west that was Lake Champlain, then glided down over the forest and smoking chimneys of the few homes that dotted the paved road south of Lake Alban. Several times in the past he had misjudged the morning convection drafts. He had fallen short and had to set his glider down on the little-traveled roadway. Today he knew he could easily make it to the field near his father’s trailer. As he cleared the last patch of mist and a knoll of tall pines, he saw his sister waiting by the duck pond, waving him in.
Loch set the glider down and was out of its harness in time to catch Zaidee when she reached him. “You looked like a chicken hawk up there,” she said, the strands of her bobbed hair bouncing up to her ears as she jumped. She locked her arms and swung from his neck. “When are you going to teach me to hang glide?” she asked, so wanting to be just like her big brother. “When?”
“How long have you worked for Cavenger?” the young man wanted to know as he helped move boxes of research equipment from the back of the U-Haul truck into Sam Perkins’s 1978 Volvo.
“About seven years,” Sam answered, just to be polite about it. Small talk with college graduates just starting to claw their way up the corporate ladder had never been his strong point.
Erdon checked deeper inside the U-Haul truck. Most of the boxes were brimming with Sam’s measurement gauges, core samplers, and other marine research equipment. “What’s under the canvas?”
“An old Jet Ski.” Sam grabbed the last box. “It huffs and puffs, but it still kicks water.”
“Great.” If there was one thing Erdon knew he’d need on this hick assignment, it would be some quality playtime. “Mind if I take it out on the lake sometime?” he asked. “I sort of grew up on one.”
“No problem,” Sam said, having no intention of ever really letting him borrow anything. He had met dozens of self-conscious, muscled young men like Erdon, yuppies just out of school, thinking the world owed them a living. “You went to U.C.L.A.?”
“Does it show?” Erdon asked defensively.
“Well, that’s what it says on the decal you’ve got plastered on your Pathfinder.”
“Oh.”
Sam struggled to open the rear loading door of the Volvo station wagon. He was proud of the 193,000 miles he’d put on it, even as he used his old screwdriver trick to spring the broken hatch lock. Dr. Sam, as everyone called him, had become a highly respected marine biologist during the first dozen years he’d been out of Boston University. That all seemed very long ago to him now, long before he had married the bright and loving Joan Meisner and she had given him two wonderful children-and long before he’d gone to work for Cavenger. He didn’t care that he looked shopworn in his dusty brown cap and big-pocketed fatigues, well frayed from the strong detergents of Laundromats.
“I was wondering how you made the transition from marine research to working for Cavenger,” Erdon said, putting his pair of Nikon cameras back around his neck. “I mean, my textbooks had half a dozen species of marine life carrying your name.”
“It’s called following the money,” Sam said bluntly, surprised Erdon had done his homework. “Exactly what you’re doing.” He turned and headed for the trailer, with Erdon after him.
“Cavenger says you have photos, sketches of what we’re looking for in the lake,” Erdon pressed. “I mean, I’ll be doing the stills and video, but if I could see what you’ve got, it might help me know what to expect. Was it Darwin or Pasteur who said chance favors the mind that’s prepared?”
Dr. Sam was thankful to see Loch and Zaidee running up the knoll.
“It was great up there this morning, Dad,” Loch said, breaking into a wide grin. “Saw clear across Lake Champlain.”
“Good, son,” Dr. Sam said. “Loch, this is Mr. Erdon. He’s doing the documentary camera work on today’s search. Give him the special Cook’s tour, okay?”
“Sure,” Loch agreed, smiling devilishly.
“My brother and I have a laptop we play Crashers on,” Zaidee bragged, as she pushed by everyone to be the first inside the trailer. “I’ll show you after I go to the bathroom.”
“Watch your head,” Loch warned Erdon as they followed her inside. “Try not to step on the scuba masks.”
Zaidee went into the John as Dr. Sam gave his son a wink and dropped into the dining nook to finish his long-cold morning coffee. “The main event’s in my room,” Loch told Erdon. He led him through the maze of furniture and lab equipment to the back of the trailer. “In there,” Loch said, pointing to a door. Erdon reached out, opened the door, and started in. Suddenly, from out of the shadows, the head of a hideous beast, its mouth gaping, lunged down for Erdon’s face.
“Ahhhhh!” Erdon screamed, his Nikons clanking as he threw up his arms. The head, its ferocious eyes glaring from a mass of matted hair, bounced off his elbow, snapped back, and came forward again and again in decreasing arcs.
“Sorry,” Loch apologized, lighting up with a grin. He reached past Erdon and grabbed the fake monster head, which hung from a fishing string. Loch set the head back on top of a shelf. “It’s just a little joke we play on visitors to our humble hall of cryptids.”
Erdon’s face was flushed, adrenaline pulsing through him as he heard Dr. Sam laughing in the dining nook. “It wouldn’t be so funny if I had a heart condition,” he called out angrily, trying to hide his embarrassment. Finally, he walked into the bedroom. Loch flicked on the light. Erdon’s face moved slowly into a glow of astonishment. “Oh, my God,” he said, his eyes scanning the blitz of shocking drawings, eerie photos, and models of dozens of grotesque creatures. “I’ve never seen anything like this.” He took one of the Nikons and started shooting away. “What are they?”
Loch brushed a pile of science books and computer magazines from his bed onto the floor and sat down. “Just your average devil pig, water dragon, and Sasquatch,” Loch said, ticked off that Erdon hadn’t asked if he could take pictures. “Haven’t you seen all the cryptozoo junk Cavenger stores at his London publishing offices?”
“I’m just playing catch-up. You know, my folks would never have let me keep my room like this,” Erdon said enviously. “This is terrific.” He reached out to touch the head of a tremendous, toothed skull. “My mom made me keep everything out of sight. She wrapped half our house in plastic.”
Loch felt an ache in his stomach. He took the skull from Erdon. “This is a plaster head of a Tzuchinoko, a monster lots of people say they’ve seen around lakes,” he said, wanting to move away from remembering how much he missed his own mother. If she were still alive, Loch knew, she would make certain Zaidee, Dr. Sam, and he lived in a much neater home too. “People claim it’s a thick-bodied snake with twisted horns above its eyes.”
“But it’s all really a big crock,” Erdon said, loud enough for Dr. Sam to hear him.
“Sure, it’s probably a catfish brought to the top by a drought,” Loch agreed, “but last year the town of Chigusa, Japan, believed in it enough to offer a two-million-yen reward for a living specimen. Cavenger had us off and running on that one too.”
Erdon smirked. “You guys always find diddly, right?”
“Doesn’t matter. Cavenger hypes it up into grist for his weird magazines, like
Erdon shuffled through a stack of sketches of ferocious flying creatures and sea monsters, photographing everything that caught his eye. He knew he could easily freelance a couple of photo layouts to Cavenger’s competitors. “Who did the drawings?”
“I do a lot of them,” Loch said proudly.
“They’re not bad.” Erdon leaned across a cluttered table to get a closer look at a set of dark, shadowy photo enlargements thumb-tacked to the wall. “These are supposed to be of the Loch Ness monster, right?”
“The shot showing the big fin is the best,” Loch said. “They call it the Ledniz shot.”
Erdon knew that photo alone had been bought and reprinted so many times it had been an annuity for the photographer. “Lots of the photos have been shown to be phony. That one guy on his deathbed admitted his photo was a toy submarine, right?”
“All the photos can’t be fakes,” Loch said.
“Something like Nessie is what Cavenger thinks is in Lake Alban?”
“A few locals think so too.”
From what Erdon had seen of the citizens of Lake Alban, he’d decided they’d invent anything to bring a few
