She stood up and pointed west. “Jump that inlet,” she said too loudly, “both of you, and one run the outside of that bar, one the inside, until the dark turns you back.” She grabbed their upper arms and shoved them into the water. Set in motion, they swam across and set off at a jog. After five minutes she could hear their voices over the ruffling grassland as they called out, “T-Buuuuub” and, later, “Ti-enne.” She brought Paul’s father a pack of cheese crackers from the boat and gave him some soda to wash them down with. Then she ran up the inside of the channel until she sank to her knees in a bitter mud. A lagoon a half mile across festered behind the island, a trapped and shallow place. There were no tracks anywhere, no sign that the reeds had ever been disturbed, just the keening of a pair of gulls and the distant bellow of an alligator. Backtracking through water, she waded the mud from her legs and walked past Paul’s father, who stared out over the Gulf. She jogged east over gray sand for a mile, stopping to examine trash washed up in the shallows, until the sun set and the bottoms of the western clouds showed coppery fire. Where she stopped, she turned to the darkening east and filled her lungs, yelling Paul’s name with an earsplitting anger, receiving no call in return, her voice going out like the truest of arrows, nothing to stop it, no one to hear. She yelled again, from her bones out, a long blast of pain lost over the uncaring marshland.

Chapter Twenty-three

Twenty-three

Victor and Vincent had the old man lying down on the deck and the motor idling when she got back. She splashed out to the boat and each twin grabbed an arm and hauled her in.

“Colette,” Vincent began, “we didn’t find nothing. No tracks, no nothing.” His expression was apologetic, a look she had never seen on the face of a Larousse. She sat down on a life jacket, suddenly too tired to think, her throat sore. Victor scanned the Gulf for Emile’s running lights and turned the boat around. In half an hour they were all in the crew boat, the Unsinkabelle following behind on a towline, heading south for the tugboat’s carbon arc light, which LeBlanc was sweeping like a finger of ice on the darkening water, a signal to guide them in, to cast one last look.