"Seems that way," I said. "Unless he managed to slip over where you were without your seeing him."
"I doubt that. I've got pretty sharp eyes."
"Sure." I thought I might as well introduce myself; maybe that would reassure him. So I gave my name, with a by-the-way after it, and waited while he made up his mind whether or not he wanted to reciprocate.
"Jackson," he said finally. "Herb Jackson."
"Nice to know you, Mr. Jackson. How about if we each take one side and work back toward my skiff?"
He said that was okay with him and we fanned out away from each other, me into the vegetation on the south side. We each used a switch-backing course from the center out to the edges, where the ground was boggy and the footing a little treacherous. Both of us kept silent, but all you could hear were the keening of the wind and the whispery rustle of the tules as I spread through them with my hands and Jackson probed through them with his fishing rod. I caught him looking over at me a couple of times as if he wanted to make sure I intended to stay on my half of the turf.
Neither of us found anything. The only things hidden among the rushes were occasional rocks and chunks of decaying driftwood; and there was no way anybody could have concealed himself in the sparse offshore grasses. You're always hearing about how people submerge in shallow water and breathe through a hollow reed, and maybe that's a possibility in places like Florida and Louisiana, but not in California. Tule grass isn't hollow and you can't breathe through its stalks; you'd swallow water and probably drown if you tried it.
It took us ten minutes to make our way back and down to where my rented boat was. I got there first, and when Jackson came up he halted a good eight feet away and looked down at the empty beach, into the empty skiff, across the empty slough at the empty levee on the far side. Then he put his butterscotch eyes on me.
I said, "He's got to be over where you were somewhere. We've gone over all the ground on this end."
"If he's on the island at all," Jackson said.
"Well, he's got to be." A thought occurred to me. "The outboard on your boat-do you start it with an ignition key or by hand?"
"Key. Why?"
"Did you leave it in the ignition or have you got it with you?"
"In my pocket," he said. "What're you thinking? That he might try to steal my boat?"
"It could happen. But it wouldn't do him much good without power. Unless you keep oars for an emergency."
"No oars." Jackson looked a little worried now, as though he might be imagining his boat adrift and in the hands of a mysterious redheaded stranger. "Damn it, you could be right."
He set off at a soggy run, bulling his way through the rushes and shrubs, slashing at them with whip-like sweeps of the rod. I went after him, off to one side and at a slower pace. He reached the blackberry bushes, cut past them onto the hump and pulled up near the drooping fan of branches on one willow. Then I saw him relax and take a couple of deep breaths; he turned to wait for me.
When I got up there I could see that his boat was still tied alongside the empty rock shelf. The channels beyond were a couple hundred yards wide at the narrowest point; you could swim that distance easily enough in fifteen minutes-but not on a day like this, with that wind whipping up the water to a froth, and not when you were hurt and so unsteady on your feet you couldn't walk without stumbling.
"So he's still on the island," I said to Jackson. "It shouldn't take us long to find him now."
He had nothing to say to that; he just turned toward the willow, spread the branches, looked in among them and at the ones higher up. I went over and did the same thing at the second tree. The red-haired man was not hiding in either of them — and he wasn't hiding among the blackberry bushes or anywhere else on or near the hump.
We started down toward Jackson's boat, one on each side as before. Rocks, more pieces of driftwood, a rusted coffee can, the carcass of some sort of large bird-nothing else. The pepper tree was on my side, and I paused at the bole and peered up through pungent leaves and thick clusters of mistletoe. Nothing. The shoreline on this end was rockier, with shrubs and nettles growing along it instead of tule grass; but there was nobody concealed there, not on my half and not on Jackson's.
Where is he? I thought. He couldn't have just disappeared into thin air. Where is he?
The eerie feeling came back over me as I neared the rock shelf; in spite of myself I thought again of O'Farrell; the murdered Gold Rush miner, and his ghost that was supposed to haunt Dead Man's Slough. I shook the thought away, but I didn't feel any better after I had.
I reached the shelf before Jackson and stopped abaft the boat. She was a sleek little lady, not more than a year old, with bright chrome fittings to go with the green-and-white paint job; the outboard was a thirty-five-horsepower Evinrude. In the stem, I saw then, was a tackle box, a wicker creel, an Olympic spincast outfit and a nifty Shakespeare graphite-and-fiberglass rod. A heavy sheepskin jacket was draped over the back of the naugahyde seat.
When I heard Jackson come up near me a few seconds later I pivoted around to face him. He said, "I don't like this at all." Neither did I, not one bit. "Yeah," I said.
He gave me a narrow look. He had that rod slanted across the front of his body again. "You sure you're not just playing games with me, mister?"
"Why would I want to play games with you?"
"I don't know. All I know is we've been over the entire island without finding this redhead of yours. There's nothing here except tule grass and shrubs and three trees; we couldn't have overlooked anything as big as a man."
"I guess not," I said.
"Then where is he-if he exists at all?"
"Dead, maybe."
"Dead?"
"He's not on the island; that means he had to have tried swimming across one of the channels. But you or I would've seen him at some point if he'd got halfway across any of them."
"You think he drowned?"
"I'm afraid so," I said. "He was hurt and probably weak-and that water is turbulent and ice-cold. Unless he was an exceptionally strong swimmer and in the best possible shape, he couldn't have lasted long."
Jackson thought that over, rubbing fingertips along his craggy jaw. "You might be right, at that," he said. "So what do we do now?"
"There's not much we can do. One of us should notify the county sheriff, but that's about all. The body'll turn up sooner or later."
"Sure," Jackson said. "Tell you what: I'll call the sheriff from the camp in Hogback Slough; I'm heading in there right away."
"Would you do that?"
"Be glad to. No problem."
"Well, thanks. He can reach me on Whiskey Island if he wants to talk to me about it."
"I'll tell him that."
He nodded to me, lowered the rod a little, then moved past me to the boat. I retreated a dozen yards over the rocky ground, watching him as he untied the bowline from a shrub and climbed in under the wheel. Thirty seconds later, when I was halfway up to the willow trees, the outboard made a guttural rumbling noise and its propeller blades began churning the water. Jackson maneuvered backward away from the shelf, waved as he shifted into a forward gear and opened the throttle wide; the boat got away in a hurry, bow lifting under the surge of power. From up on the hump I watched it dwindle as he cut down the center of the southern channel toward the entrance to Hogback Slough.
So much for Herb Jackson, I thought then. Now I could start worrying about the red-haired man again.
What I had said about being afraid he'd drowned was a lie. But he was not a ghost and he had not pulled any magical vanishing act; he was still here, and I was pretty sure he was still alive. It was just that Jackson and I had overlooked something-and it had not occurred to me what it was until Jackson said there was nothing here except tule grass and shrubs and three trees. That was not quite true. There was something else on the islet, and it made one place we had failed to search; that was where the man had to be.