Brody told the woman and the man to wait in his office, and he walked out into the front of the station house. Meadows was standing by the outer door, leaning against the wall. A young man—the reporter from the Times, Brody guessed—was gesturing at Meadows and seemed to be asking questions. The young man was tall and slim. He wore sandals and a bathing suit and a short-sleeved shirt with an alligator emblem stitched to the left breast, which caused Brody to take an instant, instinctive dislike to the man. In his adolescence Brody had thought of those shirts as badges of wealth and position. All the summer people wore them. Brody badgered his mother until she bought him one—“a two-dollar shirt with a six-dollar lizard on it,” she said—and when he didn’t find himself suddenly wooed by gaggles of summer people, he was humiliated. He tore the alligator off the pocket and used the shirt as a rag to clean the lawn mower with which he earned his summer income. More recently, Ellen had insisted on buying several shifts made by the same manufacturer—paying a premium they could ill afford for the alligator emblem—to help her regain her entrée to her old milieu. To Brody’s dismay, one evening he found himself nagging Ellen for buying “a ten-dollar dress with a twenty-dollar lizard on it.”

Two men were sitting on a bench—the Newsday reporters. One wore a bathing suit, the other a blazer and slacks. Meadows’ reporter—Brody knew him as Nat something or other—was leaning against the desk, chatting with Bixby. They stopped talking as soon as they saw Brody enter.

“What can I do for you?” Brody said.

The young man next to Meadows took a step forward and said, “I’m Bill Whitman, from the New York Times.”

“And?” What am I supposed to do? Brody thought. Fall on my ass?

“I was on the beach.”

“What did you see?”

One of the Newsday reporters interrupted: “Nothing. I was there, too. Nobody saw anything. Except maybe the guy in your office. He says he saw something.”

“I know,” said Brody, “but he’s not sure just what it was he saw.”

The Times man said, “Are you prepared to list this as a shark attack?”

“I’m not prepared to list this as anything, and I’d suggest you don’t go listing it as anything, either, until you know a hell of a lot more about it than you do now.”

The Times man smiled. “Come on, Chief, what do you want us to do? Call it a mysterious disappearance? Boy lost at sea?”

It was difficult for Brody to resist the temptation to trade angry ironies with the Times reporter. He said, “Listen, Mr.—Whitman, is it?—Whitman. We have no witnesses who saw anything but a splash. The man inside thinks he saw a big silver-colored thing that he thinks may have been a shark. He says he has never seen a live shark in his life, so that’s not what you’d call expert testimony. We have no body, no real evidence that anything violent happened to the boy … I mean, except that he’s missing. It is conceivable that he drowned. It is conceivable that he had a fit or a seizure of some kind and then drowned. And it is conceivable that he was attacked by some kind of fish or animal—or even person, for that matter. All of those things are possible, and until we get …”