Shadow trees, brambles, my hair snagging on a branch and ripping loose, sticky with pitch. I see my clueless face in grainy newsprint, maybe sophomore year’s school picture, caught in a permanent blink, A junior at Pender District High School, Morrison was last seen in a nearby salt marsh captioned beneath, just another footnote in the news anchor’s nightly spiel. I could scream for help; the couples who crossed the bridge might hear. Or call Sage’s phone, interrupting her make-out session with Trace so I can whimper about being lost? I’d rather sleep in the mud.

I crash into a clearing so suddenly it scatters all thought.

I’ve reached the banks, the water so close and so wide that all I can do is stare at the tiny ripples threading the surface, the steely color it takes on in the twilight, something so separate and industrious about it, this living thing that doesn’t give a damn about me or my problems. To my left, I can see the bridge, quite a distance away now, three black arches crowned by the silhouettes of our jack-o’-lanterns.

I’m surrounded by cattails. They jog the memory of the egret, tall and reed-thin. Something not quite right about those spindly legs, the curved beak tucked to its breast, the eyes like beads of volcanic glass.

I turn slightly, and it’s there: tall, dark egret shape, the head cocked in study of me. I jolt, flashes of thought (egret—Mumbler—run) slamming through me, but my feet are rooted, and I nearly fall.

“It’s okay.” Kincaid’s voice. Couldn’t mistake it for anyone else’s. The egret-thing comes over, long legs, slow steps. Adrenaline won’t quite let me believe it’s really him yet. “Did I jump you?” He doesn’t sound sorry.

“Yeah.” My heartbeat’s still in my ears.

“Everybody else went that way.” He gestures vaguely down shore in the direction of town.

“I kinda figured.” He doesn’t speak for a moment, and I shift my feet, or try to, sunken in the mud up to my shoelaces, wanting to dislodge myself without being obvious. “Did you come looking for me?” Something in me leaps at that, but I hate the thought of him witnessing my crazy lab-rat-in-a-maze route through the trees.

A shrug. “It can get dangerous out here, if you don’t know where you’re going. You know how to swim, right?”

“Doggy paddle.”

“That works. But everything looks the same. You can get turned around pretty easy, and if you panic, and end up in the water . . .” Soft laugh. “Glub, glub.”