It was cold, so heavy and soundless. Hungry water. It wasn’t red under here. It was blackness, nothingness.

  Bolt lost half the breath he had left, pushing up. Reaching for air that wasn’t coming. Don’t go past the dock, Mom always insisted to him, holding him back while trying to drag Cassie into the water. But now Bolt was past the dock, long past.

  He heard it again, the formless howl of someone somewhere in the water screaming with rage.

  Bolt fought against the water that dragged him down, pulled until the pressure broke, and suddenly, he was rising, racing up toward the surface again. He burst into the air, coughing, and grabbed the slimy dock pole before the water changed its mind.

  “Help me out, you shit,” Bolt rasped.

  Rig was doubled over laughing from his place on the dock, which he somehow managed to occupy like it was a throne. Whatever Bolt had seen for that instant was veiled again, curtain drawn. “Did you forget how to swim, loser?”

  Bolt heaved himself over the edge of the dock, stumbled to his feet, and launched himself at Rig, knocking him onto the wood slats.

  “Fuck—c’mon—” Rig tried to jolt him off, kneeing him in the gut. “It was a joke, dude.”

  Bolt shoved him back, fists balled in his collar. “You’re the worst sometimes, you know that? Is it fun for you?”

  His bones were rubber. Rig rolled them, and in an instant, Bolt was pinned. There was a gentle click, and then something cool tickled his throat. Pocketknife. “I mean…” He snickered. “Sort of.”

  Bolt’s throat ached under the knife. Water licked at the dock. He should have been scared by the cool playfulness, the curiosity, in Rig’s eyes. He should have put his hands out, not just tightened his grip on his collar, fists pressing into his chest. “You’re a psycho.”

  Rig drew the flat of the knife over his cheek, eyes bright like black light lamps. “And yet I’m your only friend.”

  It wasn’t true, Bolt wanted to say. He might have been his oldest friend, but Bolt was getting out, getting away from Lake Prosper, and going to bigger places. “What are you going to do, cut me and dump me back in the water?” Bolt snorted. “Or get up so we can find beer?”

  Rig chuckled. Then the pocketknife disappeared. He got up, offering Bolt his hand. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Bolt gave him the smile he wanted but didn’t take his hand. It felt safer standing alone.

  * * *

  When night fell, June left the church. She hiked through long grass, the night air buzzing around her with the kind of heat that raised swarms of circling gnats. The moon was low and enormous, casting cinema silhouettes in the grass. Eliza had been fielding calls from her flock, all convinced the red water was a sign from God. June knew better. The problem wasn’t one from the heavens. It was from the water. The box. It sat, a bad omen, on the rug in her borrowed bedroom, leaking mud into the fibers.

  The chest had survived its long fall off the roof. June had nearly killed herself, fumbling on the ladder in the darkness as she descended, and she’d scooped the box up and carted it inside. In her room, she’d pored over it for cracks and shaken it gently to see if she heard that sound from inside again.

  But nothing. The chest was unmoved, unbroken, and closed to her. The next day, she’d woken to water the color of blood, of vengeance and violence. It was like she was living in a locked box, someplace hot and close and inescapable. Maybe that was why she’d been so determined to yank it out of the grip of the lake bed. She empathized too keenly with trapped things. She knew why they yearned to lash out.

  Maybe it was texting Lark that did it; the thought of her drew June behind the church, through the trees, seeking the edge of the water where she’d last seen her, where Lark had dropped her off in the shallows. Outside, the world was as awake as she was—insects buzzing, wind whispering, owls screeching. June wouldn’t find peace in her room, with the box there. Dropping it from the church had caused all this. June didn’t usually bother to lie to herself—her uncontrollable heart, her stomach, knew the truth. She was desperate for comfort.

  The path down to the water from the church was easily lost, gone one moment, there the next. It wasn’t much of a path, too skinny, clogged with mossy logs and a thin branch that bowed over it, and difficult to see in the dark. She was blind until she stumbled into the familiar moonlit clearing, bordered on one side by dark water. Sinking back into damp grass, June rested her head against something hard and ivy covered. Aimless, she brushed her fingers over it, rock that faintly reflected silver moonlight. Rock that looked deliberately carved.

  June straightened, turning to examine the thing she’d been leaning against. She brushed ivy and dirty leaves away.

  It read: 1900–1931.

  For the first time, not caught on the memory of cotton candy hair, not subsumed in the mystery of a box, June realized where she was.

  The land at the edge of the church, bordering the red water, wasn’t just a clearing. It was a graveyard. It was old, barely recognizable. But the jagged dark shapes resolved themselves into headstones and, occasionally, weathered, cracked statues whose forms she couldn’t make out. A cross, here and there, so swamped in overgrowth, it was difficult to make out. Once upon a time, their rows must have been straight and their plots orderly. There were probably others too covered in growth to be seen. Now the rows were gone, most of the graves barely more than broken stones, forgotten by the living. Red water encroached on its territory. Someone had left a rusted trowel dug into the ground, a monument to someone’s attempt to clear the weeds. They had been upended along half of one row and piled there, but they had already grown back, a little smaller but just as ambitious.

  “Well,” June said hoarsely into the silence. “You’ve all let yourselves go a little, huh?” She picked up the trowel; the wooden handle was warm and worn in her palm, like a hopeful silent question in the night. Like possibility.

  And then someone else spoke. “It ain’t the only thing that let go.”

  June jumped.

  On the other side of the cove sat five lawn chairs and five men with five fishing rods. One of them lifted a hand and waved, but he was too far away for June to discern whether he was familiar or just a polite stranger. She couldn’t imagine how she hadn’t seen them before; she’d felt so alone in such a large quiet space.

  “What brings you out, missy?” one of the old fishermen hollered. His voice was a bullfrog’s croak across the distance, loud, rough, but somehow allowed. It didn’t disrupt the song of the evening. The man beside him checked his line, whistling along with the wind.

  June dropped the trowel and walked to the shore, standing near a headstone barely holding its chin over the water. “Wanted to see the Red Sea,” she called over. “You guys?”

  “Full moon,” growled the fisherman farthest from her. He had a skullcap pulled low over his brow. Somehow, in this light, it looked like he had only one large eye glittering from beneath it. “Best time to catch trout. If any are left.”

  “I’ve seen you before,” she replied. “You hang out at the Mosquito Bite, don’t you?”

  “Sometimes,” agreed another of them, and this voice she recognized from the bar. She could hear the smile lines in his voice. “You’re the girl with all the questions. You come here for a story?”

  No. She hadn’t. “Do you have one?” June asked. The night air was so hot, and the men looked wrong, off-color in a way they hadn’t in the harmless light of the Mosquito Bite.

  The posse exchanged looks.

  She recognized the one who spoke. At the bar, he’d had a cap pulled down over half his face. Now, with midnight hanging between them, she could still only see that one glimmering eye. “One of the oldest stories there is.” The cyclops rummaged in his tackle box. “It was a long time ago, near Memphis. The original Memphis, you know, down in Egypt.” He pulled something out, inspected it, rummaged again. “Pharaoh’s heart was hard, and Moses turned the Nile to blood to teach him.”

  Maybe they went to Eliza’s church. Only she’d never seen them filing in and out after a service, not even one, much less all of them. But the night was morphing around her, taking on the fevered unreality of a dream. Or a bad mushroom trip.

  “Not that Moses’s trick worked. Pharaoh had sorcerers too, ones who’d discovered red food coloring a few millennia early, I guess,” the cyclops grunted as he reeled his line in to add the new bait. It rested in his palm, like a peeled egg, round and dewy under the moon. “He’d believe anything not to have to let those people go. Pharaoh wanted them there to build his great monuments of stone. Every day, they toiled on those pyramids, and the Egyptians reaped their own destruction.”

  “People’ll do anything to keep the lights on,” his neighbor, the Cajun, recast. “Even build a dam to flood their own town.”

  June shifted her weight. “Even deny an act of God.”

  The red lake certainly looked like one. Random, monstrous nature. Algae. The water had been blue, sweet and summery when she’d been diving that day she kicked the top of her foot against the blunt corner of the mysterious box. She’d ripped it out of the mud, reeds clinging then breaking when she pushed up from the bottom. She’d thrown it off the roof, and though the chest hadn’t cracked, she couldn’t shake the thought that something else, something in the world around her, had. Hurricane June striking again, breaking precious things in her wake.

  “God sent those plagues to smite Egypt, one after the other,” the sunburned one sighed, shaking his head. “You know what’s the worst of ’em, girl?”

  “Locusts,” June guessed. She edged back from the water. It wasn’t fun anymore. She wanted to dig, to clean those weathered stones, not to speak of red water and pharaohs. Why couldn’t she be that person instead, one who made the things she touched better?

  “I’ll tell ya.” The Cajun scratched his chin with the grip of his fishing pole. “Pestilence. Nothing makes folk stir up like pestilence.”

  She shook off the urge to shudder. “Right. I have to go…”

  The whistler laughed at that, his weathered, ruddy face cracking. “Sickness came, and Pharaoh didn’t do a single thing. Didn’t lift one finger.” He nodded to June. “Times like that, we do what needs done to save our kin. We let them other people go.”

  June swallowed, fear building. “Cool story,” she said, cutting as she could make it. “But the pharaoh sounds like a dick.”

  “We let them other people go,” the cyclops repeated as he threw his line, the hook and its new bait hitting the surface with a wet plop. June could hardly see their chairs now through the fog. She could imagine them standing in it as it rolled over the town. How could she get out of here? His words smothered her. “The dead have a tight grip on this place. Making them let go of you, that’s the trick.”

  One sunny autumn day when she was seven and riding her bike home from school, a car had slipped behind her, prowled after her, slow and deliberate. She was too petrified to look at it, sure if she did, the standoff would end and some terrible unknown would happen. For three blocks, tears filming her vision, she pedaled with that shadow hunting before she’d dared to veer down a narrow alley and finally escape. June wanted to go now too, but she was rooted to the spot, more and more unable to move too suddenly because of that terrible unknown, the violent question mark of what they might do. She would wait until she found her alley.

  The whistler’s strange fluttering song took a sudden dip, and with a splash, a fish flew into his grip. It wriggled there, eyes huge and stunned. He shoved it in the cooler.

  The fishermen looked older than she had imagined, sunburned with gray stubble, huddled among their coolers, their heads bent together, laughing, and she was pretty sure she was the joke. But she wouldn’t be their joke.

  She followed their lines down to the water, imagining dark shadows, catfish sliding through the mud. There was debris down there—bottles, sodden towels—and five fishing lines that gleamed like strands of silver hair, drifting just under the surface.

  At the end of the cyclops’s line, something pale floated on the surface, the size of a golf ball. But it wasn’t a golf ball. It was marbled with veins and had a dark iris in the center, the hook buried like an optic nerve somewhere in the back, thankfully out of her sight.

  The eye, the human eye, bobbed. The cyclops was staring at her, his mouth a gross expectant smile.

  Fury and revulsion mingled, rising all the way up her body until June broke. She stormed into the bloody water and hurled her only weapon, the trowel, at them.

  “Fuck off!” she roared.

  Silence.

  The trowel plunked down in shallows, kept company by nothing but the ferns and bending old trees.

  As suddenly as she had been visited, June was alone again.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In all her nightmares about Lake Prosper, Cassie had never imagined this. She’d spent the first hours of the unholy water’s appearance crouched in her RV, the bees a roaring cloud all around her property. She couldn’t calm them into their hives when she wasn’t calm herself. But Mitch had assuaged the worst of her fear. He saw the red water too. It wasn’t her imagination. For once, Cassie wasn’t the only one repulsed by the water. They’d spent the day firmly on land, Cassie and Mitch, finding a blackberry farm outside Charlene, somewhere far enough away that she couldn’t smell the water. And she had felt better.

  Still, she hid from the water in the shop. Today was not a day for helping antiques find new homes, or watching tourists browse the shelf of honey from her hives, or restocking her homemade candles and the novelty oven mitts and aprons that kept tourists coming in. Today, the door was locked, and the sign read CLOSED. A new box of telescopes from Lark, Box 15, had been waiting on her porch with a page of careful notes written in Lark’s deliberate hand. Cassie didn’t need Lark to make notes, but she hadn’t said. It was a kind effort to make her life easier, and reading analysis in another person’s writing fetched back the memory of warm days in the shop with Grandad. Cassie had been the scribe then, learning her letters with words like “Victrola,” “second-edition,” “curio,” while Grandad sorted through old silverware, lamps from the ’60s, and Grecian-style vases.

  Yes, he would murmur, running spidering hands over faded labels. Are you ready, bug? I think I know where this was made. Sometimes she wondered what he was looking for in all those washed-up trinkets, the junk piles he divided into trash and treasure. Cassie lifted out a newer telescope, one fit for amateur stargazing, examining its sleek white curves, when there was a knock on the window. There stood a lean, familiar shadow with messy blond hair. Bolt. He pressed his face to the window, trying to see in. He had a half-eaten breakfast sandwich in one hand, a grocery bag dangling from his wrist.

  She put down the telescope and went to unlock the door, nearly stepping on Smoky, who streaked to hide under a wardrobe. He pushed it open, letting a wash of warm sunlight into the shop with the jingle of the doorway bell.

  “Hungry?” He unearthed a small wrapped parcel from his bag, and even before she took it, Cassie knew what it would be. A freshly buttered biscuit sandwich, cheese and egg melting into one creature in the middle. “Valerie told me not to come back until you ate. Mitch says ‘please.’”

  She took it. It was still warm, and someone had drawn a smiley face on the paper in one of Valerie’s green markers. “Thank you.”

  He’d brought the smell of the Grand Destiny with him: baking apples and cinnamon, lemon meringue, potatoes frying in oil, the whisper of Mitch’s paperback pages.

  “Haven’t seen you in a while. Aren’t you supposed to be watching me?” he asked so lightly that Cassie could practically smell how hard he was trying. Trying to sound normal, trying to sound like she was normal. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. His smile dimmed. Cassie’s heart twinged. She’d been terse. “Really,” she added. “I’m no worse than usual, even if the lake is.” It was sweet of him to come. She knew he loved her. But he didn’t understand her, and wasn’t understanding the work of love?

  Bolt sobered. “It looks really freaky out there. I keep wondering what Grandad would say if he could see it.”

  “Probably that this is a shit place full of shit people.” Cassie sighed, unwrapping her sandwich and tearing off a corner. “Or that it’s karma. Somehow.”

  He nodded. “I’m fine too. By the way. If you care.”

  That didn’t sound fine. Cassie raised her head. Bolt scratched aimlessly at the back of his neck.

  “Are you?” she asked. Now that she looked, there was something worn about him, a lankness. “Did you get enough sleep last night?”

  Bolt snorted, a sharp, cross sound. “No. I had a crappy night. Don’t want to talk about it.”

  Silence sank between them. Cassie peeled off another piece of her sandwich, letting it crumble. Bolt glared out the window. “Okay,” Cassie offered. What else was she meant to say?

  “I heard you had dinner with Mr. Daley.”

  “Yes.” Grateful, she grasped the new topic. “A business proposition, buying up land, developing it. I wasn’t interested—”

  “Yeah. I heard that too. You should consider it. He’s a good businessman. He likes me, so he’d do right by you,” Bolt added and then waited. For what, she wasn’t sure. For her to agree? Run out and call Daley? Wasn’t Cassie supposed to be the older one, the more responsible one? When had Bolt grown up so much, enough to give her unwanted advice?

  “He does like you,” she managed, the only agreement she could offer. “I’ve got…” She gestured vaguely to her workstation, the unfinished mending to be done.

  “Of course. Right. Don’t want to interrupt.” Bolt backed up, swiping a hand through his hair and over his clothes like he was trying to wipe off mud she couldn’t see.

  The bell above the door chimed once, and so Cassie bent her head over the box of telescopes again, putting the sandwich aside on her worktable for later. She was already spinning with lenses and tripods, when from above her, someone spoke.