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scared a flock of eight wild turkeys—two hens and six half-grown poults—out of our side yard as I left the house. It was my day off. I didn’t have to rush down to the shop. All was serene.
    I had barely reached the newspaper delivery box when the screaming started.
    â€œHelp! Help!”
    I nearly dropped my newspaper as I whirled toward the sound. A girl wearing a neon-striped bikini came running up Lake Shore Drive toward me, a pair of orange flip-flops flip-flopping on her feet.
    â€œHe didn’t come up! He just disappeared!”
    As soon as she was within clutching distance, she grabbed my arm. Her fingers felt like so many vises. I could see that tears were running down her face.
    â€œI’m afraid he’s dead!”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œJeremy! He said he was going to show me how to do a surface dive. But he never came up! I think he drowned.”

Chapter 4

    T wo hours later I was sitting in my folding beach chair on the sand of Beech Tree Public Access Area, a quarter mile from our house. The temperature had just hit seventy-two degrees, and puffy white clouds floated here and there in the broad blue sky. August is one of the reasons Lake Michigan is a major resort area, and that day was a perfect demonstration of its perfect weather.
    At the top of the bank behind me, delightful breezes wafted through twenty-five or so elms and maples and one giant beech tree, the tree that gave the beach its name. The sun had just climbed higher than the trees, so it was now beginning to reach the beach. I had brought a big multicolored umbrella; soon we’d need it for protection from the sun.
    The idyllic setting contrasted with the activities on the beach. A half dozen people in law enforcement outfits—Warner Pier Police Department and Warner County Sheriff’s Department—were talking on radios or standing in concerned clumps, staring out into the lake. There more than twenty people walked slowly through the water with their arms linked.
    These were volunteers, mostly from our neighborhood, and they were using their feet to search for the body of the missing swimmer. They formed a line anchored at the beach and walked through the water in a fan-shaped pattern, re-forming at the end of each sweep to cover a new area.
    Although I had phoned in the first alarm, I was a minor part of the search. My job was keeping an eye on two things: first, a large cooler of bottled water for the volunteers in the lake; second, the missing man’s girlfriend, the girl in the bright bikini. She was sitting beside me in a second beach chair.
    Her name was Jill Campbell. I was assigned to keep any news media representatives away from her, unless she wanted to talk to them, and to make sure she didn’t disappear, in case the rescuers needed to talk to her. Spectators were confined to the top of the bank behind us by yellow “do not cross” tape, of course, and the umbrella was supposed to shield her from the gaze of the merely curious as well as from the sun.
    Jill seemed to be barely smart enough to fasten her bikini top. She had a sweetly pretty face, blond hair that was artfully dark at the roots, and a figure a little too slim to properly display the neon-striped swimsuit that peeked out from her white terry-cloth beach wrap. Actually, it was my terry-cloth beach wrap. I’d loaned it to her. I was still wearing the shorts I’d put on to go get the newspaper, but I’d replaced my sweatshirt with a tee, and I’d put on my own flip-flops.
    Joe was one of the guys out in the lake, looking for Jeremy, the missing swimmer. Since he was among the tallest, he was also farthest out.
    This wasn’t my favorite way to spend a Saturday, the one day a week I don’t have to work during the height of the summer tourist season, but someone needed to sit with Jill.
    Lake Michigan is an inland sea, 118 miles across at the widest point between Michigan and Wisconsin, more than