I promised her I wouldn't. I meant it at the time, although it took me longer than it should have to understand what keeping that promise required.
At six the next morning I found Ethan asleep on the sofa with Miriam's oldest field guide open on his chest. The boy had insisted on staying over, and sometime after midnight I had heard him at the kitchen table turning pages and comparing photographs. He had put little slips of paper into the chapters on rainbow trout and largemouth bass. I covered him with the quilt from the end of the hall and went outside to check the pond before the sun reached it.
The water was slightly calmer, but not enough to reassure me. Fish still rose too frequently, and the eastern bank looked as though the entire population had decided to gather for a meeting nobody wanted to attend. I checked the aerator and listened for the motor's steady rhythm. The sound carried across the fields and brought back a memory of Miriam standing beside me twenty years earlier, laughing as we installed a much smaller pump because the first fish we bought kept coming up to the surface in August.
"There is always more to learn than you think," she had told me that day. I had laughed at the time because she was the science teacher and I was the man who knew how to repair the pump. Standing by the same water now, I was not laughing. I needed someone who knew exactly what was happening under that surface.
The person Daniel sent arrived shortly after eight. Dr. Mara Velez was a fisheries biologist who had spent fifteen years advising private pond owners, aquaculture operators, and county conservation programs. She stepped out of an aging green pickup carrying a water-testing case and a small cooler full of sampling bottles. She greeted me, looked past my shoulder at the pond, and stopped walking before we had finished shaking hands.
"How long has it looked like this?" she asked.
"Since yesterday morning. The transfer appears to have happened three nights before that."
"And nobody told you how many they delivered?"
"Not a number, no."
She exhaled through her nose, not in disgust at me, but at the kind of avoidable problem that made a professional's day much longer. Then she asked for the invoice and any photographs taken before the fish appeared. I gave her both, along with Miriam's last three water-quality entries and the photographs Ethan and I had made the previous evening. She looked at the notes and raised her eyebrows.
"Your wife kept good records," she said.
"She kept good records of everything."
Mara smiled. "Then she may have given us something valuable. We'll know what this pond was doing before somebody changed it."
For the next two hours, we walked the shore and the service track while she tested different depths and took carefully labeled samples. She explained that the concentration of fish was creating immediate stress, but that the pond's depth and spring inflow might buy us a little time if we managed oxygen and feeding correctly. She did not promise that every fish would survive. She also warned me not to move any of them into another pond, however tempting it might be, until disease testing and the necessary approvals had been completed.