"What did you run off for?"

"He dropped something for us. Didn't you see?"

She looked down at her granddaughter. "No, I didn't. Did he really?" She glanced at Deenie. The girl's black eyes darted away. What was going on?

"It was white," Thea piped up. "It fell down behind the hill." Thea looked up at Deenie. "And Deenie saw it too."

"No, ma'am!" Deenie shook her head. "She be fibbin'. She be lyin' through her mouth."

"No, I'm not," squealed Thea. "Grandma, I am not!"

Ellen squeezed her hand. "I'm sure you're not. And neither's Deenie." A tropical tern, as white as a scrap of paper in the wind, flashed overhead. "Maybe you saw a bird."

"It wasn't a bird," protested Thea. She seemed close to tears. "I saw it, and I ran up there, and a man took it away."

"A man?"

"A black man."

Deenie glanced up at Ellen, and Ellen caught a glint of fear. Without a word the little black girl flew off down the trail toward home.

"Now, what was that all about?" she muttered. Thea was tugging at her hand. Her tiny palm, which had been so warm on the beach, was freezing cold.

"Grandma?" she whined suddenly. "I'm scared. Pick me up?"

Ellen picked her up and held her close. "Scared, sweetheart? Of what?"

Thea shook her head and would not answer. A clap of thunder sounded, and the rain began to fall.

Before Ellen could get her home, she'd vomited three times.

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Ellen left Thea's room with Michael to have a council of war. Mike was trying to be cool, but his hands were trembling.

"You never," he muttered, "know how much you need a doctor on this godforsaken island until a child gets sick."

Scared as she was, she tried to reassure him.

"You and Sean had this kind of thing all the time when you were small. A fever and—"

"She doesn't have a temperature."

"Well..." Ellen realized that she was smiling much too brightly, but she could not seem to stop. "That can happen too." She reminded him that he'd got sick once a year, like clockwork, around Christmas. "Sometimes you'd get delirious and say the damnedest things. Remember in the sun room? We thought that you were dying, and it wasn't anything at all."

Her mind went back to Amity, before the second shark, to a summer morning in the sun room where they ate. Brody had finally allowed Michael to take the diving class Michael had worked and skimped for all summer long. For his birthday Brody had even bought him a wet suit.

An hour before the ocean checkout for the class, Michael had become deathly sick. Now he was groaning on the wicker couch, blaming it on Sean, who had insisted on her feeding everyone a mackerel he'd caught off Town Dock the night before.

"If it was the fish," Sean wanted to know, "why aren't I sick too?"