A faded red curtain divided the store in half. Rose had peeked behind; looking over her head, Liam saw that the room was filled with shark jaws hanging on every inch of wall space. A rack of jars leaned precariously against a table—they contained tiny sharks in formaldehyde. Their eyes were clouded, their snouts sharp, their shark shapes unmistakable. A pile of ragged hacked-off shark and dolphin fins lay on the rickety blue table. Everything had a price tag. After a quick look, Lily hurried Rose back into the grocery area.

“Can I help you?” a man asked, coming through a door at the back of the room. He had a dark five-o'clock shadow, salt-damp hair, and a T-shirt that said “Captain Nick's Sportfish Charters.”

“Are you Captain Nick?” Liam asked.

“You got it,” he said. “Interested in a charter? There's plenty to go after right now, twenty-foot great whites up from the Bahamas and even bigger white whales down from Nova Scotia.”

“Belugas are an endangered species,” Liam said.

The man laughed. “Oh, I know,” he said. “We're not going to hook them—just see them. I have to admit, I get a little carried away. There's never been a summer like this one—pure fishing madness, thanks to some gigantic waves rolling in from out at sea. You should've seen what we bagged yesterday—purple back, pink sides, and bright red fins, five or six feet long, swimming zigzag like a sea snake. Had to be straight up from the tropics.”

“An opah,” Liam said.

“Whatever it's called, it was something else. Check it out on the board in front—got a whole gallery of my customers' catches out there.”

“I'm actually interested in your catches here,” Liam said, getting ready to blast Captain Nick for the baby sharks and boiled jaws and ruined fins. But just then Lily called his name, and he backed away. It was just as well. His emotions were running so high from seeing Lily again, he wasn't quite in command of himself.

She stood on the porch, right in front of the board Captain Nick had just mentioned. While Rose rocked happily in one of the wooden porch chairs, Lily pointed at a blurry photo.

“Is that who I think it is?” she asked.

Liam focused on the board. There was the photograph Nick had mentioned—a six-foot opah, brilliant colors sparkling. His eyes swept over the gallery of trophy fish—marlin, sharks, swordfish, and tuna. The pictures had been taken dockside, with the fishermen standing proudly by the hanging scales. Lily was pointing at a photo of a fifteen-foot Atlantic bottlenose dolphin, hanging upside down, caught in a net.

“Don't get bent out of shape or anything,” Captain Nick said, coming up behind them. “That fish isn't dead.”

“It's not a fish,” Liam said. “It's a mammal.”

“Who caught it?” Lily asked, her voice trembling.