Jasper Ridcombe's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Jasper hauled the empty bladder onto the beach and dropped to his knees. Below the swell, the current was already dragging fresh sand over his friend. He had touched the body. Now he could not even mark where it lay. The bent tree gave him a line, but a line was not a spot. If he lost the exact place, he would waste days finding it again, and the sand would win. He needed a marker. Something to drop on the seafloor beside the body, something heavy that the current could not shift. He looked around the beach and found nothing but stones and weed. Steps crossed the sand behind him. Coral Hanes, the lighthouse keeper from the point, stopped a few feet off. She held her logbook open in one hand. She had been nailing warning signs to the boarding house doors for days, and no one listened. Jasper had passed one that morning, its paint peeling, its faded letters warning of the harbor's strong currents. "Glass dropped again," she said. "Storm by tomorrow. You shouldn't be out there." "I have to be." He kept his eyes on the water. She followed his gaze. "You've got a line off the tree. Not a spot. The current shifts under here every tide." She said it plainly, like a fact from her book. Jasper turned. She understood the water better than the men who called him mad. "I need to fix a mark to the bottom. It has to hold against the drag." Coral looked at the tree, then at the swell, judging the pull. "You need weight and a float. Sink a stone, run a line up, tie something that rides the surface. Then you find your float, not your tree." He had rope. He pulled the coiled belt from his waist, its fibers frayed and stiff with salt. He knotted a heavy stone to one end. For the float he needed air that would not sink. He picked up the sealskin bladder and filled it with his breath again, tied the neck tight, and lashed it to the free end of the rope. "Measure it long," Coral said. "Deeper than you think." He swam out on the tree's line and went down. The cold closed over him. He kicked past the old depth and found the shelf. The dark shape lay there, more sand heaped along its side than before. Jasper set the stone in the sand a hand's width from the body and pressed it deep. The rope rose straight toward the light above. He surfaced beside the bobbing bladder. The current tugged it, but the stone held it fast over the spot. He had marked the place at last. Coral wrote in her logbook without looking up. "It'll hold through today. Not through the storm." Jasper stared at the float riding the swell. He had one day to get his friend up before the water took the mark, and everything under it, for good.