“Why is that?” Allen asked. He wasn’t going to allow himself to be left out of the conversation. “I’d think you’d want all the help you can get.”

Luke glanced at Allen, the irritation clear in his eyes, his voice.

“Too many tenured college professors, too many old hippies working for Microsoft. They assuage their consciences for selling out by joining Sierra Club or Amnesty International. They’ve become a new-millennium version of the Optimists Club.”

I laid down my fork. “That’s not fair,” I said. “You’d never have gotten the Wild and Scenic status without their help. You didn’t have a problem calling on them then to help you. And they did help you, not just with donations but a lot of time spent making phone calls and writing letters.”

“But this is different,” Luke said. “They’ll have to take a stand where not everyone is going to pat them on the head and say how beneficent and conscientious they are. It will take guts to say what they know is right.”

“And what is that?” Allen asked.

“That the girl’s body is the Tamassee’s now, that the moment she stepped in the shallows she accepted the river on its own terms. That’s what wilderness is—nature on its terms, not ours, and there’s no middle ground. It either is or it isn’t. Look at the Smokies. They’ve got restaurants and hotels and first-aid stations and gift shops in there. You’d think it was the North Carolina branch of Disney World. If that park was set up the way it should be, there wouldn’t be a single road. You’d walk in. There wouldn’t be a McDonald’s every hundred yards in case you got hungry or thirsty. And if little Johnny got lost and starved to death or was bitten by a rattlesnake, that’s the price of admission.”

“So why didn’t you let Billy’s nephew drown?”

I turned to Allen.

“Billy’s nephew fell out of a canoe in Bull Sluice. There was a hydraulic. Not as bad as the one at Wolf Cliff but bad enough. It took Luke two tries.”

“I didn’t have to harm the river to get him out,” Luke said.

“So you would have let him drown if saving him had hurt the Tamassee?”

“Yes,” Luke said tersely, slipping the photos back in the envelope.

“I don’t believe that,” I said. “I believe you’d have gone in anyway.”

“Believe what you want,” Luke said, and looked at Allen. “One last thing—Maggie’s cousin is right. If Brennon thinks a five-foot-high piece of polyurethane can stop the Tamassee this time of year, he has no more idea of what that river can do than Ruth Kowalsky did.”

Luke eased out of the booth. He paused as he stepped past me, his right hand patting my shoulder.