And from then, every day of summer and spring when Cassie went swimming, she was no longer alone. Catfish had been there with her, teaching her to dunk her head without getting water in her nose, guiding her through careful somersaults, and demonstrating how to pinwheel her arms like a paddleboat.

  “Stay in sight,” Cassie murmured now, fingering the stretched, used lining of the waistband of the swimsuit. “Don’t swim past the dock. Don’t swim. Don’t swim…”

  The bell over the door jingled. “Hello, hello,” a man called, too backlit by the blistering sun streaming through the door for Cassie to immediately know him. Then her customer turned enough to reveal the boyish face of Jeff Daley. It was well-known from the new billboards and from the newspaper, which had done a big article when he bought the Prosper marina a few months back. He took off his hat and fanned his flushed, clean-shaven neck with its wide brim. “Whew.” He let out his breath, chuckling. “It’s hotter than the fires of hell out there, even this early in June. How are you, Miss Fairchild?”

  Jeff Daley, with his cherub cheeks and his Bill Clinton hair, came from Charlene. He’d moved his half-a-million-dollar houseboat over to E Dock when he bought the marina, and now he reigned over them all from there. He’d been a butcher once and still aged his own steaks, but he’d made his fortune opening convenience stores across the state. Now here he was, pouring that money into the Prosper side of the lake with such gusto, it was a wonder nobody heard the splash. His houseboat was twice as big as any other out on the water. His life was as large and loud as the speedboat in which he often roared across the water.

  “Mr. Daley, hi,” Cassie replied, brushing off her jeans. They were covered in hand shapes from absentminded swipes when she was elbow deep in tarnished precious metal. “Call me Cassie.”

  “Cassie, then.” She had a sense of him committing it to memory. Three months into his life in Prosper, and apparently he wouldn’t be content until he knew everybody. He leaned on her counter, grinning his lopsided schoolboy grin. His was a mercantile kind of affability—networking that led to exchanges of favors, box seats, shortcuts, and handshake deals, a foreign language of brotherhood with nuances that had always escaped her. “Mind if I look around?”

  “Of course not,” Cassie replied, hands fluttering back to her pockets. “Take your time.”

  Jeff took a stroll through her wares. He nodded enthusiastically around the store, eyes fixing on no particular piece. It was more a gesture of approval than of interest. After a few minutes, he returned, pulling a packet of Bazooka bubble gum from the breast pocket of his button-down before he stuck a piece in his mouth. The pink strip was just a shade or two lighter than his tongue. “Gum?” he offered.

  Cassie took the wax-wrapped square and unfolded it. “You know, we’ve got a lovely Queen Anne wardrobe in right now,” she tried. It had come from Charlene, just like him. There was nothing else here she could imagine him wanting. “If you’d like to take a look.”

  His eager nod returned, but he didn’t pursue it. “I’ve been wanting to discuss something with you, Miss Cassie. A little business talk.”

  “Oh. All right,” Cassie said, but it didn’t make much sense. She dealt in the old, the forgotten, and Daley liked his trappings shiny and new.

  “It’s—well, I’d rather sit down with some materials. Don’t want to just spring it on you. Why don’t you come over for supper?” he suggested. “Let’s see… How’s next Wednesday? Then you won’t have to dodge tourists on the way down the dock—just you, me, and my son. I’ve got some great filets right now.”

  “That’s kind of you,” she replied. Jeff Daley might have known her name, but he didn’t know anything else about her. “But I don’t like to go out on the water. Sort of a phobia.”

  “Oh no.” He gave her a folksy sort of pout. “That so? Well. Let’s go out, then. We can go into Charlene. Ranalli’s has the best lasagna around, or—”

  “The Grand Destiny has fried green tomatoes on Wednesdays.”

  “Wonderful. That’s wonderful. I’ll sure be looking forward to it.” He withdrew a battered leather wallet and shimmied a business card free. “There’s my number, if you don’t happen to already have it.” He smiled at her again—a charming, bubble gum–scented grin—as he pushed open the door and let a gust of summer heat inside. “Bye now. Keep cool, huh? Gracious.”

  He got into a big white Jeep, so new that the license plate was temporary paper, and with a last jovial wave, he whipped out of her parking lot, kicking up a wake of gravel, and zoomed down the road toward the marina.

  Cassie leaned her back on the door. Airy and blushing with afternoon light, her shop seemed to expand back into place in his absence, filling the space he had taken up. She popped the gum in her mouth, then chewed until her tongue tingled with artificial pink flavor. But even as a child, she’d never had the taste for bubble gum, so she spit it back into the wrapper and rolled it into a ball.

  “Smoky,” she murmured and tossed it. In a blur, Smoky was out from under a chest of drawers and after it, batting it between the legs of a dining room table. If she were small enough, Cassie might have hidden under the furniture when she heard that man coming too. Whatever business proposition he intended to serve her at dinner, she suspected she wouldn’t like it.

  * * *

  Lark kept her back to the dock, ignoring neighbors chatting as they strolled by and dock-rat kids chasing between spotlights where the sun leaked through spaces in the tin roof. Besides the out-of-control telescope collection, their houseboat had remained in an odd expectant stasis, like it was waiting for the family to come back and get started with summer festivities. Her family’s charcoal grill still perched on their dock box, a memory of rib eye smoke, rich char, and heady July evenings reaching Lark across the gap. Mom’s chimes, roofed with cobwebs, bonged in their corner. Around her, everyone else’s weekend was a distant joyful roar.

  She’d started her labors with the part of the collection Daddy had left on the front porch. The three dozen or so telescopes out there were in rough shape. Some were in cases, and those were only damp, but the spyglasses watching her from tripods had rusted necks and watery eyes, all cracks and cataracts. Even these junkers would have to be measured and then photographed if she stood a chance of unloading some of this and selling the boat. With gentle hands, Lark loosened tacky screws, lowered stand legs, measured lens diameters and extendable shafts. Anything engraved on their pocked green hulls, a brand or anything, she noted. All in all, it wasn’t that different from inventorying the vinyl that came into Goner Records from estate and yard sales, their labels rumpled and stained, long fallen from collective musical memory.

  For two nights, she’d had strange, fish-eyed dreams, loud and too bright, and woke up tired. Daddy was close in those nightmares, like an indecipherable mutter that lined her sleep. It was that—the closeness or kinship she felt when she woke—that left her gasping and afraid.

  Damnation and hellfire. She needed to get out of this dusty mausoleum. Lark only stubbed her toe once as she pulled free of the Big Dipper and set off down the dock. She passed some familiar faces: Joe, a bald eccentric who drove down from Magnolia every weekend to his minuscule canal barge near the gangplank, sauntered by with one of his snow-white ferrets draped around his neck. Allen and Josh, the twins from Slip 17, were on top of their squatty cruiser, doing chores for money. Lark had babysat them years ago when their parents went for dinner at Aunt Valerie’s, but now they were shamefaced preteens with identical acne. Allen peered at Lark over his broom handle.

  “Hey, Lark.” It was Mable, sitting regally up on her front porch, her bunioned feet resting in a basin of cucumber water. She’d had her little boat with lilac canvases down here since before Lark was born, and Mable always had some snack or another ready to hand out to passing kids. Lark had eaten many of her crispy oatmeal cookies over the years. “Your daddy doing any better?”

  Lark didn’t quite stop, ducking her head a bit as she passed. “Um—no, ma’am, not really.” She meant well, but it was an impossible kind of question to answer.

  “My granddaughter Sammy’s here for the summer, sugar,” Mable called after her. “Maybe she can help you with all that business down there. Keep her out of trouble.”

  “Ha. Right,” Lark called back, already jogging up the ramp. When hell freezes over.

  It wasn’t a long drive to the Grand Destiny Resort, which had been in the family since the 1940s. Daddy had grown up at the Destiny, and his favorite stories to tell were about what it was like to be a boy there. In 1960, the resort was in the middle of a growth spurt, a new generation’s ambition ballooning it from its humble postwar footprint. Lark’s great-uncle had built some of the cabins nearest to the water, the smell of fresh paint and varnish mingling with fish batter and chlorine from the brand-new swimming pool. Back then, Daddy’s job—a very important one, his mother had insisted—was to make sure each table had its own glass ketchup bottle in between two shiny salt and pepper shakers. Boy, did those summer folks sure go through some ketchup, he’d tell her, chuckling. Later, when he was a teenager, Daddy would sit behind the motel desk and check in guests over the pages of his Astronomer’s Monthly.

  As Lark pulled into the gravel lot, the green-and-white-striped awning over the restaurant waved to her. The high season perched on the horizon, and Aunt Valerie was notoriously a terror trying to get everything ready. The place had the scrubbed, rebellious look of a little boy in church clothes. The grass down to the lake and docks was perfect, the pool freshly cleaned. A fresh coat of green paint gleamed around the restaurant windows.

  “Oh, behave!” Aunt Valerie stomped a warped floorboard back into place on her way to greet Lark at the door of the restaurant. “Honestly, this place is just like Dennis the Menace.”

  “Up to your usual tricks, then?” Lark ran a hand over the old wood paneling. The whole family knew it was a lazy old motel. The place loved for things to go wrong. Back in the forties, they’d built the motel from every stick they had managed to carry out of their timber yard. That green wood—salvaged, orphaned, and damp from the lake water that had buried its hewn stumps—was full of mischief. But Daddy’s older sister was perfectly capable of keeping the place in line.

  Aunt Valerie looked happy to see Lark in her distracted, slightly prickly way. She couldn’t be more different than Daddy, with her direct, no-nonsense face. “Hey, honey.” The hug Aunt Valerie gave Lark was firm: sure knots tied by confident hands. She smelled like her grandmother Destiny’s world-famous piecrust. “I just got off the phone with your mama a little bit ago.”

  “Hey.” Lark held on to the bony hug. “This place is really looking summer ready.” Mom had already called and explained everything. Aunt Valerie didn’t have to ask Lark how Daddy was, and she didn’t have to tell her.

  Valerie pulled back to give her a hard looking-over. As usual, Aunt Valerie’s bangs were carefully blown out, the rest of her hair tied up with a purple rubber band. It was a blond-gray blend, a sort of oatmeal color. Oatmeal with all the fixings. The tan she’d cultivated in her youth was now permanent and leathery. She was so down-to-earth, visitors sometimes found her rude. A dustrag hung from one of the belt loops of her work jeans. “Mitch! Your cousin is here.”

  Mitch poked his head out of the office, which connected the motel and restaurant to his little grocery. “Lark!” he bellowed, replacing Valerie’s tight embrace with a huge solid one of his own. “We’ve been looking for you, kiddo. Diego nearly drove over this morning to check on you.”

  Lark had had a massive crush on Mitch when he was a teenager and she was a squirmy little kid in her polka-dot swimsuit. He’d only gotten taller and brawnier since, but the days of her mooning after her cousin were long over. Now Lark just felt a little like a garden gnome next to him.

  “Lordy. What did you do to your hair?” Valerie cringed at the faded cotton candy pink, and Lark swiped at it, smiling.

  “I just needed a change. But it was pinker at first. More Pepto-Bismol.” She had to laugh at Valerie’s expression. It had been an ill-conceived coping mechanism, maybe, but she was still feeling it. Though her punky hair had fit in better during nights out on Beale Street than it did out here in the boonies.

  Aunt Valerie scoffed. “You look like a flamingo.”

  “Come see the market,” Mitch said, guiding her through to the grocery. Started by his father before his sudden disappearance sometime during Lark’s childhood, the Grand Destiny Market had been under Mitch’s management since he broke off his engagement in Little Rock a little while back. “We’ve just done a big renovation in here to try to keep up with the new swindler over at the marina. You won’t believe it. Whole new ceiling and everything.”

  “Really?” Lark gazed around at the familiar space. There was the same old faded welcome mat Mitch laid out every morning, the fishing section with the tackle and line and poles, the floaties. There was the little case of hot pizzas and chicken strips and hot dogs Lark used to rummage in after a swim. The creaky old swivel chair with its fraying seat still sat behind the horseshoe counter; one side faced the lobby so guests could be checked in, and the other side faced the market, where hungry weekenders stocked up.

  Weekenders always descended on this place like the seven plagues of Egypt. As teenagers, she and Mitch had stayed plenty busy stocking their minuscule dairy section with milk and eggs and bacon from the farms a few miles west of them. Lark loved the plates of baked goods Mitch picked up each day from the local old ladies: Mrs. Freemire’s pistachio brownies, Sadie Simpson’s Rice Krispies treats, Linda’s meringues, Mable’s giant oatmeal pecan cookies, not to mention the Fairchild honey. They were friends, all those little treats in their plastic wrap. Thanks to the family sweet tooth—the Destiny was known foremost for pie, after all—nobody could complain that the market candy section was subpar. They had everything from horehound candy to Charleston Chews, nutty nougats and rainbow sticks, hubcap-sized lollipops, Hershey’s and Cadbury and Nestle, plus special extras: homemade chocolate speedboats with caramel stripes, marzipan houseboats (mostly for display because those things took hours), rock-candy Arkansas quartz, and chocolate-marshmallow life preservers.

  All these things were sewn into the lining of the shop, and so it was precious. Even the video rental section, a small room behind the wall of bread and cereal and canned goods, stayed as unchanged as Mitch could keep it. That had originally been his dad’s idea too, back in the day. Lark peeped around the corner. The smell of the moldering VCR boxes was comforting. Those old tapes—Jurassic Park II, Air Force One, Titanic—still made up most of the library, though Aunt Valerie had apparently forced Mitch to surrender a back corner to a few DVDs, plus one or two video games.

  This little world was built on routine. The shelves were dusted, the glass dome of the gumball machine shiny and stocked. The tiny customer bathroom was spick-and-span. But Lark could discern no change whatsoever from this so-called “renovation.” Mitch watched expectantly for her reaction.

  “It looks absolutely perfect,” she told him, giving him another quick squeeze.

  They moved into the heart of the Destiny, the ancient icy window unit shuddering to life as if in greeting. Huge rotating fans sent breezes all through the place to form a dozen competing wind tunnels. Aunt Valerie said, “We aren’t open today, but I just put some peas on. And I’m fixing pie with some of our neighbor Cassie’s honey. Remember her? I bet you’re starving to death.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Food please.” Lark slid onto one of the red vinyl barstools at the restaurant counter, the gleaming pie case rotating enticingly behind it. “Cassie. She runs Fairchild’s Treasures, doesn’t she?” Cassie had long been a presence Lark was aware of without truly knowing, a neighbor girl with an oddball young mom and a mild look of panic at any social gathering.

  “Yeah.” Mitch was straightening the stand of pamphlets featuring local attractions. “You should see the old stuff she repairs over there. Stuff most people’d just throw away. Makes good money too.”

  “Oh really?” Lark took a slow spin on the stool, taking in the restaurant that belonged on a 1950s road trip postcard. Down the hill, Valerie’s business partner, Diego, crouched at the back end of the old swan paddleboats, giving them their annual coat of paint. Lark had always loved those swans bobbing along the lake like a bevy of puff pastries. She rotated back to Mitch. “You think she might be able to help me out with Daddy’s telescopes?”

  Mitch and Valerie exchanged an unmissable glance. “I’ll call and ask her,” Mitch said. “I’m sure she’d at least have some advice. Who knows? Maybe she’d want to buy some for the shop.”

  “There, now. That’s a good idea.” Valerie plunked a huge glass of sweet tea in front of Lark, hands on her hips. A turkey club complete with pickle spear had already appeared on the counter in front of her. “Now sit still and eat something.” She was already halfway back to the kitchen to check on her peas. “Just like your daddy, too busy thinking to eat anything.”

  Lark winced, half the sandwich already crammed into her mouth. But Valerie was right: Lark’s mind was already down the road, knocking on the door of Fairchild’s Treasures.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Cassie was napping, her book over her eyes as a sun shield, when the bees roused her. She felt them circling above her like a little cyclone, and she lifted herself out of gauzy dreams, no more than brief flashes of color, sound, and familiar laughter coming from the water. Three bees had settled on the end of her braid; from a distance, they might have looked like a decorative flower. Cassie stretched, back bowed against the warm roof of the RV, and rolled toward the edge. She caught the railing and shimmied down until her feet found first the open windowsill and then the cinderblock she had propped on its head as a makeshift step stool, and she hopped to the ground.