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was her brother’s friend really. He and Gaeton had been grade school and high school buddies and she’d been the tag-along sister, three years younger, but because even then she had an instinct for the weather, the tides and resulting movement of fish, they’d let her come along, a kind of human barometer.
    How does this feel, Darcy? Over there by the sandbar?
    No, farther, by that stand of mangroves.
    Thorn had always asked her how she did it, trying to learn it in the way you’d learn to read the depths by the tint of water. But it wasn’t anything out there . It drifted somewhere in her consciousness. Something so wispy that the moment she began to try to describe it to him, it would vanish.
    Thorn smiled as she opened her car door. He always seemed to pick up the pace of her pulse. He was rawboned and tanned. His eyes looked at you. They didn’t slide off. They were blue and deep-set beneath thick blond eyebrows. He’d let his sun-singed hair get a bit shaggy, and there was a mistiness in his eyes she didn’t remember, but considering all that had happened to him lately, he was still Thorn. The only guy she’d ever trusted enough to tell about her gift. The only guy who even came close to being the fisherman she was.

5
    “Hey, stranger,” she said, settling into the recliner beside him. She looked at him more closely. “Thorn, you OK? You look spooked.”
    “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” he said. “Really.” He smiled to show her how fine he was. “Just came over to drop off Gaeton’s car.” He nodded at the Mercedes.
    “Oh, boy,” she said. “What’ve you two been up to?”
    “Well, now that’s a story,” Thorn said. He had a Budweiser in his hand, four empties on the cement beside his recliner. He’d been picturing that alligator, its jaws wide, its eyes empty. It made him very thirsty.
    Thorn tore out the last beer from the six-pack and offered it to Darcy. She took it, drained a third of it, gasped, and said, “I could use a good story.”
    He took a small sip and looked up at the last shreds of daylight. A sulfurous golden glow, like honey swirled with blood, shone in the west through a tangle of telephone poles and palm fronds. From down the row of trailers, Bruce Springsteen began to wail. The old couple sitting out on their porch across the street stood up, glared down the street, then across at Thorn and Darcy as though they were accomplices, and went inside their trailer, and turned on their chuffing air conditioner.
    He told her about the morning, keeping it light, and when he was finished, she was quiet. He took another sip from his beer, watching the last light take the red in Darcy’s hair, leaving a flicker where her eyes were.
    She said, all business, “And did you stay around, see how he handled the Porsche guy?”
    “Yeah,” Thorn said. “They made some calls, worked it all out.”
    Darcy sighed.
    “This company Gaeton works for, it’s what, a rent-a-cop thing?”
    “No,” she said. “It’s bigger than that. It’s international.” There was something odd in her voice, as if she wanted to say more, maybe debating it.
    “Gaeton asked me to help him with something he’s working on.
    “Well, now that’s just great.”
    “What’re you so pissed about?” Thorn looked at her through the final stages of twilight, tried to read her face. But the parts that mattered were gone.
    She sighed again, said, “I just don’t like to see him mixing you up in his business, that’s all.”
    “It’s OK, I need a break,” Thorn said. “I been working nonstop on the house. It’s good to get out, see how the world’s going.”
    “Yeah, yeah,” she said. “Maybe you two deserve each other.”
    This was a new Darcy. Not little sister Darcy. Not Miss Congenial, Miss Monroe County, Runner-up Miss Florida. That Darcy, who never froze her smile into place like the other beauty queens but really seemed to enjoy it, standing up there in a bathing suit, as if it were too goofy not