“Wake up,” Cassie pleaded. She swallowed water, then air, then water again. She coughed and spluttered. “I can’t move, Catfish. Wake up.”

  Catfish’s hair floated in clouds around her head, and Cassie sank.

  And finally, Catfish opened her eyes. They were no longer the warm color of Mom’s morning coffee. They were milky pale all over with faint blueish veins.

  Cassie scrabbled against the hold on her hair but couldn’t rip free, only jerked above water and banged her head again against the slick underside of the dock. She beat her hands against the wall of the building, against the confines of the dock, and screamed.

  Suddenly, something sliced through her hair—she was free and warm. Firm hands pulled her out of the flooded room, out from under the dock. Mom.

  “What have I told you—don’t go under the dock!” Mom shouted. The sun was as bright as a peeled lemon in the sky, high above the deep reeds and the darting water bugs. Mom must have heard her scream from the inside of their double-wide and left their phone swinging on the cord, Aunt Babs in Kentucky, concerned in curlers, still on the line. Mom had rushed out, kicking off her house slippers, and charged into the water. She’d sawed away at the tangle with her pocketknife, Grandad’s gift, to pull Cassie out, leaving a hunk of hair shorn from her temple behind. She was covered in mud and draped seaweed like lace sleeves. Mom hoisted her up, and Cassie only screamed harder and struggled. She peed in her skirted pink bathing suit bottoms.

  “What did I tell you—stop it—what did I tell you?” Mom murmured soft words, but Cassie thrashed in her arms, hard enough that she bruised Mom’s jaw. “Stop it!” Mom screamed. She heaved her back into the little house, with its yellow kitchen and the smell of wax and balsam, where Mom had been making candles, and tumbled Cassie into the bathtub, turning on the shower. And Cassie stood there on an aching ankle, shorn hair straggling and dark as the mud sticking to her face. She’d kept on crying, wailing wordlessly. Mom had turned on the hot tap, wiping mud off her face, checking for injuries. Some of her fingernails were broken, and there were scratches on her ankles and her arms.

  Mom pulled her out, her hair still a mess, and wrapped her bathing suit and all in a thick, robin’s-egg-blue towel, before sitting her on the couch. “Stop it!” Mom pleaded again. “Stop it! Stop it!”

  But Cassie had yet to look at her.

  And finally, as if her hands had moved without permission, Mom slapped her. For a moment Cassie stopped, eyes red and stunned, tears still trembling off her eyelashes.

  “Stop,” Mom told her, her mouth huge and horrified. “What happened? I told you not to go under the dock, I told you.”

  Cassie didn’t speak a word but opened her mouth and screamed louder.

  Now Cassie wrenched herself awake, her mouth dry. She sat up in her narrow bed, and though she didn’t look out the window—wouldn’t look at Lake Prosper—she listened. Just in case there was someone still in the water, waiting for her.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The phone ringing was like a shriek, vibrating between the wall and bed so that Lark had to scrabble. She never left her sound on; the service was so poor at E Dock that her phone had spent most of the past few weeks charging beside the coffeepot.

  “Hello?” she mumbled, still clambering out of a swiftly receding dream.

  “Lark?” The voice was strained, escaping from a locked jaw. That youthful tenor, so fond of waxing on about this or that cosmic event, cracked with anxiety. She hadn’t heard it in weeks; while in the hospital, he’d barely spoken at all. “Are you there?”

  “Daddy.” Lark sat up, hot and then cold. Nausea ran down her body. She didn’t let any of the telescopes stay in the bedroom with her, but she heard them rocking all through the boat. “I’m here. How are you? Mom didn’t tell me—”

  His voice scraped over her through the phone. “You can’t stay there now. Not now. Not now, Little Bird. Something’s broken—broken glass. That whole place is broken glass on the floor.”

  Lark was numb. She stared at the blankness of the wall, only lit by a timid dawn. “I swept up the glass, Daddy. You don’t have to worry about this anymore. I’m fixing everything.”

  “You can’t fix what’s wrong there.” He sounded thick, groggy with medication. But it didn’t stop the frantic flow of his words. “It gets in you. Smell it and smell it and see it and touch it and drink it—that water gets in you and wrings you out—”

  “Where’s Mom—” Lark tried, but his words rushed over her.

  “I know what you’ve seen. I know because I saw. I saw—” He sobbed. “You’ll see more.”

  Lark shifted onto her knees, containing herself. Steady. “What did you see? Where should I look?”

  He was too agitated to answer her, crying on the line. Mornings were bad, Mom had told her. He didn’t sleep well, waking up far away in orbit. “It gets in you,” he repeated. “You can’t stay there now.”

  “It’s okay, Daddy.” Lark wiped at her face, shivering. “Everything’s okay. Put Mom on the phone.”

  “Get out,” he urged. “Don’t even look at it. Just get out.”

  “I love you,” Lark tried, though her voice was a wreck by then. “Daddy? I love—”

  The line went dead.

  Lark listened a moment longer, chest thundering. The phone was like putting her ear to a shell. She hung on it, hooked by a dull suction of need. Did Mom have him now? Would he be okay? She couldn’t breathe. She gasped, stumbling out of the bed, shoving her hands into her hair. Her phone hit the floor. The air felt close and too hot as she tripped through the boat before wrenching open the back door. Fresh air, fresh air would—

  She flinched back inside, almost falling as her heel caught on the floor rail of the sliding door.

  “What am I seeing?” she demanded of the spyglasses huddled around her. But this was no vision. She saw it with her naked eye.

  It must have been sometime during the night, in the hours after Lark had giddily tied up her dinghy. June’s song had still hung in her ears as she hopped onto the Big Dipper and whistled her way to bed. Too dark to notice. Too happy.

  Around her, she heard the shocked murmurings of her neighbors, the early risers just taking morning coffee out for their quiet porch time. But the air buzzed, hot as high noon, still and fetid as a slaughterhouse. She wasn’t imagining it? She leaned out again, screwing her eyes shut to confirm it. But nothing changed the hazy 6:00 a.m. panorama.

  Don’t even look at it. Just get out.

  Lark sank into one of the porch chairs, squeezing her eyes shut again.

  “Jeff!” Ferret-fanatic Joe called a boat over. “You have to see this!”

  “Should we call the sheriff?” Margaret Pickle hollered.

  Lark couldn’t say a word. The image burned behind her lids.

  The lake had been distorted, its odor sticky and metallic. Sometime in the night, the gray-green water had curdled. It lapped at the shore, dark, glistening red.

  * * *

  Everything was all wrong. Even down at the Destiny, Bolt could almost hear Cassie’s bees roaring their panic up the hill. Her feelings about the water had always been hard to wrap his mind around. But what if she’d been right? Mitch had gone up to see her the minute they all saw the lake that morning, and he hadn’t returned.

  In the shadow of the bank, the water looked black—solid, mineralized. It was only farther out, where light struck it obliquely that the lake sparkled crimson. Against the loud blue of the June sky, the tender green of new summer leaves, the lake water stung, sharp opposites, a spider bite sting of wrong. And it was almost beautiful too, like staring at the deep, fractured interior of his mother’s garnet earrings, the heavy scarlet teardrops Grandad had given her for her fortieth birthday. That almost beauty, the moments when Bolt caught himself staring, made it that much more horrible.

  After his shift in the restaurant, trying to shake the crawling of his skin, Bolt grabbed a Coke from the icebox and propped it on his navel out by the pool, watching the liquid inside the glass wobble every time he took a breath. Diego had tugged the swan boats up to the roost on the lawn so their white tail feathers wouldn’t be ruined. Rig would be coming by any moment now after dinner with his dad.

  Usually, the Grand Destiny would have been buzzing, but the red water had left a pall over everything. The motel wasn’t taking it well—some appliance or another seemed to start smoking every hour. The toilet in Room 4 had exploded with such energy that the bowl had nearly blown a hole in the roof.

  Bolt stared at the powder-blue deep end of the pool. At least this water was behaving like it was supposed to. Diego was on the opposite side, capturing leaves with his wide square net. Every so often, Bolt glanced over at the Grand Destiny restaurant, watching the golden clouds reflected in the windows. The grocery was shut; Mitch had gone with Cassie to Charlene, but Valerie was inside the restaurant, serving slices of lemon meringue pie to a couple of dinner regulars. She’d sent her waitstaff home. There were only three cars in the lot, and one of them was Mitch’s beat-up green pickup.

  “When there’s no lake, the pool is king,” Diego murmured, with surprising cheer, and it wasn’t totally clear if he was talking to Bolt or to himself.

  Bolt sipped his Coke and settled back again. “All hail the pool.”

  Diego chuckled, dumping some of his debris over the fence. He glanced over his shoulder, tracking Valerie as she marched across the lawn to sit with them. The last of her paltry dinner crowd had trickled away.

  “Well, I can die,” Valerie exclaimed, plopping down beside Bolt on one of the pool chairs. “I have truly seen it all now.” Her eyes were fixed on the sunset licking Lake Prosper’s still surface, which glowed a fevered carnelian. There wasn’t a breath of wind, the water thick and quiet ahead of them. In that fading light, it looked almost like the surface of Mars.

  “You should make a menu based off it,” Bolt suggested. “Tomato pie. Bloody Marys. Red pepper dip. Mr. Daley told us today that ‘anything can turn into a business opportunity if you think outside the box.’”

  “Oh, phooey on Jeff Daley.” Valerie swatted the air like she had a damp rag in her hand. “Did he leave any more messages today, Diego?”

  Diego was checking the filters, but he nodded. “Deleted them.”

  She snorted. “You doing all right?” She gave Bolt a gentle nudge. “Where are your mean friends, huh?”

  “Rig’s on his way, Woody’s got mono, and Sammy’s with her grandma. And they’re not mean,” Bolt added, a little late. “Sam’s pretty cool actually. And Rig just gets bored. He can also be…different. What’s Mr. Daley calling you about?”

  “Oh, he thinks everybody needs his money and expertise.” Valerie rolled her eyes. Diego was smiling into the filter at her tone. “He should try throwing that cash straight into the water. Maybe then it’ll turn green.”

  “Did he offer you guys money or something?” Bolt put down his bottle. “When? You guys aren’t struggling, are you?”

  “Don’t you worry.” Valerie put one of her bony hands on his shoulder, rocking him back and forth. “We don’t need any more investors around here. Honestly, honey, you can’t take everything on all the time.” Which was a little rich, coming from the busiest bee in the hive.

  “Good, because if you sold the Destiny, who would make me pie and gizzards?” Bolt asked, catching her hand with a grin. “How would we all go on without you?”

  “Well.” She patted his head a few times, grumbling in the happy way she did when she couldn’t take a compliment. “You and Rig have big plans tonight? Be careful with that boy. Mitch doesn’t like him one bit.”

  “I won’t be out late,” Bolt promised.

  Valerie shrugged, standing. “Okay. I’ll get up to check on you too. Your mama is trusting me to look after you. Diego, you about done? Nightcap?”

  The sun cast a lurid glow across the water, pooling at the base of the Grand Destiny dock, and there was a slight rugged shadow coming toward them—Rig, hands in his pockets, schlepping down in his headphones. He leaned against the walkway, checking his phone.

  It was a familiar image, the freshest of Rig in Bolt’s life. It was an old friendship. They’d met in school, one day at indoor recess, rain slashing against the windows outside. When Bolt had left a battered, ancient game of Sorry! and gone to investigate the kid in the corner, he’d found Rig bent over a piece of graph paper.

  “What are you doing?” Bolt had asked.

  Rig had grinned and lifted his arm to reveal a half-done sketch of their teacher, Mr. Fox, recognizable by his thick beard and the large spectacles perched on his birdlike nose. “What do you think? Does he need more hair?” he’d asked, shy but sly. Mr. Fox had discovered the doodle at the end of recess. It had pleased him so much, he’d given it a permanent place of honor on the blackboard.

  A few days ago, when they were alone, Bolt had asked Rig if he still drew. “Not much. But sometimes,” Rig replied, and without Woody, without beer, without the nighttime air, he’d looked almost shy again.

  The Grand Destiny had a broad dock—a parking lot of a dock—made for a lunch rush’s worth of boats. For once, there were no firecrackers in sight, though Rig was staring into the pale flame perched on top of his cheap marina lighter. Lately everything was about the fireworks tent and the mysterious products the crew carried away from it. Tonight, Rig was on his own, wearing one of the Under Armour tanks he wakeboarded in. He glanced up at Bolt, smirking over the little fire. “Thought they’d never leave.”

  “You could have said hello.” They ambled down the dock, the flinty click of the lighter sounding every half a minute or so. “I was surprised you wanted to come all the way out here. Usually you make me come to you.”

  “I needed to get away from Dad.” Rig was really better looking in profile, with a fine, almost sculpted silhouette, whereas he was almost serpentine head-on. “I swear he’s losing it. Calls twenty-four seven. Always staring at the water.” They stood at the very end of the dock, and he hooked an arm around Bolt’s neck. As casual as the move had been, the arm was full of some buried tension; around Bolt’s neck it felt like bundled wire. “I set off a firecracker on top of the boat last night. There are still sparks floating around in the dock rafters. It was fucking amazing.”

  Bolt could envision it, light arcing into the sky. Maybe last night he’d even heard it. “The fireworks dude definitely isn’t selling legal stuff. It’s too…”

  “They’re too good,” Rig agreed. His laugh was special or at least very characteristic—a raw, cynical sound. Tonight it had some extra edge. “I’ve got a few more, just looking for the right thing to do with them.”

  “I heard your dad wants to invest in this place,” Bolt said. “Is that true?”

  “Where do you think that old coot will set up next?” Rig asked, heedless. There was a strange catch to his voice when they were on this topic—a rush, like every minute dwelling on the firecrackers gave him a tiny high. “Listen, you remember that night at the graveyard? What we painted? I think this is the answer. We are the chaos bringers. The fireworks are the key.”

  “What?” Bolt could only laugh; even Rig’s veneer of cool seemed to crack under this manic enthusiasm. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.” Rig’s lighter animated again, and he ran his finger, ever so slowly, over the heat. “I have really fucking weird dreams here. Do you?” He stared into the flame, the skin of his finger growing angry. “The fireworks are the only things that make any sense.”

  Bolt snorted. “Woody must’ve gotten you the good shit this week. Listen—your dad. Why would he invest in the Destiny?”

  Rig sobered. He looked annoyed as he stuffed the lighter in his pocket again. There was something off with him tonight, some pissed-off agitation. “He wants to pour money into all these run-down mudholes. Red water won’t stop him. Seems like it’s inspiring him. He, like, never sleeps.” Rig snorted. “That’s the whole reason we’re here. To clean up this side of the lake.”

  “I didn’t know,” Bolt said. “Why does he want to do that?”

  “Guess he likes to solve everyone else’s problems. And be the boss.” Rig sat on the dock, dragging a toe in the water.

  “Don’t touch it.” Repulsed by the way the surface rippled, Bolt tugged at Rig’s collar. “Come on. Get up.”

  Rig rolled his eyes but stood back up. He glanced back at the motel. “They should let him invest. This dump needs a few coats of paint.” Rig grinned lazily at him, a challenge. “Wouldn’t hurt that junk shop either.”

  Bolt elbowed him in the ribs. “Don’t be an ass.”

  Rig barked a laugh, loud and harsh enough that Bolt stared into his face.

  There were his dark eyes, still full of firework sparks and some ill humor. They stared at each other, for too long, at too close a range. Bolt searched for something else to say, found nothing, just watched as that deep-down thing, that rage, grew starker in Rig’s look. Maybe he felt challenged, that Bolt never blinked, that he didn’t look away like Woody would have. Maybe it was something else, something he’d brought out here from home, that was nothing to do with Bolt or this impromptu staring contest. Whatever it was—

  Rig gave Bolt a sudden hard shove.

  The loss of purchase, the heartless tug of gravity. There was the disbelief too, the dull whoosh of empty air. It was like on TV, when the air lock on some sci-fi space station is released and someone gets sucked out into open, silent space. There was no chance for a final gasp of air.

  Bolt plummeted into the muddy red lake.

  Then came cold, ugly shock; water rushing up his nose. And Bolt sank, too far, too deep, too quickly. He flailed, losing one flip-flop then the other, kicking to bump up against a muddy bottom that didn’t come. Blind and breathless. Pressure pounded in his temples. Green dock light flickered through the water. Too far up. It was his only guide toward the surface.

  Bolt kicked up through nothingness. But the lake didn’t want to let him out.