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said.
    “What?”
    I shook my head and turned and ran to the center of the railroad bridge, bending as low as I could. The bass boat was closer. I looked over the edge of the bridge, and the caution sign was there, nailed to one of the bridge timbers. I lay flat and reached over and with both hands bent the bottom of the sign up toward me. It pulled loose. I dragged it up onto the bridge and laid it across the ties, with the writing facing up.
    I started to get up and the bass boat came around the bend of the river. I dropped back flat again, lying against one of the big creosote-stinking timbers, trying to be invisible.
    He probably wouldn’t have seen me even if he looked up. The hard rain in his face would make it difficult to see. As the bass boat got closer, I could see that he was drinking from a mason jar. As he came to the bridge, he looked up. He was so close I could see him squinting against the rain.
    Then he was under the bridge, and I was looking straight down at him. I was so still I’m not sure I breathed at all while he was beneath me. He was wearing a yellow slicker and a nasty-looking felt hat. I couldn’t see the bowie knife, but I knew it was there, inside the coat.
    When he was past the bridge, I swiveled slightly to watch. Ahead of him my rowboat with the blankets bunched in the back was drifting along in the murk. He must have seen it too, because I heard the motor on the bass boat rev a little higher. Then the rowboat drifted around the bend, and, closing on it fast, the bass boat disappeared right after. I stood and ran to the shore where Jeannie was.
    “What?” she said.
    “Stay there,” I said.
    I ran past her through the woods, toward the bend in the river. I got to the bend in time to see my rowboat go over the falls. The motor on the bass boat was screaming as Luke tried to turn and go back upstream. He couldn’t. The current was too strong. It pushed the bass boat stern first to the top of the falls. Luke stood at the last moment as if he could dive into the water and swim to shore. Which he couldn’t. The boat went over before he got out of it and he was gone.
    Behind him on the river, bobbing in the current, was the nearly empty mason jar, which, before it went over the falls, filled with water and sank.

Chapter 22
    We walked west along the railroad tracks, Pearl galloping ahead, exploring the woods, occasionally putting up a woodcock and looking at me in puzzlement when I didn’t shoot it.
    “You saw him,” Jeannie said.
    “Yes.”
    “He was dead?” she asked.
    “Floating facedown,” I said. “I watched him for five or six minutes. He banged round in the white water for a while and then floated downstream.”
    “Dead,” Jeannie said.
    “Had to be.”
    “Good,” Jeannie said.
    Pearl appeared from a clump of alder and looked at me and wagged her tail. I nodded, and she dashed off again into the woods. The rain didn’t seem to bother her. And she didn’t seem depressed about having a couple of Oreo cookies to eat. She seemed to be having a pretty good time.
    “How do you feel?” I said.
    “Glad,” she said.
    “Nothing else?”
    “Relief,” she said. “I mean, I know he was my father in a, you know, scientific way. But he was never a father. He was always just something to be scared of.”
    I looked at the bruises marking her wrist and nodded. We kept walking.
    “He used to smack my mother around,” Jeannie said. “Me too. Even after my mom threw him out and they got divorced, he used to show up drunk sometimes and try to make her . . . do stuff.”
    I nodded.
    “She ever call the cops?” I said.
    Jeannie shook her head.
    “She was too embarrassed,” Jeannie said.
    “Too bad you didn’t tell me more about it,” I said.
    “You’re a kid, what were you going to do?” Jeannie said.
    “I’da told my father,” I said. “And my uncles.”
    “They would have done something?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    The rain kept coming as we walked. It was kind of