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Those glowing eyes I’d seen in the water the other day were still haunting me and it was time for me to do my own research.

I left Devon and Rita to handle things in the store and went upstairs to dig up information on lake monsters from the rather extensive resource library I had there.

In addition to a variety of articles and books, my resources included personal notes, thoughts, and observations, both mine and those my parents had accumulated over the years.

My mother had homeschooled me, so it’s no surprise, given the shared interests she and my father had, that my education had a strong emphasis on the animal sciences and mythology.

It was probably a good thing I hadn’t attended a regular school, because most people thought my parents were eccentric, weird, and, as one sweet British lady put it, “a bit daft.”

Their reputations often trickled down to me and that sometimes complicated my life.

I did attend an expensive private boarding school for a year, I think to assuage some guilt my parents felt over my lack of a “normal”

childhood, not that boarding schools provide that.

Rich kids are just as mean and cliquey as public school kids—maybe more so—and even though my folks were members of the wealthy elite like most of the other parents at the private school, their unusual hobbies and interests were determined too “out there”

for them to be included in any of the social outings or other gatherings attended by the rest of the “in”

crowd.

They weren’t invited to parties, dinners, or nights out at the theater, and I wasn’t invited to visit or spend any of the weekends or vacation times with any of my schoolmates like the other girls in my class were.

Should anyone question my family’s exclusion from the inner circle, one of the other parents would simply raise their eyebrows and say something like, “Go visit their store, Odds and Ends, and check out the inventory.

Then get back to me.”

I don’t think anyone ever did—get back to anyone, that is.

Several of them did come into the store, though, and they didn’t just check out the inventory; they gaped, gawked, and gasped with looks that ranged from disgust and disdain to abject horror, though one or two stared at certain objects with curiosity and something akin to longing, not that they ever would have given in to their desires.

Many of the parents who came in never made it past Henry, which might have hurt his feelings if he’d had any.

My parents might have seemed odd to those people, but given that those other parents spent hours on a golf course trying to hit a little white ball into a hole for fun, or dressing in uncomfortable clothes and mingling at various charity events while eating and drinking away lots of potential donation money, I don’t think they had room to criticize.

I’d much rather spend my day bouncing over the waves of Loch Ness or tromping up the side of a snowy mountain in search of a giant ape-man than doing any of those other things.

My parents weren’t snubbed all the time.

There were, and still are, plenty of like-minded people out there.

While much of academia scoffs at the idea of crytpids, there are also some highly intelligent people who are at least open-minded enough to entertain the possibility that they exist.

How can one not believe when looking at something like the coelacanth? It’s not unreasonable to think that there might be living creatures out there that we haven’t discovered yet, and the seas and lakes of the world—some of them with unreachable depths, underwater caves, and uncharted tunnels—are some of the last great unexplored places on our planet.

My parents dedicated a disproportionate amount of their time, effort, and money to the pursuit of Nessie and her ilk.

That was because, to my way of thinking—and theirs—sea and lake “monsters”

are the most likely of all the cryptids to exist.

There are hundreds of stories, going back centuries, in which such creatures have been sighted and described with strikingly similar characteristics by people who lived on different continents and had no way of communicating with one another.

There have been multiple sightings by rational, reasonable people who not only had nothing to gain by reporting what they saw, but who all too often ended up being ridiculed and derided.

Of course, the pendulum of belief swung both ways.

There were plenty of hoaxers out there looking for notoriety or a chance to make a quick buck.

And there was no escaping the fact that despite plenty of rational scientific theories about what these creatures might be and how they could have existed undiscovered for thousands, even millions of years, there was no definitive proof that they did.

No bodies, or parts of bodies, have ever been discovered.

There was no denying that the odds of Nessie-like creatures existing were long, but I remained open to the possibility.

I’ve always been a skeptic, however, and I knew that many of the reported sightings had much simpler and more sensible explanations.

Water and light can play tricks on your eyes and mind.

A bit of debris or a rogue wave can look like a humped sea serpent under the right conditions.

How many times had my heart skipped a beat because my brain briefly interpreted something I saw as something I wanted to see rather than what was actually there?

I’ve always approached the hunt with my skeptic’s point of view firmly in place, though after my glimpse of those glowing eyes in the lake the other day, on the heels of seeing the bite marks on the victims, I was struggling to keep my hopes in check.

I needed to reassess, read over relevant notes my parents had jotted down over the years, and review some of the scientific articles hypothesizing the existence of such creatures.

In the apartment above the store was a room that my parents had used as an office.

An antique wooden partners desk sat in the middle of it—a behemoth made from oak with drawers on both sides and a surface marred by scratches, glass rings, and tiny dents.

I had many fond memories of watching my parents at that desk engaging in lively, sometimes heated debates with each other.

Back then, the top of the desk would have been covered with papers, books, magazines, and the beverage-filled glasses that had left those rings.

Now its surface was clear of anything but dust, though this was in sharp contrast to the rest of the room, which was a disorganized-looking mess that somewhat resembled the inside of Marty’s trailer, though without the ambient aromas.

There were boxes overflowing with books; manila folders and envelopes stacked up against the walls, many of them leaking papers; four tall metal filing cabinets that I knew were full and whose tops were covered with more boxes and papers; three bookcases with books and papers and the odd tchotchke stuffed into every available nook and cranny; and pictures, maps, and posters hanging on all the walls.

This office was its own encyclopedic library filled with everything and anything one might want to know about cryptids, mysticism, ESP, and other mysteries of life and death.

Despite the disorganized appearance, I knew where most things were because I’d spent hours as a child exploring every square inch of the room and its contents.

After my parents died, I stopped using the room for the most part, only going in when I absolutely had to and then making quick work of it.

The sight of that desk made me feel the loss of them all over again, and I tended to behave like an ostrich when it came to facing my grief.

That day’s incursion into the hallowed hall was no different.

I kept my eyes averted from the desk as I walked over to one of the filing cabinets and opened the top drawer.

Information on sea and lake monsters was in the top three drawers, and I sifted through folders and papers, pulling some out, bypassing others.

When I had what I wanted from the top drawer, I moved on to the other two drawers and did the same, building a pile on the floor.

Finally, I went to one of the bookcases and, after a thoughtful perusal of the titles, removed five books.

I carried everything out to the living room in two trips, piling it all on the coffee table, where some of the folders slipped and slid onto the floor.

Then I went downstairs and got my laptop from the store office and brought it up.

My plan was to settle in on the couch to wade through it all, but then another idea came to me.

I dragged the Adirondack chair that Marty had gifted to me into the living room, setting it on the other side of the coffee table and tossing a couple of throw pillows onto it.

Finally, I made myself a cup of coffee, curled up in Marty’s chair, and started reading.

I began with a quick review of the geography of the Great Lakes—particularly Superior, Huron, and Michigan—and some speculative articles regarding the geography we can’t see, like certain caverns, particular areas of the lake bottoms, and what might lie beneath them.

My parents had accumulated an impressive collection of these geographical studies and maps—some of them rendered by amateur geographers or laypeople, while others were professionally drafted from whatever modern-day technologies were available at the time.

Lake Superior lives up to its name as it’s the largest and deepest of the lakes with an average depth of five hundred feet and a maximum depth of 1,335 feet.

It is also the coldest of the lakes with a water temperature that rarely makes it into the fifties.

Glacial activity during the Ice Age carved much of the area’s topography and it also played a significant role in the creation of the lakes as well as the many underwater tunnels and caverns.

Because of all these things, most of the scientific hypotheses regarding Nessie-type creatures in the Great Lakes list Superior as the most likely home base.

When people drown in Lake Superior, the water temperature prevents the buildup of the bacteria that causes a dead body to swell with gas.

As a result, the bodies often sink, never to be seen again. It’s not a big step from that to an assumption that the bodies of any creatures living in those depths would do the same, thus explaining why one has never been found.

Sightings on a lake are harder to explain away than those at sea, because lakes aren’t subject to the same tidal actions.

They are, however, subject to something called “seiche,”

a word from the French that means “back-and-forth swaying.”

Seiche occurs because of the natural buildup of water on one side of a body of water, which then sloshes its way back toward the other side.

It happens all the time because of the effects of wind, boats, wildlife, and other things, and while the resultant waves are generally small, they have been known to get big enough to capsize a ship, particularly when they are storm driven.

Given that, it isn’t much of a stretch to think that some of the reported sightings over the centuries have been optical illusions caused by seiche activity.

While Lake Superior might serve as home base for those creatures because of its size, depth, and the fact that it’s the last of the lakes in a chain, all the lakes are interconnected and lead to the ocean, making it easy to envision these creatures migrating from one body of water to another.

Some believe that Loch Ness, another deep glacial creation, has subterranean tunnels and caves that connect it to oceanic waters.

The theory I personally favor suggests that Nessie lives in oceanic waters most of the time, in underground caverns that are hundreds, maybe thousands of feet deep.

During certain times of the year when freshwater food sources that these creatures consider delicacies become plentiful, they swim through these underground highways and into the lakes to feed.

That could have been when some of the more credible sightings have occurred.

With the Great Lakes, the ocean connection is more obvious as all the lakes are connected to one another and to the sea via the Saint Lawrence Seaway.

While that would be a long and treacherous trek for a creature—particularly one rumored to be as large as Nessie—to take in modern times, ten thousand years ago, when glacial advance and retreat was shaping and forming the Great Lakes, those creatures could have ventured into the lake basins and then become trapped.

Forced to adjust or die, they found ways to exist in their new, freshwater environment.

From that, one can conclude that while there is no absolute proof these creatures exist, there is also no scientific reason why they can’t from an environmental and geographical perspective.

It is this potential—something my mother called “plausible existability”—that drove my parents to keep searching.

And it’s what keeps me following in their footsteps.

After reviewing the literature and reassuring myself of plausible existability, I moved on to the science—the biology and zoology that are my areas of expertise—and the glowing eyes that I’d seen in the water.

I’d been mulling over the significance of those glowing orbs ever since I saw them, trying to rationally explain them with the science I knew.

There are creatures capable of bioluminescence—the ability to produce and emit light, like a firefly—as well as creatures capable of biofluorescence—the ability to absorb sunlight and then emit it back as a different color.

Hundreds of animals, including humans, have eyes that can reflect light back in colors—witness the dreaded red-eye of photography—but there aren’t many animals with eyes that glow like headlights.

The fact that these had glowed supported my hypothesis that sea serpents, if they exist, most likely live in the deepest, darkest depths.

While many denizens of the deepest waters are often blind or completely lacking eyes because the blackness around them makes the ability to see useless, the need to navigate through dark underwater tunnels might have triggered the evolutionary result of eyes that function like headlights. It made perfect sense.

Still, it was a hard sell.

Most theorists have speculated that a form of inner sonar—much like the echolocation that bats, dolphins, and whales use—is the more likely method of navigation to have evolved, but glowing eyes weren’t beyond the realm of possibilities.

There are other examples of this in nature, such as the flashlight fish, which has pockets beneath its eyes filled with bioluminescent bacteria that can not only emit light but flash in communicative patterns.

It all added up to plausible existability.

Growing up, I’d seen how my parents changed whenever they caught the fever, watched as the excitement took them over and made them forget about everything else, including me at times.

I didn’t understand it then, but I came to.

My glimpse of those two glowing eyes had been ever so brief and inconclusive, but it had triggered a fever inside me.

Adding to it was my certainty that Marty had seen something at the same time.

Had he gone out again to explore further? And had that exploration cost him his life? In all the sightings over the centuries, records or reports of lake monsters attacking people were incredibly rare and subject to skepticism and far more plausible explanations.

So what had happened to Marty? And to Oliver Sykes and Will Stokstad?

That thought brought me to the part of the case that made me cast doubt on plausible existability.

I looked at the collection of speculative papers I’d removed from the file cabinet, including several written by world-renowned zoologists and biologists, and one written five years earlier by a cryptid hunter with a questionable reputation.

They all touted two main theories of what a Nessie-type creature might be: a surviving remnant of the prehistoric plesiosaurs assumed to have gone extinct millions of years ago, or a type of giant eel, most likely from the moray family.

I’d always favored the plesiosaur theory myself because the physical characteristics, as well as the described behaviors from sightings around the world and across the centuries, matched up better with the prehistoric creatures.

There had been some reported land sightings, and if those were to be believed, the eel theory didn’t fit.

Plus, it made sense to me that a prehistoric creature assumed to be extinct might have survived by living in caverns and caves deep down in the waters, much like the coelacanth had.

Yet there was one thing that didn’t fit either hypothesis: those tooth impressions.

The bites appeared to have been inflicted by flat-surfaced molar teeth, the kind used for grinding rather than the tearing of flesh, yet both the eels and the plesiosaurs have, or had, sharp, flesh-tearing teeth.

It was highly unlikely that the creatures, if they existed, were mammals, though I supposed they could have some biological similarities to whales.

In fact, perhaps sightings of these creatures over the years had been of whales.

But there were no whales I knew of that had teeth like the ones that made the bite impressions on Oliver and Will.

The teeth of land mammals tend to be specialized, allowing them to catch prey and tear their food, and the teeth of the upper jaw generally mesh well with those of the lower jaw to facilitate chewing. Toothed whales have teeth that don’t fit together because they don’t chew; they swallow the prey they catch whole. Other species of whale have baleen rather than teeth, screens that filter water as they swim and capture tiny plankton and other organisms. The teeth of whatever had bitten those men appeared to be all molars, and that made no sense at all.

Even so, I felt the fever inside me climb.