“Let me tell you something.” She knelt next to his chair. “I never thought I would say this out loud. He is so sharp. He has never once run into another pair of dancers. He knows where he’s going, six, maybe eight steps in advance. Even when he’s talking to his partner, I’ve noticed that he keeps the whole dance floor in the edge of his vision and sees how everyone else is moving. I danced with him years ago and can tell you that he is the only man I know who can tell a dirty joke, chew a breath mint, feel up and down a girl’s back, and dance a two-step on a dance floor with thirty-five couples and not brush a shirt sleeve with anyone else in the room.” She squeezed Emile’s hand hard.

The man’s eyes flared. “So when the boat hit the rig, he wasn’t just lost. He was going somewhere.” He turned on the cabin light, got down on all fours once more, and hovered above the chart. Colette listened to his labored breathing, looked out to the north, where the light was failing over a plateau of tan grass bordered on the horizon by a pebble of tortured oaks. “Here,” he said at last. “We might as well try here. It’s a mud hole, but maybe he knew something I don’t. It’s northeast of that rig, I can see that. They mighta been making a beeline for it.”

In twenty minutes the sun was aground, and Colette was with the Larousses, their skiff slowly feeling through the shallows, a motor on dead slow. A hundred yards ahead lay a thirty-foot-wide opening in the marsh. So far they had not struck bottom. A breeze kicked up, and a light chop foamed against the boat. Ten feet into the mouth of the inlet, Victor gave a whoop and sprang over the windshield into the thigh-deep water, skimming to the narrow sand fringe bordering the marsh grass. Lying there was Paul’s father, barefoot and wobbly, trying to sit up. Vincent grounded the boat ten feet from shore and slid over, giving Colette a hand. When they reached the old man, they kept him down and made him drink from a plastic water jug. He was shivering. His eyes, bloodshot and staring, fastened on the Larousse boys. They rubbed him over to check for broken bones and to limber him up, to show how glad they were to welcome him back to the world. Colette ran her hands over the white whiskers on his chapped face. She gave him water a sip at a time and soon he sat up.