“I wait for Catterine. When she say `going,’ then is safe I going.” His knees muffled his voice.

“She can’t come. You can see the pond from your window here; you must have seen her grandmother arrive this evening. Her grandmother will not let her leave the house again tonight, and her grandmother may well call the police. We probably have until the sun comes up to get you out of here, but I need to know who you are and why you’re hiding.” I laughed suddenly. “You saw me, too, this evening, didn’t you, jumping in and out of that wretched pond. Poor Sister Anne, with nothing to do but watch the horizon, did you see-“

“I am not girl!” His head jerked up and he glowered at me ferociously. “Who said anything-oh, Sister Anne. A character in a children’s story who has to keep watch from a tower. I know you’re not a girl. But I know you saw me this afternoon. And you must have been watching for Catherine on Sunday. Sunday night, someone killed a man outside this house. They put his body in the pond. Did you see this?”

When he didn’t answer, I moved so I was standing directly over him.

“You were watching for Catherine; you knew she was coming that night, or, anyway, some night soon. You saw the killer put the man’s body into the water. Who put him there?”

“Nothing, I seeing nothing.”

“Did you help kill him? Is that why you’re hiding?”

“No and no and no, and now-oh, where is Catterine? Only she-” He broke off and looked at his knees again. “I am a girl, crying, hiding behind another girl, I am a baby and a girl.”

He lapsed into a mortified silence. I frowned, trying to force my tired brain into some useful line of questioning that would get him to tell me who he was-and what he had seen on Sunday. Finally, I went to the leather-topped desk to look at the books: one of them might be his, one of them might have his name in it. I needed more light than the moon provided. Hoping this wasn’t one of Geraldine Graham’s wakeful times, I switched on my headlamp and picked up the open book.

I had never seen anything as beautiful as the coral reef. It stretched away for miles and was soft to the touch, like velvet. Stupidly I forgot the dangers that lay all around as I watched the many bright-colored fishes swim through the red reef. Suddenly I felt a pain in my left leg so sharp I tried to scream, forgetting in my fear I was underwater. I took in a mouthful of water around my breathing tube. I looked down in terror. A giant clam had grabbed my leg!

I flipped to the title page. Eric Nielsen on the Great Barrier Reef, published in 1920. “Calvin Bayard, His Book,” was printed underneath the title in a child’s drunken hand. There were two other Eric Nielsen adventures, along with Treasure Island and an old Tom Swift. Catherine Bayard must have raided her grandfather’s library for books she thought might appeal to a boy trying to learn English.