Colette sat in the cabin and imagined that the skiff had blown off in a waterspout. The jacket might have been in the skiff. Emile looked at her face, then told her to get back onto the roof. “Go on. What they found don’t mean nothing. You gettin’ a good suntan up there. Stretch out them field glasses.” She retook her position between the tarnished horn and the corroded antenna, scanning the water as though she was looking for a lost ring in a vast grassy yard. Her mind began to drift, and sometimes her imaginings would float into the eyepieces, making her straighten her back with false surprise. She saw a face above every leaden swell.

She pulled a life jacket between her and the aluminum roof. She heard the radio come alive in the cabin as LeBlanc and Emile planned the search. The tug crew would continue their own zigzag pattern and the crew boat would try to find the Larousses and extend the close-in search to the east. She heard LeBlanc’s voice translated over the water. “We saw the wild bastards flying low to the north, and we shined a carbon light after them, but God knows what they were after. If we knew whether they’d found anything, it’d be a help.” In half an hour Colette and Emile passed within hailing distance of the tug, then angled away. For the first time she read the boat’s name, Dernière Chance, visible through the prop spray of the crew boat as they rumbled north in search of the twins.

Chapter Twenty-two

Twenty-two