“You know what I heard?” Woody said eagerly. He shook his paint can. “There were people in town when they flooded it. All these people, sleeping in their beds. They did it to kill the yellow fever. Drown it out.”

  Bolt shook his head. “My grandfather worked on the dam, dipshit. He says he had already been moved out of Prosper before they flooded it.”

  “That’s a wild story, man.” Rig tossed an arm around him.

  They were all quiet for a moment, staring at their handiwork. Eyes now watched them from every angle.

  Then Rig gave Woody a sudden kick in the ass. With a yelp of pain, he smashed face-first into the prow, then crashed off the rotted timbers into the sludge between boat and dock carcass. Rig chuckled, ducking inside the boat itself. “Enough ghost stories. Let’s get drunk.”

  Somehow, the hard stares of all those painted eyes seemed to follow them inside.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “I should call the cops on those kids,” Mitch growled to Cassie a couple of days after he’d heard the teenagers shouting drunkenly in the woods and busting bottles right behind the Destiny. “Cops” was a bit of an exaggeration. The law enforcement of Prosper was essentially a feckless sheriff’s deputy whose wife ran one of the Arkansas quartz shops. Cyril had recently read an article about the ill effects of radio waves on the human brain, so he usually kept his scanner off these days. Mitch rubbed another glob of wax sheen over the warm cherry tabletop, grumbling. “Somebody’s gonna end up dead if they keep going out to that junkyard. I just don’t want it to be Bolt.”

  They were in the shop, laying a coat of finish on an antique table that had come in from Charlene. The boxes of Uncle Stu’s telescopes sat piled in the corner, where Cassie and Lark had been slowly going through them the day before, but today, the table took precedence. Cassie had already sanded it, applied new varnish.

  Sometimes Cassie gave the impression that she was deep underwater in her own head, but she was one of the best listeners in the world. She didn’t always reply right away. Sometimes she didn’t reply for days. But she never forgot a word Mitch spoke to her either; she simply absorbed what she was told, marinated in it, and returned it in her own time, annotated with her careful, precise thoughts. Some people liked to battle for their share of conversation, for the pleasure of hearing their own voice. Not Cassie. A conversation with Cassie was writing a letter and sending it off with hope.

  “They shouldn’t be out on the lake at night. It isn’t safe. I’ll tell Bolt not to go, but he won’t listen to me.” The news of her brother’s antics had alarmed her; Mitch could tell by the faint line of strain appearing between her thin, wood stain–dark eyebrows. “Kids only like danger until danger likes them back. Then it isn’t so fun.” She brushed aside a strand of her hair. The wood was starting to preen under her attention. Soon it would be fresh and stately again. “Sometimes I think I don’t know Bolt at all.”

  “Cassie…” Mitch frowned, bending down to watch her buzz around her task.

  “Bolt wants to go to Vanderbilt,” she went on. “Daley told me.” She finally moved on to another table leg. He watched her face. It was a foreign language to most people, but Mitch had started studying when they were in school together, and he was fluent now in the subtle shift of her expressions. Though her voice gave nothing away, her eyes told all: distress and preoccupation, the nerves that came with a break in her regularly scheduled life.

  Mitch stuck his brush back in the warm beeswax and caught an edge he’d missed. Vanderbilt was one of the best universities in the South. But it was pricey, way beyond the dreams of most people Mitch knew. “I wonder why Bolt wouldn’t tell you.”

  “It’s expensive. He also didn’t want to stay with me,” Cassie added with her usual unassuming frankness. “He and Mom didn’t want me to know that, though.”

  Mitch had witnessed when Dorothy had brought Bolt into the Destiny to ask Mom for room. He hadn’t put the pieces together at the time. “He’s just a teenager,” he said, more gently. “He doesn’t know what’s important yet.”

  “I know we’re different. I just don’t want him to get hurt.”

  “I’ll tell Mom and Diego to keep him as busy as possible over at the Destiny.” Everything in him wanted to reassure her. “He’ll be all right. He’s smart.”

  Cassie smiled. “Maybe. But he’s still a teenage boy.” She stood and put the lid on the wax.

  The beeswax on the tabletop was already drying. She touched the surface with loving hands. That tenderness tugged Mitch in, and suddenly he wanted to touch her hand, those pretty, calloused fingers against the dark grain.

  “So you’re sure about telling Daley no?” Mitch had already heard Cassie’s frustrating abbreviated story of the dinner. “That land by the marina?” It would be a big step toward a fancy college for Bolt. Still, it would hurt. Daley was a Charlener, and they loved nothing more than sucking the marrow out of this side of the lake. There had been a small uproar when Ludwig sold Daley the marina, but no one else in Prosper had the free funds to take the place over.

  “I can’t give him land so close to my house and the Destiny,” she said. “The noise from the tourists would keep me up all night.” She dipped her hand into her pocket and withdrew with a glint of copper in her palm. Mitch looked at it a moment before he realized what it was. Then he drew his own lucky coin, the one she’d rescued from the old piggy bank, from the back pocket of his jeans. The two pennies made a soft clink when they met.

  * * *

  Summer in the South was very different from summers in Chicago. There, heat was metallic, as if the skyscrapers were sweating along with everyone else. Here the air churned with wind and bugs, birdsong from somewhere on the horizon, and sunshine so bright that when June woke in the late morning, she had no choice but to cart her treasure from the dinky sink in the laundry room, the safest place for its lake grime, outside onto the grass and flop down in front of it.

  Eliza had snorted when she’d seen June lugging the thing into the car at 2:00 a.m., waving the smell of mud away, and she laughed when she wandered outside onto the porch with another of her many brews of morning coffee and saw June lying on the grass and digging into the chest’s lock with a screwdriver.

  “I want to know what’s inside,” June said, smiling at her. “What if it’s treasure?”

  “It probably was, for somebody.” Eliza had her sermon notebook in her hands. She usually waited until the last minute to get all her thoughts down for the coming Sunday. “Doesn’t mean it’s treasure for you.” She shrugged, settling in on the porch swing. “It’s probably a bunch of rotten papers. Or a picture of that naked white lady in Titanic.”

  “How could it not be a treasure for me?” June asked, pushing again on an inner mechanism without success. “I found it.”

  Eliza only shook her head as she slipped her Airpods in and opened her notebook.

  June had rarely met a lock she couldn’t hack, but this one was proving to be difficult. When her screwdriver found some invisible cog and tried to cajole it, playing at being a key, nothing would budge.

  And sometimes, when she paused to wipe sweat from her brow or readjust her grip, she’d poke the end of the screwdriver back in and wouldn’t scrape up against a thing. She couldn’t find any purchase, as if she’d poked a hole through a blanket into empty space and the lock was just decoration.

  Cracking this particular beast would require surgery rather than piracy.

  There was a dull roar as a truck turned into the church parking lot. It was an ancient rust bucket, with bulbous headlights and a bed covered in jewel-toned canvases. BAG OF TRICKS TRAVELING PYROTECHNICS CO.! it read in lurid letters that spilled from the end of a painted magician’s wand. The man at the helm was scrawny and crow-like, his bristled face pinched as he threw the thing into reverse. His tires roared over the corner of the church’s lawn.

  Eliza frowned, slipping an earbud out as she watched him. “Guess he got lost?” she muttered.

  June sat up, caught on the truck’s painted sides, suddenly full of the taste and smell of fire. “He’s not one of your flock?”

  The man in the truck raised a hand to Aunt Eliza, and she nodded to him, face impassive. “Never seen him before.”

  “Fireworks. That should be fun,” June said as he nearly clipped a flower bed on the way out. There was something about the truck, its grumbling engine and the hulking shape of the canvases on its back, that gave the illusion they weren’t covering up simple sparklers but something big and cohesive, like the slender sharp back of a dragon. She stood, watching it go. On the truck’s tarnished chrome rear end was a wide black rectangle: a bumper sticker. Emblazoned in white was a circle caught in a diamond, glaring out like an abstracted eye. The sticker seemed to watch June until the truck’s tail vanished through the trees.

  “Should be,” Eliza repeated, though she didn’t sound quite sure. The phone rang from inside the house, and she went in to answer it, glancing back only once.

  The truck left scuffed grass behind and a strange whiff of cigarette smoke. June kneeled again beside the chest, frustrated and too hot. She shoved it, and despite its weight, it tipped over onto its back, the lock too tarnished to shine in the sun. She picked up her screwdriver again and slammed the handle down onto the lock.

  Finally, some piece of her she hadn’t even known was coiled tight now relaxed. After so much careful tinkering, holding herself back, it was fun, so she hit it again; a shard of plastic grip glinted off through the air. The lock itself, and the chest as a whole, remained unscathed.

  June’s fingers burned from holding the thin metal end of the tool, but it was a good burn now. She hit it again.

  * * *

  By the time the marina closed on Sunday, and Bolt, Rig, and the others ended their shifts, the sun was already gilding the edges of the lake, and Bolt was starving for a break. The four of them gathered at the Daley slip, where Rig lowered the Jet Skis into the water with a fancy mechanized lever; they hummed on their way to the water like racehorses chomping at the bit.

  It felt like the whole world was chomping at the bit for something. The water was choppy from a day of activity, delighted shrieks and boat engines still echoing from shore to shore, and Bolt himself was loopy from the smell of gas tanks. He’d always liked Jet Skis, even if Mom worried when he went out with friends on them. Motorcycles on water, she grumbled. Only you aren’t wearing a helmet.

  The summer before ninth grade, a girl a few grades above him had died in a Jet Ski collision. Going too fast, people murmured at the memorial service over iced tea, blaming the kids rather than facing the actual legal problem with this. Mom had made him attend, and he’d stood in a corner trying to swallow down a dry chicken salad sandwich. What a tragedy. Her poor mother.

  Bolt shook himself and hooked an arm around Sammy’s shoulder. It was getting too quiet. “Do you want the pink life jacket? Or can I wear it?”

  She snickered. “I’ll take the tie-dye.”

  Woody was watching open-mouthed as the Jet Skis dipped into the water.

  Rig slung a life jacket over his shoulders, the Jet Ski key clipped to its chest. The idea was that if you were thrown off the back of this bucking bronco of a water raft, the key would disengage and kill the power.

  “Looks like most of the boomers are off the water now,” he noted, shading his eyes to look past the no-wake zone. He leaped onto the nearest Jet Ski. “Ready for a night out?”

  “Very.” Bolt took a long, lunging step from the dock to the Jet Ski, and it rocked under his weight.

  “I wanted that one. I wanted to drive,” Woody snapped; Bolt ignored him.

  Rig snorted. “As if, Wood.”

  “Sam, with me?” Bolt offered. She hopped aboard behind him, zipping her life jacket. Her grandma Mable had second sight about boat safety.

  “Hey, you know where you want to go?” Bolt hit the ignition, and the Jet Ski purred to life under them. “I know some kick-ass channels that boats can’t go in.” The Snake was the most famous, a thin, winding waterway where the lake’s chop never touched. You could punch the accelerator on a Jet Ski and move like quicksilver down those aquatic back roads.

  “Actually.” Rig was already revving his engine, putting enough distance between himself and the boat that Woody had to hurl himself across the breach. “I want to see it.”

  “See what?” Bolt called, but it was lost to the wind; Rig was already off, wake splashing them as he burst out of the slip, curving in a sharp arch west into the setting sun. He never followed the rules.

  Bolt sighed. “Hold on,” he said, then turned their nose to the sun. Sammy’s thin fingers dug into the straps of his life jacket as they kicked off the water and revved across the lake.

  Rig had always been a reckless driver, zooming as fast as he could over the wakes, chasing them down. Once Bolt had been riding behind him and bit his tongue so hard, he tasted blood. It had hurt to talk for a week.

  Bolt skated through his turbulence, smooth and fast, avoiding the bumpy ride Rig seemed to crave. Not all wakes looked as dangerous as they were. Some mountains, stirred by powerful engines and wind, hid themselves in shades of blue, pretending to be ripples until they surged under the hull of your craft.

  The lake felt endlessly big from the back of a Jet Ski. Grandad had said it was probably about two hundred feet at its deepest. They crossed into the deepest parts of the water, away from the prettiest part of the lake. Bolt felt them leave the summery warmth and tall trees of the lake he knew best. It was about ten minutes before the edge of the lake resolved itself into a thick charcoal line, and their destination became clear.

  The Damnation, Bolt heard Grandad’s whisper across years. The dam loomed ahead of them, a black wall holding up all that water, keeping it from the riverbed where it once used to flow toward a far-off ocean. It was what powered much of the state, what made the lake, accounting for every visit from every weekender. A silent, man-made backbone everything was built upon.

  “No wonder we haven’t come out here before,” Rig shouted over the water as he ripped toward the shore. He only ever cut the engine at the very last second. “This is a fucking long way.” Though the ride must’ve been twice as far from Charlene, miles and miles away, down at the other end of the lake.

  It should’ve been pitch-black out there, but lights twinkled on top of the dam.

  “What’s that thing?” Sammy murmured as they cruised onto pebbles. Rig was already loitering on land, tapping a cigarette against his pack. His lighter gave several false starts.

  “I don’t know. A guardhouse? Maybe?” Bolt suggested. Sammy squinted through deep twilight, scraping her way onto dry land. “It doesn’t really belong.”

  “That’s a tent, you idiots,” Woody said. He hopped up the bank, rocks falling in his wake. “Pyrotechnics,” he read, and his face lit up. “Fireworks.”

  Rig, who’d gotten his smoke lit at last, exhaled softly.

  They climbed onto the dam, hiking up the grassy hill until they crested the top. A tent like the center ring of a grand circus glowed golden ahead of them. Paisleys, painted faces, dancers, and mythical beasts veiled by the night waved faintly on the surface of the canvases. The yellow light lit Sammy’s face as she stared at it. “This is bizarre,” she hissed. The firecracker tent had an element of storybook wonder in its seams.

  “I can’t imagine he gets many customers looking to buy fireworks here,” Bolt said. “It’s too remote.”

  There were no cars anywhere. Not even a parking lot. The tent floated above the lake, standing right on the precipice. It might as well have been conjured out of the shadows. Bolt walked to the edge of the dam, heels on the ground, toes in open air. It was just high enough to be uncomfortable. Far below, a trickling, unfed creek wound away from him.

  The construction had held since Grandad was about his age. He’d worked there when he was barely eighteen, carting gravel and supplies across the gorge as it was built. Once he told Bolt about an early test of the lock system. The river had allowed them to corral it through the locks. They could siphon energy off its back as it raced through the dam, he said, but when it came time to cut off the flow entirely, Grandad privately expected the mechanism to fail. The locks had slowly activated for the first time, and he’d watched the river narrow to an angry trickle, white water frothing as the gates pushed through its current. It was like watching God close his fist, Grandad had thought, and the river, not the dam, gave way.

  Bolt could almost see him there now, crouched on top of the dam, hat pressed to his chest in honor of the river’s death.

  “We’ve got to go inside,” Rig said.

  “Don’t you have to be over eighteen to buy fireworks?” Bolt asked, kicking a stone over the edge.

  “In Arkansas, you only have to be twelve,” Woody said, finally catching up. He knocked Sammy hard in the shoulder so roughly, she nearly tripped. “Didn’t there used to be a fireworks tent outside Charlene, with a different guy? Marty, you know?”

  “I used to score pot off Marty,” Rig said regretfully. “Hope this joker makes up for that loss.”

  “What are you kids doing loitering out here?” rasped a voice, and then a man ducked out of the tent to greet them. Where the twin flaps of the opening met was a gilded, diamond-shaped eye. The familiarity of the shape gave Bolt a lurch. He remembered the eye more in the muscles of his arm, the five sprays of the paint can nozzle it took to put it on that abandoned boat. A shooting-range smell accompanied him. He scratched a weathered cheek, surveying them with a gleam. “Welcome, one and all.”