Free Jaws by Peter Benchley

the decision. I think he went along with it, too.”
    “What makes you think so?”
    “I’m not sure. Do you know anything about his partners in the business?”
    “He doesn’t have any real partners, does he?”
    “I’m beginning to wonder. Anyway, fuck it … for now.” Brody took another step, and when Meadows still followed him, he said, “You better go around front, Harry … for appearances’ sake.”
    Brody entered his office through a side door. The boy’s mother was sitting in front of the desk, clutching a handkerchief. She was wearing a short robe over her bathing suit. Her feet were bare. Brody looked at her nervously, once again feeling the rush of guilt. He couldn’t tell if she was crying, for her eyes were masked by large, round sunglasses.
    A man was standing by the back wall. Brody assumed he was the one who claimed to have witnessed the accident. He was gazing absently at Brody’s collection of memorabilia: citations from community-service groups, pictures of Brody with visiting dignitaries. Not exactly the stuff to command much attention from an adult, but staring at it was preferable to risking conversation with the woman.
    Brody had never been adept at consoling people, so he simply introduced himself and started asking questions. Thewoman said she had seen nothing: one moment the boy was there, the next he was gone, “and all I saw were pieces of his raft.” Her voice was weak but steady. The man described what he had seen, or what he thought he had seen.
    “So no one actually saw this shark,” Brody said, courting a faint hope in the back of his mind.
    “No,” said the man. “I guess not. But what else could it have been?”
    “Any number of things.” Brody was lying to himself as well as to them, testing to see if he could believe his own lies, wondering if any alternative to reality could be made credible. “The raft could have gone flat and the boy could have drowned.”
    “Alex is a good swimmer,” the woman protested. “Or … was.…”
    “And what about the splash?” said the man.
    “The boy could have been thrashing around.”
    “He never cried out. Not a word.”
    Brody realized that the exercise was futile. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll probably know soon enough, anyway.”
    “What do you mean?” said the man.
    “One way or another, people who die in the water usually wash up somewhere. If it was a shark, there’ll be no mistaking it.” The woman’s shoulders hunched forward, and Brody cursed himself for being a clumsy fool. “I’m sorry,” he said. The woman shook her head and wept.
    Brody told the woman and the man to wait in his office, and he walked out into the front of the station house. Meadows was standing by the outer door, leaning against the wall. A young man—the reporter from the
Times
, Brody guessed—was gesturing at Meadows and seemed to be asking questions. The young man was tall and slim. He wore sandals and a bathing suit and a short-sleeved shirt with an alligator emblem stitched to the left breast, which caused Brody to take an instant, instinctive dislike to the man. In his adolescence Brody had thought of those shirts as badges of wealthand position. All the summer people wore them. Brody badgered his mother until she bought him one—“a two-dollar shirt with a six-dollar lizard on it,” she said—and when he didn’t find himself suddenly wooed by gaggles of summer people, he was humiliated. He tore the alligator off the pocket and used the shirt as a rag to clean the lawn mower with which he earned his summer income. More recently, Ellen had insisted on buying several shifts made by the same manufacturer—paying a premium they could ill afford for the alligator emblem—to help her regain her entrée to her old milieu. To Brody’s dismay, one evening he found himself nagging Ellen for buying “a ten-dollar dress with a twenty-dollar lizard on it.”
    Two men were sitting on a bench—the
Newsday
reporters. One