Gail turned her head and stared out again at the silvered surface of the lake.

She had an idea a ship had gone down, someone’s schooner, not far offshore, and she was discovering the treasure washed in by the tide. A spoon and an emerald couldn’t be a coincidence.

She lowered her head and walked along, slower now, on the lookout for more salvage. Soon enough she found a tin cowboy with a tin lasso. She felt a shiver of pleasure, but also sorrow. There had been a child on the boat.

“He’s probably dead now,” she said to herself, and looked sadly out at the water once more. “Drowned,” she decided.

She wished she had a yellow rose to throw into the water.

Gail went on but had trudged hardly three paces when she heard a sound from across the lake, a long, mournful lowing, like a foghorn but also not like one.

She stopped for another look.

The mist smelt of rotting smelt.

The foghorn did not sound again.

An enormous gray boulder rose out of the shallows here, rising right up onto the sand. Some net was snarled around it. After a moment of hesitation, Gail grabbed the net and climbed to the top.

It was a really large boulder, higher than her head. It was curious she’d never noticed it before, but then things looked different in the mist.

Gail stood on the boulder, which was high but also long, sloping away to her right and curling in a crescent out into the water on her left. It was a low ridge of stone marking the line between land and water.

She peered out into the cool, blowing smoke, looking for the rescue ship that had to be out there somewhere, trolling for survivors of the wreck. Maybe it wasn’t too late for the little boy. She lifted her kaleidoscope to her eye, counting on its special powers to penetrate the mist and show her where the schooner had gone down.

“What are you doing?” said someone behind her.