He didn’t ask anything else. He left his number, a couple of pamphlets, went out to the yard, put on his protective gloves, sealed the bone in plastic, and wrote the address and the time it was found (he’d check the coordinates later). Before he left, he knocked on the door again and asked for Isabel.

Her mother brought her to the screen door, and Bunty squatted once more to her level.

You know something, he said through the screen. You were right after all. That is the merman’s mask.

A toothy smile erupted on Isabel’s face, and she turned it up to her mother.

See. I told you.

Yes, honey. Her mother smiled and looked at Bunty through the screen and thanked him with her eyes.

He climbed back into the squad car. They all watched him go. What a day it had been already—and it was not yet noon.

The socket in the pelvis where the femur joins the ilium is called the “acetabulum.” In Latin it means “vinegar cup.” The indentation is deep and cup-shaped and directed downward and outward and forward. It was this part of the ilium that was flown to a lab in Indiana, and there all the joined bones were pulverized and tested for weeks. And it wasn’t until almost July when Ana Gathreaux received the phone call from the head pathologist in Halifax. She was in her lab at the time. The man’s voice was measured. Was she alone? he asked. (Yes.) Was she sitting down? (No.)

You might, he said, want to have a seat.

They’d identified Russell’s remains. The rest she didn’t hear. Was it relief she felt, or an oceanic sadness, like a wave collapsing on the sand, with nowhere now to crawl to but back under the sea? The pathologist talked for a while longer, but his words no longer cohered; they seemed to Ana like tiny black beads falling out of the receiver and spilling over the floor—pearls on a necklace, bouncing out the door. She said she’d have to call him back, she had to hang up now. Before she did, she asked one thing: Are you positive it’s him?

She both wanted, and didn’t want, to hear his answer.

The man said: One hundred percent.

I’ve got to go now, she whispered.

The man said he understood and started to leave a number for her to call back, but she hung up before the last digit.