Lost Girls

The boy moves forward, steadying the canoe with his hands on the sides. Then he kneels before the girl, cups her face in his palms. ''Amazing.''

He kisses her hard and she makes a sound, an indeterminable sigh of submission or resistance. As his fingers go to work--pulling, pressing, positioning--he holds his mouth over hers to keep her from speaking. But eventually he has to pull back to arrange his own body into the right angle, and when she opens her mouth it's not to say Don't but ''Please,'' her voice constricted with panic. She asks him to stop without calling him by name--just please--for to the girl he was no longer her cousin but something else, a wild, rabid thing, like the bear she'd once seen frothing and wailing down by the landfill before the provincial police shot it through the skull.

''Don't move. You'll tip it,'' the boy whispers. But she doesn't want to move. What she wants is to lie so still it makes him stop. So she closes her eyes, stiffens her back straight over the jabbing aluminum ribs of the canoe's hull, and imagines herself floating on the perfect line between water and sky. But still there is his breath, his strong fingers, the weight of his thighs pressing down on hers.

For a moment the boy stops and she opens her eyes to see him scrabbling with the clasp on his shorts and the zipper below it. With a grunt he falls back and pulls them down, ripping the seam and kicking them off his feet onto her chest. Then he comes forward again and brushes his mouth next to her ear.

''C'mon,'' he whispers. It's all he can think of to say. C'mon, c'mon, c'mon. He wishes she were different-- older and inviting, like the faceless women of his imagination-- not this girl with bony hips and a face he knows too well pinched up in fear. He doesn't want this. He wants a dream. So he closes his eyes, fumbling with himself, and just as this and the sway of the canoe and the blooming heat within him begin to feel more like what he wants he is awakened by her screams.

He tries to shush her but she screams even more, banging the sides with her fists and slamming her heels into his back. The screaming doesn't stop even after he pulls back from her and tells her it's okay, it's over, he's sorry, he won't try it again. Checks over his shoulder in the direction of the cottage to see if her sounds have brought anyone down to the beach but he can't tell, his view blinded by the lowering sun. When he turns his head back again the girl is struggling to stand up, one hand waving in the air and the other pushing down on the side. The shadow of her cut against the dim sky, looking down at him with both recognition and horror. Then, in the same moment --in the same half moment--that she gets to her feet the canoe moves into a fluid spin that pushes them both below the water.

Cold.

It's the cold that shocks the blood in their hearts and cramps their muscles as soon as they begin thrashing for the surface. The boy keeps his eyes closed but reaches up, searching for the overturned canoe and soon finding it. With a single pull his head breaks through into the air and he takes in a hungry gasp. How long had he been down there? Five seconds? Long enough to make his chest ache. For a time he holds his arms over the slippery hull and simply breathes. Then he remembers the girl.

Calls her name once, but doesn't shout it.

Nothing.

No sound but the lapping of water against his shoulders. Where was she? Both of them good swimmers but she better than he, faster and with far greater endurance. She should have been beside him, spitting water in his face, or a hundred yards off kicking her way to shore. But she wasn't. The boy knows he has to go under to find her, but it feels so cold down there. A difference of several degrees between armpits and toes. It's the cold that frightens him.

The first time he goes down only a few feet before twisting back up, eyes closed against the imagined sight of bug-eyed snakes and glowing, tentacled jellyfish. Gnashes at the air.

On the second dive he takes as large a breath as his lungs will allow and flutters down against his own buoyancy, eyes still closed, hands reaching before him. Then he feels her. Not any actual part of her body, but the vibrations of her struggle radiating out through the water. Down, farther down. When he begins to feel the muscles in his jaw ache to pull his mouth open he tells himself to turn back but nothing obeys and he goes two strokes farther yet.

And finds her arm. Slides his hand up and bracelets her wrist with his fingers. Then he kicks like hell.

But the girl feels heavy, heavier than she should, as though attached to a sack of wet sand. A dozen sacks of wet sand. The pain that comes with the lack of oxygen now a bell tolling in the boy's head but he doesn't let her go, pushing against the weight with the last of his strength until his free arm knocks against the underside of the canoe.

Even with the leverage of his fingers locked around the hull's edge the girl is still too heavy to bring up with him. His shoulder strains, his toes brush through her hair but she moves no farther. Then he feels a tug. A sharp force from below her that nearly takes him down too. Then another.

It's not that the girl is too heavy for him to pull up. Something else is pulling the other way.

With the third tug she's gone.

The boy pulls his head through to the light, counts to two, and goes under once more. One Mississippi, two Mississippi. This time, when he's down as far as he can go and moves his arms out to feel for her, there's nothing there.

He tells himself not to do it, that it will be too horrible and do no good, but he does anyway. He looks.

What he notices first is that the opening of his eyes also opens his ears, because it is only then that he hears his cousin's scream. Then he sees her scream, her gaping mouth blowing a diminishing stream of bubbles up toward him before breaking soundlessly at the surface. But as she runs out of air her scream becomes something worse, a moaning inhalation of the lake's purple weight. Eyes a wild white, blond hair now black as oil, writhing out from her head like eels. Fingers grasping up toward the light, at him, at anything, but when they stop they are frozen into gnarled fists.

She goes down fast, but he remembers all of this.

Not sinking but pulled. That's what he sees. His cousin pulled down from the last snaking shafts of sunlight into the black, into the blind, cold depths.

part 1

chapter 1

There is nothing more overrated in the practice of criminal law than the truth. Indeed it's something of a trade secret among professionals in the field that the facts alone rarely determine the outcome of a trial. What's overlooked by the casual observer is the subtle distinction between the truth and the convincing of others to accept one of its alternatives.

Allow me to make reference to current events:

Later today I'm expected to complete the defense's case in a sexual assault trial where the facts are clear and they all disfavor the position of my client, a Mr. Leonard Busch. To make matters worse, counsel for the prosecution is as skillful, determined, and ambitious as yours truly. A constipated-looking young woman whose eyebrows form a piercing V when she speaks and whose every word vibrates with accusation, qualities that contributed to the splendid job she did in her exam-in-chief of the complainant. When the tears started in the middle of the girl's recounting of the night in question my opponent stepped helplessly toward the witness box, leveled a vicious glare at my client, and shushed the girl with ''It's all right, Debbie. You don't have to look at him,'' while at the same time stabbing a trembling index finger at my man Lenny. It was a beautiful move: theatrical, maternal, prejudicial. The effect was so damaging that I was tempted to leap to my feet and make an objection against what was so obviously a purely tactical maneuver. But in the end I remained seated, met the prosecution's eyes with what I hoped was a look of indignation and held my tongue. It's important at such moments to remember one of the first rules of successful advocacy: sometimes one has to accept small defeats in the interest of capturing the final victory.

But victory for Mr. Busch (and more important for his lawyer, Bartholomew Christian Crane) did not appear to be an imminent outcome of the trial. In fact, as the Crown's evidence was paraded plainly before the court, the prospect of an acquittal seemed a fading likelihood unless our defense could come up with an ace. Nothing short of