"What do you mean it’s not their little boy they fished out of the lake, Percy?" Clement Lacey said, not even bothering to hide his annoyance with such a preposterous notion. Clement, a detective with the St. John’s County sheriff’s office, was on the radio with Percy Schmidt, the responding officer.

    "That’s what they said. Said when the storm kicked up, their boy fell out, but the one they pulled up wasn’t theirs."

    "Alive or dead?"

    "Dead," Percy said. His tone suggested Clement was a fool for even asking such a question.

    "And what kind of state is the body in?"

    "In tact. Hasn’t been eaten. A little bloated, a little swollen. Looks like a kid who died from drowning."

    "Uh-huh," Clement said, assimilating the information. "Shock, then. Denial. Can’t accept the loss."

    There was a pause and then Percy said, "Um, Clement. It’s not their kid."

    "What do you mean, Percy? It would have to be their kid."

    There was another pause, then Percy said, "Look, just git on out here and you’ll see for yerself."

    Clement sighed. So, it was going to be one of those days.

***

    Born and raised in Jacksonville, Clement knew exactly where the old Skinner Fish Camp was. Which was lucky, because anyone not familiar with these parts would have had a heck of a time finding it. He blasted down State Road 13 until he came to the turn off, noted by a sign that had seen better days. Nailed to a tree, the once white piece of rectangular wood now sported faded red letters, some obviously missing due to the gaps between them. The only ones left and legible read: Skin Ish Ca.

    Clement vaguely remembered the days when the sign didn’t look so battered, but that was a long, long time ago. As were the days when the little lake at the end of the road his cruiser now bumped along had hosted a fine fishing spot.

    The closer he got to the lake, the thicker the trees got and the more dense the underbrush. When he finally reached the end, where an assortment of emergency vehicles congregated by the boat ramp –or what was left of the pocked concrete that disappeared into the water—he groaned. He was in no hurry to leave the air-conditioned comfort of his car. Standing around in the muggy summer heat getting eaten by mosquitoes seemed even less appealing than questioning the parents of a missing child. If there was one thing he hated most, it was missing kid cases. Emotions ran high in almost any crime, but more so when it came to innocents. Nope, this was one case he was by no means looking forward to investigating. Especially with such a preposterous claim. Their boy fell out of the boat, but the one they pulled up wasn’t theirs.

    Riiiight, Clement thought to himself as he stepped out of his car. He was instantly assaulted by a swarm of bloodsuckers riding a wave of hot air, made even muggier by the recent rains they’d had. Might as well up and die since I done heard ‘bout everything now.

    Percy spotted him and came right over.

    "Parents’ names are Ted and Denise Emerson. Boy’s name is Sam," Percy said, filling Clement in. "Happened right after two this afternoon, when that little thunderstorm moved across."

    Clement glanced at his watch. It was half past three now.

    "Know how to swim?" Clement asked, meaning the boy.

    Percy nodded.

    "But the parents said it didn’t do him no good. The mother wouldn’t stop babbling about the water sucking her boy under, like it was grabbing him and not letting go. Like it was hungry." Percy glanced nervously at the back of the ambulance where the mother, white as a blanched almond, sat, her black hair, still damp, clinging to her face in stringy tendrils. "They had to give her a sedative."

    Clement nodded. Standard. Most mothers needed something to help calm them in situations like this.

    "The father’s better. He’s over there," Percy said, pointing to a man standing with the head of the dive team. Clement turned to head in that direction, but Percy grabbed his arm.

    "Before you talk to him, you need to see something. He was real mad at first, because he’s no idiot, Clement. He knows how impossible this sounds."

    Before Clement could throw out a smart remark, Percy shoved a photo into his hands.

    "That’s their boy."

    Clement looked at the photo. It was of a boy with dark hair like his mother’s and a round face with big green eyes like his father’s.

    "Now come over here," Percy said, guiding Percy to the back of another ambulance where the body was being kept. He peeled back the plastic and revealed a boy with fair hair, freckles, a square face and blue eyes. Not the same boy at all. About the same age, but not the same boy.

    "What the—" Clement said, startled. "This makes no sense. I don’t get it."

    "None of us do," Percy said.

    "How do we know the boy in the picture is even theirs? This could all be some big con they’re trying to run on us."

    "Come on, Clement. Even you can’t be so callous about this. Look at the boy in the picture, then look at those people. That’s their kid all right. Not that one," Percy said, pointing to the body bag. "Don’t need no DNA test for that."

    "Couldn’t run one anyway, with him being missing and all."

    Percy shook his head.

    "Divers had any luck?"

    "Not so far," Percy said.

    Clement turned his attention away from the body and looked at the parents. In this day and age, when it was all too common for parents to be involved when a child disappeared, it only paid to be wary of a suspicious story. But this...this went beyond suspicious. It was just plain bizarre. In all of his twenty-seven years on the force, Clement Lacey had never heard of a case even remotely like it.

    Jessie, from the coroner’s office, came over to talk to him.

    "Okay to take the body in, Detective?"

    "Ain’t gonna do me any more good out here. You gonna run dentals?"

    "Standard in a John Doe like this. You know that."

    "Call me the second you find anything."

    "’Course," Jessie said before walking away.

    "What about the parents?" Percy asked.

    Clement looked at him, saw the same thing in his eyes that must be reflected in his own. They were trained to be suspicious, to assume that with limited facts the people most closely involved were most likely responsible, but... Not this time. Even the best actors couldn’t feign the mother’s despair or the father’s rage. These people were as stricken as Clement and the Sheriff’s office were befuddled. This was not a classic, by-the-book parental neglect or abuse case. Then again, it could be just a good old-fashioned accident where no one and nothing was to blame except bad luck. Though rare, that still did happen from time to time.

    "Not much we can do, is there? Except wait."

    And wait they did. The divers searched, or tried to, but the only thing they found were problems. On top of zero visibility, two divers almost drowned. Some kind of suction, like a whirlpool effect, out there they said. Water was more than hard to maneuver through, even for the accomplished swimmers they were. They couldn’t explain it; they were just happy to get out of it alive. Which they barely did. And once out, they were drained. Both felt as if they’d swam hundreds of miles instead of a couple of feet. Working under the assumption that there might be some toxin in the water, the divers were taken to a local hospital for treatment and no more were sent in.

    The search and rescue team moved to plan B and brought out the nets. The parents waited with the rest of the rescue workers. Even the mother kept vigil. In Clement’s opinion, she could have benefited from a ride home and a stiff shot of whisky instead of staying at the mosquito-laden swamp.

    "Gotta call it off, Clement," the head of the dive team finally told him five hours later. "If we haven’t found him now, we’re not likely to."

    Clement nodded, but groaned internally. He wasn’t looking forward to his next task: informing the parents there was nothing more the Sheriff’s Office could do.

***

    An hour later, back at the safety of his desk and away from the abusive ranting and mournful howling of Mr. and Mrs. Emerson, Clement Lacey swallowed the last of the coffee he’d picked up on his way back in and rubbed his eyes. The phone rang.

    "Found a match on those dental records, Sheriff," Jessie from the coroner’s office said. Then, in a less certain voice he added, "I think."

    "What do you mean, you think?"

    "Well," Jessie said nervously. "I had to do a bit of digging. Wasn’t in the database for between eight and twelve years ago, which is what we estimated his age at being."

    "So where was it then?" Clement demanded impatiently.

    "Let me give you his name first. Then I’ll tell you."

    "I’m ready," Clement said, pen and paper in hand.

    "Okay, they belonged to a kid named Finney. Jasper Finney."

    Clement scratched down the name, but his pen froze when Jessie said, "And after running a general search on all the years, we found a match...from 1967."

***

    Clement sat on a stool, alone in the Sheriff’s Office basement, going through files long considered unsolvable and therefore dead. The dead file room. The name never gave him the creeps like it did that night.

    But when he found the file for Jasper Finney, age nine, missing since January 7, 1967, and when he further opened the file to find a picture of Jasper Finney, he knew what real creeps were.

    Inside, a black and white photo showing a boy dressed in a baseball uniform, a bat over his shoulder, poised to swing, was the boy from the body bag. Even in black and white, Clement could tell the boy had fair hair and freckles. He couldn’t tell the color of his eyes, but that information was provided among the statistics inside the file.

    And the statement given by his dad and uncle, who were the last to see Jasper the day of their fateful fishing trip to the same lake the Emersons had ventured to, said that Jasper had been wearing a red flannel shirt, jeans, and a blue cap. Clement hadn’t seen the cap, but the clothes matched.

    With shaking hands, he closed the file, tucked it under his arm, and quickly made his way out of the dead file room.

***

    Clement did a search on Jasper’s parents and found them still living not far from the St. Augustine address they’d had thirty-five years before. He sat in his car outside their home, fanning both pictures of Jasper–the color one the coroner had taken two days before out at the lake, and the black and white one taken thirty-five years ago of a boy in a baseball uniform—against the steering wheel.

    Closure. That’s what he could give them. But was it better to tell them simply that Jasper’s remains had been found? Or should he show them the evidence, as he would in a normal case? As he would in a case where positive identification of the deceased would bring the family much pain, but leave no doubts. After thirty-five years–under normal circumstances—there’d be nothing to identify anyway. Only bones, with dental records being the only way to confirm the identity.

    He decided it wouldn’t do them any good to see the most recent picture. It was better that mystery stayed to trouble those who had been involved, the few who knew. And thanks to laws requiring they contact the victim’s family first before releasing the victim’s name to the media, the newshounds hadn’t–and wouldn’t, thanks to some strategic maneuvering by Percy and himself to confine the information—wrapped their mouths around this juicy nugget of a story.

    Clement put both pictures away in the folder, laid it on the passenger seat, then trudged up the path to the front door of the Finney’s residence.

***

    "Weird, ain’t it?" Percy asked Clement over drinks later that night.

    Clement nodded, then chugged another hefty sip of his beer.

    "What if...what if..." Percy said, hesitating.

    "What if what, Percy?" Clement said, perhaps a little too gruffly.

    Percy looked down at the liquor stained table in the booth they shared. Keeping his eyes lowered he said, "What if that lake is the Fountain of Youth Ponce de Leon was searching for when he landed in St. Augustine hundreds of years ago?"

    Clement stared hard at Percy, who finally had the courage to raise his head. Their eyes locked. In Percy’s eyes Clement saw not elation at the possibility of such a discovery, but fear.

    And Clement understood why.

    Ponce de Leon was searching for the promised fortune of gold and silver surrounding the mythical fountain, but he was also looking for something man had probably wanted to attain since finding the first gray hair: permanent youth. Even now, in Clement’s time, people drank all sorts of concoctions, had all sorts of surgery, popped all sorts of pills, trying to stay forever young. In the end, everything and everyone died. Nothing was forever. And the harder people strived to change that, the more dearly they paid.

    That lake, Clement knew, as did Percy, was not to be revered. The divers who had gone in to find the Emerson’s boy had almost died. Once they’d been taken to the hospital, their muscles had atrophied so severely even the doctors couldn’t explain it. And they slept the sleep of Death. At last check, Clement had heard they’d recently been upgraded from serious to stable condition, and the doctors had hope for full recovery, but the question remained: what had caused their condition to begin with?

    Clement and Percy knew, and perhaps Jessie at the coroner’s office suspected, as might a couple of others. It was the lake. Fountain of Youth it might be, but not the fabled fountain whose tale they knew from childhood. It would preserve a person’s youth all right, but the price it claimed for such preservation was the highest of the high. Life.

    Finally, after a long silence, Clement responded to Percy’s speculation.

    "Well, if it is, it ain’t gonna be for long. I heard the Department of Health and the Department of Environment is getting involved. Going to run some tests. Think some illegal waste was dumped there. Probably by one of the paper mills."

    "Depending on what went in, that might explain the preserved state of the Finney body."

    Clement shrugged and looked at Percy, who he could tell didn’t believe that statement anymore than he did.

    "I don’t know ‘bout none of that, but they’re closing it off to the public. My guess is they’ll probably end up draining it."

    Percy slammed the rest of his drink, wiped the foam from his mouth, and said, "Best thing for it."

    Clement sighed. And when it was drained, then what? Would Sam Emerson’s body finally be found? Would it be as well preserved as Jasper Finney’s?

    If so, Clement knew the secret would be out then. But he hoped he was wrong about it all, that his imagination had simply gotten the better of him. He hoped it was toxins from illegal waste that explained the well-preserved state of the Finney body.

    Because God help the world if it was anything more than that.