Bolt’s hands burned from the leather polish he’d massaged into the seats. Now he stood on the dock below the lifted boat, scrubbing red scum off its bottom. The red-water smell made his head swim, and he ducked to wipe at his nose. Rusty, soapy water ran down his arms.

  Daley liked Bolt because he was good with his hands, an education learned in Grandad’s shop before he’d passed. Even as a kid, the smells of polish had made him feel queasy.

  “You shouldn’t have him around all those fumes. Just because Cassie hangs on your every word doesn’t mean Bolt will too,” Mom scolded once.

  Grandad hadn’t reacted to that, other than with the wrinkles around his mouth and beetle-dark eyes, which pulled taut like a tightening line.

  “He’s all right, Dory,” he said, using the special name no one else got to call Mom. But he’d knelt beside Bolt and handed him a root beer. “Buck up, son,” Grandad said, not unkindly. “There are worse things.”

  So many nights, Grandad had been drawn to the lake, sobbing and sleep-blind as a newborn puppy, stumbling down their sloping lawn.

  Would he have gone into the red water? Would he have been dragged up by Mom and Cassie with his pajamas stained? Bolt had wrung his clothes out in his motel room sink after Rig pushed him in. He locked his door, then propped a chair against it in case the water called him while he slept and he couldn’t resist any more than Grandad had.

  He’d spent the whole night sinking in that stink coming from his drying clothes.

  “Mr. Daley,” Bolt called up. “Do you need a gas up?”

  Daley had been on his phone most of that morning, speaking into his Bluetooth headphones like he was an announcer at a ball game. He was speaking about the water with university experts, who had shut down his plans to market it as a long-term tourist attraction. Apparently the water would return to normal with time; already the shade was turning from garnet to the warm brown of Mississippi River silt. All the businesses he ran or consulted for in Charlene and the rest of the state bombarded him with calls at all hours, but the advice Bolt had overheard him giving that day shared a certain tenor, a loose-ends energy that had left Bolt antsy.

  “What was that?” Daley swept his gray hair back with a fretful hand, leaning over the side. His collar was folded up on one side. “Oh—yeah, go ahead, son. Great—yeah, great work.” He climbed down while Bolt was watching the nozzle burble in the tank. “It’s hot out here,” Daley announced, loitering, his hands retreating into the pockets of his golf pants. “This summer’s gonna make it into the record books, that’s for sure.”

  “I think my mom says that every year.” Bolt was done, as done as he could be, considering the boat was going back in the water as soon as he finished gassing it. “Hey, Mr. Daley, I’m going for some college scholarships with early deadlines. Would I be able to get that rec letter from you a few months early?”

  “Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I have a good start on my computer at home.” Daley leaned against his boat as Bolt knelt there holding the gas nozzle. “You know, I think we’re a lot alike, Bolt. I understand you, how you tick.” He laughed, wiping at his face. “Sometimes better than my own son. You know what you want.”

  The first time Rig had brought him over, Mr. Daley taught him that the lake wasn’t just cruising estate sales. It could be speed boats and waterskiing, steaks on the charcoal grill, and video games in the TV room until it was bedtime.

  He was so scared to try skiing at first, but Mr. Daley hadn’t let Rig tease him. “Have a little courage, son. The worst that’ll happen is that you might fall and get some water up your nose.” He was patient for half an hour as Bolt learned to stop fearing the gravity of water pulling at his limbs and let the rope tug him out of its hold to glide on top. He’d been the one to tell Bolt not to settle for a state college, that the world was changed by men who dared to want more.

  “Never lose that drive,” Mr. Daley urged, giving his shoulder a pat. “You know, when Steph and I split, I just wanted to make it all right for Richie. I wanted to fill our lives with new people. Help people who needed help. You know? Like this town. But…I’ve lost it somehow. I can’t…make it all come together. I just wish your—” He stopped himself, taking several swats at the air like he was batting the topic away.

  Bolt listened to the pump disengage under his hand. “What was that?”

  “Oh, nothing, nothing.” Daley squeezed his eyes shut, like he’d gotten sweat in them. As he’d spoken, his speech had slowed, halting. “Aren’t you thirsty in this heat?” He nodded at the water cooler they kept near the dock in offer.

  “I am, actually. Thanks,” Bolt said, standing, wiping his hands off, and heading for it.

  “I’ve got it.” Daley smiled benevolently, even as sweat poured down his face. He had a ruddy sheen, like he was wearing makeup not quite the right color for him. He pulled one of the paper cones from the water cooler and—before Bolt could open his mouth—bent to scoop some of the lake into it. He passed Bolt the cone, where sediment swam, the white paper already staining rosy. Bolt’s lunch rose in his throat. Still, if this was some joke, he didn’t want to leave his benefactor waiting for a laugh. “Ha,” he tried, a bit lamely. “Good—yeah…” But to his horror, Mr. Daley was filling a second paper cone with the lake.

  “To a job well done,” Daley said, tapping his muddy share against Bolt’s before raising it to his parched lips. Dead skin was flaking off them, as if he were peeling from a bad sunburn.

  Without quite deciding to do it, he slapped the lake water from Mr. Daley’s hand. It slopped once against the dock before landing in the water. The cup saturated red, then sank.

  Daley stared at his own empty hand, an almost comical—and deeply horrible—look on his face. Of disbelief, a genuine, rather fragile hurt that something he would offer someone would be unwanted. The slap of rejection. He turned his gaze on Bolt, and the look shifted, for one instant, to rage. It was the same look Bolt had seen on Rig’s face that moment before the hard shove into the dark water below the Grand Destiny dock.

  “Nice job,” came a shout from the shop door, where Rig had just appeared, grinning. He wandered over, squinting at the speedboat. He gestured with a languid finger. “Might’ve missed a spot. Right there.” Bolt and Mr. Daley looked up, and before Bolt could search for something to say to him—maybe are you okay? or, bizarrely, I’m so sorry for being ungrateful—Daley strode away.

  Rig glared over his shoulder at his dad’s retreating back. “What was that all about?”

  “I don’t know. He’s your dad. If that was a joke, it was messed up,” Bolt said, tossing the water back into the lake where it belonged and the empty cup toward Rig’s feet. It didn’t feel like a joke. “Where have you been? Blowing things up with Woody all day?” he asked, just to shake the moment off, to reclaim the summer day.

  Rig hopped onto the side of the speedboat, legs dangling. Up there, leaning lazily on his throne, there was something of Daley’s strange energy in the flick of his feet. “You missed a real show last night,” he said lightly, leaning back on his hands. “Can’t stop thinking about it.” He snorted. “Burning bees kind of smell like peanut brittle.”

  Bolt had stooped to gather his bottles and rags. He rose slowly. “Bees?” A sick red feeling crawled up his back like sunburn. “What did you do?”

  Rig just shrugged, his face twisted with a sick humor. “Woody dared me. I had no idea all the stuff in those beehouses would break apart like that. Dude. It was like putting a bomb in a mummy.”

  Even with Woody’s influence, Rig wouldn’t. He wouldn’t breach the lines built over years of friendship. “One of Cassie’s?” Bolt asked. “One of my sister’s?”

  “Huh?” Rig pushed up to frown down at him. There was a brief falter in the humor, though his legs still kicked without tempo. “Didn’t even think of that, bro. You’re like never over there. I thought you said she’s super weird.”

  “Like hell you didn’t think. Was she there?” Bolt straightened. Cassie would have been home. Of course, she would have been home, close enough to hear the attack, to see the wreckage while it still smoked. He could see her face, cracked like a plate. “Why the hell would you do that?”

  “For fun,” Rig snapped, though all the mirth had drained from his face. “Anyway, my dad’s losing his mind. The whole thing with your sister is driving him up the wall.”

  “What thing with my sister?” Bolt started toward him before skidding to a barely controlled stop.

  Rig hung forward, mouth twisting and ugly. “You’re sweating over this boat, saving pennies and begging my dad for scholarship letters, when your sister could take care of everything if she’d just get her head out of her ass.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. My sister lives in a trailer and sells antiques,” Bolt replied, humiliation choking him. “You had no right to do that to her.” How would he ever make it up to her?

  “Are you—” Rig shook his head at Bolt in disbelief. “Shit. You don’t know?”

  Bolt’s face must have given him away, because with a pitying look, Rig continued. “She owns like half the lakefront on the Prosper side. Your grandad bought it all up, and now my dad is basically screwed cause she’s a crazy hermit.”

  To that, Bolt had no response. Of course, he knew that Cassie owned the land around their home, buttressed on one side by the Destiny, and the land where the antique shop stood, and a few other vague green acres. They blended, without a landmark. But half the lake? Could that be possible? Did Mom even know, or had it been left directly to Cassie, only Cassie? “You’re lying to me,” Bolt tried. How had Grandad, whose biggest expense had been the RV, had that kind of money?

  Cassie had never said a word.

  “Maybe a few burned bees will bring her to her senses,” Rig suggested, stretching across the gleaming leather hide of the boat. “For both your sakes.”

  Bolt didn’t stay to hear anything more. He stormed down the dock and found his bike, which Cassie had fixed up for him when he was ten with her gentle hands. He’d been such a needy child; he’d clung to her side, buzzing around her all day, because he hated being alone, and he ran to her as much as to Mom when he had nightmares. Cassie, read to me. Cassie, I’m not tired yet. Cassie, can I stay with you tonight? And now…

  He jerked his bike onto the road. Rage and betrayal fueled him, carried him up the narrow curving country roads to his childhood home.

  * * *

  When Cassie slipped out of Mitch’s bed, she sensed he was awake, but he didn’t try to stop her when she left him without a look or a word. He knew her, knew that sometimes she got exhausted with people. He knew, without her telling, that she had her own rites to conduct. She had dead hives to set to rights. She had built these hives until bees came and their hum was as thick as a forest, and she had thought maybe it was enough to block out the sights and sounds that came from the water, the ones no one else ever seemed to notice. She climbed the hill, dreading the sight that awaited her.

  When she crested the hill, it was in perfect, eerie silence. No rustling in the wildflowers. The surviving hives were quiet. And two were just broken. Charred husks littered the yard, wooden frames scattered. A third hive, the nearest to the two, was marred with scorch marks. But that wasn’t the only anomaly, and something cold squeezed Cassie’s heart.

  The chest June had pulled from the water stared at her from the center of the hives. Only Cassie was sure she had left it on a protective layer of old newspapers in the middle of the double-wide. She would never leave it there in the middle of the wreckage. No, she’d run to Mitch’s, desolate and anguished. Had the boys moved it? Had they stayed after she fled? Had they touched her things? Cassie rushed up the hill before heaving the box out of the grass and carrying it to the double-wide. The newspaper where she had been sure she left it was still on the floor; a torn piece of an old Sunday crossword, half-done, still clung under one corner of the box. Thirty-four across: Banquo, Mom had written, daring in pen.

  Cassie put it down there and stepped back, keeping her eyes on it as she crossed the lawn to return to her work. She knelt in the grass, her head full of the smell of burned honey. A few dazed survivors floated around her head. Some had fled. They might not come back.

  Cassie unfolded a paper bag to collect everything too burned to be salvaged. She sifted through charred, melted wax and the blackened bodies of bees caught in it like amber. The rest—frames, honey that wasn’t too badly burned—perhaps could be saved. The bees were masters of reusing what they could.

  Cassie stood when the bag was full and immediately tripped over something hard and unmoving. She gritted out a curse, catching herself on her palms. Her forearms ached, scraped to hell but too shocked to bleed just yet. Her eyes were watery, but she didn’t shed tears. The box was back. It was in her path and caught her shins, the lock as fixed as a scowl. She wanted to scream, so badly that holding it back made her jaw ache. Cassie stormed over and dropped the bag of ruined hive on top of it, an anchor to keep it down, keep it away. She rushed to the double-wide, her breath trembling out of her.

  The newspapers were still there. A muddy rectangle framed the open space where the chest should have been. Where she had left it. Cassie yanked that door closed and locked it too, then turned. Now the blood came. She felt it pooling on her skin, saw a couple of drops fall, slipping down her thighs.

  Cassie wiped at her eyes to clear them. She had tried—when she was very young—to tell her family about what was wrong with the lake, to put words to the horror that people sunbathed beside. But there was no way for a child to explain they lived on the lips of ravenous water. No one believed her. She’d stopped with her futile warnings and stayed, trying desperately to keep her home from being swallowed.

  She took a deep calming breath.

  And then Bolt shot around the corner on his bike, his expression thunderous through the window.

  She swiped at her eyes, trying to compose herself before he skidded to a stop on the doublewide’s porch. Cassie unlocked the door, and stepped out to meet him. “Bolt. Hi.”

  He didn’t say anything. Letting the handlebars hit the grass, he stomped to the steps and then sat heavily in the shade. His eyes skated between her and the hives. “You look like hell,” he said.

  “I feel like it,” Cassie admitted.

  For a moment, the only sound between them was the distracted buzz of a honeybee landing on Cassie’s shoulder. Crickets roared away in the trees, never sensitive to human silences. Bolt had a fresh crop of freckles on both cheeks from days in the summer sun, though his dwindled during the school year, and Cassie’s never faded. She paused, a hard truth lodged in her throat beside an even more unbearable fear: Did you know? “This was done by your friends. Rip and the other one.” She gestured to the char on her grass, to scattered wood pieces and honeycomb burned black and curled.

  “Rig. He’s an asshole.” Bolt’s Adam’s apple bobbed. He ducked his head. “It won’t happen again.” His voice faltered, anger heavy and embarrassed. “But he told me why he did it.”

  Cassie stiffened. “There was a why?”

  Bolt pushed a hand into his hair, pressing it down against his scalp. “He said we’re rich.” The pieces began to slot into place. Rig Daley. Was that why this had happened? Because Cassie refused a business proposal? Bolt watched her. “Rig says Grandad left you enough land on the lake that, by my guess, neither of us should have to work. That I could go to ten colleges if I wanted to.”

  Cassie sighed. “It isn’t that simple.”

  She approached, meaning to sit on the porch with him in the warm, darkening night, but he shot to his feet and wheeled around to pace the short length of it. “Either it’s true or it’s not.”

  His anger didn’t make sense. Cassie couldn’t fathom why he would care except—I could go to ten colleges, he’d said. She put up her hands. “Then yes. It’s true that he left land in a trust and true that I became executor when he died. But it’s not that simple. There’s no money on hand. It’s all in property, and I don’t really know how much.”

  “Figures,” he spat out, shoulders and neck tense and red. “That’s just like Grandad. Selfish bastard. Leaves it with you, not Mom. Doesn’t even tell me.”

  He was lit from within. “Why are you angry?” Cassie interjected. “Because I didn’t tell you?”

  “No.” He scoffed and twisted away from her. “You don’t get it.”

  “Okay.” It was easy to accept that she didn’t “get” many things. “Because he put me in charge.”

  Bolt shot her a narrow, almost suspicious glance. “I work all the time.” One hand drummed on the porch railing. “Every weekend. After school. During the summer, it’s two jobs.” There were particles of wax and firework casing on the grass below his feet. “Because in my head, I’ve got to get into college, and one day, I’ll probably be the only one able to support Mom when she gets old because you’re not going to do it. Then I’ll have to take care of you when you get old. But now I find out that you could have done all that.”

  “I’ve never asked you to take care of me,” Cassie said, and that familiar anger reared. It was his worst quality, Mom’s judgment and dismissiveness reincarnated in her once-sweet little brother.

  “You didn’t have to, Cassie!” Bolt said, red creeping up to his ears. “Damn it—you live on this piece of nothing in the middle of nowhere. Mom still picks up weekend shifts at the grocery store, I’m working my ass off, and all this time, you could have helped, and you didn’t.”

  It was hit after hit, and she fought to keep herself calm, though her resolve trembled. “Grandad bought it so people like Daley didn’t get it,” Cassie said through a sawdust throat. “He wouldn’t want me to sell it to him—”

  “Grandad’s dead! Don’t you get that?” Bolt’s voice smothered the evening cricket song. “Or is your head too far up in the clouds? He’s dead, and it doesn’t matter what dead people want.” He stared at her like she was a muddy child, something small and misbehaving, and it felt all wrong. Cassie felt the thin, glass calm inside her crack and that wild-child scream rising.