“Thank you, Dooley. I’ll keep an eye out for him.”

The warning was a private joke. When Song Lee first arrived on Bonefish Key from China, Dooley told her about the monster alligator lurking in the mangroves. Seeing from her startled expression that she believed his tall tale, he had quickly explained that no alligator had been seen around Bonefish Key for decades.

Dooley watched Lee paddle the kayak to the mouth of the inlet and thought how fond he had become of the young Chinese scientist. He wasn’t too old to appreciate her flowerlike beauty, but his interest was far from prurient. Lee was around thirty, the same age as a daughter who had disowned him years before. He had quit drinking, after running the family shrimp business aground on the shoals of gin, poker, and a series of wives, but he and his daughter were still estranged.

As Dooley went back to the outboard motor, Lee headed along the shore of the island and emerged from the mangroves into a small bay. She pointed the kayak’s prow toward the stranded cabin cruiser, then left the bay and headed into the funnel-shaped cove Dooley had entered earlier that day on his tour with Gamay. Seeing a ripple on the water, Lee shipped her paddle and was rewarded a moment later when a shiny back scarred by propeller blades broke the surface.

Manatee!

She banged off some photos, until the lumbering mammal submerged to feed on the bottom. Lee took up her paddle again, heading farther into the cove. The distance between the mangroves diminished from a quarter of a mile to a couple hundred feet.

A great blue heron took off with a mighty flap of its long wings. Lee watched the big bird until it was out of sight, then she brought her binoculars to bear on a pair of snowy egrets wading in the shallows. Her heart skipped a beat at the flash of pink behind one of them.

The egrets moved, and she brought the camera up to her eye. Through the viewfinder, she saw a bird that looked like a flamingo with a duck bill. She snapped off several pictures of the roseate spoonbill, then reviewed the photos. They were all perfect. Lee was smiling when she took up her paddle again.

With a few strokes, she sent the kayak toward a weathered gray wooden post that stuck out of the water near the edge of a mangrove. It marked a narrow break in the otherwise impenetrable tangle of roots. The kayak’s hull scraped an oyster bed and came to rest on shore.

Lee stepped into warm, knee-deep water. Although she knew that Dooley’s giant alligator was a fable, she quickly hauled the kayak onto the narrow beach.