Red Kayak: Chapters 16–23

She had no idea the torment that ravaged me inside, even though I was stretched out, quiet and still, on the living-room couch, Tilly on the floor beside me.

“It was hot,” I conceded, staring at my shoes.

Carl shook his head. “Nah. Probably wasn’t nothing to fight about! It’s just him—Old Man Griswald, drinkin’ and bein’ ornery.”

Just then my train was announced, and I practically jumped up, flustered, eager to escape, the Cinnabon container still in my hands.

But Digger would turn all that good food down in a heartbeat for a pack of MRE rations.

I can still see him sprawled toward me, his chin bleeding, his tooth chipped forever, reaching both of his bare, cold hands out to me while I thrashed around in that freezing water and couldn’t get a grip because the edges of the ice kept breaking.

I can still see him sprawled toward me, his chin bleeding, his tooth chipped forever, reaching both of his bare, cold hands out to me while I thrashed around in that freezing water and couldn’t get a grip because the edges of the ice kept breaking.

My hands curled up into fists and my chest got tight remembering something Carl once told me: Hypothermia makes you shiver real bad, then your muscles get rigid and you kind of go into a stupor and pass out....

My hands curled up into fists and my chest got tight remembering something Carl once told me: Hypothermia makes you shiver real bad, then your muscles get rigid and you kind of go into a stupor and pass out....

I wasn’t naive. I knew that this whole week had been a planned effort to get my mind off what had happened in the river.

“Been a lousy season, Brady,” Dad said. “Kenny and I are even talkin’ ’bout doin’ some perch fishin’ to offset it some.”

In the dim evening light I watched the ripples from the disturbed water chase one another, some toward me, and some toward the opposite shore, where they disappeared before long into the dark expanse of water.

And although I can’t be sure of this, I had the eerie feeling he was watching me all day.

I could barely wait to leave at noon when Mrs. DiAngelo came out to pay me. Her eyes glistened, like she’d been crying, and all the way home on my bike I wondered if Mr. DiAngelo suspected me of something. Paranoid.

Cicadas hummed insistently in the trees, and the soil was dry as dust.

While I dug two small holes with the trowel, Mom asked me how Mrs. DiAngelo was doing.

She said something else, too. About how she had to stop blaming herself for what happened to Amanda before she could cope with it and move forward.

Puzzled, I let her lead me into the living room, where she let go of my fingers and lifted the top of a crystal candy dish on the fireplace mantel.

J.T. smiled wanly.

All the time I was watching J.T., I noticed how his whole face had an odd pallor to it.

“I wondered, Dad, if you would hook up the oyster dredger to the Miss Amanda and help me haul something out of the river?”

It was uncanny, but it was almost as though he could read my thoughts. He asked in a quiet voice, “Would it be a red kayak, Brady?”

A great blue heron squawked at us for making too much noise and, indignant, took off from a nearby bank as we boarded my father’s boat.

Dad went to work getting the grapnel hook ready. He didn’t think it was necessary to use the oyster dredger. I was glad, because it would have taken most of a day and a half to get the contraption hooked up.

Dad said that if the kayak was still there, we could snare it with the grapnel hook, which was actually an extra anchor he kept on board. It had several pointy flukes on it, so if it caught hold, we could wrap the lines around the machine that acts like a high-powered winch to pull in crab pots and hoist it up that way.

I hadn’t slept much, but I was alert and pumped full of adrenaline.

Heavy, gray clouds obscured the sunrise, and a few raindrops already warned us it wasn’t going to be a beautiful day.

As soon as I saw the rotten pilings jutting out of the water, the events of last April tumbled forward in my mind and my stomach lurched.

Backing off on the throttle, Dad carefully maneuvered the boat through the narrow channel along the sandbar.

“Right there,” I said glumly, pointing and already disappointed. “That’s where I saw the kayak last April.”

Dad stopped rubbing his chin. He resettled his hat. “Not necessarily. I think what you’ve got here, Brady, is a littoral drift.”

But as the waves come around the corner, you get this swirlin’ effect. It creates a backwater eddy—a dimple, if you will.

But as the waves come around the corner, you get this swirlin’ effect. It creates a backwater eddy—a dimple, if you will.

We heaved the anchor back in. When it landed, Dad pulled up on the line a few times until he felt as though he had hooked something else.

In slow motion, right before our eyes, little rivulets of rainwater pushed aside the slime until we could see, my dad and I, how three holes had been drilled into the bottom.