“Hey, what’s wrong?” he asked, seeing her troubled expression.

“I’m a hell of a long way from Brooklyn.”

“That’s in New York?”

“Right,” she said.

He clicked his nails. “And it bothers you not being there?”

“You bet it does.”

Steering toward the shore, he said, “That’s what scares insects the most.”

“What’s that?”

“Like, it’s weird. They don’t mind working and they don’t mind fighting. But they get all freaked out in an unfamiliar place. Even if it’s safe. They hate it, don’t know what to do.”

Okay, Sachs thought, I guess I’m a card-carrying insect. She preferred the way Lincoln phrased it: Fish out of water.

“You can always tell when an insect’s really upset. They clean their antennas over and over again…. Insects’ antennas show their moods. Like our faces. Only the thing is,” he added cryptically, “they don’t fake it. Like we do.” He laughed in an odd way—a sound she hadn’t heard before.

He eased over the side of the boat into the water and pulled the boat onto the land. Sachs climbed out. He directed her through the woods and seemed to know exactly where he was going despite the darkness of dusk and the absence of any path that she could see.

“How do you know where to go?” she asked.

Garrett said, “I guess I’m like the monarchs. I just know directions pretty good.”

“Monarchs?”

“You know, the butterflies. They migrate a thousand miles and know exactly where they’re going. It’s really, really cool—they navigate by the sun and, like, change course automatically depending on where it is on the horizon. Oh, and when it’s overcast or dark they use this other sense they have—they can feel the earth’s magnetic fields.”

When a bat shoots out a beam of sound to find them, moths fold their wings and drop to the ground and hide.

She was smiling at his enthusiastic lecture when she stopped suddenly and crouched. “Look out,” she whispered. “There! There’s a light.”

Faint illumination reflecting off a murky pond. An eerie yellow light like a failing lantern.

But Garrett was laughing.

She looked at him quizzically.

He said, “Just a ghost.”

“What?” she asked.

“It’s the Lady of the Swamp. Like, this Indian maiden who died the night before her wedding. Her ghost still paddles through the Dismal Swamp looking for the guy she was going to marry. We’re not in the Great Dismal but it’s near here.” He nodded toward the glow. “What it is really is just fox fire—this gross fungus that glows.”

She didn’t like the light. It reminded her of the uneasiness she felt as they drove into Tanner’s Corner that morning, seeing the small coffin at the funeral.

“I don’t like the swamp, with or without ghosts,” Sachs said.