"Sweet Jesus. Not again."

On the river I am still looking at the child's face, glowing in the moonlight, bobbing in the water, and my first reaction is to help. My second is to get the hell out. My third is to calm down.

The sound of a billion chirping insects is overpowering the silence. I draw a breath full of warm humid air and force myself to think. I'm a mile from my shack and a good two and a half miles from the ranger station. I'm staring at a dead child and a crime scene. I'm a cop too long, despite bailing out of the title two years ago, and if my isolation has taught me anything it is that you can't flush everything out of your head for good.

I start organizing, running through a list. The bundle was wedged up into the roots of the cypress tree but it could have been pushed there by the current, or placed there on purpose. The body is neatly and tightly wrapped, but the face is exposed. Why? Why does it need to look out? The skin is so pale that it looks preserved, but who knows what effect the brackish water has had? And if it's been floating upright, the settling blood could already be drawn down from the face.

The sailcloth of the bundle is a rip-stop nylon. Too clean, I think. Too new. I start to reach out and hook it with my paddle but I look at the face again and stop. Crime scene, I say to myself. Let the crime scene guys do it. It's not going anywhere. Go call it in.

It's two and a half miles, downstream, at least a hard hour to the ranger station at Thompson's Point. Cleve Wilson, the senior ranger, would be there on his monthly, twenty-four-hour live-in shift. I spin the canoe and start back north, heading for the falls. In eight or ten deep strokes I pick up speed and then lean back and launch myself over the four-foot dam, whumping down onto the lower river, kicking a spray up on either side. On the bob up, I grab another purchase of thick water with the paddle and pull back on it and shoot the canoe forward. The face of a dead child is chasing me again.