She remembered the fin, and the poor woman lifting Thea from her place, and the awful snout growing from the water, and the blood streaming from its jaws.

But after that she had only the dimmest recollections: a tiny clinic in the doctor's home; Carla massaging Thea; hushed voices; a doctor; a syringe that looked far too big for such a little child.

She stepped into the deckhouse. The boat-smell of varnish and damp canvas brought her back to the days when her father had chartered ketches much like this and they had cruised the coast of Maine. Her mother hated boats and had stayed at home.

Ellen had loved the ocean then, but she'd loved her father more, and the ocean was a place where she could have him to herself.

"First-rate first mate," he'd called her, his crinkling eyes all soft. Anchored on a summer evening off some granite Block Island cove, he would toast her with his first drink of the night: "Sun's over the yardarm! To the best little seaman a father ever had!"

Long, long ago... and how had she used to start the diesel?

She looked at the instrument panel by the inside helm. "Battery switch: #1, #2, Off, Both." She remembered and switched to "Both." The computer screen lit up, and a faint, rhythmical thudding sounded from the sonic speaker. She must be listening to conch, along the bottom.

She found the engine shift. "Neutral." Starter switch: "On."

There was a grinding from the engine room, a reluctant cough, and then the deep rumble of the diesel. So far, so good.

In a queer, muddled fog she cast off her lines, pushed her bow out with a boat hook, and let the ketch float clear of the dock on the offshore breeze. She stepped to the wheel in the cockpit, aft, threw the boat in "Forward," and was smoothly underway.

She had a rendezvous with a great white shark that was trying to kill her family off. She knew somehow that he awaited her in deep ocean waters; not here, in Masthead Sound, but at sea, beyond the point.

She brought the helm to starboard, lined the bowsprit up with Masthead Light, and eased the throttle forward.

She was going to kill the shark before it destroyed her and her family.

Kill him or die herself.

***

Papa Jacques had followed the beach line alone all the way from Pretty Sally Bay to Masthead Point. He passed through the hysterical crowds on Harbor Beach at the height of the excitement, when the children were pulled out of the water, and hardly spared a glance.

He knew that his loa had failed in its attack on the Brody child, somehow felt it deep inside. Perhaps the child's bucket had not been a proper wanga, or perhaps Damballah, the African serpent god, had simply decided to spare the little girl and instead take her elders one by one.