The fishing boats came out the next morning.
There were six of them. They started at the city and worked their way along the north shore, one behind another, pushing slowly into every patch of reeds with long poles. The men in them didn't fish. They didn't talk. They poked the poles into the reeds, waited, pulled them out, and moved on.
"He's looking for us," Agnes said.
"He's looking for her," Nathan said, and nodded at Amelia.
Amelia sat against the rail with her tied hands in her lap. She didn't argue.
They moved the barge at midday, when the boats were still two miles away. Agnes poled them west along the shore, deeper into the reeds, to a narrow channel between two muddy islands where the water was so shallow the barge's flat bottom touched the mud. She stuck the pole in the mud to hold them there and threw old sacks over everything.
The boats came within half a mile that afternoon. Then the sun went down, and they turned around and went home.
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