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“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…”