“You’re thinking about fried fish, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, stop.” If she gave the herring what she wanted, Diana knew there’d be consequences. More healthy, native species of fish in the lake, for one thing. Actually, more healthy, native species of fish in the lake was about the only thing. She couldn’t see a down side– which was always vaguely unsettling.
“You can’t do it, can you?”
“Of course I can do it.” It was disconcerting that her cat was using the same argument on her that she’d used on him. “Technically, as a Keeper, if I’m asked for help to right a wrong, I can’t refuse. Sea lampreys in the lake seem to be definitely a wrong.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“I’m not sure fish were included under that rule.”
“Very anti-ichthyoid of you.”
“Anti what? Never mind.” She waved off his explanation. “You’re watching way too much television. Okay, tell her I’ll do it, but it has to be after the hole is closed, I can’t access the Possibilities until then.”
“She wants to know why she should trust you.”
Diana glanced over at the herring. “Because I’m one of the good guys.”
“She only has your word for that.”
“Sam!”
“Okay, okay, she didn’t say that. You get to work; I’ll convince her you’re trustworthy.”
“Thank you.” Setting the jaw bone carefully aside, Diana began to scratch the definitions of the accident site onto the rocks around the hole with the point of her nail file, the algae just thick enough for it to leave a legible impression.
“Incoming!”
“I’m almost done.”
“Maybe you don’t quite understand what incoming means,” Sam shouted as the first herring whacked into her shoulder.
Diana scrambled to get the last definition drawn in the midst of a silver swirl of fish and dove out of the way in the instant of clear water that followed.
Given a choice between diving face first into rock or returning back where it had come from, the serpent chose the second, less painful, option.
The instant the tip of its wedge-shaped tail disappeared, Diana grabbed the definitions and slammed the hole closed. When she looked up, three dozen silver faces stared back at her, all wearing the same expectant expression. Well, probably expectant; it was surprisingly hard to judge expression on a fish.
“Okay, okay, give me a minute to catch my breath.” She tested the seal on the hole and reached into the Possibilities. Turned out there were a lot of sea lamprey in the lake, and over half of them had to be removed from living prey.
“Where’d you put them?” Sam spun around in a slow circle, lazily sculling with his tail.
“I dropped them in the Mid-Atlantic.”
“There are sharks in the Mid-Atlantic.”
“So?”
“Sharks eat lampreys.”
“Sharks eat Volkswagens. What’s your point?”
“We’ve been down here for hours, we missed lunch, and I’m hungry. Can we go now?”
“In a minute, I have one more thing to do.”
It was only a part of a jaw bone, but once it had been a part of a man who’d sailed the lakes.
Diana set the bone down beside the wreck and waited.
He hadn’t been very old. Under his knit cap, his hair was brown, long enough to wisp out over his ears, and there was a glint of red in his bad teenage moustache. He wore faded blue pants with a patch on one knee. His heavy sweater looked a little too big for him, but that may have been because he was wearing it over at least one other sweater, maybe two. At some point, not long before he’d died, he’d whacked the index finger on his left hand, leaving the nail black and blue.
Pulling the two copper coins from her pocket, Diana bent and laid one on each closed eye. “To pay the ferryman,” she said, feeling Sam’s unasked question. “He’s been in the water long enough, I think he’d like to be back on it.”
A heartbeat later, there was only the wreck and the rocks.
The coins and the jaw bone were gone.
“Now, can we go?”
Diana slung her backpack over one shoulder and picked up the cat with her other hand. “Yes. Now we can go.”
Carol Diamond was standing on the shore when she came out of the water. Her eyes were wide and her mouth worked for a moment before any sound emerged. “You went… you were… in the…”
“I went wading.”
“Wading?”
“Yes. You saw me wading. Then I came out of the water…” Diana stepped over the ridge of zebra mussel shells and set Sam down on the gravel. “…and I rolled down my jeans and put my shoes and socks back on.”
White curls bounced as she shook her head. “You were under the water!”
“Couldn’t have been. I’m completely dry.”
“But you…”
“But I what?” Diana held the older woman’s gaze.
“You went wading?”
“Yes, I did.”
“But that water must be freezing!”
“I hardly felt it.”
“Well,” Carol laughed a little uncertainly, “it must be nice to be young. Doesn’t that rock look just like an orange cat?”
“You think? I don’t see it.”
Sam sighed and headed for the dock.
Ryan sat between the two girls on the way back to the mainland. There was a fair bit of giggling from all concerned.
The lake was calm, the silvered blue broken only by the wake of the boat and a small school of herring rising to feed on the water bugs dimpling the surface.
Sam had eaten, then curled up and gone to sleep in her backpack. Dangling a bottle of water from one hand, Diana leaned back against the gunnels and listened to Gary Straum list just some of the more than fifty ships that had gone down between Point Petre and Main Duck Island. She didn’t know which ship her sailor had been from, but it didn’t really matter.
He was home now.
“The Metcalfe, the Maggie Hunter, the Gazelle, the Norway, the Atlas, the Annie Falconer, the Olive Branch, the Sheboygan, the Ida Walker, the Maple Glenn, the Lady Washington…”