When I was far enough from shore, I sat up and paddled away as fast as I could. By the time I reached the middle of the pond, I’d decided the simplest option was to drown myself. I would need something heavy to weigh me down. I was a strong swimmer and I knew that, in the end, I would fight for the surface. If I had a big rock, I could tie it to the boat’s painter, wrap the rope round my ankle, and jump. Conrad might never admit what he had done, but he would know, for the rest of his miserable psycho life, that he was responsible for my death.
I paddled toward the swampy, uninhabited side of the pond, where the horsetail reeds stalked out into the pond like an army, and hair-thin tangles of lily pad stems waited to trap your oar. The shoreline here was scattered with glacial debris, ancient rocks and pebbles deposited in the wake of the slow-moving glacial ice.
As I neared the shallows, I dug my paddle hard into the water, gathering momentum, then lifted it high and clear over the lily pads, gliding silently over their spidery web. The crunch of the sandy floor scraped the bottom of the canoe. I was about to leap out and drag it the rest of the way in when I heard a quiet voice.
“Don’t move. Stay in the boat.”
I looked up, startled. Jonas was sitting perfectly still on the lowest branch of a pitch pine that jutted out above my head, over the water. Almost completely camouflaged. Shirtless, wearing a pair of faded army-green shorts, long legs dangling. He was leaner than the last time I’d seen him. Taller, of course—he must be at least twelve by now—his thick black hair tangled below his shoulders. But his eyes had the same older-than-his-years intensity that had struck me the day he found me in the woods.
“Hand me your paddle,” he whispered.
“Why are you whispering?” I whispered back.
He pointed to the reeds beneath my boat.
I leaned over the edge of the canoe, trying to see what he was pointing at, but from my angle I couldn’t make out anything.
“The paddle?” he whispered again.
I stood up, careful not to rock the canoe, and passed the paddle up into the tree. Jonas took a plastic bag of something that looked like raw hamburger meat out of his pocket and slathered it over the end of the oar.
“Watch.” He lowered it down directly in front of me.
The sound will always stick in my brain—the sudden, violent crack of wood as the paddle split. Jonas leaned backward on the branch with his full weight, hanging onto the oar. And then I saw it, rising from the murk, jaws clamped shut around my paddle. It was the Big One, the granddaddy—an ugly snapper as wide as a rowboat. Prehistoric. Chicken-headed. And he was angry. Jonas jumped down onto the shore, pulled on the paddle with all his might. Teeth gritted.
“I need help.”
Giving the snapper a wide berth, I made my way to Jonas and together we dragged the snapper toward dry land.
“I need to unhitch your painter,” he said. “Don’t let go.” He ran to the canoe and undid the thick rope clipped to its bow.
“Hurry, please,” I said. The snapper was slowly eating his way up the paddle toward me.
Jonas made a slipknot in the painter, crept behind the turtle, and lassoed its thick-scaled tail.
“Got him,” he said.
“Now what?”
“We need to get him into the boat.”
The snapper hissed and thrashed, pulling against his bonds. His long neck twisted and turned, groping impotently for the rope, his razor-sharp jaws never letting go of the paddle. He turned his attention back to me with a dead-eyed anger—humiliation at being caught; fury at having been exposed to the world, stripped of his dignity—and began to make his way farther up the oar. He was coming for me now, coming for his pound of flesh, and I understood what he was feeling completely.
“Let him go,” I said.
“No way.” Jonas pulled harder at the rope.
“It’s wrong,” I said. “And he’s going to eat me.”
“I’ve been trying to catch him for two years. My brothers say he doesn’t exist.”
“Well, you caught him.”
“Yeah, but they won’t believe me.”
“Then they’re idiots.”
“According to them, I’m the idiot.”
“This isn’t a great time to argue the point,” I said as the snapper inched toward me. “But if your plan was for us to lift a one-hundred-pound enraged killer turtle into a tippy canoe, then maybe your brothers are right.”
Jonas stood assessing the situation: the massive beast pulling at its yoke, my frightened face, the fiberglass canoe. With a deep sigh, he untied his trophy. I let go of the paddle and we backed away.