’d rather show me.

Panic is like a fierce little bird trapped in my chest. I want to fall to my knees and let it happen, a full-scale panic attack, fluttering heartbeats, hyperventilation, the whole works. But my legs have ideas of their own, they carry me forward, over the damp grass and the firm mud beneath, through the ragged, toothy fronds of saw grass and palmetto slashing at my knees. Racing forward, my eyes searching wildly for the one terrible thing I hope never to see, my daughter’s name resonating within me, kellykellykellykelly on an endless loop until suddenly I burst through a thick stand of palmetto bushes or trees or whatever they are, and go facedown with a great womp! into the black water.

Shane pulls me out, holds me up, shakes me. Shaking me dry or maybe trying to shake some sense into me. Hard to say because I’m blubbering and with water in my ears not really listening. I see his mouth move, but what is the silly man saying?

“Nutter!” he says.

So he thinks I’m crazy. That makes two of us. Then the syllables begin to separate themselves and I realize he’s saying, “Not her.”

Not her. Not Kelly.

He sets me down, looking as worried as ever I’ve seen him. Worried for my state of mind, obviously. As he should be.

“Back with us, missy?” Fish wants to know.

Too soon to speak, but I manage to nod in the right places.

“Shots were fired here,” he says, indicating a thick area of mangroves. “I was too far away to see it, but there’s plenty of trace left behind. See the way those branches are bent? Two people lying there. Hiding, is my guess. Just above, where the branch is busted, that’s from the first shotgun. Ten gauge, from the sound of it, and looks to be a slug shot. Sorry, missy. That’s the size gun and ammunition a man might use hunting deer or wild boar.”

“Or people,” I manage to gasp.

“Or people,” he concedes. “Which is what he was doing, right enough. The way he fired the first two shots, he was maybe tryin’ to back ‘em out of the mangroves. There’s no blood, no indication they was hit.”

“They?” I ask. The guide’s methodical approach helps calm me, ever so slightly, and my heartbeat is no longer fluttering.

It helps there are no bodies. I was expecting bodies.

“The two was hiding in the mangroves,” Fish explains. “You see that area over there? Where it opens up and the water looks a little deeper along the shore? That’s one of Ricky Lang’s old camps. Used to be trailers and shacks and such like, until the rangers burned it all down. Ricky lived here till he was about twelve years old, is my guess. I’m also guessin’ he has someplace nearby where he kept his captives. Yur daughter and the young man.”