The men stiffened as I rose, as if my standing posed a threat, and the man in the middle, his eyes wide with tension and his lips thin with mistrust, jerked his hand from his pocket and pointed a gun at me. His hand shook, and I swayed. With no warning, no demand, no reason at all, he pulled the trigger. The sound was a muted crack, and the sudden and violent shuddering of my skiff felt wholly separate from his action, as if a great, whistling beast had risen from the depths of Lough Gill beneath my boat and tossed me into the drink.
The frigid water stole my breath and didn’t give it back. I chased it, floundering, and kicked for the surface, sputtering as my face broke free into the heavy white that was almost as wet and thick as the water I’d fallen into.
I couldn’t see anything but white, endless white. No boat. No land. No sky. No men with guns.
I tried to lean back, to force myself to float and stay silent. If I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see me, I rationalized. I managed to keep my head above water without a great deal of splashing, listening and peering into the white. Beneath the adrenaline and the clawing cold was a burning fire in my side. I continued treading water, trying to avoid the truth; I’d been shot, and I had to find my boat. If I didn’t find my boat, I was going to drown.
I began swimming furiously this way and that, making a wide circle around the area where I’d fallen, trying to find my boat in the mist.
The whistling began again, abruptly, midtune, as if the whistler had been singing whole stanzas in his head while his lips took a ten-minute breather. The sound warbled and broke and came back stronger, and I cried out again, my teeth chattering around my plea, my arms and legs kicking frantically to keep my head above water. If the whistler was one of the men on the barge, I was only alerting them that I was still alive, but somehow the thought did not occur to me at the time.
“Help me! Is someone there?”
The whistling ceased.
“Help! Please! Can you hear me?”
The life vest with the broken strap was gone. My shoes had come free the moment I started kicking my legs. My clothes were heavy, my cable-knit sweater dragging me down even as I tried to swim in the direction of the whistling.
“Is someone there?” I called again, and my panic made my voice shrill, cutting through the dense fog.
A faded red boat, not unlike the one I’d rented from Jim Donnelly, emerged from the mist like a sea serpent and glided toward me. There was a man at the oars, his features obscured by the thick fog, but I heard him curse in surprise. I was too cold to know if I was hallucinating or dying, or maybe both, but the face looking down at me was strangely familiar. I could only pray I wasn’t imagining him.
“Can you grab on? I’ll pull you in,” he urged. I reached for the mirage and felt the sweet answer of solidity. The boat was real, as was the man, but I could only cling to the side, so grateful I began to cry.
“Good God. Where did you come from?” the man asked. His hands gripped mine, encircling my wrists. Then he was pulling me up and into the boat, with no assistance whatsoever from me. I felt the bump and scrape of the side of the boat against my hip and stomach and cried out, drawing his attention to the blood that seeped from my stomach.
“What the hell?” he hissed, and I cried out again. “What happened to you?” The bottom of the boat was a cloud, and I was boneless, so weary I couldn’t pull his face into focus. He pulled my arms from the sopping sweater that had made it so hard for me to swim. His hands worked briskly against my skin, rubbing and bringing warmth back into my limbs, and I forced my eyes open so I could whisper my thanks. His face was so close, framed by a peaked cap like the ones the men in the barge wore and set with a pair of blue eyes as pale as the fog. They widened as they met mine.
“Anne?” he asked, the incredulous lift of his voice and the familiarity with which