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and one day the giant spiders would take over Silicon Valley.
    The first trap had two lobsters in it, but they were small. She passed them by. The next had one enormous old fellow. Lobsters could live a hundred years, though most didn’t make it more than ten or fifteen. This guy looked to weigh close to two pounds. He had been around a while.
    Careful to avoid the claws, Denise reached in and dragged him out. Her hand twitched as if she’d been hit by an electric shock, much the way Paulette Duffy’s had. Her knuckles rapped on the side of the trap, and her fingers opened. With a flick of his tail, the lobster shot into the darkness.
    Nerves.
    Over forty and falling apart, Denise thought. The big spider would have been a good addition to the canvas sack trailing from a tether attached to her dive harness, but, in a way, she was glad it had escaped. Sad to end one’s life in a tourist’s stomach.
    When she had ten good-sized lobsters, she switched off her light. Her bag could easily hold as many as fifteen, but she made it a rule never to take every one she found. If a trap had a couple of lobsters in it, she’d take only one. Those she emptied, if there was any bait left inside, might lure in another crustacean before the licensee came to check his catch. This way she figured the lobsterman would be pretty sure his traps had been poached, but not a hundred percent sure.
    Denise rotated her lobster rustling through four different patches. All they had in common was that they were shallow and easily accessible from Somes Sound, where she moored her little boat. Other than running into somebody night diving—and probably up to no good either—while she was in the act of robbing the traps, there was no way she could get caught.
    Denise liked that the lobstermen knew they’d been had, liked that she was thumbing her nose at the holier-than-thous in the park service, the Peter Barneses. Liked the feeling that, at least in this, she was the one in control. It was she, Denise Castle, who was making fools of them all. That was as important as the money she got for her catch with the less than honest owner of the Big Fat Lobster Trap, a seafood restaurant on the outskirts of Bar Harbor.
    Lobster rustling was petty payback for what had been done to her since she was old enough to remember. Pathetic, if she thought about it, but it was the best she could do.
    Until now.
    Paulette Duffy.
    There were possibilities opening to her that hadn’t existed before.
    Kicking off the bottom, she let herself rise gently to the surface. She had not been deep enough, nor down long enough, to make any decompression stops necessary. At the surface, she bobbed, a black sea creature in a black sea. Finding her boat was the most challenging aspect of her midnight forays into the seafood aisle of the Atlantic.
    Under the gunwale, on either side of the bow, she had mounted three small LED lights. They were green. She’d been careful not to put them in a line or evenly spaced—the telltale marks of a work of man, not nature. Glimpsed by anyone, they’d be taken for a reflection, a bit of phosphorescent sea vegetation, or a trick of the light. For her they were homing beacons.
    After a minute or two she saw them winking as the boat rose and fell on a gentle swell. She swam toward it. Having tied her sack of squirming arachnids to the starboard cleat, Denise heaved herself over the gunwale. As always, her first action was to remove and stow her dive gear, then pull on Levi’s, a sweatshirt, and a ball cap to cover her wet hair. She’d established her reputation as a woman who enjoyed night diving. Still, diving at night, alone, was considered dangerous enough to raise questions she’d rather not answer on the off chance she ran into anyone. The lobsters she could always cut loose back into the ocean if need be.
    An innocent, if nocturnal, ranger once again, enjoying the resource and preserving it for blah, blah, blah, she started her motor and