Kelly locks eyes with me and tries to speak. Nothing comes out.

Randall Shane, knife in hand and grinning like he’s just won the lottery, helps me cut away the rawhide ropes binding them to the deeply driven wooden stakes. We get Kelly’s arms free, but something’s wrong, terribly wrong. It’s as if she’s partially paralyzed, unable to move on her own. Is it the effect of being staked down, held immobile, or is it something worse?

Her beautiful blue eyes are trying to communicate something and her jaw is working, but no words come out. How did I hear her calling me? Not that it matters. Nothing matters but the fact that she’s alive.

“Some sort of powerful tranquilizer,” Shane theorizes, sawing at the ropes. “We need to move her limbs, stimulate her circulation. You do Kelly, I’ll work on him.”

He means Seth, who, although cut free, remains as still as death, one arm and part of his face strangely swollen. Shane starts to pump on the young man’s inert chest.

“I’ll get to you in a moment,” he says to Edwin Manning, who is struggling and failing to speak.

Manning’s tear-filled eyes blink rapidly. We both know he’d want his son saved first.

Kelly’s eyes become frantic. Has she figured out that Seth is dead or dying? Or is it something else? She seems to be trying to look behind me. Wanting me to look, too.

I’m about to turn when a pair of huge, bloodied hands grab Shane by the throat.

Before I can fully react, or understand what’s happening, a muddy foot connects with the side of my head, knocking me into the water.

There’s nothing quite so stimulating as falling into water very recently occupied by a twelve-foot alligator. I’m out of there like a scalded cat, but even so by the time I crawl back onto the shore, Shane and Ricky Lang are rolling on the ground, hands locked around each other’s necks.

Neither man speaks. Except for a few wheezing grunts, the battle is conducted in total silence. Shane is taller, but pound for pound his opponent is more muscular, and has the uncanny strength of the insane.

Shane’s face is getting blue and his eyes are bugging out.

Find the knife, I’m thinking frantically, find the knife! But there’s no time for that because the mud-covered madman is pounding Shane’s head into the dirt.

Shane struggles, kicks at him, pumping his knees up into Lang’s midsection to no avail.

I look around for something to use as a weapon. A rock, a two-by-four. In the movies there’s always something handy. But out here in the middle of godforsaken nowhere there’s nothing but floppy palm fronds.

No weapons available, so I do what any hundred-and-twenty-five-pound woman would do in similar circumstances—I leap on his back and try to gouge out his eyes.

Bad idea.

With a roar that made the startled alligator sound timid, Ricky Lang instantly leaps to his feet, whirls around and throws me into the bushes. The whole move takes less than a heartbeat and I land flat on my back with a force that knocks the wind out of me and cracks a few ribs.

I can’t breathe and my ears are ringing, muffling the world in silence, but my eyes are still functioning. I can see what happens next.

Shane on his knees, drooling blood.

Ricky Lang methodically kicking away the palm fronds and recovering a knife. Not Shane’s knife, something bigger and uglier.

Then my ears pop and I can hear again. Birds chirping, bugs buzzing, peepers peeping, and my heart banging against my broken ribs.

Ricky Lang looks at me with eyes from another world. He looks at Shane on his knees. He says, “Gator needs blood,” and he strides toward Kelly, knife raised.

Shane lunges, grabs his ankles.

Lang grunts with irritation and is about to plunge the big knife in Shane’s back when he changes his mind and slowly sits down on the damp and bloody ground.

It’s like watching a sturdy building collapse. His huge shoulders slump. He sighs deeply, the big knife falling from his open hand.

He looks around, as if searching for someone.

“Kids?” he says, his throat gurgling.

Lang smiles and tries to lift his arms, as if to embrace an invisible someone, and seems satisfied, relieved of a great burden. The air leaves him. His dark eyes stare up at the bright vastness of the deep blue sky and then glass over, gone forever.

“Everybody okay?” asks Leo Fish, standing there in his little boat, lowering a smoking rifle.

I never even heard the shot.

“Sorry it took so long,” he says sheepishly. “I can’t run like you young folk.”

EPILOGUE

Six Months Later

The plane looks so small, the sky so big.

We’re all of us waiting at the airfield in Monticello, New York. Me and Fern and our new friend Seth Manning, who turns out to be a really neat kid—excuse me, young man. Shane had wanted to be here but he’s off on a case, searching for another missing child. He told me recently that the kids he recovered were for him like an extended family, he keeps in touch with all of them, as he does with both Seth and Kelly. It doesn’t make up for his loss, but it helps.

It was a near thing with Seth, a raging blood infection that put him in a coma for a while. God bless Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami and all the folks who worked so hard to find the right combination of antibiotics, and who never gave up. Probably didn’t hurt that his father was pledging to build a new wing, but I’d like to think they saved him because saving people is what they do.

Not a bad mission in life, come to think, and one Kelly has lately been drawn to. Whether from her own experience or Seth’s, I can’t be sure. Maybe both. Anyhow, she’s been talking about a career in medicine. Maybe one that somehow involves flying, which is just like a kid, wanting everything rolled into a nice, neat package.

If only life worked that way. But she’ll learn.

That’s her up in the ridiculously small airplane. All by herself at, Seth tells us, five thousand feet. Soaring over the rolling, snow-dusted Catskills on a brisk but sunny December day. I wanted her to wait until summer—anything to put this off—but she really, really wanted to solo by Christmas, please, Mom, please, and so here we all are, giving in to my willful daughter, even though the idea of her up in a plane all by herself is scaring us to death.

Okay, scaring me to death. Seth and Fern seem to be okay with the concept. Seth because he taught her, and Fern because she thinks Kelly can do anything she sets her mind to.

It isn’t setting her mind to it that worries me. It’s all the things that can go wrong. Engines stall or catch on fire. A bird could hit the windshield. Planes fall out of the sky. It happens, don’t tell me it doesn’t happen.

Fern, sensing my anxiety, goes, “Ya need a bag, lady?”

Making a joke of it. Amazingly enough, I haven’t hyperventilated or had a panic attack since Miami. Actually it was before Miami, come to think. Whatever, I still get anxious, but seem to have lost my need for those little white paper bags, as Fern well knows.

“Let me fret, okay?” I say irritably. “She’s seventeen and she’s flying a plane, for God’s sake! I get to fret—that’s my job.”

Seth shakes his handsome head and smiles. He knows me pretty well by now. “She’s doing great, Jane. See how steady she holds the wings? There, she’s starting her bank for the final approach.”

“Don’t call it the final approach. That sounds terrible!”

Fern gives me a squeeze to let me know it will be all right. Fern always thinks things will be all right, that’s one of the reasons we’ve been friends for all these years—because she’s so generous with her strength.