Like all the towns along this part of the river, Frenchman’s Bend straddled the highway. Four buildings, including sheds, on the side toward the river, maybe twice that many on the other. In his first look around at the place, Simon could not see that anything at all had changed in fifteen years.
He got out of the car, listening to cicadas drone, looking around some more. The stub of road that he had parked on continued to the edge of the low bluff on which the houses stood, then plunged down through a broad cut in the bluff to the shoreline just a few feet below. The bluffs along this side of the river were considerably lower than those lining the opposite bank, several hundred yards away. Over there the land rose abruptly from the shoreline well over a hundred feet, a height exaggerated by the tallness of the trees atop the bluffs; all that could be seen of the far shore was a continuous soft leafy mass.
In Frenchman’s Bend the old frame houses stood as Simon remembered them. Whether it was the same paint covering them now or not, it looked no older than the paint of fifteen years ago. The two parked cars were unfamiliar, though; even here some things had to change.
With Margie following him silently, Simon turned his back on the houses for a moment and walked to the place where the road cut through the bluff. He stood there looking down. On the gravel shingle just below was an abandoned pile of clamshells, left over from the decades before plastic buttons, when the freshwater shells had had some commercial value. Simon remembered the shell pile as soon as he saw it again, as with the giant elm.
No one around here built a permanent boatdock; the spring ice-jams and floods tended to be too fierce, tearing away anything weaker than a bridge abutment. But there was an old rowboat, too lacking in distinction for Simon’s memory to feel sure about it, tied by padlocked chain to the narrow strip of sand that at the water’s very edge blended into rich mud, an aluminum canoe, unlocked, had been inverted, with a wooden paddle partially visible underneath it. IOf this was the same canoe that he remembered—
Motion and whiteness, along the wooded shore of an island a hundred yards out in the stream, caught Simon’s eye. He looked up sharply.
Margie, who had been gazing out across the water in a different direction, turned toward him. “What is it?”
“I thought I saw … someone out on the island.” The impression, momentary but convincing, had been of pale flesh, completely unclothed, and dark curly hair. Of course what was much more likely was that he had seen someone wearing some light-colored summer garment.
At the distance, he reflected as he watched the island, it would be hard for even the steadiest gaze to perceive curliness.
An insect droned from across the water. “Looks like a real jungle over there,” said Margie without much interest.
Was his imagination continuing to add details, or had he really seen the figure, in that one doubtful moment, as beckoning to him with one arm. He closed his eyes. An inner voice said that, even if he couldn’t remember it, there was good reason why he hadn’t come back here for fifteen years.
Simon opened his eyes again before Margie could take notice. Now on a sudden impulse he climbed a few steps, from the road to the lip of the bluff. From here he stared downstream, between islands, along the longest visible reach of the river. He knew where the castle stood, half a mile downstream, atop the high bluff opposite. Simon knew the exact direction in which to look, or thought he did, because he had seen it often enough from this very spot in winter, its gray stone angles standing out starkly amid a tracery of black branches, against gray winter sky…
A crow, cawing sharply as if disturbed by someone nearby, came up from amid the trees of the nearest island, the one where Simon thought that he had seen the figure. Well then, there was someone on the island, and what of it? But he felt relieved.
“I’ve never been in a canoe,” said Margie, looking down toward the shingle. “Is that how we’re going to get across?”
“We’ll see,” Simon told her. “Look, we’ll just check it out as far as we can go, the secret passage and the rest. When we hit a snag that could stop us we’ll give up the idea and come back here and drive back to Blackhawk and around and drive up to the castle by the front door like they’re expecting us to do, and put on our alternate act. But the secret passage just makes too beautiful an opportunity to resist, if it’s still there and we can use it. Right?”
Margie had been doubtful all along. “The people who own the place now don’t know this passageway is there?”
“I tell you I don’t think they do. And it can’t hurt anything to try.” Simon resolutely turned his back on the water.
There were two houses on this side of the highway, along with a couple of outbuildings. In front of the bigger house a wooden sign said BOATS. The ANTIQUES sign Simon also remembered had disappeared sometime in the last decade and a half; he thought he could make out from here the slightly discolored spot on a tree trunk where it had been nailed.
“Canoes are all right,” he said to Margie now. “You can tip them if you try, or if you jump around wildly in one, but you’re all right if you just sit still. I can do the paddling.” As he spoke he had started walking
