"NO!"
With Stein's help, McGill convinced the police that the thing had to be dumped, and we dropped it off a police launch beyond Sandy Hook, to their bored perplexity. They would have been still more puzzled if they had known what it was.
McGill came down to Oyster Bay for the weekend and we played a game of gin rummy—a truly memorable game, because the cards behaved and I even lost a little.
He congratulated me in a pre-occupied way, which annoyed me. "I should think you'd be gladder than that," I told him.
"I am," he said. "But there's something else—"
"What's that?" asked Molly, worried.
"The schools of fish are traveling head to tail. I'm wondering if that's just the beginning of another mess."
We went back to playing gin rummy, but our minds weren't on what we were doing. They haven't been since. Just yesterday, an ocean liner chased its berthing tugboats away and went sightseeing up the Hudson River.