“Okay, everyone, listen up!” A fortyish man wearing Ministry khaki, climbed up on a wooden crate and waved a clipboard. “Some of you already know me, but for the rest, I’m Gary Straum, and I’ll be your guide this trip. The young man driving the boat is Jamie Wierster. He knows almost as much as I do about the island, so if I’m not available, he’ll do his best to tell you anything you need to know.”
A ruddy-cheeked, young giant leaned out of the tiny cabin and waved.
“I just want to remind you of a few things before we get started,” Gary continued as the two girls giggled. “Main Duck Island is part of the St. Lawrence Islands National Parks system and is a nature sanctuary. You may not take samples of the plant life away with you– this means no picking, no digging, no collecting seeds. The wildlife is to be left strictly alone. If there’s a disagreement of any kind between you and any creature living on that island, I will rule in favour of the creature. Anything you carry in must be carried out. If you can’t live with that, I suggest you leave now.” Gary smiled as an older man grabbed the back of the teenage boy’s skater shirt and hauled him back by his side. “All right, then. When I read your name, come and pick up your life jacket…” He gestured at the open steel locker beside him. “…put it on, and board. Thesooner we get going, the more time we’ll have to spend on the island.”
Diana’s name was the last on the list. She hadn’t put it there, and she felt a little sorry for the actual twenty-fifth person, who’d been bumped to make room for her, but there was a hole in the fabric of reality out on Main Duck Island and it was her job as a Keeper to close it.
Feeling awkward and faintly ridiculous in the life jacket, Diana sat down on a wooden bench and set her backpack carefully at her feet.
“I saw the cat. When we passed you in the lane.”
She answered the teenage boy’s smile with one of her own as he dropped onto the bench beside her. According to the boarding list, his name was Ryan. Ryan, like everyone else on the boat, was a Bystander, and given the relative numbers, Keepers were used to working around them. “Of course you did, Ryan.Please forget about it.”
It really was a magic word.
He frowned. Looked around like he was wondering why he’d sat beside her, and after mumbling something inarticulate, moved across the boat to sit back down in his original seat. The girls, Mackenzie and Erin, sitting on the bench in front of him, giggled.
“I get the impression you’re not the giggling type.”
It was one of the older women, her husband busy taking pictures of Gary casting off and jumping aboard.
“Not really, no.”
“Carol Diamond. That’s my husband Richard. We’re here as part of an Elder Hostel program.” Her wave took in the rest of the hats-and-hiking-boots crowd. “All of us.”
“Great.”
“Are you travelling on your own, dear?”
“Yes, I am.”
Carol smiled the even, white smile of the fully-dentured and nodded toward the teenagers. “Well, how nice you have some people of your own age to spend time with.”
Diana blinked. Two months shy of twenty, she did not appreciate being lumped in with the children. Fortunately, between the motor and the wind it was difficult to carry on a casual conversation, and Carol didn’t try, content to sit quietly while her husband took pictures of Waupoos Island, Prince Edward Point, waves, sky, gulls, the other people in the boat, and once, while he was fiddling with the focus, his lap.
The three pictures with Diana in them would be mysteriously over-exposed.
So would one of the shots he’d taken of the southern view across Lake Ontario, but Diana had nothing to do with that.
“Hey!” Ryan managed to make himself heard over the ambient noise. “What’s that?”
Everyone squinted in the direction he was pointing. A series of small, dark dots rose above a sharp-edged horizon.
“That’s our first sight of the island; we’re about five miles out.” Gary moved closer to the teenager. “Well done.”
Ryan turned just far enough to scowl at him. “Not that. Closer to us.”
About twenty metres from the boat, another series of small dark dots rose and fell with the slight chop. Then, suddenly, they were gone. The last dot rose up into a triangular point just before it disappeared.
“That looked like a tail!”
“Might be a loon,” Gary offered.
“Fucking big loon!”
“Ryan!”
Ryan rolled his eyes at his father, but muttered an apology.
“It’s probably just some floating junk.” A half-turn included the rest of the group in the discussion. “You’d be amazed at the stuff we find out here.” His list had almost everyone laughing.
Lake monster wasn’t on it, Diana noted.
As Main Duck Island coalesced into a low, solid line of trees with a light house rising off the westernmost point, Gary explained that it had been acquired by the park service in 1998, having been previously owned by John Foster Dulles, a prominent lawyer who’d been American Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration. The island was 209 hectares in size, and except for the ruins of some old fishing cabins that had been postedno trespassing, none of it was off limits.
“The lighthouse?” one of the lime-green t-shirt group asked.
“Is unmanned and closed to the public, but you can go right up to it and poke around.”
Mention of the lighthouse started the shipwreck stories. There were a lot of them; the area around the island was known as the graveyard of Lake Ontario and contained the wrecks of two-and three-masted schooners, brigantines, barges, and steamers, dating back to a small French warship en route to Fort Niagara with supplies and a pay chest of gold for the troops that went down in late fall around 1750.
Diana had begun to get a bad feeling about the location of the hole she had to close.
As Jamie steered the trawler into School House Bay, Gary told the story of theJohn Randall. She’d anchored in the bay for shelter back in 1920, only to have the wind shift to the north and drive her ashore. Her stern hit a rock, her engine lifted, and she broke in two.
“The crew of four scrambled up onto the bow and remained there for ten hours, washed by heavy seas and lashed by a November northeaster. They finally made it ashore on a hatch cover and stayed with the lighthouse keeper nine days before they were picked up. You can still see the wooden ribs and planks of the ship in the bay.”
“So no one died?” Ryan asked.
“Not that time.” With the dock only metres away, Gary moved over to the port side of the boat and picked up the rear mooring line. “But a year and eight days later, the Captain of theRandall went down while in command of theCity of New York. His wife and his ten-month-old daughter went to the bottom with him.”
“So sad,” Carol sighed as Gary leapt out onto the dock. “But at least they were together.” She twisted on the bench to look back the way they’d come. “I bet those waves hide a hundred stories.”
“I bet they hide a hundred and one,” Diana muttered, hoisting her backpack. She was not going to enjoy explaining this to Sam.
“In the water?”
“Essentially.”
Sam’s ears saddled. “Howessentially?” The echoed word dripped with feline sarcasm.
“Under the water.”
“Have a nice time.”
Down on one knee beside him, Diana stroked along his back and out his tail. “There’s a lake monster out there, too. Looked like a sea serpent. Probably came through the hole.”
“And that’s supposed to make me change my mind?” the cat snorted. He peered off the end of the dock into the weedy bay. “Frogs pee in that water, you know.”