But there were so many. All silent. They walked through the glass sliding door, which hung ajar from the jolt of the collision. The inside was a battlefield. The boxy early millennium TV had fallen from its place and lay busted on the ground beside couch cushions, as was the barometer that usually stood beside the neglected captain’s chair and the coffee maker. Coffee grounds dribbled under the unreliable dishwasher. Lark’s mother’s blown-glass vase, once buttressed on the kitchen table by telescope cases, had been thrown against one of the windows and lay shattered on the ground. And amid these things, every telescope Lark had neglected was on its side, unmoving. Stands were toppled, lens caps displaced. Several of the delicate tripods had snapped. Glass crunched beneath their feet. She swallowed, bracing herself on one of the chairs.

  “You took great care of this place.” Aunt Valerie was stoic, as strong as her coffee. A little broken glass couldn’t get under her skin. “Sit and rest. I’ll get a broom and get this glass out of here. Mitch will be right back. We can get it all fixed up in no time.” She checked the time on Mama’s dangling kitchen clock. “Then we’re gonna call that realtor and get her in here to take a look.”

  “But—” Lark’s lip trembled. “It’s not time yet.”

  Valerie hunted for a broom in the cramped utility closet. “It’s time. Past time.”

  Lark gazed around at the destruction, this new world throwing the futility of her summer’s work into stark relief. “I’m not done. I’m not—ready.”

  Valerie had fought a broom out from the tangle of appliances. She leaned on it, casting a thoughtful glance around at the Big Dipper. Very lightly, she touched Lark’s hair. “You’ve got another home here, baby. It’s time to let this one go.”

  * * *

  Though the rain had stopped, as if the clouds were simply wrung out, the gray sky was still swollen like a punched cheek. Bolt felt just as finished. Cassie pressed fresh gauze to his side and the honest-to-God stab wound there. He was propped against the dusty headboard, where he’d slept that night for the first time all summer. Faded daffodil sheets. The mobile of red mechanical cardinals Grandad had made him when he was a child. A family picture on the wall.

  “The box was—”

  Cassie nodded. “Yes.”

  “And she was…”

  “She loved him. And she died too young.” Cassie tightened the fresh bandages. On the floor below them lay unused gauze, Cassie’s first shaky attempts from the night before, like bits of wrinkled snake skin on the carpet. “You saw her,” she reassured him. “You saw everything I did. It was real.”

  He’d seen Cassie, who could barely look at the lake, take up an eerie burden and wade into the water she’d feared for Bolt’s whole life. He’d seen her walk straight toward the girl in the water, a girl so angry and hurt and as dangerous as raw nature. Cassie had held out the chest, and the girl had taken it, cradled it against her body. She’d bent like a willow tree over it, tracing the rough letters carved into the grain. Cassie had stood there, watching as the girl turned away and walked into the water. It had come up to her chest, and her hair had billowed like moss. The water had lapped at her shoulders. But it was tamer, no longer the storm swells it had been, the kind that could drag you under with an alligator’s brutality. Cassie had stayed in the wakes, a faithful witness as the girl vanished under the surface and out of sight.

  “She was there all the time. She was real, and we didn’t believe you,” Bolt started, some kind of apology still swirling, amorphous emotion in his head.

  “You were a child,” Cassie replied. “It was unbelievable. Arms up.”

  He lifted his arms gingerly so she could wind the new gauze around his ribs. Her hands were gentle and reassuring. “I think I was hearing her call to me,” Bolt admitted. “Sleepwalking. Like he did.”

  “He probably heard her again near the end, when he was forgetting things. I don’t believe she meant to hurt us, really,” she said. “And she won’t now. I think you’ll sleep just fine.”

  If Cassie said so, if she was sure, Bolt could be too. He suspected he’d only witnessed the very end of a long train of horrors. But Cassie was calm to the bone, in a way she had never been before.

  She tucked one end of the bandage into the others, pulling it to a neat close. “I’ll sell some of the land if you want,” she added out of nowhere. “If it’ll help you. After all this.”

  They hadn’t talked about it, that last, greatest fight or what they both believed had become of the pearls, what the man they both knew was most likely to have done with a bounty like that, grieving all he’d lost to other men’s greed and fear. It had gone unspoken, with everything else.

  Before Bolt could think of an answer, his phone buzzed with an incoming message. It was Sammy.

  Jeff Daley, king of the lake, she texted him, was dead.

  Rig had wandered home after a night on the dam, lost in the woods, people were saying. No one had noticed him coming onto the wreckage of Echo before he saw his father’s arm, wristwatch still ticking, jutting from between the hulking bodies of his houseboat and the next. Rig’s mother was driving up from Little Rock, where she owned a little interior design company, to collect him.

  Cassie read the stream of messages over Bolt’s shoulder and then tucked him gently against her, like when she’d read him stories as a kid. “What do you want to do?” she asked.

  Bolt should have been thinking about the man he’d known and admired once upon a time. But all he could think of was Rig. It was hard to connect the Rig who’d sunk a knife into his side with the one he had met all those years ago in school, the offbeat little artist with too much intelligence and not enough outlets. For all he seemed like a vagabond, a shiftless drifter, like the fireworks man, Rig had never lived away from the security blanket of his wealthy father.

  “I want to see him,” Bolt decided.

  So he let himself into the empty Grand Destiny kitchen early, turned on the ovens, and borrowed one of Valerie’s aprons. She’d taught him all her little tricks, how to fold blueberries into sugar and vanilla and then into a piecrust, always made from scratch. Magic, she called it. The magic of her great-grandmother’s crust was the cure for all ills.

  Cassie didn’t understand why he had baked a pie. She certainly didn’t understand why he’d want to go see Rig. But she agreed to drive. Bolt held the pie on his lap, and they cruised around the basin to the docks, hopping puddles and dodging waterlogged bumps in the road, jolting his wound. The windows were down, and the day was still and muggy. They hurtled around a craterous bend.

  Cassie parked in the lot beside a Ford Explorer, left her engine still rumbling. There was a bee balanced on her ring finger.

  “I’ll wait here,” she said, which wasn’t surprising. For all her bravery the night before, there were still quite a few people around, and she didn’t thrive in a crowd. “Unless you need me.”

  “No. I won’t be long.” Bolt hopped out, pie in hand, and started the walk down to the half-drowned, still-reeling Echo Dock.

  The sight was dramatic enough that he paused, sucking in a breath. The neighboring dock hung at the wrong angle, like a broken arm, dislocated entirely from its hinge on land and yet fused with E Dock where it had swung with such force. The water was so high, it had devoured the nearest trees, and the gangplank was low and soggy. Out on the water, workers on boats attempted to disentangle the two docks, doing battle with a new formation of roots that clung on like stubborn old growth. Occasionally a crash or the scrape of industrial ruins echoed over the lake.

  Bolt held the pie, the glass dish still warm on the bottom, picking over the patchwork of broken dock and ropey roots. It was dark and silent. No electricity. The houseboaters spoke in low, careful tones. He saw Valerie on her brother’s boat, sweeping up glass, and she paused to hug him and peck his cheek.

  “I don’t know what to say to him,” Bolt admitted, gripping the pie tightly.

  Valerie laid a hand on his back. Any anger at his disappearance the night before was washed away in relief that he was all right. “There’s no right thing to say. That’s why you brought the pie.”

  Jeff Daley’s slip was the last on the dock, twice as long as any of the others. Rig had liked showing that off in his typical blasé manner. He’d never explained why he preferred Rig to Ritchard, but maybe the nautical name had been tied to the houseboat. Or perhaps he liked it because it was like naming himself a cheater, a person who could always rig the game. Bolt had never asked about that either.

  There were a lot of people on the Godfather, or at least, what was left of it. It looked to be a whole room shorter than it had once been, the back deck and back bedroom totally crushed. Daley’s family and friends were crammed into the rest, a solemn gathering with his ex-wife, Rig’s mom, reigning in the middle. She looked small, her thin face drawn and framed by a gleaming curtain of dark hair. But there was no sign of Rig there among his family.

  Bolt found him on the roof, staring out at the crumpled wreck of the houseboat’s back end. The frenetic, horrifying energy of the night before had drained away, and Rig was just a kid again, bony shoulders hunched in on themselves, his hands still for once.

  “Hey.” The pie was making Bolt’s hands clammy.

  Rig glanced up at him, his eyes dull and red. He took in Bolt, the pie in his grip, and then looked back at the water. “Hey,” he said.

  “I brought a pie,” Bolt offered. “Oh hell. Rig…”

  “I told you he’d been acting like a psycho,” Rig snapped, wrapping his arms around his legs. “I was at Woody’s after we saw y’all.” An explanation—an alibi. “That was pretty out of control out there.”

  “I wouldn’t know. Someone stabbed me,” Bolt said before he could stop himself. He winced and took a long painful breath. “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Yeah. Well…” It wasn’t in Rig to apologize. He gave a forced, slightly soggy laugh. “Weird summer, huh?”

  It was all he’d get from Rig, who had never been much of a giver. We spent our days on the water or shooting firecrackers—weird summer! I stabbed you last night, and my dad died—weird summer! I don’t know what got into me—weird summer!

  And yet what did Bolt have to offer him? Forgiveness for wounds Rig didn’t care about? There had to be something. In these situations, wasn’t there always something to be done, some comfort to offer?

  At a loss, Bolt rested a palm on Rig’s back, tucking the pie against his stomach.

  It felt wrong.

  Pressing his lips together, Rig looked up at him, eyes glassy, and nodded. “Um. Thanks.” He swallowed. “For coming.”

  That felt wrong too. They were just kids playing adult.

  “Take care,” Bolt said. “You don’t have to eat the pie if you don’t want to.”

  Rig snorted and didn’t answer until Bolt was halfway down the stairs. “Probably will.”

  When Bolt returned to the parking lot, Cassie was parked where he’d left her in that dusty old El Camino, her window open. Hadn’t there just been one bee? Now two crawled around the collar of her cotton shirt. But she looked happy, twirling her fingers in the wind.

  “Okay?” Cassie asked, gaze huge and concerned on his face.

  He nodded, pulling the seat belt across his ribs with a twinge. He pictured the return of spring, Cassie’s bees building a new hive, exploring a world of wildflowers around grassy fields. He remembered Grandad, who used to take him fishing on his birthdays, and the serene coves where they’d laid down lines under the green umbrellas of those April trees. And those velvet-soft nights when Mom, Valerie, and Grandad would sit with their feet in the Grand Destiny’s pool, and tucked safe in bed, he and Cassie would hear them belting out Dolly Parton, all the way up the hill.

  “I don’t want to sell the land,” he admitted in the safety of the cab. “I don’t want to wake up one day and not recognize this place.” He glanced up at her. “Do you think that’ll cost me?”

  Cassie smiled as she checked her rearview mirror, and he could tell she was quietly, painfully relieved. “Not even for a second.”

  * * *

  Aunt Eliza and June drove cautiously down drowned roads toward the church, Eliza’s knuckles on the steering wheel telling the whole story of her long night, her panicked search. There had been power outages and flooding all around the lake, so some people were sheltering at the church. She’d heard where June was from one of the F Dock refugees. She’d heard about the miracle, roots that sprang from the water to hold the docks down. People were already scoffing, saying clearly it was old growth that had been caught up by the swinging F Dock, a trick of luck and nature. June didn’t say a word, still feeling the thrum of their creation in her body.

  “Phones out, power out, lightning and thunder—” Eliza took a shivering breath, wiping at her eyes again. “What were you thinking?” She reached over to give June’s hand another tendon-cracking squeeze, anger—but mostly a bone-deep relief—contained in the grip. “You’re lucky I didn’t call your mama. Another hour and I would’ve.” They whooshed through another puddle so deep, it was nearly a pond in the middle of the road. “Did you hear somebody died? What if—what if that had been you?”

  Eliza’s mixed concern and anger washed over June, and she closed her eyes. The storm had dried cold on her skin, in her clothes, and the stench of fear was everywhere around her. She was more wrung out than she could remember being in a long time. Listening to the pitch of Eliza’s voice, it occurred to June how very rarely in her life she was truly exhausted.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “Really. I should have called.”

  Eliza glanced at her, reading the fatigue that must’ve shown in every line of her. “You could’ve tried,” she relented. “Service was out. Let’s go home so you can get some…” They were at the corner, ready to turn into the church lot. But across the street, just a little farther down the road, the Bag of Tricks Traveling Pyrotechnics Co. truck curved across the gravel lot of Fairchild’s. “There’s that truck again,” she murmured. “I saw you on his barge last night during the show.”

  “Yes,” June admitted. She pinched the bridge of her nose. “I…paid for it. I was stupid. The things I saw last night made me wish I’d never—” She could still see those under the water, their silent grief. “I didn’t believe in ghosts before. Not really. But now…”

  Eliza didn’t scoff or shrug it off. She watched the truck through the windshield, unblinking. After a moment, Jack came around the back, unrolling the tarps, adjusting a strap. “You never met Great-Granddaddy,” she said thoughtfully. Her voice was very calm. “He told some strange stories about this town. Drifters, dealing in magic tricks and trouble.” Her fingernails, painted a dusky blue, tapped the steering wheel. “I think it’s time for that man to go.”

  She passed the church lot and turned into Fairchild’s, parking alongside the truck. Jack looked up, nonplussed. There was no tent set up now. Had he passed the storm in his truck?

  “What are we doing?” June asked.

  Aunt Eliza didn’t answer, just jerking her seat belt loose before ducking out of the car and striding over to where Jack stood chewing his lip. She was tall, nearly as tall as he was, standing there in the mist.

  The car was running. June cracked her window, wet air whipping her face.

  “I think you’ve been here long enough,” Eliza said.

  Jack reclined on one foot, appraising her, still wearing his quiet smirk. “You’re the reverend these days, huh? Trying to fill old Hiram’s big shoes?” June’s mind flitted to that proud face, those brown hands around the sunflower stem. Somehow he knew. Or remembered.

  “That’s right.” Eliza faced him head-on, so June couldn’t read her face, but she could imagine it, the unflappable stare, the stillness. “My great-grandfather watched over this place. We had people here. So I came back.” A pause spread out between them. “Why did you?”

  His lips only twisted. “That was some show last night. What did you think?”

  “I think you better stay away from my niece.” Her voice had an edge now, a knife blade beneath a calm surface. It was full of power, maybe a special kind of force she’d learned standing at a pulpit. “You’ve done enough here. Move on.”

  He stared at her, and for an instant, his eyes flickered to settle on June, waiting in the car. He nodded to her, and it was to her that he spoke. “I’m all packed up anyways. There are always other places to go.” He was a thing that kept on and on. He just carried his tricks from one town to the next, and he never stopped.

  June caught the door handle and shoved it open. After the solidity of the earth, she would never chase fire again. “Not for you,” she snapped. “No one needs you here, and wherever you go next, they don’t need you there. I don’t need you.”

  He didn’t have an answer to that, only stood there, very still, holding her gaze as long as she would give it to him. He was very old and shabby.

  Eliza turned and walked back to the car at a steady pace. She got in. They used the half-mud gravel to turn around.

  When June looked back, she couldn’t help but see how lonely he looked there.

  “I’m proud of you, honey,” Eliza said. They drove. That was the end of it.

  She turned to Aunt Eliza. “I want to show you what I’ve been doing in the cemetery.”

  June dreaded seeing what havoc the storm had wreaked in her garden. It had ripped F Dock across the water, so what could it do to her new flowers? The sapling fig tree, the dogwood, the stones she’d piled into a makeshift bench: It would be trashed now. All the new flowers would be overturned, their pale roots floating in the water, and all that fertilizer and velvet soil she’d bought and laid would be swept out.

  June was always the leaver in her life, the one who roamed. In every breakup, she’d never kept the apartment. No wonder she was more comfortable in chaos, on the road, between places—she never got to be the one who stayed. She never learned how. The garden was the first thing she’d built herself. She hadn’t shared it with anyone yet, but maybe that was part of the problem. Maybe good things needed to be shared. Maybe it made a difference.