“Really?” She could hear Bolt smiling, turning his words into mischief. “Why should you walk all the way down that hill when I live there? Unless there’s another reason you want to visit Mitch’s store? Besides the light bulbs.”

  Cassie yanked the next bulb out from the fixture so hard, her knuckles almost collided with her face. “Why not? He’s my friend.”

  “Uh-huh.” He tapped his fingers on the edge of the sink before he hopped up, then bent backward to jimmy the cover off the ceiling bulb there. “We should go down for dinner. What was that thing Grandad liked to get? Valerie always rolled her eyes about it.”

  “Beer?” Cassie snorted.

  “Do you remember the last time we all went there?” Bolt laughed. “He got in that fistfight with that old dude, Duke Something. It usually took him ten minutes just to get up from his rocking chair, but he was throwing punches like Jermain Taylor.”

  Cassie smiled. “Grandad used to box, actually. He learned in the army.” Bolt had been young then, seven at the most, but it had been the kind of day a person remembers, a cherry-pie Fourth of July, and Duke had said something sour to Grandad on the way into Valerie’s. Right there, amid the picnic benches and kids playing on the lawn, the chlorine splashes from the pool, Grandad had socked him in the jaw. They’d both gone down, brawling in the grass until Mitch and Valerie stormed out to break them apart then help them stand, the old men no longer hot-blooded and invincible. Mom and Cassie half carried Grandad home.

  It was a funny thing about Grandad—he had lived all but his war years in Prosper, and yet he had few friends among the people there. He liked the tourists best. That night, Cassie had lingered in the hall while Mom and Grandad split a finger of whiskey, a rare ritual reserved for only the worst days.

  “Shit town with some shit people, that’s what it is,” he spat as Mom held a bag of frozen corn to his eye. He had a quiet voice that often seemed to get lost on the way out of his mouth, but on occasions like that, hot words could come booming up from his stomach. He was as he had been in the fight, an old dragon, saving up what remained of his once-great fire. “I guess I’m shit too, since I’m still here.”

  Cassie had never gotten the chance to ask him what he meant; he was gone about a month later. But they all knew Grandad couldn’t have lived away from the water. He loved it too much. If it had made him sad when Cassie stopped swimming, started avoiding the lake, she didn’t know. He’d never said a word about it.

  Bolt tore his light bulb free with a whoop and dropped it in the bag.

  “Chicken gizzards,” Cassie said, working on the final bulb in the kitchen fixture. “Grandad liked chicken gizzards. They’re a real pain to make. You’ve got to boil them before you fry them if you want them to be tender, so they take a while, and Valerie hated going to all the trouble.”

  After a brief confused pause, Bolt caught on to her train of thought again. “She always complained,” he remembered.

  “But she made them every Sunday for him.”

  “Maybe that’s what I want for dinner,” Bolt decided.

  “She’ll probably tell you to make them yourself.”

  Bolt laughed.

  Two more light bulbs joined the others. One more, in the ceiling over the bed. Cassie stepped around a pile of books to hop onto the old springy mattress and fish for it.

  “He must have been sleepwalking by then,” Bolt said, voice carefully light. Cassie stopped her fiddling and looked at him. He’d followed her over to the bed, shuffling his feet, his face a half-cracked door. “Mom doesn’t ever want to talk about it,” he said in his own defense.

  “I know,” she assured him. Mom had no qualms about saying how she felt, but this topic had always been closed, even to Cassie until she trembled from holding back the urge to shake her mom and shout, This is mine too. This happened to me just as much as it did to you. “I don’t mind,” she added.

  Bolt looked a little relieved. “I can’t remember when it started, that’s all.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Cassie that his experience might have been so different, but of course it was. He was a child, and she had been almost an adult when Grandad died. “The sleepwalking wasn’t new. As long as I can remember, Grandad would sleepwalk.”

  Bolt raised his eyebrows; this likely wasn’t the story Mom would have told anyone. It wasn’t the one she knew.

  “I used to hear him outside at night because the RV door squeaked,” Cassie admitted. “He’d go, and then later, after maybe an hour, he’d come back. But about a year before he died, he stopped bringing himself back.”

  He had to be moved to the double-wide then. So many nights were cut with the loud, confused bawling, like an infant’s, blind and deaf to everything outside itself. So many nights, Cassie and Mom would be roused to stumble out of bed and rush outside.

  “Come back,” he would call distantly over the water. “Don’t leave me, come back…” Grandad was physically strong even then, and it took the two of them to wrestle him back. Though she was a teenager, Cassie couldn’t get in the water, not even for him. She could only kneel on the dock, pleading, waiting for Mom to wade mulishly in and drag him, stumbling, close enough that Cassie could hook on his collar or wrap her arms around his shoulders, and the two of them together would urge him back onshore then up the steep hill toward home. Once, when he’d been almost waist deep, Mom hooking her arms around his stomach like a linebacker, her feet tangled in the underwater weed, and they both went under. Cassie was nailed to the dock in horror, too petrified of the water to jump in, splinters piercing her fingertips until, finally, they’d come back up and she grabbed Mom’s hand and helped pull them both to safety. Afterward, Mom had screamed at Cassie on the lawn so loud and so long, Valerie had rushed outside with her shotgun, convinced someone was being murdered.

  “It’s a miracle he never killed himself, walking into the water like that,” Bolt said softly.

  “We couldn’t get him to stop.” Cassie freed the last light bulb and dropped it in the bag. “He never remembered it in the morning either.”

  Bolt frowned at the floor.

  He was less comfortable with silence than she was, so Cassie broke it. “If you want chicken gizzards, you’d better tell Valerie now.”

  Just like that, he perked up. “Want me to tell her to make enough for two?”

  “Sure.” Cassie smiled at him. On his way out, he plucked one of her black-eyed Susans and tucked it behind his ear. He batted his eyelashes at her before jogging down the hill.

  All in all, she exorcised ten bulbs from her RV before her lungs unspooled in relief. For a moment, Cassie stood out in the sunlight. A pair of bees returned to sit on her sill and tickle the air inside her home with fragile wings, a benevolent sign of the natural state restored. Cassie let out a long slow breath and tried not to think anymore.

  Before Mom had gone back to Louisiana, she’d cupped Cassie’s cheeks with firm hands and gazed at her for a long time.

  “What is it?” Cassie asked.

  “You hold your whole heart in your eyes sometimes,” Mom replied. One of her thumbs followed the high end of Cassie’s cheekbone. Mom had said that before, when Cassie had been young. Hearing it again now had felt funny in her gut, in her chest, even in her elbows and wrists. “You know that, out of the whole wide world, you and Bolt are what I’ve got, right?”

  It was as close to an apology as Mom could speak. Sometimes, Cassie thought maybe the two of them weren’t so different. It was hard for Cassie to say the most important words too.

  * * *

  Lark had seen something through the telescope. A vision. A hallucination? Something.

  She lay on one of the fraying deck chairs atop the Big Dipper. It’d taken half an hour with the tweezers to get all the glass out of her palm, and even a few days later her hand felt raw. The night stretched around her, a hand grabbing the docks, the distant bank, and the green trees beyond. It was all air out here, a free fall. She took a deep breath.

  Lark remembered the storybook summers of her childhood, drowned in daydreams, hours flowing by and ignored like they’d last forever. Endless games of Skip-Bo huddled around the table in still-damp swimsuits, homemade ice cream on the deck, sunset boat rides to watch the fireworks. Magical temporary moments that had felt completely normal. Mom opening a bag of Cheetos. Doris Ann lumbering across the dock to tumble into the speedboat for a ride. Now, afloat here, looking through the lenses Daddy had left behind, Lark felt life transforming into a fragile waterlogged fantasy of a different kind.

  She was on her father’s path.

  Since Sammy smashed the telescope, Lark’s dreams had gone haywire. She stayed up late to avoid the wild crush of indecipherable images, the blur of color and sound that seemed to travel through murky water. She woke to find the telescopes spinning out of control on their stands. She’d sat up in the bed, shivering, stomach turned to acid. And yet—

  She couldn’t leave. There was still so much to do, so many more boxes to fill before they could sell the boat. This summer daydream turned nightmare was an asset they just couldn’t hold on to anymore. And she hadn’t solved it yet, any of it. What had this place done to Daddy?

  What was it trying to do to her?

  She couldn’t shut the door on this. Every staring match she had with these spyglasses had something to tell her. Some secret to share. Terrifying as that was, Lark couldn’t walk away. Did that mean her aunt and cousin and mom would be down here in a few weeks carrying her out like Daddy?

  Lark hadn’t seen it. She’d been in Memphis when they came to get him, after his radio silence had scared them all. But she and Mom were too close for her not to know all the details. Dried blood had striped his cheeks like tears. They still couldn’t get a straight answer from him about what had happened to his eyes.

  Lark held a pair of mother-of-pearl binoculars, which had gleamed knowingly at her earlier in the day. A smarter woman would throw it in the lake, leave this boat to rot, and never look back.

  But maybe Lark really did have too much of her father in her. What if he hadn’t been driven mad out here? What if he really had been under attack?

  She stared up at the stars, and they trembled, tiny water droplets on a dark window, barely there, like they might slide off at any moment and disappear under the horizon line in glistening trails. Most of her telescope companions were sleeping, their shafts drooping, not bothering to track her. The ones up here on the top were some of the largest, some of the most science-fictional. The longest was much bigger than Lark, its bronze stand glinting with an elaborate tarnished pattern of filigree. The lens at its end was probably two feet wide, at least. Dad had loved that one. He and Lark would look through it together at any kind of eclipse, planetary phenomenon, or comet. On a clear night, the telescope made the craters on the moon as big as soup bowls.

  They were on the wrong side of Echo to see the dam from the top of their boat; concealed by the dock’s tin roof, it was ever present and yet hidden from view. They kept their eyes fastened on other things.

  The collection was different now than in her childhood. She’d looked once, and now the can was open and the worms were out. Maybe a more grounded person, like Aunt Valerie or Mitch, could have caught a taste of this dream and then abandoned it. But Lark couldn’t just leave it there after what she’d seen. Hands trembling, her bandaged hand still stinging, she took the small mother-of-pearl binoculars from between her knees and held them up to her eyes.

  The first thing she noticed wasn’t the image, which was a fuzzy and abstracted view of one of the houseboat’s navy tarps. It was the smell. The binoculars had soft leather grips around their shining shell inlay.

  She lifted her head, shoving the binoculars up at the Big Dipper in the sky. Through their low magnification, the constellation set in the darkness wasn’t a void but a close embroidered presence. White stars reached for one another with delicate frilling arms, a drapery of white lace. Doilies as big as galaxies, gentle as a whispered word. Mother-of-pearl, as if made from the shells of mussels that had lived in this water.

  Lark set the binoculars down a moment, waiting for her pulse to slow a little. She checked herself over and stared at her hands. She could still stop, couldn’t she? That could be the end of it. She shifted, crisscrossing her legs, bracing herself. Then she lifted the binoculars again.

  Now they pointed at the dock across the way—D Dock. At first, there was nothing but the still night. The wind seemed to kick up. She scanned the line of boats, the fanning dock lights in the water. She was losing her nerves under that lacy starscape. She needed to go in, go to bed. But then—

  Lark started, nearly dropping the delicate instrument in her hands. Figures—there were people trudging along the roof of D Dock. She leaned forward, pulse hammering through her eye socket. They hung suspended, feet dipping near the tin without quite touching it. A dozen or so, in old-fashioned rags, torn and faded overalls, molding linen, skirts stained at their base. The desiccated forms hunched under the weight of a small dingy coffin. It was black and distended, as if it had already spent a long time submerged in some primordial bog. The pallbearers moved at the rhythm of a funeral dirge until they reached the end of D Dock. Pallid faces slack, eyes dead, they handed their small charge down into the darkness below.

  There was a splash from the nearest shore, and it took everything in Lark not to scream. “Damnation and hellfire,” she snapped, clutching her chest. She threw the binoculars down on the deck chair and shot up. It was late; no one should be out now. Any ghost who came this way would get a telescope to the skull, that was for sure—

  There was a ripple out past the docks, in the cool open, in the bear-paw swipe of shallows that curved around the deepest, bluest part of the lake. Lark had begun to think she’d imagined it, the shadows and the spyglasses playing tricks, when in the distance, someone rocketed out of the water with a huff for breath and pushed long seaweed strands of hair out of her face. She bobbed in the water once, twice, and then dived again, vanishing with a tiny flip of her ankles.

  Who was swimming in the middle of the night? Lark peered through the nearest telescope, but the lens was as yellow and opaque as a mud puddle. Quietly, she climbed down from the top of the Big Dipper and onto the back deck, still squinting through the darkness.

  The woman appeared again, swirling around in the water. She slapped it with a loud, carrying curse and then dived again.

  Lark couldn’t know if she was real or not, but that flat-handed smack against the surface of the water had sounded real. What was she doing out there anyway? The vision in the binoculars’ stare had ended right there at the water, right where the woman dove. Lark had to find out for herself. Because she had to know. Because she wanted to know. Because her Daddy wasn’t just some traumatized old man who’d hurt himself. She would go deeper here, dive in. Maybe there was some truth he’d left for her. Quietly, Lark hopped into her shabby little dinghy tied up beside the houseboat and rowed the hundred yards or so into the water to check it out. It had a small motor too, but she didn’t want to disturb the night.

  Soon she could draw up beside this diving expedition. “Hey,” she said, when the woman surfaced yet again. Lark’s boat sent moonlit ripples out toward the rocky beach and smelled strongly of rotting rope. “Are you okay?”

  The stranger looked a little surprised to see her, swimming close enough to grip the edge of the boat. She was naked, bare shoulders in the water and totally unconcerned with it. “Hi.” She swiped water droplets out of her eyes.

  Lark almost laughed but ended up just gaping at her, mouth slightly open as if the laugh might escape at any moment. She didn’t recognize her from among the lake’s old familiar faces. “What are you doing out here?”

  She had a rich, lively gaze, focused as a spotlight. “Diving. I’m actually getting tired, so you came at the perfect time. Hold on.” And with that, she vanished again.

  “Wait, why are you—” But there was no point. The skinny-dipper had already slipped out of sight again. Lark waited.

  This time, the ripples started to fade, as if she’d been a mermaid, not a person at all, another spyglass dream in the nighttime. Then the woman rocketed up, heaving something dark and huge over the side of the boat with a clatter. She sank back against the side, clinging with her fingertips, panting for air. The boat rocked, swooping toward her. She rested her forehead on her wrist, recovering.

  “That was pushing it.” She flashed an obscured grin at Lark, a single dark eye and half of her smile. “I thought I might not be able to get it. It was lodged pretty deeply in the mud.”

  “How did you even—” Lark was too struck to even fix her eyes on the discovery for a few moments. She just stared at the girl resting against the boat. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. But I banged it with my knee when I was swimming along the bottom. Wanted to know what it was.” The girl offered her hand. “June. Help me in?”

  “I’m Lark.” She took June’s hand but hesitated. This time she did manage to laugh. The tension built around her by solitude and psychosis had eased as soon as June spoke. “Any sailor worth half her mettle knows you shouldn’t bring a mermaid aboard,” she said and June smiled, wide and surprised.

  “Excuse you, I’m not a mermaid!” June protested, then looked down at herself with a flash of self-consciousness for the first time. “Actually, that’s not a bad idea. I left my seashell bra over…” She waved at the dock. “Yonder.”

  Lark cleared her throat. “I’ll pull the boat up at the shore and let you in that way.” She gently paddled into the shallows, a dark heap of clothes coming into sight on the rocky beach.

  June hung on the boat until they were near enough for her to slip off and to her clothes, pulling an overlarge maroon shirt over her head with a wince. She shrugged into jean shorts that seemed unforgiving on wet skin. She’d barely been out of the water for two seconds, and already, the ends of her hair had begun to curl as she pulled it in layers through the collar of her shirt. “Have you ever gone night swimming?”