The air smelled like sap and mud and violets. It was the waning of the full moon, the milk moon, which had always told gardeners when to plant. They set up their campsite at the far end of Hourglass Lake. From here they could tell why it had been named so: in the middle, at the deepest point, the shoreline was equally indented, creating a narrow passageway that could fit two rowboats at most, such as the two that were hidden in the tall grass. Hap had tripped over one of the boats, then he leaned down to flatten the weeds. The boats hadn’t been used for decades, not since Jenny went out fishing with her father, who called her little Pearl on these occasions, and who taught her that sitting quietly was more important than how many fish were actually caught.
“We’ll go out into the dead center,” Stella said. “We’ll get our water samples from a location no one’s ever been to before. Mr. Grillo will be so impressed he won’t mind that we’re a little late.”
“We’re already two weeks late, Stella. I thought we were waiting until morning.” Hap stood there holding two oars he had found, chewed up by field mice and time, but still serviceable. All the same, he hadn’t planned on night fishing. It was dark, in spite of the milk moon. And there was the dead horse to consider, after all, the one he wasn’t worried about.
Stella began to drag one of the boats out of the grass. Little Pearl, it was called. “I wonder who little Pearl was.”
Stella, of course, had no idea that her mother had been a girl who liked to go fishing and swimming with her father and who had once counted ninety-two water lilies among the weeds. The bullfrogs were croaking, and the sound of the water was soft as the rowboat was pulled into the shallows. Stella got in.
“Come on,” she urged, and Hap lurched into the boat awkwardly, holding on to the glass sample vials; Little Pearl tipped with his weight and Stella laughed at her friend.
The reeds were tall and feathery, black in the night, like the strands of Rebecca Sparrow’s hair when they chopped off her braid. They drifted a bit and could spy the wedding cake house as they neared the center of the lake. There was a light on in the kitchen. Someone couldn’t sleep. Elinor, perhaps, was ailing; someone was most likely fixing tea. Still Stella and Hap were fairly certain they would go unnoticed. They both had the feeling that their friendship was about to change, not unwind, exactly, but shift. It had done so already, because of Jimmy Elliot, and now there seemed to be Juliet. Stella wasn’t a fool; she sensed her two best friends were becoming closer to each other than they were to her. People were coming between Stella and Hap, mattering, if not more, than certainly differently.
Perhaps that was why they were out on the lake, steering toward the center where a good number of lily pads were sucked into the current created by the movement of their oars. Soon, the yellow water lilies would open, but now they looked like a mass of frogs, the pads greenish black and leathery.
There was a plashing sound and Stella stiffened. It was a moment when she suddenly felt they had no business being out here at this hour.
“Bullfrog,” Hap whispered.
Stella, comforted, leaned back and looked up at the swirl of stars up above. “‘I wish I may, I wish I might,’” she whispered now. Unbidden, Jimmy Elliot came to mind.
A bullfrog hopped from one lily pad to another, scaring them for a moment.
“Jesus,” Hap said.
The boat rocked back and forth, and Stella and Hap held on to the sides and laughed.
“Jeremiah.” Stella recalled an old song her father sometimes played. The notion of a bullfrog with a name like Jeremiah set them to laughing again, although they tried their best to muffle the sound. For that instant they concentrated completely on not being caught, all they heard was the sound of each other’s mirth, the laughter gulped down. They didn’t hear anything else in the water until the second boat knocked into theirs. It was the boat they’d left behind in the grass, The Seahorse. Stella felt a wave of anger, thinking it was Jimmy following her, but Jimmy had been tossing rocks at her window and was only just turning down Lockhart on his way toward home, disappointed by her absence.
Stella thought “Seahorse” a second time, and then the anger turned to something else. She divided the word, and was left in that dark instant with a single terrifying syllable.
When the other boat hit against theirs, an oar was swung out toward them through the black night. Hap was knocked overboard so quickly, it was quicker than the leap of any frog. One minute he had been leaning over to dip a glass vial into the water, trying his best not to laugh at the bullfrog’s antics, and the next he’d been swallowed whole by the dark.