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“Carol Diamond. That’s my husband Richard. We’re here as part of an Elder Hostel program.” Her wave took in the rest of the hats-and-hiking-boots crowd. “All of us.”

“Great.”

“Are you travelling on your own, dear?”

“Yes, I am.”

Carol smiled the even, white smile of the fully-dentured and nodded toward the teenagers. “Well, how nice you have some people of your own age to spend time with.”

Diana blinked. Two months shy of twenty, she did not appreciate being lumped in with the children. Fortunately, between the motor and the wind it was difficult to carry on a casual conversation, and Carol didn’t try, content to sit quietly while her husband took pictures of Waupoos Island, Prince Edward Point, waves, sky, gulls, the other people in the boat, and once, while he was fiddling with the focus, his lap.

The three pictures with Diana in them would be mysteriously over-exposed.

So would one of the shots he’d taken of the southern view across Lake Ontario, but Diana had nothing to do with that.

“Hey!” Ryan managed to make himself heard over the ambient noise. “What’s that?”

Everyone squinted in the direction he was pointing. A series of small, dark dots rose above a sharp-edged horizon.

“That’s our first sight of the island; we’re about five miles out.” Gary moved closer to the teenager. “Well done.”

Ryan turned just far enough to scowl at him. “Not that. Closer to us.”

About twenty metres from the boat, another series of small dark dots rose and fell with the slight chop. Then, suddenly, they were gone. The last dot rose up into a triangular point just before it disappeared.

“That looked like a tail!”

“Might be a loon,” Gary offered.

“Fucking big loon!”

“Ryan!”

Ryan rolled his eyes at his father, but muttered an apology.

“It’s probably just some floating junk.” A half-turn included the rest of the group in the discussion. “You’d be amazed at the stuff we find out here.” His list had almost everyone laughing.

Lake monster wasn’t on it, Diana noted.

As Main Duck Island coalesced into a low, solid line of trees with a light house rising off the westernmost point, Gary explained that it had been acquired by the park service in 1998, having been previously owned by John Foster Dulles, a prominent lawyer who’d been American Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration. The island was 209 hectares in size, and except for the ruins of some old fishing cabins that had been postedno trespassing, none of it was off limits.

“The lighthouse?” one of the lime-green t-shirt group asked.

“Is unmanned and closed to the public, but you can go right up to it and poke around.”

Mention of the lighthouse started the shipwreck stories. There were a lot of them; the area around the island was known as the graveyard of Lake Ontario and contained the wrecks of two-and three-masted schooners, brigantines, barges, and steamers, dating back to a small French warship en route to Fort Niagara with supplies and a pay chest of gold for the troops that went down in late fall around 1750.

Diana had begun to get a bad feeling about the location of the hole she had to close.

As Jamie steered the trawler into School House Bay, Gary told the story of theJohn Randall. She’d anchored in the bay for shelter back in 1920, only to have the wind shift to the north and drive her ashore. Her stern hit a rock, her engine lifted, and she broke in two.

“The crew of four scrambled up onto the bow and remained there for ten hours, washed by heavy seas and lashed by a November northeaster. They finally made it ashore on a hatch cover and stayed with the lighthouse keeper nine days before they were picked up. You can still see the wooden ribs and planks of the ship in the bay.”

“So no one died?” Ryan asked.

“Not that time.” With the dock only metres away, Gary moved over to the port side of the boat and picked up the rear mooring line. “But a year and eight days later, the Captain of theRandall went down while in command of theCity of New York. His wife and his ten-month-old daughter went to the bottom with him.”

“So sad,” Carol sighed as Gary leapt out onto the dock. “But at least they were together.” She twisted on the bench to look back the way they’d come. “I bet those waves hide a hundred stories.”

“I bet they hide a hundred and one,” Diana muttered, hoisting her backpack. She was not going to enjoy explaining this to Sam.

“In the water?”

“Essentially.”

Sam’s ears saddled. “Howessentially?” The echoed word dripped with feline sarcasm.

“Under the water.”

“Have a nice time.”

Down on one knee beside him, Diana stroked along his back and out his tail. “There’s a lake monster out there, too. Looked like a sea serpent. Probably came through the hole.”

“And that’s supposed to make me change my mind?” the cat snorted. He peered off the end of the dock into the weedy bay. “Frogs pee in that water, you know.”

“That’s not…” She probed at the Summons, trying to narrow it down a little. “…exactly the water we’re going into.”