Tommy and Rob had driven all day to reach the west side of Lake Seminole. They spent the night in a cabin off Three Rivers Park Road, very close to where the Chattahoochee and the Flint rivers merged.

It was a cloudless morning and the lake was calm. Rob had made coffee and was unpacking his gear when Tommy came into the kitchen, stretching and yawning. "Sleep alright,?" Rob asked his partner.

"I don't know, kid, I'm getting too old for this." Tommy picked up a coffee cup from the side board, looked at it and blew some dust out of it before he poured coffee. " I can't remember the last time I slept in my own bed."

"I'll finish up here and get this stuff down to the dock."

"Beatrice will have overnighted in the swamps north of here. She is eating now and will probably be on the move in another hour."

"How do you know her so well?" Rob asked. "I don't think I heard that story."

Tommy took a sip of coffee, "Lets get set up on the dock and I'll tell ya all about it." It didn't take them long. Established in deck chairs, Tommy started his story. "Fresh outta college, I got a call. A lady said the senior senator from Florida wanted to talk to me. Now I got good grades but wasn't anyone special. I had no idea what he wanted."

Another sip. "Turns out they were building this big dam. He needed an engineer he could trust. Not to work on the dam, they had plenty of engineers for that. He had a special project in mind. He called me because of my organization, A.S.S. I guess he wanted to see me in person to make sure I wasn't just some crackpot. After swearing me to secrecy, he showed me some pictures. It was Abigail. Beatrice's mother. They found her deep in the Okefenokee, in the wilderness area. She was in a bad way.

The senator, Holland was his name, was a conservationist and had it in his mind that he wanted me to build a sanctuary in that new lake they were making, then move Abigail to it, all in secret. It was the craziest damn thing I ever heard of and of course I signed on right away."

"We made a big underwater grotto deep in the limestone where there was a freshwater spring. To get the financing, the senator had it labeled as a secret military underwater training facility. Of course the military never used it. But we did."

"Before they had the lake opened, we moved Abigail to the sanctuary. She was recovering slowly and they actually held up opening the lake for public use for months while we tweaked her habitat. I spent a lot of time with her."

"She surprised us all when she dropped two eggs. We got a bigger surprise when we figured out they were viable. We had no idea what conditions those eggs were gonna need to survive but Abigail knew. We just needed to stay out of her way."

"Seemed to take forever, but eventually they hatched; two of the cutest little critters you've ever seen, Barnabus and Beatrice."