The sheriff’s department description for the searchers, as if they’d bump into another dead girl on the river: Ariel was five feet six inches, 120 pounds, a little long-waisted, with thick orange-gold hair and gray-blue eyes. She was wearing blue shorts and orange water shoes and a white T-shirt when she went into the river. She wore a Peake’s hat, too, but there was no way it would have stayed on. She had a goofy deep giggle. She loved Tolkien and Frank Herbert, and her Subaru was coated in good-natured left-wing bumper stickers. She was tough—she’d placed second in the St. Patrick’s Day Run to the Pub ten-kilometer race that spring. She’d been a lovely girl, funny and smart and ready to give the world wonder for decades. Or not—who knew what she would have been? Dead was all the things that would never happen.

Accidents, thought Polly, came like arrows. A plane in a shrill pirouette, the flicker of an oncoming car in the corner of the eye, the branch that took you into a final cold, wet, violent kingdom.

Graham told Cy Merwin and his deputies that he and Ariel had let their friends go on ahead so they could make love, that they’d been seeing each other for a while but kept it secret because of her family. When they put the kayak back into the river after waiting out the storm, they’d almost made it through a fast, braided section when a branch from a submerged tree hit the kayak just right at a dip, sweeping both of them into the water. Graham said he’d seen Ariel’s face underwater, but given the opacity of the river, this was delusion. He’d crawled up a bank with water in his lungs, bleeding from cuts, and a raft of stoned college students had found him there an hour later.

By then it was almost 7:00. After a deputy finally managed to translate what Graham—who was crying, though he would not cry again—was saying, Search and Rescue was on the river within a half hour. Ned was already in Harry’s drift boat before they understood they’d be looking for someone they knew.