Lana conjured up a rough image of one of the tidal charts, the water rising and falling every twelve hours. “I see what you mean.”
Jack pulled a binder out of her backpack and extracted a printed map covered in intricate marks and topographical lines. “All the creeks I know are short. But I’d noticed one on your land trust map that went up behind the mud flats. And a couple on the Rhoads ranch headed in that same direction.”
Lana leaned over. “Where’d you get this map?”
“I texted that grad student I told you about, the one studying ocean navigation. She had this whole database of contour maps of the creeks. This morning, I went out to see if any of them connect to each other.”
She looked up for a moment and across the table at Beth. “I know, I know. I should have told you.”
Beth stopped buttering a roll to gesture with the knife for Jack to keep talking.
“I found a linkup. It goes from all the way up here”—Jack wiped her hand and put one finger on the map—“to here.” Her finger wound from the far end of the mud flats up into the fields, across the land trust property line, and through the ranch, then let out at the public fishing dock. “It runs for at least three miles. You saw me just as I was coming out.”
Lana pulled the map to her. “Did you see anything unusual in the creek?”
“Like what?”
“Maybe something to indicate Ricardo had been there? A torn piece of fabric? Muddy boot prints?”
“A giant sign that said ‘Man Killed Here’？” Beth suggested.
Lana shot Beth a look. “Perhaps we should discuss this in the bedroom,” Lana said to Jack.
“I’ll be good,” Beth said.
Jack looked back and forth between her mother and grandmother. Were they teasing each other? Or was another war about to start? Was this what it was like to have two parents?
When nothing exploded, Jack continued. “Um, well, no, nothing like that. I was mostly just focused on figuring out if it went through. But then there was that man. I thought he was just some farmer or something, but he spooked me. He was doing something with a shovel for a long time. That’s why I was late. I was hiding, waiting for him to leave.”
“I know this morning you said you didn’t recognize him,” Lana said. “But was there anything about him or that spot, anything you remember?”
“It smelled bad, I remember that. Like a dead animal, maybe, or a live skunk. But I didn’t see anything. There were these big reeds all around me. I was hidden really well.” At least, that’s what she hoped. “But here’s the weird thing. He didn’t go back up into the fields when he was done. He left in a kayak.”
“Did you see the kayak?”
“I sort of followed it. That’s how I got back out to the slough.”
“Jack!”
“Mom, I was way behind him. And I ditched my life jacket. He couldn’t see me. I promise.”
Beth bit her lip. The crease between her eyebrows was back.
“What did the kayak look like?” Lana asked.
“It was a standard two-seater Tribe, yellow, the same kind pretty much everyone on the slough uses. The guy had a lot of stuff in it. I could barely see him because of it all. He had a big bag covering the bow and a box strapped in behind him on the stern.”
“What color was the box?”
“Maybe gray? Or white? It was kind of a blur.”
“Could it have been a cooler?”
“Uh . . . I guess so.”
Lana tapped her spoon against her bowl of congealing chowder.
Beth eyed her mother. “Ma, what is it?”
“Paul Hanley. Before we met up with you at the motorboat, I saw him paddling into the marina in a kayak. With a huge black bag, a white cooler. And a shovel.”
Lana looked back at the map. “Jack, could the man you heard have been doing that digging here?” She pointed to the small wedge of land Paul leased from Mr. Rhoads.
Jack scrunched up her face. “I can’t be sure. I passed a gate, and some barbed wire fencing. I don’t know how far it was from there to where I was hiding.”
“And you couldn’t see what he was doing?”
“Just digging, I think. Whatever it was, it sounded like hard work.”
Lana tried to recall if Paul had looked fatigued when she’d first seen him. But all she could remember were flashes of her own panic, the spray off the motorboat, the painful searching until they saw Jack and could start breathing again.