Hefting her pack, clutching the rough rail, she eased down the gangplank, through the silent neighborhood of floating homes, and toward Slip 23, where the Big Dipper was docked. Her chest fluttered with the leftover thrill of childhood to reach it, but there was something else too—the flat clap of dread to see them, for them to see her. Throughout her childhood, the collection had always ogled Daddy, joints squeaking as they turned on their own, adjusted their myopic focuses to fix on him. But now he wasn’t here, and Lark, the next best thing, would enter their lair alone for the first time.

  Besides the carved mallards on Jerry Mason’s boat, who watched her peacefully from their perch in the front window, there was no one to notice her so late, not yet. No one was out; not a curtain rustled. There was lots of peeling paint, yards of faded canvases. The Snyder boat, where Lark had her first ever sip of prosecco one New Year’s Eve, had a FOR SALE sign on it. Everything looked older. Duke’s GONE FISHING welcome mat seemed to speak for the whole dock, as if everyone were out, tucked into quiet coves, listening through their cast lines for bass stirring far below.

  Just as she’d expected, Lark’s houseboat saw her coming, its hundreds of eyes turning their glass lenses on her in tandem. Propped on tripods, or any conceivable surface, really, the collection littered the entryway, crowded the side stairs, and jutted up from the top like a miniature skyline. The dread in her rose. It was pitch-dark, yet light seemed to catch in them, to pool in their fishbowl eyes. Lark stopped a few yards away, stunned at their number. Mom had warned her, her neck splotchy red with anxiety. The collection got totally out of hand. I just—nobody knew what being down here on his own would do to him.

  Inside was just as bad, maybe worse. Aunt Valerie had felt so guilty. He always came to the Destiny, never had me over. She’d been over once after the intervention, cleaned the worst of it. Even so, there was no free surface, no place for Lark to put her feet or lay her pack. The boat was hot and musky from months of being shut, slightly sour with loneliness and the things that had spoiled there.

  Lark didn’t bother turning on a light. Thrusting open every window she could manage to reach through the clutter, she battled her way to the guest bedroom, and then she threw herself straight on the dusty coverlet of the bed.

  It was very quiet. As if she were the last person left anywhere. Daddy must’ve felt that, in endless cycles, constantly before the audience of these things. She’d always been too much like him. Overimaginative, her teachers had said. Out in la-la land, said Aunt Valerie. Even as a child, as she’d dozed in her bed here, glow-in-the-dark stars twinkling above her, that quiet from below had been immense, a presence more than an absence. It seemed to come from the deep cold of the water. This would’ve been near the town once, almost a hundred years ago, when Old Prosper had still stood in this valley that was now a lake basin. Then the dam. And now that huddle of ruins—church, churchyard, town hall, even train tracks—was buried in the deepest parts of the lake, covered in sediment and far from the sun.

  “Damnation and hellfire,” Lark groaned, turning over to face the wall. She’d always slept best here, out on the water. She would try to sleep now. Though this time it probably wouldn’t be so easy. These days, ghost stories of the town under the lake were the least of it.

  Because like strange googly-eyed voyeurs, her father’s collection of telescopes—hundreds of them, strewn through the boat in every size, design, age, material—had been waiting for her. Now Lark was caught in their unblinking gaze.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Watery light shimmered on the ceiling above the guest bed. Angel choir, Lark thought sleepily. Country dance. Bright reflections like that, the lake’s morning jig, were a sure sign that Lark had slept in. She should smell bacon now, hear a deep roar as Daddy tested the engines or the low skid of the swim ladder being pulled out. But there was nothing. Lark lay in a dusty silence. One small spyglass, no larger than a pendant and made of milky jade, perched on the windowsill, its tiny lens fixed on her. Lark resisted the urge to snatch it up and smash it against the pale wood of the floor. She might’ve, had there been even a square foot of free floor where she could hurl it. Never look through them, she hummed to herself. Never look, or they’ll get you like they got him. As if she would. As if she’d even be tempted.

  Carefully, so carefully, she lifted herself down from the bed and tiptoed from the guest room. Houseboats on Lake Prosper came in every shape and size: from tiny shoeboxes with little more than a couch and a sink inside; to tall sailboats and cruisers with cavernous cabins; to the three-bedroom Suncoasters, like the Big Dipper, with cheery canvases and wide decks. Most of the boats were old and a little cobwebby, fishing boats roped up at the rear, swim towels drying on the backs of lounge chairs. Over at Charlene Marina, there were one or two half-a-million-dollar behemoths docked, with five bedrooms and luxury kitchens, Jacuzzis and saunas. But Prosper was almost allergic to fancy. Year after year, it was just the same old families in their same old slips. If a boat was put up for sale, it was big news.

  Lark crept down the houseboat’s main hallway. This narrow artery connected the Big Dipper’s front room, where the cooking and the living were meant to happen, to the three bedrooms. The large(ish) master bedroom—her parents’ room—was at the back, with a view of the cove and the islands opposite. From the back deck, they would swim or read; they’d watch for turtles or for herons. Between the guest room and the master bedroom was the cuddy down a short flight of steps. There were two beds there, and high windows just above the waterline. The cuddy had been Lark’s kid space, full of her books and stuffed animals—perfect for sleepovers. She’d filled it with her dreams since she was four years old, when they’d bought this boat from one of Daddy’s uncles. Now the cuddy, like the rest of the boat, was crammed with telescopes. All the living space they’d once shared had been appropriated, serving merely as a great floating warehouse for the collection, for Daddy’s daydream made real.

  Lark sidestepped a heavy modern telescope that could’ve been the Hubble’s little brother and inched her way toward the kitchen. Huge cobalt and emerald blossoms adorned every curtain, every chair, the sofa, and the place settings on the table. It was a big bold pattern that remembered the 1980s shoulder pads, a kind of loud American optimism that was difficult for Lark to wrap her mind around now.

  Prosper was abuzz with summer, and outside, Echo was lively. It was early in the season, and people were either spraying down their old things, trying to make them like new again, or showing off a latest purchase: shining new tubes from the marina shop, new (to them) Jet Skis, any variety of watercraft available to the Arkansas boater. A loud, jovial voice she didn’t recognize boomed from the end of the dock. Somewhere, children whooped and splashed, leaping from the top of boats into the chilly water. Jerry passed the Big Dipper with fishing poles and coolers and a box of crickets as he went to meet Duke, his longtime fishing buddy. A boat down, one of the Pickle sisters—the one whose name wasn’t Margaret—was painting her toenails, her dog racing from one end of her deck to the other. Doris Ann had been like that in her youth, falling into the lake every other day and then splashing mournfully until she was rescued. Out back, speedboats and party barges putted out toward the wider lake with tubes, wakeboards, and skis, their cruising playlists booming. Lark recognized many of the families who chugged by from lunches at the Grand Destiny, holiday dock parties, even a few from her school in Hot Springs.

  It wouldn’t take long for the neighbors to realize somebody was back on the Big Dipper. If the whispering wasn’t rustling between bows and sterns yet, it would be soon.

  Lark knocked over an antique spyglass and nearly upset several wavering boxes of unopened telescopes as she scrounged through the kitchen. She got the coffeepot going with some slightly stale dark roast from the pantry, then laboriously cleared off a chair at the table. She sat with a faded mug, one she’d hand painted as a child, clutched between her hands, gazing at the absolute wreck piled around her on every side.

  She’d assured Mom she could inventory the telescopes and prepare the Big Dipper for sale. Sure, Mom. Of course. No problem.

  There was a massive splash outside as a nearby child cannonballed into the lake. One of the telescopes closest to the window teetered ominously.

  So where the hell did she start?

  * * *

  Early in the morning, Cassie coaxed her blue El Camino to a grumbling start. The car knew the winding, wooded back roads from her land so well, it practically drove itself. Tourism on their side of the lake depended on that single strip of road, a loop that ran around the lake before charging off toward Little Rock. The basin road curved straight down into the marina, where it sprouted houseboat docks. Cassie parked where the forest crowded close to the gravel lot of the antique shop, then crunched across to the locked door and dark windows.

  Grandad was a Prosperite from way back, old enough to remember the days before the Damnation, old enough to have lived in the town when there was one. He used to tell her stories about Prosper, about the church bell you could hear clear across the water, and his nights spent sneaking out to lie in switchgrass and count stars, where he first discovered he wanted to fly among them. Grown up, Grandad had indeed flown a Dauntless in the Pacific during World War II, and throughout Cassie’s childhood, they’d made models together. He’d taught her the different types of fighter planes. English Spitfires, Japanese Zeroes, Thunderbolts.

  In 1964, Grandad had seen the burgeoning marina, the incoming flock of summer visitors, and bought himself some land, starting at the basin road’s turnoff from Route 380. There, he had built Fairchild’s Treasures, a one-story rectangle with a slanted roof and slightly wonky gutters. The expansive bay windows were almost too big for it, dwarfing the door between them. Dreaming windows, he’d called them sometimes. They showed you a nice, big slice of the world. When he’d died, he’d left the deed to the four acres and the title of the shop in Cassie’s name. She hadn’t changed a thing. Even the sign was the same, simple white paint on blue wood: FAIRCHILD’S TREASURES. Sometimes when she opened the door, her heart still expected Grandad to be sitting at the worktable, tinkering away in the lamplight.

  Cassie jiggled the lock open and let herself into cool air. The shop was home for the tired, the poor, the antique, the broken, the rusted. Lit almost entirely by sunlight, the front had some locally made furniture and even some kitchenware: cow-shaped salt and pepper shakers, succulents that needed loving care, her own mason jars of honey: dark, light, and honeycomb.

  Of course, only some things could stand that much sunlight; many of the antiques, all the things fished from the lake, lived near the back, where shadows ran deep. Paintings, photographs, furs, books, old sifters, and vintage dresses, including a high-collar wedding dress with a row of pink pearl buttons from nape to tailbone. China cabinets and tired dining room tables and chairs; a whole section of Remington typewriters. Ancient cameras, faded dolls and chess sets, a gleaming Tiffany tea set missing only the sugar bowl. A rosy-cheeked family of Hummels, a tiny carved ivory mermaid, jewelry that wanted badly to tarnish. She wrote tags for each one, pricing it all, every drawer of copper forks and every glass lamp that collected so much dust, it needed cleaning every day. The sprigs of lavender and jasmine she hid around the shop kept it smelling more like the ghost of perfume than mothballs or the dust of previous owners’ lives.

  Tourists liked to come, browsing for the most interesting souvenirs—better than boogie boards and pictures of themselves holding foot-long bass. Dads with sunburned necks liked to riffle through the lawn furniture and statuary. As children, Cassie and Bolt hadn’t had a dad like that. All Cassie ever knew about hers was that she had his pale Irish skin and narrow feet. But she’d had Grandad. He was the real reason Mom had moved back to Lake Prosper after getting pregnant with Cassie. As a young girl, Cassie had spent hours at Fairchild’s Treasures. When Mom picked up a day job cleaning houses or waiting tables, Grandad had acted as babysitter and teacher. He would sit at his counter with the cash register and beckon Cassie over to watch him work.

  “If you can’t fix it, give it a new start,” Grandad would rasp as he stuffed a blackened nail into his pocket. “We can make something out of this.” They made lots of little creatures, automobiles, and planes. Dauntlesses, Spitfires, Zeroes, and Thunderbolts hung from the shop ceiling, strung on fishing line, soldered together from rusted keys, screws, and shells from Old Prosper. Doodad frogs, crawdads, dragonflies, and birds were sold next to the houseplants.

  Cassie brushed her hand over the counter, where he used to sit. Once, after Bolt had come along when Cassie was ten, she and Grandad had carved their names, one after the other, into the top of the worktable. Tobias. Cassandra. They’d added Bolt for good measure.

  Grandad hadn’t just run a good shop; he had built a legendary one. Everyone in fifty miles knew Tobias Fairchild. Charlene had its share of antique shops and consignment stores, but when something needed fixing or a rare piece of the past needed finding, it was a known fact: go to the Syrian man on the older side of the lake. Strangers would bring him their microwaves, their fishing poles, rusty jewelry, once even a grand old cuckoo clock. Bolt had been in diapers and pacifiers, so he didn’t remember it, but Cassie had spent hours watching Grandad’s hands as he fiddled with this gear and that spring. They had a shared fixation, an inability to stop fixing and tweaking, even those pieces that were never going to sell.

  Cassie never felt time passing at Grandad’s worktable, only now she spent those hours fiddling with trinkets herself. Today her project was robbing an antique piggy bank, which had been fished from the water’s depths. It smiled up at her with a blank, muddy leer and faded china eyes. The moldy cork in the piglet’s rotund belly had already proved unwilling to be dislodged. She was battling the lake gunk glued around it when a burly shadow crossed her work space, casting the ceramic face in sinister darkness.

  “Okay. I hate that thing.” It was Mitch, his laugh a low, pleasant growl that filled her with warmth. He leaned his elbows on the table, peering at her project. His eyes were turned down at the corners and eternally sleepy. A few smile lines already collected around them from the sun, and his skin had a warm, deep tan. In looks, he took much more after his father than his mother, Valerie, with his dark hair, expansive face, and broad, bearish shoulders. “There can be nothing good in that.”

  “I won’t know until I get it out.” Cassie held it up—and slightly left of Mitch—to the light and turned it to catch the groove she’d been aiming at, to wriggle her screwdriver in and force the old cork out. She tried again. “If this doesn’t work, I suppose I’ll let you smash it.”

  “It’ll work,” Mitch said, setting a bottle of root beer down for her. He must’ve brought it over from his market. “Just throwing this out there: I hope it’s full of gold.”

  Even for him, it was a little difficult to put down her screwdriver, but the root beer fizzed hopefully. She’d always liked root beer best, ever since Grandad had showed her an hoja santa and its perfume had been just the same. She took an earthy, freezer-chilled sip. “Thank you.”

  “Cheers,” Mitch said, gently tapping her root beer with his own chunky Yoo-hoo bottle. He was the closest thing Cassie had ever had to a next-door neighbor. His mom’s motel and restaurant, the Grand Destiny Resort, was just through the woods from her house. So, growing up, he’d always been right there, a little boy with a serious face, tromping through poison ivy and catching crickets for bait. He’d enjoyed Grandad’s shop as a kid, perhaps because it was quiet. He would skulk through the aisles in total silence, touching old ruins with gentle fingers, choosing oddities from their shelves to ask for when his birthday rolled around. He’d given an engagement ring from the shop to a girl he’d met in college, Farha Banerjee, and they’d lived together in Little Rock for a few years.

  Cassie had never met the girl, but she remembered the ring. Gold band, an oval diamond inset with three tiny rubies. She remembered the day he’d bought it and the tight, breathless feeling in her stomach, like a spider trapped under a glass.

  But now he was home again, making some room for himself at the resort, including taking over the newly renovated Grand Destiny Market, where weekenders and locals could pick up a few bare necessities if they didn’t feel like making the drive to Charlene. But he didn’t look at the jewelry case anymore: maybe he was afraid he might see the empty space where Farha’s ring had lived before it was hers, when it had meant something else to someone else.

  With a frank mewl, Smoky appeared from the shadows, jumping up onto the desk to lick condensation from Mitch’s Yoo-hoo. Years ago, Smoky, an ancient charcoal-gray cat with a smoker’s meow, had adopted the shop as her territory. She didn’t always come out for Cassie, but she always appeared for Mitch. He gave her a luxurious scratch behind the ears and then up her back to the sweet spot at the arch of her spine. He yawned, and Smoky yawned back at him in a drowsy afternoon chorus.

  “The summer crowd is stocking their refrigerators,” Mitch said mildly as Cassie returned to scraping at the piggy bank. “We’re out of everything at the market. No bacon. No eggs. No milk. Nothing. Only VCR tapes, Tic Tacs, and those bags of premade bagels. We’re all going to starve,” he continued, glum. “More business for Mom at least.”

  The thought of food—of Valerie’s divine fried catfish, the perfect crunch of her fried chicken, her seasoned rice with broccoli and almond slivers, her slow-cooked, oven-browned pot roast, and even Valerie’s Achilles’ heel, the slightly soggy steak fries—made Cassie’s stomach rumble. Was it lunchtime? Had she given the entire morning to this piggy bank? The screwdriver finally caught. She passed her root beer to Mitch to hold for safety.