I searched and Dan wasn’t in any of the ones I knew about. I considered that maybe he was thinking what I was thinking and he’d already gone across to Cato City so I went down to the beach. The sand was chewed up by the dock like a person had been there. Maybe two people. But that could have been from birds. Or rabbits. Or a dog someone had brought back with them. It didn’t mean anything. What did mean something, I thought, was finding Dan’s silver ring shining up from the sand at the water’s edge. I picked it up. Why would he have left it there unless he wanted to leave me a clue? Maybe he wanted me to know he was swimming across. He wasn’t that strong yet, but he might have been able to make it. Even at the time I was thinking that though, I knew it was mostly a wish. I held on to it for a while, the way you do when you don’t want to see how things really are, but underneath I was afraid he’d started to swim across to the other side, but couldn’t get there. Or worse, maybe he’d just gone out into the water and hadn’t even tried to swim.
