38

In the milky half-light of the early morning, Domenic could almost have taken his surroundings for a field of ice — if it wasn’t for the thin wraiths of mist that whispered up from the surface of the water, curtaining the motionless landscape like ghosts. It was like a scene from an earlier time, he thought, an infinite, undisturbed natural world, patiently waiting for the coming of a new cycle of life, for the arrival of a new species called humans.

Beside him, Damian stirred. “Your turn for the coffee run, I believe,” he said, sitting up. “I’ll take a cheese croissant, too.”

Domenic forced a smile but he didn’t turn from looking out over the mirror-calm water. Nothing broke the surface between them and the low smudge of the treeline that hovered in the far distance. “I think the water is still rising, Damian,” he said. “There were a couple of snags out there yesterday, out past where those Common Goldeneyes are now. And a small mound of reeds, too. They’re not visible anymore.”

His brother looked at the uneasy grey lake around them. It stretched out across the plain as far as he could see. “That storm dumped a lot of water in the hills in the interior,” he said. “Once all that reaches this flood plain, too, it’s going to raise the level even higher. That search party better get here soon, or we’re going to be sitting in water by the time they find us.”

In the distance, the spindly reflections of the dead trees lay on the silvery surface of the water like cracks in a mirror. A raft of ducks poked around near the submerged roots. Buffleheads, perhaps? They were too far off for Domenic to tell. Above them, a pair of Whooping Cranes tracked across the white sky, necks outstretched, calling loudly.

“Looking for a home,” said Damian. “This area should be perfect habitat for them, but they won’t nest here if the water levels stay this high. They need it to be much lower, knee height at best.”

“Don’t Whooping Cranes prefer to reuse the same nest each year?”

Domenic nodded. “If they can. They always have to repair some damage that the nests have suffered over the previous winter, but I’d say they’d have their work cut out for them this year. Even if these waters do recede in time for the breeding season, they’ll almost certainly choose to relocate. If they nested here last year, they won’t want to move far from this area, though.”

Domenic watched the birds as they continued across the landscape, gliding effortlessly on their black-tipped wings. The thought that had eluded him up on the esker that day finally distilled for him in the quiet peace of this place, like an image forming in a dream.

“I think I know what she was involved in. And why she needed to keep it from you.”

Damian drew his eyes away from the birds. “Annie? You think she was mixed up in something illegal?” He shook his head uncertainly. “I don’t know, Domino. Okay, she was determined, and she didn’t like to be told no. She was uber-focused and maybe a touch obsessive, but I can’t believe she would knowingly get caught up in anything really bad. She was basically a good person. A really good person.”

Domenic said nothing. Damian would already know that even good people got caught up in bad things sometimes.

“Perhaps I don’t need to hear it. It doesn’t matter anymore, so you can spare me the details. Maybe it’s more important now just to safeguard her memory. Let me do that, okay, Domino? Let me protect her, just like you want to protect Lindy.”

“It’s over between us.” The words came suddenly. Surrounded by this desolate landscape, there no longer seemed to be anywhere for Domenic to hide from the truth.

Damian looked hard at his brother. “Now? After everything you’ve done for her, everything you laid on the line? To break up with you after all that doesn’t sound like the Lindy I know.” In the continuing silence from his brother, Damian shook his head slowly as the realization gradually took hold. “Oh, no, no, Domino. Don’t tell me you didn’t tell her about this guy Hayes?”

“It wasn’t that simple. It’s a long story.”

Damian made a point of looking out at the waters surrounding their tiny, isolated perch. “You have something more pressing you need to attend to?”

Domenic sighed. “I had to keep her in the dark. It was the only way I could protect her.”

“No, it wasn’t. You could have told her, let her in on everything that was happening.”

Domenic shook his head. “You know what she’s like. She would never have let herself be cowed by Hayes, no matter how afraid she was.”

“That’s not up to you, Domino. However she wanted to deal with it, it should have been her choice. You took that away from her because you thought you knew better. You can’t go on making decisions for people because you think it’s in their best interests. You have to let people make their own mistakes.”

“This one could have cost Lindy her life.”

Damian looked around their reed island once more. “But look what yours has cost you.”

The brothers had been silent for a long time after Domenic’s revelation, each staring out from the island, lost in their own thoughts. It was Domenic who spoke first.

“At least Traz is safe. You don’t want to hear about Annie’s part and that’s okay. But I know you’ve been worried that you put Traz in danger by sending him those coordinates. That’s what’s been gnawing at you, isn’t it?”

Damian stirred. “I didn’t like the thought of him out there all on his own, poking around those U.S. air bases. I liked even less the idea that I was the one that might have put him in harm’s way. I’ve screwed up enough things. I didn’t want that on my conscience, too. But if you’re right, and let’s face it, it has been known, if those men were not U.S. military, then, yeah, at least Traz is safe.”

“He’s not on his own, either. I spoke to him before I came out here. He’s picked up a travel partner. A woman named Verity. He met her in Aransas.”

“Aransas? He was only planning to be there one night.” Damian nodded approvingly. “Clearly, he hasn’t lost his touch. Not surprising, though,” he said with mock pride, “I taught that boy all he knows about women.”

“Then maybe we do need to be concerned about him, after all. He’s obviously in a lot more trouble than he realizes.”

At first, Domenic thought the noise between them was the thrumming of the wind through the reeds, the constant white noise soundtrack of their time out here. But the pitch was different this time, and when he looked up, he saw the dark speck in the sky, and a glint of light as it banked. The plane was low, flying beneath the cloud cover, the one-note drone of its engine rolling across the empty landscape towards the men.

“Cessna 210,” said Damian. “It’s the search plane.” They stood and raised their arms above their heads, waving like cheerleaders, shouting and moving around as much as they dared on their water-laden stage.

But the Cessna banked away to continue its search farther along the river, moving inexorably away from them as if drawn by a magnet. The plane was heading for the spot where Damian’s inReach had stopped working, thought Domenic, where he had told Roy he would be heading, kilometres away from where they were now.

They stopped waving and sank to the ground, their boots sodden with the water that had oozed up into the footprints they had pressed into the vegetation with their exertions. They continued to watch until the dark speck receded into the leaden skies and the sound was swallowed by the distance.

“They’ll do another pass tomorrow,” Damian said confidently. “We need something that will catch their eye. Do you have anything light; a white T-shirt maybe?” But the brothers had nothing between them, just the browns and greys and drab olives of outdoorsmen who wanted to blend into their landscape, not stand out from it. Even Damian’s tiger-stripe jacket was perfect camouflage for the reeds that surrounded them. The clothes they were wearing would be difficult to pick out from two hundred feet in the air, let alone two thousand. If they did come again, Domenic knew, it would be to follow eskers and moraines, solid dry tracks you’d expect humans to use as they moved through the park, as generations of Dene had done before them. The search plane would trace a fifty-kilometre stretch of the river, scanning the landscape a kilometre and a half either side. One hundred and fifty square kilometres of a park three hundred times that size. The pilot would not check the middle of sodden, waterlogged swamps, areas where humans had no place, where there was no shelter for them, no sustenance. Even if the search plane returned, no one was going to look for them here.