I can’t stand here like this, doing nothing. I take her elbow and drag her down the esplanade. A half mile away, the second pier juts out into the lake, surrounded by churning water. I march toward it, searching the path, searching the rocks beneath the esplanade for any sign of human movement. Another figure becomes visible, walking toward us, but it’s only a man with a large, shaggy dog of some mountain breed, I don’t know what. The dog takes a lunge at us as we pass each other, and the man hauls on the leash and doesn’t say a word. There’s the pier, just beyond, empty except for the spray kicking up on all sides. The pretty gazebo at the end, painted in green and white stripes, looks like it might blow away like an umbrella. I am swallowing back panic, clenching my teeth with the effort of keeping myself from shaking to pieces. Over and over, I think, It can’t end like this, he can’t have gone this far and then drowned almost within sight of us.

“Maybe we missed them,” Margaret says.

“Not if they were here, we didn’t.”

“Let’s double back and make another pass.”

I stare another second or two at the pier and start to turn. Margaret tugs on my arm. “Wait a moment,” she whispers.

She squints at the pier, or rather beneath the pier, near the place where the stairs disappear into the rocky base of the esplanade. I follow her gaze. Hold myself still, or so near to still as you can hold yourself when you’re trembling as I’m trembling, when you’re as godawful frightened as I am in that moment.

And then. Something moves.

I make a little cry and dart forward. Margaret’s behind me. We trip down the steps to find a hollow cut into the stone, beneath the wooden pier, in which a man and a woman huddle together, and the man is inspecting the woman’s leg, her ankle. He hears us and looks up, and my heart slams in my throat when I see it’s the wrong man, his hair is dark and wet, his features all wrong.

“Stefan?”

“She came down hard when we landed,” he says, in French. “The ankle’s twisted. She can’t get up the stairs.”

I look down into the face of a woman I’ve never seen, blond, irritated, built like a draft horse. “Ursula?”

“Shh! Get me up.”

Margaret calls down. “Patrol!”

“What about Benedict? What about Benedict?” I cry.

Stefan says, “There was nobody else. Just her.”

I put my arm around Ursula’s ribs and haul her upright, not without effort. Thick bones, thick muscle. She grunts in pain.

“All right?” says Stefan.

“Stay there!” I hiss. “I’ll lead them away!”