He toggled two keys on a master keyboard.
Suddenly I understood.
In one picture the wooden rowboat—the one I’d used earlier—was in its correct place on the side of the garage.
In the second, it wasn’t.
Before.
After.
Before.
After.
I didn’t need to look at the time stamp to know which picture the after was.
The boat was gone.
Oh no. Grant wouldn’t. Not by himself.
Earlier, when I’d talked to him in that rowboat, with a light mist just beginning to fall around us, crabs hadn’t been on his mind.
Escape had.
He’d been so scared by something, he hadn’t wanted to go back—not even to Henry. That, along with the fact that the security tapes had been tampered with, made me think that Mr. Shepherd had been right to involve the law. There was something at stake here that went beyond feuds about property boundaries or one little boy who deliberately sabotaged his busy father’s schedule every Sunday night.
I hadn’t understood earlier when we were out in the rowboat. I just thought he wanted to do the impossible, like my brothers and I did every day.
Please don’t take me back, Pix, Grant had said when we’d rowed as far as the Shepherds’ orange buoy. How hard would it be to row across the Sound?
It looks easier than it actually is. At some point, the depth drops off. The closest land off-island is Point No Point. To get there, you’d have to go through the shipping lanes. And you’d have to get past the wreck.
What wreck?
Never mind. Why do you want to go anyway? You’ve got nothing to prove.
I want to disappear.
I should’ve been more sensitive to him and asked more questions about why he wanted to get away. But he seemed to want to disappear every Sunday. So, instead, I said:
Disappear? Like that? Not on my watch, dude.
I was already sprinting out of the shack and running the perimeter of the Shepherd house, over the flagstone patio that surrounded the main building, eight motion-detector lights flicking on as I went.
I vaguely heard Henry calling, “Pix? What’s going on?”
There was one thing I needed to check before I pulled in Patience to start sniffing.
The buoy. The orange one that marked where the Shepherds dropped their crab traps. I couldn’t see the rowboat attached to it. But what was that? A knot of rope? Something was there. It was even darker now. I had to make sure.
I dropped my kit at the end of the Shepherds’ boardwalk and was already stripping off my rain gear and sweats before I got to the water’s edge. I dove and cleaved the bay like a knife.
Three feet of water. That was all it was. But the water was so cold it sent a drag with each stroke. It felt as if my arms and legs were twisted up in bulb kelp.
When I reached the buoy, I stood up. The water reached my waist.
I felt underneath. There. Thick cable covered with barnacles. Something was attached. Something that wasn’t floating.
I gave the rope a good tug, expecting it to come away easily.
Instead, it had no give. There was something heavy on the other end.
I felt along the cable’s length to the end and found a wooden hull. An upside-down one, covered in barnacles, but still a hull. Even under water I could tell that something was wrong. The boards were uneven or sticking up, as though someone had taken an ax to it.
My fingers probed the perimeter till they hit something soft and squishy that swayed with the ripples of the water.
I jerked my hand away.
I started to shake—and not from the cold.
I knew a dead thing when I felt it.
Maybe it wasn’t what I thought it was. Maybe it was a halibut or a spiny dogfish, even though I knew the truth.
Halibut don’t have fingers.
By now, Henry had found the flashlight and was standing on the back patio, shining it in my eyes, his own eye a puffed-up, plummy mess.
“Pix?” he called.
I didn’t want him here. I didn’t want him to see what I was afraid we’d see. I tried ignoring him.
“Pixie?” he said again.
“Stay there, Henry. Call my brothers.”
The only response was a splash. I should’ve known. Say what you like about Henry’s mood this afternoon, he wasn’t the type to stand back and observe when there was an emergency.
I tugged on the cable and tugged again, but it wouldn’t come free.
Henry surfaced next to me with a gasp. “What have you got, Pix?”
He wasn’t ready for this. He hadn’t been trained. So I tried once more to send him back.
“I can handle this on my own, Henry.”
He ignored me. He reached under the water and found the hull.
I’d forgotten that he was boat-savvy. He rowed crew. Even his mess of a face was a boathouse-related injury.
He felt along the cable to where it was attached to the buoy and loosened the complex knot.
The rowboat should’ve floated to the surface.
It did not, but I could’ve told him that. There had been a drag to it when I’d tried to lift it earlier.
“All right. Let’s flip it, then drag it to the beach.”