On day four, the machinery of drowning still included the helicopter and the county boat, a dozen rafts and drift boats and a dog team from Flathead County. A Yellowstone County crew arrived with a big motorized craft to give the Park County teams a break. Harry didn’t much like them; bad blood from a case years ago, reawakened by a comment about Ariel becoming Yellowstone County’s problem soon, anyway.

Polly, dropping Ned off at the Carter’s Bridge take-out, happened to hear this. She was standing off to the side, studying the high, cave-dappled rock face on the east side of the river. If she watched for long enough, she would see something move, or something watching back. That much rock felt like the ocean, filled with invisibilities—something lived within every crack. The night before, a huge black Mordor-style cloud had opened up above the upper valley and Yellowstone Park. The river would rise and turn an opaque milky brown again, and Ariel’s body might be lifted and dropped by this new surge. Some riverbanks would have to be searched again.

Ned swung a leg into Harry’s boat, and she felt a blast of tenderness.

“What are you going to do before the shit hits the fan?” he asked.

The shit included cleaning and Maude’s late-morning flight. The next day Polly would prep at the restaurant for the first time in months because everyone wanted parade day off, and then it would be Maude all the time for the rodeo, the picnic, the party.

The men pushed off and the river sucked the boat away, Ned looking uneasy as Polly took off her shoes and waded into the river to her ankles: melting snow, pure and simple. You didn’t avoid the river, even though it was silver, loud, brutal. Of course it killed people, and of course she should bring her children back to play near it, and float on it. Polly watched the surface roar by and wondered if the deep pools beneath felt still and green. Once a diver found a body upright after two weeks in a fifteen-foot-deep pool—was Ariel standing under these boats, waiting?

Ned was worried Polly would go out for a walk and forget to come in, as it were. She’d wandered a few times that spring, and he always found her walking along the river. Didn’t everyone walk toward the water? She hadn’t felt lost. Polly took the dogs back down to the area near the baseball fields and saw three heads in the osprey nest, which made her feel smug. She’d have to tell Jane, who didn’t need to know that Polly had also wondered whether one had been blown out, pecked to death by siblings, neglected by the mother, who preferred the others. Nature, tooth and claw.