“Oh yeah. But it’s been a long time.” Lark prodded the heavy thing June had thrown in the boat. In the darkness, it looked almost like a pirate’s treasure chest, lost in some legendary shipwreck. “I can’t believe you dragged this thing up.”

  June clambered onto the boat, stuffing her underwear in her back pocket, and knelt beside the thing again before lifting it. It was solid when she plunked it on the bench next to her. The box was beyond soaked, goopy with mud and weeds as thick as yarn. Underneath, it seemed to be wood. June pressed her fingers against the seam of the lid. It didn’t budge. “This is better than I expected,” she said, grinning up at Lark as if they were co-conspirators. “I wonder what’s in it.”

  Lark wondered too, a flash of real summertime hijinks in her gut. Not like the sick dread combined with hopeless curiosity that had moored her here. The telescopes waiting on the dock were probably gossiping about it all, winking to one another and whirling their screws. “I have a tool kit on the houseboat,” she offered, ears buzzing. This dream, which had started with the binoculars, was getting away from her, and Lark loosened her grip on all the reasons why that was a bad thing. “Maybe we can get it open in some better light.”

  “Good idea, sailor.” June sat back in the boat and winked at Lark. “Full steam ahead or whatever.”

  With her new cargo on board, skin prickling, Lark headed home.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When she was young, June woke up sometimes with petals strewn across her pillow. Red, pink, a dusty desert blue. They smelled like cardamom and silk, like faraway places where June wanted to be.

  “Where did you get these?” Mom would grumble, playful and anxious, sweeping them off her sheets, crumpling them in her rich brown hands. “Are you leaving the windows open again?”

  June never opened the windows. She knew, of course, and Mom knew where they really came from, but neither of them ever talked about it. They played their pretend game, that silly June had left her fifth-story apartment window open again, that the flowers had blown in from the balcony. But she knew it scared Mom.

  Sometimes Mom’s eyes would catch and worry on the back of June’s head, where petals were tangled so thick at the nape of her neck that a comb couldn’t get through it. She would quietly get the gleaming pair of silver barber’s scissors, pull June’s hair over her shoulders and—Snip. Snip. Snip. Always careful not to cut June’s hair but thoroughly slicing every blossom out. Mom would kiss her head, praying, “All I want is for you to be safe.” And June would sweep it up and throw it out the window. Watching the petals drift would make something in her heart thrum and her fingers itch. I, she would think, I am alive. I am so alive that it hurts. I am so alive that it’s growing out of me.

  June hadn’t intended to go skinny-dipping at all that night. But she’d woken up in the darkest heart of the morning and found bloodred petals tipped with black all over her pillow for the first time in over two years.

  She’d only gone to the water intending to wash them away, but then she’d remembered her conversation with the fisherman, and it had sounded like an adventure. June wandered the shoreline, and the rest of the world was black, lined sterling by the moon, and everything except for her, the bugs, and the owls was asleep. The church was near a marina, where houseboats full of sleeping people rocked against the dock. Everyone and everything were dead to the world. Except for June. The water had called to her, dared her to test it, and June never could resist a dare—

  Then a box. Then a boat. Then a girl.

  June wasn’t the only one awake and alive after all. Dressed in wet clothes, the box at her feet, June watched the flex of the girl’s arms as she maneuvered her shabby boat with care. Lark’s eyes—gray as a tarnished mirror—were sharp on the docks, chipped black polish glinting on her nails as she steered. She knew what she was doing in a boat, but she didn’t look like one of the water people June had seen at the bar or around the church, tanned and casual, with something of the South in their voices and their footsteps. Lark was different.

  She’d appeared out of the gloom shyly at first, but it must take a kind person to venture into the night for a stranger. Maybe she was lonely. She seemed a little lonely.

  “Careful,” Lark warned as she tied her dinghy on the back of a hulking shadow of a houseboat, painted in a past-midnight monochrome untouched by the buzzing yellow dock lights. “It’s a little…” But that sentence sputtered out.

  “It’s fine,” June said. “I’ve never been on a houseboat before.” From what she could tell, it was basically an RV on water instead of wheels, a nightmare for people who were easily seasick. “I have no expectations.”

  But when June stepped foot on Lark’s houseboat, it felt a little like walking into the middle of a surprise party poised to reveal itself. The space was pitch-black but full of something, presences that might as well have been nudging one another, shushing this one or that one as they jostled together, waiting for the perfect moment to jump out and shout, Surprise!

  Instead, Lark flicked the light on to reveal an antiquarian’s mechanical paradise. Spindly shapes—telescopes and spyglasses, even a couple of astrolabes—littered every surface. There was no room to live and barely enough room to breathe. And, even more bizarrely, every glass seemed trained on June like a crowd of unblinking eyes.

  “Don’t be rude,” Lark scolded, and it took a moment for June to realize she wasn’t talking to her. She was having a staring contest with some of the fish-eyed lenses nearby. And maybe she won, because after a moment Lark let her breath out, shooting June another of her shy, humorous smiles. “Sorry about the, uh—clutter. Come in.”

  What kind of person accumulated this many telescopes? Was she trying to own one telescope per star in the sky? June tapped the nearest one experimentally, and it spun slowly away from her on its swivel neck. What kind of person talked to their telescopes?

  At first glance out on the lake, where her every pore had seemed to absorb moonlight, Lark had looked blond. But her hair was fading in sunset streaks of peach and pink, a fun decision losing its steam. June couldn’t help but picture her as a barefoot and tangle-haired wild child or a pink-haired ballerina-punk teenager. But now, everything about this girl had a fading quality, like life was wearing her down.

  “Interesting hobby you’ve got here,” June said.

  “Not me,” Lark replied, to June’s relief. “These are all my dad’s. I’m just trying to get out from under them.”

  June followed Lark’s path step by step down the hallway and into the houseboat’s large front room. It was equally stuffed. Lark switched on a huge—almost surgical—reading lamp over the table and cleared a space for the chest.

  “I guess collecting stuff is a dad thing. For my dad and his wife, it’s these fluffy white cats they breed,” June said, rambling while Lark dug around in the piles of debris and lenses, looking for something. “Persians. He sews them little bow ties.”

  “Really? Do they look happier with the bow ties on?” Lark found what she wanted and ducked for it, nearly toppling a pile of books. She returned, triumphant, and clunked a huge jeweler’s tool kit onto the table. “There we go.”

  “You seem awfully prepared.” June heaved her treasure down beside it. It was heavy, but not solidly like iron. Instead it was a kind of heavy like a Maine coon cat, a weight that shifted and might rear around and lunge for the ground. A towel lay nearby, and she co-opted it, wiping away at the surface. The box was too big to hold in one arm; two were required. There was a subtle bump on the top and metal bits, hinges, and a latch, perhaps. A faintly reedy, mucky smell hung around it.

  “Welcome to the dragon’s hoard.” Lark leaned against the table, arms crossed, as she supervised. “Try those pliers.” She brushed one of the hinges. “I can’t believe these haven’t completely rusted out.” She sniffed the air, frowning. “It’s sort of rank, isn’t it?”

  Of course it was. June shook it. It made no sound. But there was something in there, something besides water. She was sure. June put it back down. “I’m not intruding, am I?”

  “Not at all.” Lark readjusted the light for her. She seemed as interested in the find as June was, examining it through a tiny lens like jewelers used.

  “Good, because I’d love to intrude a little more. Do you have spare clothes?” June gestured to her still-damp outfit. Out of the water, she was getting goose bumps. “Or maybe some coffee?”

  “Absolutely! Sorry, bad host.” Lark danced around the spyglasses, and June heard her rummaging around in one of the other rooms. “Damnation and…oh good.” She appeared a moment later with a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt that said GRAND DESTINY Resort and Marina in curling, 1960s script. She looked a little proud of herself about scavenging through the mess so fast. “How’s this?”

  “Did you just say ‘damnation’?” June asked, shoving out of damp, scratchy jean shorts. No use in modesty now. Lark had seen it all out in the moonlight.

  But she was very polite, busying herself in the little kitchen alcove. “You mean you don’t swear like an old Western prospector?” she asked, laughing a sweet, sort of rusty laugh. “Here.” She brought June a friendly glass of brandy she’d poured from a dusty decanter and took a little sip of her own.

  June took a small burning drink. Maybe it was her natural inclination to seed trouble, to find beehives to poke, to start fights. But June wanted to pry open this girl’s secrets too. “Is this your boat?” She thwapped her wet shirt gently Lark’s way. The Grand Destiny one was warm and overlarge.

  Lark tilted her head back and forth, almost in a shrug, as if she were listening to some song that June couldn’t hear. “No,” she said. One of the long-necked telescopes had somehow loosened on its stand and now drooped onto her shoulder as if to stare at June. “Or sort of. I grew up out here.” She swirled her brandy and sat beside June at the table, smiling. “So are you splitting your finder’s fee or what? Half the mud for you, half for me?”

  “It’s really cute that you think I’d go half and half.” June poked tweezers and something else—a dentist’s toothpick?—at the lock, scraping gunk out of the grooves. It did not want to be scraped. It clearly liked where it was. “You can have 10 percent of the mud.”

  Lark laughed around a swallow of her drink, shy and a little stifled. “Tell you what,” she offered. “I’ve got to take a bunch of these telescopes over to this antique shop. Fairchild’s, just up the road from here. We can take that chest too. Maybe she’ll be able to tell us what it is.”

  “Tempting,” June admitted and ducked her head, returning to the chest. “But I’m not ready to split my treasure with any other dashing strangers.”

  Color crept into Lark’s face. The flush was good for her. “Well—that’s fair enough.”

  “Tell you what.” June clinked their drinks. “This is heavy. I’ll call my aunt and get her to pick me up so I can get out of your hair—also so she doesn’t worry—but I’ll leave you my number. That way, when I get this box open, you can track me down for your share of the loot.” Eliza was a bit of an insomniac herself and stayed up late reading most nights. It should be fine.

  Lark raised an eyebrow at her, mouth twisting. “Awfully confident, aren’t you? What if it won’t open?”

  “Of course it’ll open. It’s just wood.” With the box tucked in her arms, June dug for her phone, her heart thrumming with mystery, with the unexpected gift of the night. Her blood was rushing, high on the scent of cardamon and those faraway places. I, she thought, I am alive.

  * * *

  “You’re a real hard worker, kiddo.” Valerie locked up the restaurant, and Bolt followed her out. They’d had to stay an hour past closing because the Destiny had decided to try to explode the kitchen right before their last customer went home. Luckily the feisty old motel had not succeeded. This kind of thing happened often enough that it never worried anyone much. With the grease fire now extinguished, Valerie was even humming. “It’s so nice to have you back here at home where you belong.” She fixed Bolt with a squinty look. “Except those gizzards. That was the last damn time I am ever fussing around with those things.”

  Diego chuckled behind her. Mitch might take off after the grocery was shut and the motel office light was out for the night, but Diego never left Valerie on her own to close.

  “I’ve got a taste for them now,” Bolt joked. Just like Grandad. He’d have laughed at that. Cassie remembered Grandad much better; most of what Bolt remembered were contained flashes. His rusty laugh. The way he used to help Bolt make his bed, every sheet precise and without wrinkles. His hummus recipe, which no one else could replicate. The little dog figurine he’d made for Bolt out of broken watch parts.

  Who knows what he’d think of Bolt working at the marina, for a man from Charlene, no less.

  It had been a long day. He felt so pleasantly lulled by hours of sun and the smell of marina gas filling up his head, his ears, his chest. He’d gotten a job there filling gas tanks and polishing boats because he knew Mr. Daley, the new owner, through his son, Rig. Before Bolt moved away with Mom, Rig had been his best friend at his school in Charlene. Mr. Daley was a boisterous and generous boss, much easier in some ways than Valerie.

  Crickets croaked over the lawn as Bolt let himself into his little motel room. He was full and greasy from eating a platter of chicken gizzards with Cassie that were just as crisp and hot as he remembered. Between the two of them, they had reduced a full plate to crumbs and crumpled napkins.

  “Gizzards are a little muscle in the chicken’s throat. Chickens swallow a stone to grind things up in it. Sometimes you still get bits of pebble when you chew them up,” Grandad had told them over a similar plate, years before, the Destiny unchanged down to the ketchup bottles. “Around here, a girl once found a pearl in a plate of gizzards.”

  Cassie was like the Destiny: unchanged. Stubbornly, quietly herself. She was resilient. A tidal wave could wash them all away, and Cassie would likely be there in the morning, picking through the wreckage for something to save.

  Bolt was the same too, though. He was still working two jobs to pay for his choice in colleges, still struggling to keep his English grade up, still browsing colleges out of state and far and away out of pocket. Trying to make something of himself was like trying to climb up a steep and muddy lake bank and sliding down as often as he gained any ground. He was still tied to Lake Prosper, as if it didn’t want him to succeed anywhere else in the world.

  Bolt closed his mint-green curtains and lay down on his squeaky mattress, drifting off and cataloging the aches in his body: his lower back from bending over fuel tanks, his finger from a burn on the morning stove.

  But he snapped awake under the glint of cold stars, swaying on his feet and up to his thighs in freezing dark water.

  Where was he?

  Bolt’s throat tightened like the sharp return of his childhood asthma, and he crumpled, plunging under the surface. Water swallowed him whole, black as oil. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t see.

  He was so lost, beating for the surface—

  Was he dead? Alone in endless cold, endless dark—it must be death.

  Bolt’s feet found muddy purchase, and he wrestled back up into an unfamiliar world, gasping in air, blinking water out of his eyes.

  “Help!” he screamed.

  Only no one came to fish him out.

  But the blurry world began to resolve itself in front of him into a familiar long dock. The Destiny’s dock, gray in the moonlight and pointing like a finger to the horizon. And Bolt was so grateful to see it, to recognize something, that he clambered over to the nearest mooring pole and clung on it with both arms, shivering. The metal pole was scuzzy with biofilm, gunk, moss animals, decaying reeds—but Bolt didn’t care. The lake. He was in Lake Prosper, wheezing for breath, and his legs felt so weak, if he didn’t hold on, he’d slip under the surface.

  How had he gotten here? Had he been sleepwalking?

  Tonight, the lake he’d grown up with, grown up smelling and swimming and sunbathing beside, was unfamiliar. The surface trembled like a cowed dog. The swan boat flock jostled against the shore, waves crashing under them—rushing out, sucked back in—and the moon above him was a hole in black paper. Bolt had never wandered in his sleep before. How had he come so far into the water without waking? He’d even put on shoes; when he moved, the lake bed tried to suck them off his feet.

  And then came the sound. Bolt knew it had been what woke him. A voice, somewhere, bouncing off the water. He couldn’t see anyone, no sign of a boat, no figure on the shore, but somewhere, someone was making a horrible cry. A furious, desperate sound, between a sob and a scream. It bounced off the water, one moment carried on a bitter-cold, distant wind. The next, startlingly close, whipping around him until—

  “Stop!” Bolt snapped, and to his shock, it cut off abruptly, a pulled switch in the fabric of the universe, the water’s mouth clamped shut.

  This late, no shore in sight, the lake didn’t look like a lake at all. It was nothing tamed, nothing that could be dammed. Hungry water—that was what Grandad had said before. It was hungry water.

  In an instant he was not alone under the dock. Bolt felt someone else’s tearful breathing fluttering in his ear. He flinched back, still wrapped around the pole. And the presence began to let out a soft keen.

  “Stop,” Bolt whispered. But the wordless, syllable-less sound—that guttural moan—grew. His ears rang as the whisper became a wail. A cold, distant-shore wind battered him, bitter with salt—tears; was he the one crying?—rushed around him.

  I’m dreaming, he realized. It’s just a dream. The presence moaned louder, a volume dial turning up too fast. As it pushed against his body, the edges of that formless howl tightened and fluctuated, and he knew with perfect clarity that it was about to become words.