He could never be sure how their time on the beach ended. There was a great sense of amity with Perry, as if the two were—somehow—brothers, though his feelings for Annie were different and he was sure that Perry loved her, too. The light around them was gray, and sea-green, and pearly with the mist. The sun rarely appeared. The sea and the air were timeless, throbbing warmly beside and about them.

"Oh, my God!" said Annie.

"What's the matter?" both boys shouted, turning in the direction of her wide-eyed gaze.

"In—the—water," she said. "Dead—isn't he?"

The fog had parted. Something wrapped in tangles of seaweed and a few tatters of cloth lay half in and half out of the water. Here and there a patch of swollen, fishbelly white flesh showed. It might have been human. It was difficult to say, wrack-decked as it was, tossed by the surf, strands of fog drifting past it.

Perry rose to his feet.

"Maybe it is and maybe it isn't," he said. Annie had covered her face by then, and was peering between her fingers. Allan stared, fascinated.

"Do we really want to know?" Perry continued. "It may just be a mess of weeds and trash with a few dead fishes caught in it. If we don't go and look, it can be whatever we want it to be. You know what I mean? You want to tell your friends you saw a body on the beach? Well, maybe you did."

The fog moved between them, hiding it again.

"What do you think it is?" Allan asked him.

"Seaweed and rubbish," Perry replied.

"It's a body," Annie said.

Allan laughed. "No, you can't both be right," he stated.

"Why not?" Annie said suddenly.

"The world just doesn't work that way," Allan said.

Allan rose and began walking through the fog in the direction of the body.

"I think that sometimes it can," he heard her say, somewhere behind him.