Page 102 of Guess Again

Lake Morikawa, Wisconsin Tuesday, August 5, 2025

“GO,”

MADDIE WHISPERED THROUGH HER CRUSHED VOCAL CORDS.

“I’m not leaving you,”

Ethan said.

“We have to get to a hospital.”

“It won’t matter if Francis is out there.”

Tears came to her eyes.

“Please, Ethan.

Find him.”

Ethan nodded. “Okay,”

he whispered as he ran a hand across Maddie’s cheek, still plagued by Bell’s palsy from the last time Francis had gotten his hands on her.

Turning, he bolted for the door and burst out into the night, the rain loud and relentless.

His Bronco had pinned the Range Rover in the driveway, preventing Francis from using the vehicle to escape.

Ethan looked in all directions.

A bolt of lightning brightened the night and allowed him to see a figure cut across the side yard toward the river. Ethan ran after him, slipping on the grass and stumbling over boulders as he raced for the riverbank. As he grew closer to Heaven’s River, he saw that the current was angry and the rapids even louder than the rainfall.

He made quick work of catching up to Francis.

When he’d cut the distance to a few feet, Ethan lunged onto the man’s back.

They tumbled down the embankment and splashed into the raging river.

Ethan howled in pain from the bullet wound to his left shoulder as he and Francis wrestled in the water.

Climbing to his feet, he felt a blow that skimmed his temple as Francis swung at him with a large rock he’d taken from the riverbed.

Ethan kicked him in the chest, sending Francis stumbling backward into the rapids.

Like a fast-moving treadmill belt, the current sucked Francis away.

Without thought, Ethan dove into the river, allowing the current to yank him downriver in pursuit.

Ethan knew the river well from having waded through it while brook trout fishing over the years.

He understood the topography and knew that the torrential rain had lifted the water level so that the boulders, which normally poked through the surface, were now hidden beneath the water.

He maneuvered himself into a sitting position as he crashed through the rapids.

He lifted his legs so that he would easily bounce off rocks and avoid a foot entrapment.

Francis was farther downriver, and Ethan noticed that the man had no idea how to navigate the rapids.

Francis bounced off boulders like a pinball until he finally went under.

He emerged a moment later, Ethan barely able to see the man’s head pop through the surface next to him as Ethan flew past.

Ethan grabbed Francis’s white T-shirt and, in tandem, they careened down a chute and through the rapids below.

When they emerged, the water level had dropped so that Ethan was able to stand.

He still had Francis, waterlogged and exhausted, by the shirt.

He delivered a sharp jab to the face and started to drag Francis to shore when a majestic bolt of lightning struck a tree upriver.

The splintering of wood was deafening as the tree caught fire and fell into the river as if a lumberjack had sawed it at its base.

The raging rapids tugged the fallen trunk from its roots on the riverbank and sent it careening toward Ethan and Francis. It took just a second for the tree to reach them. Ethan released his grip on Francis’s shirt and dove beneath the water. Francis, Ethan noticed just before his head dipped beneath the surface, had not been as fast.

An eddy current spun Ethan in circles beneath the water.

His foot found a boulder and he pushed off, freeing himself from the eddy and mixing back into the fierce current.

The rapids sucked Ethan downriver and bounced him off rocks before finally spitting him out into Lake Morikawa.

He swam perpendicular to the tide until he was in calm water, and watched for Francis to surface.

The cold water had numbed his shoulder and taken away the pain. But he was treading water with only his legs and right arm, and wouldn’t last long. The rain made it difficult to see and after a minute of watching the mouth of Heaven’s River pour into the lake, Ethan headed for shore.

He crawled onto the rocks, heaving for breath as he squinted through the rain looking for Francis.

But the river never delivered his father’s killer into Lake Morikawa.

Assuming he had been trapped under the fallen log, Ethan ran back up the riverbank to where the trunk had lodged against two boulders.

Water seethed around the wood and swelled over the tree trunk.

Ethan had enough sense not to reenter the water.

Fatigued from the battle, and with only one functioning arm, he would be no match for the river a second time.