“I’ve driven through here with your father a couple of times. Every time we pass that sign he says some rhyme about a ‘panther’ and ‘anther.’”

Jack had to laugh. “Ogden Nash!”

“Who?”

“He was a very clever, down-to-earth poet. No airs about his stuff. Wrote a lot for kids. Dad loved him.”

Jack remembered his father’s nightly ritual of doling out a few of Nash’s animal poems at bedtime.

He’d forgotten about those times. He made a mental note to check the bookstores when he got home and see what was still in print. Vicky would love Nash’s wordplay.

He was jarred back to the present as they passed a burnt-out area where some asshole probably had flicked a cigarette out the window. Up ahead, a sign displaying a goofy-looking alligator informed them that this was a “South Florida Water Management District.”

“Not much water to manage at the moment,” Jack said as the pavement ran out and became a dusty, rutted dirt road bed.

“Even when there is theymis manage it. All the development north of here, it’s screwed up the Everglades—screwed it royally.”

Jack sensed anger in Anya’s voice. And something else…

“You sound as if you’re taking it personally.”

“I am, kiddo. I am. No decent person can feel otherwise.”

“Pardon my saying so, but isn’t it really just a big swamp?”

“Not a swamp at all. Swamps are stagnant; there’s constant flow through the Everglades. It’s a prairie—a wet, saw grass prairie. This whole part of the state runs downhill from Lake Okeechobee to the sea. The overflow from the lake travels all those miles in sloughs—”

“Whose?”

“Slough. It’s spelled S-L-O-U-G-H but pronounced like it’s S-L-E-W. The sloughs are flows of water through these prairies that keep things wet. We’re near the Taylor Slough here. The Miccosukee Indians call the EvergladesPa-hay-okee : river of grass or grassy waters. But look what’s been done in the past fifty years: Canals have been cut and farms have been put in the way, leaking all their chemicals into the water—or should I say, whatever water reaches here. What the farms don’t take is ‘managed’ by so many canals and dikes and dams and levies and flood gates that you’ve got to wonder how any of it gets where it naturally wants to go. It’s amazing anything at all has survived here. Just pure dumb luck that the whole area’s not a complete wasteland.” She glanced at him. “Sorry, kiddo. End of lecture.”

“Hey, no. I learned something. But I’d think that since Florida is just an overgrown sandbar, all of the water in the sloughs would just seep into the ground.”

“Sandbar? Where’d you get that idea?”

“I heard somebody describe it that way, so—”

She wagged a finger at him. “He was talking out histuchus . Florida is mostly limestone. It’s not an overgrown sandbar; if anything, it’s a huge reef. There’s sand, sure, but dig down and you hit the calcified corpses of countless little organisms who built up this mound back in the days when all this was under water. That’s why the water runs downhill to the Everglades: Because it must.”

“How’d you manage to learn so much about these problems?”

“It’s no secret. You just have to read the papers. Supposedly the government is going to spend billions to correct the mess. We’ll see. Shouldn’t have let it happen in the first place.” She glanced down at the map. “We should be coming up on it soon.”

“On what?”

“The intersection.” She pointed through the windshield. “There. That must be it.”

Jack saw a stop sign ahead. He slowed the car to a stop a dozen feet before the intersection. The crossing road was unmarked. Jack took the map from Anya and stared at the intersection he’d circled.

“How do we know this is the place?”

“It is,” Anya said.

“But nothing says that’s South Road.”

“Trust me, kiddo. It is.”

Jack looked at the map again. Not too many crossroads out here. This had to be it.

Leaving the engine running to keep the AC going, he got out and walked to the stop sign. It sported a couple of bullet holes—.45 caliber, maybe—but the rime of rust along their ragged edges said they were old. A sour breeze limped from the west. He stepped into the intersection and looked left and right. He checked the ground. Little pieces of glass glittered in the dust. This was where it had happened.

“What are you hoping to find?”

He turned and found Anya approaching. Oyv trotted behind her, weaving back and forth as he sniffed the ground.

“Don’t know,” he said. “It’s just that a lot of things don’t add up, especially with the timing and the assumption that my father ran a stop sign.”

“I imagine a lot of people do that out here. Look around. Here we are, midmorning on a Thursday and not a car in sight. You think maybe there were more in the earlyA.M. Tuesday?”

“No. I guess not. But he was—is—such a by-the-book guy, and not a risk taker, that I can’t see him doing it. And I can’t see what he was doing out here in the first place.”

“Oh, I can tell you that: He was driving.”

Jack tried not to show his irritation. “I know he was driving. But where to?” “To nowhere. Many nights he had trouble sleeping, so he’d go out for a drive.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me. Asked me if I wanted to come along some night. I said he should include me out. I don’t know from insomnia. Like the dead I sleep.”

So I noticed, Jack thought.

“Where did he go?”

“Out here. He said he always took the same route. He’d drive with his windows open. He said he liked the silence, liked to stop and look at the stars—you can see so many out here—or watch an approaching storm. That would have been back when we had storms, of course.” She sighed. “Such a long while since we’ve heard thunder around here.”

“All right. So he’s out here on his nightly drive and—”

“Not nightly. Two, maybe three times a week.”

“Okay, so Monday night or early Tuesday morning, he’s out here and somehow he winds up in the middle of an intersection when something else is coming along. Something big enough to total his car and keep on rolling.”

“A truck then. Sounds as if he pulled out in front of a truck.”

Jack looked up and down the road. His father’s Marquis had been hit on the right front fender. That meant…

“A truck? It would have to have been coming from the west…from the Everglades. Maybe he had a little stroke or something.”

“Dr. Huerta said his brain scans showed no damage.”

“Then it’s a mystery.”

“I don’t like mysteries, especially when they involve someone I know. And speaking of mysteries, I’m still trying to find out how someone reported the accident from downtown Novaton—”

Anya shook her head. “You call that a downtown?”

“Okay, from the local supermarket—before it happened.”

Anya peered at him through her huge sunglasses. “How do you know when it happened?”

“From my father’s watch. It’s cracked and broken, and the time on the face is something like twenty minutes after the accident call. How is that possible?”

“Clocks,” Anya said with a shrug. “Who can trust them? One’s set too fast, one’s set too slow—”

“My father was always a tightass about having the right time.”

“‘Was,’” Anya said. Shetsk ed and pointed a gnarled finger at him. “What do you know about his watch lately?”

Jack looked away. She had him there.

“Not much.”

“Right. And—”

Oyv started barking. He was standing at the edge of the ditch with his head down and his ears drawn back flat against his head.

“What is it, my sweet doggie?” Anya said. “What have you found?”

Jack followed Anya over to where Oyv was still making his racket.

“Oh, my!” she said.

Jack came up beside her. “What?”

“Look at these tracks.”

Jack saw five-toed impressions in the damp mud at the bottom of the ditch. They spanned about a foot across. Whatever had made them was big. And pigeon-toed.