She sat in the cabin, bringing the boat up to about fifteen. After they had run west for ten miles, he banged on the roof and told her to turn into a lap of their pattern, a quarter mile farther from shore. Her headache faded, and she looked over and watched Emile’s blocky shadow on the water. The shadow would turn and search, swing the other way and search. After an hour he rapped on the roof with his knuckles—she could hear the flesh and bone on the metal—and he called down to her, “Come on up and spell me. My legs is cramping up.” They changed places, and almost immediately Colette saw something floating a half mile ahead. Emile sped up at her call, and soon they were next to a box bobbing and rolling in the waves. He came out of the cabin and looked over the scarred rail to a wooden crate of cabbages, the vegetables bound tight under the slats like a raft of skulls. He looked away. “Musta fell off a ship,” he told her, tucking in his shirt and turning slowly back to the cabin.

They streaked in their chosen quarter of Gulf until noon, when the smutty clouds seemed to carry an angry light in them, sending down an eye-stinging glare. The boat wound the same braided route until two, and Colette spotted only a school of arching porpoises, a broken tangle of net floats, and a half-empty drum marked for a pesticide. On the east end of their last pass, they spotted what might have been the tugboat on the horizon. Emile spent fifteen minutes warming up his dusty shortwave and tried to raise someone in the wheelhouse. Finally Mr. LeBlanc’s voice began to dominate over the fuzz in the old set. He told Emile to come a couple of miles closer so they could talk, and Colette turned the wheel. In five minutes she could make out a red-and-gray slash on the water ahead. LeBlanc’s voice came back on, asking what they had found.

“Not a damn thing,” Emile hollered into the mike.

There was a pause in transmission and Colette picked up her head. LeBlanc’s voice came back slow and careful. “Well, we found their skiff floating and one life jacket.”

Emile rolled a pair of sorrowful eyes over at Colette. “Was the jacket latched up?”

“Yeah.”

“LeBlanc, was the rope on the skiff broke?”

“Yes. They never got to untie it.”

Emile put down the microphone, looked out the window on his side, then picked it up again.

“What else you got?”

“Nothing. But I think you better come on over this side and help us look.”

“We comin’.” The engine sounded up and they headed southeast.