The boulder they’d been standing on wasn’t a boulder. It was a dead animal. It was long, almost as long as two canoes lined end to end. The tail curled out into the water toward them, bobbing on the surface, thick as a fire hose. The head stretched out on the pebbly beach, even thicker, spade-shaped. Between the head and the tail, its body bulked up, thick around as a hippo. It wasn’t the mist that stank of rotting fish. It was the animal. Now that she was staring right at the thing, she didn’t know how she had ever stood on top of it, imagining it was a rock.

Her chest tingled and crawled, like she had ants under her dress. The ant feeling was in her hair, too. She could see where the animal was torn open, in the place where its throat widened into its torso. Its insides were red and white, like the insides of any fish. There wasn’t a lot of blood for such a big hole.

Joel gripped her hand. They stood up to their thighs in the water, staring at the dinosaur, which was as dead now as all the other dinosaurs that had ever walked the earth.

“It’s the monster,” Joel said, not that it needed to be said.

They had all heard about the monster that lived in the lake. There was always a float in the Fourth of July parade made up to look like a plesiosaur, a papier-mâché creature rising out of papier-mâché waters. In June there’d been an article about the lake creature in the newspaper, and Heather had started to read it aloud at the table, but their father made her stop.

“There isn’t anything in the lake. That’s for tourists,” he’d said then.

“It says a dozen people saw it. It says they hit it with the ferry.”

“A dozen people saw a log and got themselves all worked up. There’s nothing in this lake but the same fish that are in every other American lake.”

“There could be a dinosaur,” Heather had insisted.

“No. There couldn’t. Do you know how many of them there would have to be for a breeding population? People would be seeing them all the time. Now, hush up. You’ll scare your sisters. I didn’t buy this cottage so the four of you can sit inside and fight all day. If you girls won’t go in the lake because you’re scared of some dumb-ass American Nessie, I’ll throw you in.”

Now Joel said, “Don’t scream.”

It had never crossed Gail’s mind to scream, but she nodded to show she was listening.

“I don’t want to frighten Ben,” Joel told her in a low voice. Joel was shaking so his knees almost knocked. But then the water was very cold.

“What do you think happened to it?” she asked.