CHAPTER 1

The wet suit and the water are black, and after theman slips into both, he seems to vanish from the world. He hascome on a starless night to avoid being seen, to hide a few containerswhere they won't be found. He will be underpaid for this taskby his anonymous employer, but times are hard so he takes whathe can get.

He has gone into the water between his bobbing boat and twelveshadowy structures that float. They are gathered under the weakmoon in a semicircle like disciples awaiting their teacher. But he isnot the one they wish for. As instructed he will secure his packagesunder the second unit, which is squat and unfinished. Which willnever be finished.

The silky surface between him and building 2 reflects the sky'ssilver stars. For a moment, before he lowers the diving mask, he isdistracted by the glittering scene. The understanding gives him ajolt: because it is a starless night, and these are not reflections. Theyare sardine-sized creatures flashing with their own energy, flickeringrandomly, tricking his eyes.

He lets go of the boat and reaches out to touch one, expecting itto dart away. It flares instead, flaming like a struck match thoughfully submerged, and sends a tingling shock through the palm ofhis hand. He jerks back. The flame dies. With the thumb of hisother hand he tries to rub the sting away.

The pain won't die. Nor will his sudden certainty that moresecrets than his are hidden in this place.

He would turn back, if not for the money.

He dives into darkness to do his work, avoiding contact withthe silver things, and as he swims they fade away. Fear hurries himalong. He needs to be gone before the sun rises, before everythingconcealed comes to light.

CHAPTER 2

If he had been looking at the day from a differentpoint of view, Vance Nolan might have figured out the problemwhile there was still time to act. But when he first sensed thatsomething was wrong, his instinct told him to search for the usualsuspects: Equipment that might malfunction. Procedures thatmight be short-cut. Materials that might be shoddy.

So it was nearly noon before Vance realized that the thingbothering him was not any of these. Instead, it was an absence, anoise stripped away from the world, something like not being ableto hear the sound of his own breathing.

He couldn't hear the birds.

Vance stood at the tip of Eagle's Talon, a long peninsula thathooked the wide Rondeau River like a bird snatching a fish. Featheryblack willows spread shade across the land and housed plenty offeathered creatures, as did the tall grass-like leaves of the floweringriver bulrushes. Most days Vance could hear the calls of terns andgulls and other waterbirds over the clattering human noises thatrose from his construction site. But hammers, drills, nail guns, aircompressors, trucks, and jocular workers had never drowned outthe world as they did on this brilliant July day.

On the inside of the claw-like strip of land was a cove almosthalf a mile across, sparkling with summer sun. On the outside ofthe land's curve, the river was a swift highway that promised totransport a man to utopia if only he had a boat. Apparently thebirds had set off for paradise already.

Vance removed his white hard hat so the light breeze could coolhis head, then brushed shore dust off his short beard with his otherhand. From this vantage, facing north, he could see the entire constructionproject going on inside the crescent of the cove. Beforethe first day of fall, the neighborhood that had been translated fromhis mind onto paper and then into a model would finally become afull-scale reality—though not exactly as he'd originally envisioned.

He looked north toward the top of the cove, where the long,skinny boom of a truck-mounted pump formed a towering arcnearly forty feet over the water. It scraped the sky's belly and thenturned downward to deliver wet concrete to the surface of anunusual foundation. Constructed of sealed foam blocks, the platformwas designed to float.

Here at Eagle's Talon, Vance built homes on water.

Technically, they were condominiums. Elite living spaces forwealthy owners, eight units in each of the twelve buildings, ninety-sixunits total. To Vance, though, they were the first step toward hisreal goal, which was to build beautiful amphibious homes for thepoor. Until Tony Dean had scuttled Vance's plans, that's what theseunusual units were supposed to be.

In spite of this, every day Vance stood here at the tip of the peninsulaand reminded himself that all work was worth doing well.

On the day the birds fell silent, Vance's construction crew wasassembling prefabricated aluminum walls on the cured foundationsof buildings 1 through 6. A subcontracted pump company had spentthe week pouring the foundations of buildings 7 through 11. Building11, the final pour, would be finished within a few hours. It wouldcure within a few days. Building 12, the model, had been completedin the spring and already had residents in four of its eight units.

On the shoreline behind 11, the rough-terrain concrete-pumptruck was braced on extended outriggers between the water andthe earth. Behind the truck, a concrete mixer continuously fed wetconcrete into the pump via a chute. And on the floating platform,the pump operator guided the boom with a remote control while alaborer pointed the hose where he wanted the concrete to go. Thetruck's rack-and-pinion slewing system made a whirring sound asthe operator directed it to shift.

The only detail out of the ordinary that day was the presenceof a fifteen-year-old kid, the pump operator's son, who was permittedto sit in the truck's cab while his father worked down on thefoundation. Vance wouldn't have allowed the kid on the site at all,and he had questioned his presence in the truck, but the operatorassured him it wasn't against company policy.

Vance didn't really care. Too many things could go wrong ata work site like this, and all of it was his responsibility—especiallythe things that went wrong. So he had asked the subcontractor'sforeman, Drew Baxter, to send the kid home. As this would havesidetracked the operator and delayed the day's work, Baxter refusedand blew him off with a grin that made Vance feel uneasy.

It wasn't long afterward, while Vance watched this operationfrom the peninsula's southern point, that he noticed a small brownbird performing aerial stunts around the highest point of the concretepump's boom. The silent bird made one, two, three loops andthen plummeted toward the surface of the river, pulled out of itsdive at the last possible second, and shot away, scratching the glassywater with the tips of its feathers.

That was the moment when the birds' silence commandedVance's attention.

Vance reseated his hard hat, then peeled off his outer workshirt and left the tip of the peninsula. The summer heat had creptup on him. It caused the skin at the nape of his neck and under hisbeard to itch.

He began to walk back toward the pump-truck operation. Atbuilding 2, a young apprentice named Andy was bent over a drill,securing the wall to a floor joist. Andy was just out of high schoolbut demonstrated the reliability and skill of someone who'd beendoing this kind of work for much longer. Vance planned to keeptabs on him. The crucifix Andy wore around his neck dangledaway from his body as he worked, then slapped his chest when hestraightened up to wave a greeting.

Vance passed buildings 3 and 4, scanning the riverside bankfor the gulls that usually insisted on being heard even when theyhid. The lush vegetation looked just as it had yesterday. There wasno sign of damage to the reedy nesting areas. But neither was thereany sign of waterfowl.

Somewhere near building 7, Vance wondered if he should takethe birds' silence as a clue to call it quits early. Sometimes the wildlifewere prophets of disaster. There was another reason why thelayer of silence sounded eerie to him, a troubling reason from anobscure corner of his memory that he didn't want to examine tooclosely.

When he reached building 8, the ground at Vance's feet vibratedas if someone had dropped a heavy load just yards away.

A mechanical groan raised shouts from the concrete crew atbuilding 11. Vance dropped his overshirt in the dust and startedrunning before his mind had completely registered the problem,though his eyes spotted it right away: one of the pump truck's forwardoutriggers was sinking into the water, and already the rearaxles had given up their share of the vehicle's weight. The trucktipped at a catawampus angle, pulled over by the weight of its long,arcing boom.

"Clear out!"

His command was unnecessary. The men on the foundationwere already scrabbling off the floating platform and onto solidground. Others backed off the area like ripples of water fleeing atossed stone. The rubber hose thrashing at the end of the pumphit a man in the head and spit wet concrete into the cove as theboom swung away. And at the back of the pump truck, the concretemixer's chute groaned and twisted and then snapped off.

On the sloping bank, the foreman, Baxter, seemed to have nohead for crisis. Lips parted, eyes frowning, he was watching thetruck fall as if it were an illusion and he was trying to sort out howthe trick was done.

Someone was shouting and waving his arms as if to indicatethe operator should swing the boom in the opposite direction.The operator seemed to have forgotten the boom entirely and wasshouting about his kid in the tilting cab. Wet concrete sucked at hiswork boots and held him back from his son.

Within seconds Vance reached the truck. It was tippingswiftly, but he jumped onto the stainless step before it was too faroff the ground, then transferred his weight to the wheel guard sohe had space to open the door. The boy had been tossed off his seattoward the starboard side of the windshield. He dangled by thesteering wheel with one arm and scrabbled to get his feet underhim. A clipboard slid along the dash, clattered against a bracketedfire extinguisher, and then tumbled out the open window on theother side.

Vance yanked the door open. He braced himself, one boot onthe driver's seat and one on the truck's frame, and leaned backagainst the heavy door as he extended his hand to the boy. Theyclapped a strong grip on each other's wrists.

The pair remained on the listing thirty-ton truck for no morethan three seconds.

In the first instant, Vance looked past the kid's shoulder and outthrough the open window, which was almost touching the water.He saw the white paper of the clipboard fluttering like a fishtail asit sank to depths that hadn't existed when the truck was stabilizedsuch a short time ago. A massive hole gaped under the forward rightoutrigger where solid ground had been just hours earlier. Beneaththe surface of the water, mud was falling away from the bank likean avalanche. The paper was swallowed by swirling sediment.

In the next second, as he heaved the boy out of the cab, Vancelifted his eyes and realized that the plummeting boom would shearthe bedroom balconies clean off the face of building 12.

In the third second they leaped. Vance turned in the air. Andas they dropped behind the falling truck, he saw a person step outonto the nearest third-floor balcony.

The long blond hair belonged to Danielle Clement. Danielle,the young single mom of five-year-old Simeon. Danielle, who hadcaught Vance's eye and occupied a bright room in his mind sincethe day he'd met her at Tony Dean's office two years ago.

Danielle, who should have been at work.

She turned her back to the looming catastrophe as she reachedfor her sliding glass door.

Little Simeon was at her side.

Vance forced every remaining bit of breath out of his taxedlungs. "Danielle!" he shouted.

He saw her turn toward his warning, and then the hard groundstruck the bottom of his feet and punished every bone in his legsand back, and the upended heavy equipment blocked his view ofthe worst tragedy ever to occur on his watch.

CHAPTER 3

Danielle Clement arrived at Eagle's Talon onlyminutes before the blow hit her balcony, because a prospectivebuyer was expected that afternoon and it was Danielle's job to greethim.

There was no better place to live than on the water. At Eagle'sTalon, all problems bobbed away on the current. The breezes liftedburdens off her shoulders, and the chuckling water rocked hermind into easy dreams. Two years ago, after her husband's unexpecteddeath, Danielle never thought that such a peaceful place orframe of mind could be hers. But here she was.

Of course, the unit at Eagle's Talon where she and Simeon livedwasn't truly hers. It was Tony Dean's, provided to her by his uniquebrand of kindness, which she'd experienced for the first time onemonth to the day after her husband died. Tony found her payingrespects at Danny's grave and apologized for the intrusion. He haddone business with Danny, Tony said. She apologized for not recallinghis name. At the time her world was a blur, and Tony seemedto understand. He had heard through the grapevine that she waslooking for work, and he needed an executive assistant. Would sheconsider applying?

Danielle didn't have to say that she and Danny, in their latetwenties, had considered life insurance a waste of cash, thatDanny's death had put her behind on the mortgage, or that she wasdesperate to find an income that would support her and her son.Tony spared her that humiliation. He said only that he had thoughtwell of Danny and would like to help her and Simeon in any wayhe could.

She accepted his offer with gratitude and a healthy amountof fear. She believed men as generous and as wealthy as Tonyexpected returns on their investments, and for months she kepther guard up. He was a successful businessman, a land developerwith political aspirations, a man who demanded as much of othersas he demanded of himself. But in the office she found him to bea respectable professional, and out of the office he was a perfectcompanion.

He took her and Simeon to dinner weekly. He invited her tojoin him for public business functions and local political events.He gave her frequent raises and occasional bonuses that alwaysexceeded her credit card and house payments. He paid for Simeonto play soccer and showered him with toys at Christmas and birthdays.And after two years of this, not once did Tony make a demandthat wasn't strictly related to her job.

Danielle found it easy to be his friend, but she didn't love him,except in the way she might love a good book. In the beginning sheworried often about what she would do if his interest in her everevolved into something romantic. He was fond of pretty womenbut uninterested in marriage, and he asked her once if she thoughtthat would work against him when the time came for him to run foroffice. She said it wouldn't, and he liked her answer, and that wasthe moment when relief replaced Danielle's wariness.

This easy state of things lasted until the day Tony told her hehad set aside one of the Eagle's Talon condominiums for her andSimeon. She protested with her heart and her hopes in her throat.She had admired the project since the day she had first seen theblueprints spread across Tony's desk. She couldn't afford sucha spectacular place, not even on Tony's generosity. So when heexplained that he had a job for her to do there, and the unit wouldbe paid for, Danielle had a hard time containing her amazement.She could stay until the job ended, he said, or she could live there aslong as she desired. In either case, she would pay nothing. He suggestedshe sell her house and put the tiny equity away for Simeon'scollege fund.

Danielle responded by throwing her arms around Tony's neckand whispering her thanks into his hair. He laughed, and her gratitudebecame a kiss.

Her own spontaneity shocked her. She withdrew, mortified forhaving crossed personal and professional boundaries.

"I'm sorry. That will never—"

He silenced her apology with a kiss of his own, changing in aninstant everything about their relationship except the thing thatmattered most: Danielle did not love Tony the way a lover ought to.

But she didn't dare say so. Pretending to love him was a verysmall price to pay for her son's financial security. An insignificantprice. Only a fool would decline generosity like Tony's. In time, shetold herself, she would grow to love him for real. He was a goodman. He cared for her. Only memories of Danny held her heartback. She just needed time, and because Tony wasn't the marryingtype, she had plenty of that.

So Danielle was still emotionally breathless when Tony installedher and her son at Eagle's Talon and instructed her to pose as an artbroker who occasionally traveled but did most of her work fromhome. Her job was to "sell" units to prospective buyers, speaking tothem as an enthusiastic resident. He furnished her unit to suit thepart, saying, It's not a deception, it's an operation.

A little more pretending, Danielle thought. But when it turnedout that she loved the job and was good at it, she minded the deceitless and less.

(Continues...)