A pair of eyes glared out at her from among the collection. Lark paused at the gate and watched the girl lurking on the side steps in a striped tank top and jean shorts. One of the spyglasses turned back and forth on its stand, as if shaking its head in disapproval.

  “Who are you?” Lark managed, taken aback.

  The girl was probably about fourteen, tall and gangly, her tanned legs sprawling down the steps. Her narrowed eyes were the shade of sea glass, dark hair curling close to her head. Between her fingers was a vape pen, which accounted for the vague scent of cherry vanilla smoke. There was something familiar about this intruder. She had the shocked look of someone who’d grown very quickly. That was it. It could only be Mable’s granddaughter, Sammy. There was Mable’s mischievous glint, here in miniature. Lark caught sight of a tube of Life Savers, half unfurled into rainbow ribbon, shoved in her pocket. One of her hands was wrapped around the nearest tripod.

  Lark knew even before she actually did it. “Don’t—”

  The teenager shoved the tripod at her, and it plummeted to the deck with a horrible crack. Sammy leaped off the houseboat’s side and cut the corner onto the dock. The tripod had hooked the leg of another stand, and after a moment of hazardous wobble, there was a second smash. Lark dropped, her heart giving a painful spasm—and Sammy was running off down the dock, her eyes flashing back only once.

  Lark sprinted off the front of the boat. She was still holding one of the cases, and tears burned hot behind her eyes. Suddenly, what she’d been resisting, what she couldn’t even admit to herself she’d been avoiding, was no longer resistible. She had to look. Just to catch the girl’s face again, maybe see something there to explain the act. Jerking the case open, she ripped the telescope from its spotted silk lining. She hesitated another instant—she really shouldn’t—but then held the old device up to her eye, the smell of the polish on its soft leather grip and the lacquer of its fine rosewood shaft filling her nostrils. For a moment she searched in the fuzzy dimness, adjusting to the magnification. But it was as effortless as focusing her own eye. She seized her gaze onto the vandal again. There she was, sprinting through shafts of light between the dock’s wooden slats, the vape pen still clutched in her hand. And also—

  Lark’s breath caught. She tore the telescope from her face, blinking, as if to clear the stardust out of her vision. No more. Don’t look again. But it was like cautioning herself against taking a breath. She pulled the eyepiece back against her face.

  Sammy raced between shadows down the dock. And behind her, nearly overtaking her, was…

  Lark jerked the spyglass down, shaking. No. It wasn’t real.

  But there it was. As solid and corporeal as Sammy herself through the lens of the spyglass.

  A massive hurling wave. The form was as dark and dense as an oil spill, reaching for the girl, threatening at any moment to devour her, to swipe her off into the inky water under the dock. It boomed into the dock piers, forcing itself through narrow gaps as it surged in pursuit. Lark gasped, clutching hard at her chest, frozen in place as she watched the wave roar over the girl. Lark felt the spray, the secondary tug of a riptide around her own ankles.

  But when she lowered the spyglass and looked again, there was nothing there at all. Mable’s granddaughter was out of sight, and Lark was left in a wreck of broken glass. She crouched amid the glittering spray, staring down at it. Her eyes were tired, the world fuzzing at the edges. There was a panicked quake in her legs. She shook her head once. Again.

  Wake up. Lark rested her open palm on the deck to steady herself and felt the tender pricks of the glass shards. With a shivering breath, she ground her hand into the debris. Real. This sensation is real. Distantly, the sharp grit burying itself in her skin reached her.

  But the afterimage of the wave still roared behind her eyelids.

  * * *

  “Welcome home,” Aunt Eliza had said, when she showed June her little gabled guest room, where the air-conditioning was optimistic at best. The rectory was cozy, a white clapboard house that was half porch. Eliza’s scuffed-up bike was tucked beside the door, helmet dangling from a handlebar. The laundry/storage room had a definite church smell of hymnals and candle wax. Eliza still kept essential oil diffusers in every room, dispensing gentle florals. There was the picture of Great-Granddaddy holding the giant sunflower, preserved in his customary place of honor on her organ. This place—or close to it, at least—had been his home until the dam.

  Aunt Eliza never grilled June about why she was there, but she did immediately give her various odd jobs. Visit the market attached to the motel and buy granola, plus chia seeds, steel-cut oats, and Greek yogurt from the scruffy half giant who manned the counter. Jostle the Wi-Fi router. Drive into the nearest idyllic little town—Charlene, an aging debutante tourist trap—and print a batch of next Sunday’s welcome pamphlets. On Friday night, they dusted the inside of the chapel and laid Bibles in the pews for the upcoming service, and Aunt Eliza sang B. B. King—some Howlin’ Wolf too. Just a hint of contemporary hip-hop. She had an untaught, yet rich, real kind of a voice that rang when she sang the solo parts of “Open the Window, Noah.” Open the window, let the dove fly in. Like Mom’s.

  They hadn’t talked about June’s midnight ride into town. They giggled at reality TV, throwing Red Hots across the couch at each other, and set a mason jar of tea bags on the porch for sun tea. Apparently, there was no rush to talk because the talk was somehow inevitable. Aunt Eliza trusted the truth would appear when it was needed. It didn’t seem to be her job to pull it out hand over fist.

  “That art museum up in Chicago is really something, isn’t it?” she asked wistfully, sitting at the kitchen table with the fan blowing straight at her face after her morning yoga. “Did you ever get over there?” The coffeepot burbled, filling the kitchen with the warm scent of chicory.

  “Once or twice,” June replied. “I spent most of my time working.”

  Eliza grinned, stretching her shoulder out. “Weren’t you on the radio for a little while?”

  College radio—early morning coffee and shooting the breeze with the stoner kids, who played Fleet Foxes and Vampire Weekend and practically worshipped Arcade Fire.

  “Yes,” June replied, delayed by surprise. She lifted her head from where she’d been resting her cheek on the table. She brushed a single bread crumb off her skin. “How did you know that?”

  “Are you kidding?” Aunt Eliza chuckled as she got up, scooping a yellow coffee cup from a peg. “If somebody in our family is on the radio, you can bet I know about it. You think I don’t ever talk to your mom?”

  June grabbed a mug too. “Is this place what you’d thought it would be?”

  “I’m not sure,” Eliza said levelly, cream clouding her coffee. “Great-Granddaddy was pastor for the Black folks’ church, a very popular speaker.” She was thoughtful. “I’ve met a few from his flock over the years. He just had this shine on him, they say. Never stopped moving for a second. He did something for people, woke up their hearts. People’d come in from all over the county to bask in his words and enjoy the vegetable patch he kept.” Eliza sighed. “Of course, it was swamped along with the church when they built the dam.” She took a sip. “This is a sleepy little parish these days; the congregation’s tiny and mixed now. Weird combo of poor locals and rich tourists. I’m not sure if it was God’s will pulling me back here or…just me, looking for roots.”

  “I never knew all that about him,” June said, staring into the mug. “I mean, I know on my dad’s side, they can trace their lineage back a long way. But Mom never told me much, just that we were from here.”

  “That’s because your mom likes to think about the present, not the past,” Aunt Eliza said with a warm smile.

  Still, there was a quaintness to it all. Change was always diverting, which was close enough to fun to keep June occupied. But it wasn’t long before she went in search of what nightlife might exist for twentysomethings and fireflies on the lakefront. She tried to move quietly, avoiding the pool of light from the living room, where Eliza was reading with a cup of tea, and avoid all those questions. Where are you going? When will you be back? Why are you like this—

  “Try the Mosquito Bite,” Aunt Eliza called when June creaked the door open.

  Caught, June paused and backtracked rather sheepishly. “Where’s that?”

  Eliza’s smile was knowing. “Straight down the road along the lake. About a fifteen-minute walk.”

  June jogged past the church, then pushed through tangled undergrowth and short, stubby plants that looked a bit like cacti but weren’t. Occasionally, she came upon a stray flat bicycle tire or detached bumper—something scraggly and forgotten. She passed shabby houses behind chain-link fences, built far back from the road. In one yard, a Doberman perked its sharp, tiny ears and charged the fence with low, loud woofs. His owner, a skinny, browbeaten man, didn’t look up from the guitar he was refinishing on the porch. On another, a woman smoked, a can of Pepsi between her knees, and she watched June, her eyes unmoving until June curved along the road and out of sight. It was all a line of solitary individuals weathering life.

  Distantly, boat wakes hushed against the shore. The road turned a slow, cruising corner, and up ahead, a faint orange glow came through the trees. A shabby dark building lay between the road and water, with a rickety dock that looked one storm away from crumbling, a few houseboats tied off there. The sign over the door read THE MOSQUITO BITE. It had the faint grungy smell of a very cheap bar. If she licked the wood, she’d probably taste decades of spilled Bud Light.

  Curious, she went inside, and a cheesy motion-activated bass over the door started a tinny song above her. Tables and barstools gathered in low greenish light. A cluster of older men held beers in sun-spotted hands at one of the tables, and a few more were at the bar. There were fish instead of deer heads on the walls, tails pointed to the nets on the ceiling. June had the distinct disquieting impression that she and everyone else within were underwater, that perhaps the roof was truly a surface, dotted with fishing boats that dipped their nets in, hoping to pull wriggling treasure back up. As if they had all already drowned, only none of them knew it.

  June picked her way to the bar and chose a stool under the biggest catfish, though it was more of a skeleton than a fish. If she was noticed, no one said anything, just shuffled to make room for the new girl. The bartender, who was the type of wizened and dried out that came from years of hard knocks and toughening up, just looked at her expectantly.

  “Guinness,” she said.

  “Good order.”

  She twisted to face the man who had spoken. Sitting next to her, he was one of four in a line, all with sunburned faces and scraggly beards; the nearest wore one of those fishing hats, floppy and dotted with tackle and bait hooks like dangling earrings. He bent over the bar, picking at a peanut shell with scarred fingertips. “You new here?”

  “Where’s here?” June replied. A Guinness appeared silently at her elbow, already sweating. “It’s not technically a town, is it?”

  He didn’t look offended—if anything, he was amused. “Good question. It used to be a town, did you know?” He had the ambiguous, ageless quality of a man who could be forty or sixty, all salty hair and beard scruff.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah,” the next one down the line said, lifting his dusty bottle to his lips. His Hawaiian shirt was faded from red to sunburnt pink. “The dam got built in… When was that?”

  “1920,” one of the others murmured around a mouthful of pretzels. Even they looked slightly green in the low light. “Remember?”

  “No, no, it was 1930—you’re always about twenty years off. During that big sickness.” Behind her, someone paced the floor to the pool table, their footsteps strangely muted on the scratched wood floor.

  The fisherman nearest to June offered a small wry smile. His right canine was cracked and browned from an old injury. “Everybody moved out of town a long time ago. It’s under the water now.”

  “Why?” In the quiet, June felt compelled to inch closer to hear better, and she fought it off, scratching at the label on her bottle. “Who floods a perfectly good town?”

  “A perfectly good town.” He scoffed. “You ever heard of yellow fever?” The crow’s-feet around his eyes were white, like he smiled a lot out in the sun, enough to have tanned that way, and a pocket of burst veins flowed across his forehead. “Prosper got hit real bad with it back in the day. Men, women, kids, little babies, all with jaundiced skin in the end, bleeding, crying, their livers and hearts dying. Nasty way to go. Took out the whole town.” He gestured at her with his beer. “You aren’t from here.”

  “I’m not, technically,” she replied.

  Behind him, two of the fishermen wandered off to settle their differences at the dart board so old, it was missing most of its felt. The bartender kept cleaning glasses, either oblivious to June and her company or a very subtle eavesdropper. But this man looked at her with a glint of knowing in his eyes. “You ever been to a place without hope? A place just so out of luck that there’s no saving it?”

  The beer label shredded, caking under her fingernails. She wiped hurriedly at her jeans. “I don’t know. Yes.”

  “It became a place like that. Old Prosper, right before they engorged the lake. It’s hard to love a town on borrowed time. Even the dead had to be rehoused after the dam—all those graves flooded,” he replied. “Funny, isn’t it, that we built a new graveyard for the dead and didn’t build a new town for the living?”

  June leaned closer. “So everyone just left?”

  “Most did,” he mused. Behind him, the two bickering fishermen agreed that they were both wrong—the dam must have been built in ’37. They were getting up to go now, floating on the dark current of whiskey and beer and ready to close their eyes on the night. “It’s heavy. Things might have felt different, life might have picked back up if it hadn’t been for the fever. You got to understand the kind of fear that lived here back then.”

  “Fear of death?” June guessed.

  “Even worse,” he said with a jerk of his head. “Fear of a bad death. That fever was a bad death. Wouldn’t you do anything to save your kin from that?”

  June only stared at him.

  He stood, brushing off weathered pants. “It’s been years since the town was given over to the lake and years since the lake took it. But sometimes it doesn’t feel all that long ago.” He drifted out of sight. “Only thing heavier than fear is the weight of all that water.”

  June’s throat was dry, fingers locked around the bottle. Distantly, she felt a creak and sway, like houseboats slumbering on a dock, like families sailing above her without any thought to her existence, silent and present underneath. If the fisherman had meant to scare her, it hadn’t worked. She wasn’t afraid but awake and itching for a swim.

  Thwack—something cold and compact slapped down on her head. June cursed, beer sloshing over her hands, and distantly, she felt the thing plop on her lap, where it winked. It was a small irregular pearl. She picked it up. The ceiling above her had no secret mother-of-pearl stash. All she saw was that huge, monster catfish, mounted above her, mouth agape.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Once her mom left, Cassie climbed onto her tiny built-in table, braced one foot on the paisley-green-and-orange booth and carefully unscrewed the light bulb from the overhead lamp.

  She was exhausted from the visit, from the work of hosting, and it was a shameful secret relief to have her home back, ready to be restored. The plants on her sill seemed to stretch taller, the morning light gleam a little kinder. Even the bees, which had seemed to pause their work, were singing through the flowers again.

  Mom had put light bulbs in all the RV’s fixtures before she’d even moved on to cleaning everything and rearranging Cassie’s things into places they did not belong. Cassie would fix it all. She couldn’t sleep with the electric drone in her home, hooked into the walls of the RV, not when she had her collection of carefully chosen lamps, including one Grandad had built out of a single piece of steel. Of all the lights, the worst offender was the four-bulb fixture over the breakfast table because the third bulb flickered. Mom never listened to Cassie about the lights, especially the fluorescents. It was dark inside the RV at night, but God help her, Cassie could live there with her eyes closed without bumping her knees. It was all just as she knew it. She’d thought about remodeling before, replacing the paisley green and orange of the booths with royal blue, the Formica with soft, nice-smelling wood. She thought sometimes she might like copper fixtures, white walls, and big windows.

  But she never did it. It would mean removing traces of Grandad and the way he had lived when it was his.

  “What are you going to do with those? Is it an art project?” A lanky blond shadow appeared in the door. Bolt, bearing a root beer for her and an orange soda for him, both fresh from Valerie’s icebox. “Oh. Mom put those in?”

  Cassie nodded. “I don’t really need them. How’s Valerie treating you?”

  Bolt grinned. “Like a long-lost son, finally returned to mow the lawn. So many chores.”

  “That’s how she shows her love.”

  He brought her the drink and wandered, poking at the honey and wax slowly separating themselves in a pot on the windowsill. “What are you going to do with them?”

  “Maybe Mitch can sell them.” The bulb came loose, and Cassie let it tumble into a paper bag where all the others would soon be banished.

  He’d probably try to tell her he couldn’t sell the random loose light bulbs Mom had bought from him just days ago, but he would still take them off her hands, and then they’d be done haunting Cassie’s home. He wouldn’t begrudge her the trouble or comment on its oddness. Mitch took that kind of thing at face value.

  “I can take them over to Mitch’s store if you want,” Bolt offered.

  “No,” Cassie assured him. “No, I don’t mind it.”