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finding a hold that once, many years before, she’d used with a garden spade to hack off a rattler’s head.
    The swimmer blew a mist from her lips and slid toward the canoe on an angle that would bring her into range in a second or two.
    The moment was gone when Abigail might have fled, and a ghost of gloom swelled within her for she saw she’d erred. She should have raced this lanky woman to the next bend, used the river’s flow to her advantage. But she’d behaved the way old people so often do. A stubborn attachment to habit. Failure to adapt. She’d made that mistake a lot lately. Treating the new world as if it were still the old.
    With two precise strokes the woman closed the gap and her hand shot out for the edge of the canoe. Abigail chopped the paddle blade against her bony wrist and knocked her away. While she recovered just out of range, there was another window for escape. But again Abigail faltered.
    Sculling one-handed, the young woman rubbed at her damaged flesh and squinted at Abigail with the stony indifference of one who’d absorbed greater pain than any this old woman could deliver.
    â€œLast chance,” Abigail said. “Go back where you came from.”
    The woman smiled bleakly, then glided to the bow and took hold. With that effortless act, she had Abigail in her control. No way in hell could she work her way forward in that tippy vessel to attack the woman.
    â€œHow long can you hold your breath?” The woman’s voice had a country flavor.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThirty seconds, forty? How long?”
    The woman rocked the canoe back and forth as if testing its balance. Abigail gripped both gunwales and held on. At each tip she was only a degree or two from going over.
    â€œTell me what you want. I can make it happen. Whatever it is.”
    â€œWhat I want,” she said, “is to see how long you can hold your breath.”
    Like she was taking down a steer at branding time, the woman slung her arm across the prow and twisted the boat onto its side and Abigail slid across the metal bench and sprawled headlong into the river.
    The woman looped an arm around Abigail’s waist, securing her with a grip both solid and restrained as if determined to leave no crime-scene bruise. Abigail balled her hands and hammered at the rawboned woman, but she absorbed the blows with the forbearance of a parent enduring a child’s tantrum.
    Blind beneath the river, all she could make out was a fizz of bubbles as the woman dragged her toward the sandy bottom, ten feet, fifteen, swimming with one arm, the other locked around her waist. Strong as any man her size, this woman seemed at home beneath the surface, knifing down with an easy power.
    As they sank, the water cooled. A swirl of dizzy light spun around her, then she released half the air in her lungs, the glittering froth lifting in a cloud to the surface.
    Doing that for the woman’s benefit. If she could make her body go limp, the woman might mistake her for dead and drop her guard.
    Through slitted eyes she saw where the woman was dragging her.
    A cypress root that bowed out from the bank like the handle of a large door, the door to a bank or some impressive office building like so many Abigail herself had entered. A woman of authority. Doormen holding them open for her. The long car waiting while she did her business.
    Abigail watched the young woman take hold of the root as if she meant to open that door for Abigail, show her into the next world.
    Above her the riverbank jutted out and put them in shadows and out of view of any passing paddler. She willed herself motionless, though the pain in her chest was vicious and her consciousness was dimming fast.
    After a moment more, the woman relaxed her grip and Abigail thought she’d fallen for her ruse. She jerked hard against the woman’s hold, threw an elbow at her face. It missed. She tried a savage kick, but that failed too. The toe of her