darkness. Animals whirred and scattered, and something scampered along a branch. He stepped forward. The light flashed again. In a sudden shaft of moonlight, he saw the path curving deep into the forest before him. He went ahead on complaining feet, his arms out before him.
A branch slapped the side of his head. His big toe struck something rough and scaly that might have been a root. Then he pushed away the branch, stepped over the obstruction, and inched forward. Another flash of light came from far ahead of him. The path kept melting away before him—spidery twigs scrabbled on his cheek, and his right foot landed on something cool and wet.
The traces of the flashlight disappeared completely into the forest. The side of his arm brushed the rough bark of an oak. He had lost the path in the darkness. Tom turned around and began to inch his way back to the lodges.
Twigs snatched at his clothes, soft wet ground sucked at his feet. The path had disappeared from behind him as well as in front of him. Tom put his arms up before his face and pushed forward—he hoped it was forward.
A few panicky minutes later, he glimpsed light in front of him, and fought his way toward it. The light grew stronger and shone through gaps between the trees. Before him, the trees and underbrush came to an abrupt stop—he saw a tall spotlight and a wide plane of flat monochrome green like a golf course. It seemed entirely foreign, like nothing at Eagle Lake.
Tom wound through a dense stand of maples, walked over damp leaves, and came out into bright light and smooth short grass. Across the lawn stood a long straight redwood building with a high deck and curtained windows. He was standing on Roddy Deepdale’s lawn.
He walked down to the water and made his way along the shore to Roddy’s dock and padded across it in his wet socks. On the other side of the dock he walked along the shoreline, startling two birds into flight, until the trees on his grandfather’s property began. Then the light on his own deck guided him through the oaks behind his grandfather’s lodge.
A figure moved out of the shadows at the far side of the deck. “Tom?” Sarah Spence came into the light. “Where did you go?”
“How long have you been here?”
“About twenty minutes.”
“I’m glad you didn’t go home,” he said. He climbed up on the deck and put his arms around her. “Did your mother tell you I called?”
She shook her head against his chest. “I didn’t go home, I just came here as soon as Buddy let me go. He wasn’t very happy with me. I had to promise I’d go out for a drive with him tomorrow afternoon.” She pulled a broken twig off his jacket. “What have you been doing?”
“Do you know a path that leads up into the forest, near the Thielman lodge?”
“You tried to take a path through the woods in the middle of the night?”
“I saw someone prowling around the lodges on the other side of the lake. There have been a lot of burglaries up here in the past few years—”
“Besides the one at Roddy’s?”
“You’d know about it, if Ralph Redwing let you read the local newspaper.”
“So you followed him into the woods. Your whole life is one big
“So is yours,” he said. He kissed her.
“Could we go inside?”
“Barbara Deane’s upstairs.”
“So what?” She took him to the door and led him inside. “Ah, a couch. That’s what we need. Or is there something better in the next room?” She opened the door and peered into the big sitting room. “Ugh. It looks like a funeral parlor.”
“Don’t wake up Barbara Deane.”
“What is she, anyhow? Your babysitter or your bodyguard?” Sarah closed the door and came back to Tom. “I hope she’s not your bodyguard.” She put her arms around him.
“Did you go back to the compound after dinner?”
She looked up at him. “Why?”
“Did you see Jerry and his friends there?”
“They leave Buddy and me alone, unless he wants them for something. He even sent Kip away—he wanted to make faces at me for paying too much attention to you. As far as I know, Jerry and the other guys were in their lodge. They have a whole big place all to themselves.”
“Have you ever been inside it?”
“Sometime when nobody’s around, could you get me in there?”
She looked distinctly unhappy for a moment. “Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for you to come up here in the first place.”
He sat down beside her. “Maybe we should have just stayed on the plane.”
“Why don’t we stop talking?” Sarah said.
The next morning Tom woke up in darkness, shocked out of sleep by a nightmare that blew apart into smoke as soon as he tried to remember it. He looked at his watch: six-thirty. He groaned and got out of bed. Millions of dots of water and a dozen trickling rivulets covered his window. The tree outside was a dark blur.
He brushed his teeth and splashed water on his face, and put on a bathing suit and a sweatshirt. Downstairs, he padded out on the deck.
For a moment only his shivers let him know that he was not still dreaming. Distinct, feathery curls of white- grey smoke rose up from every part of the lake and hung in place as if anchored to the hard blue surface of the water. A few of the curls of smoke moved very slightly, turned and leaned. Across the lake, a low fog hung in a gauzy white pane between the trunks of the trees, but this was not fog—the fog was not an endless series of frozen white dervishes held to the lake like balloons to the wrist of the balloon-man. The lake seemed to be smoldering deep within itself.
He pulled the sweatshirt over his head and tossed it on one of the chairs. Then he sat on the end of the dock and put his legs in silky, startlingly warm water. Tom lowered himself into the lake and pushed away from the dock. Instantly he was in another world. The ripple of his body cutting through the silken water was the loudest sound on earth.
White-grey feathers bent around him, slid through him, flattened against his eyes, swam through his skin and re-formed themselves when he was gone. He lifted his arm from the water, and saw the smoke drifting from his flesh. He swam into the shallow water near the dock and stood up. Curls of mist clung to his body like clouds. Dark air chilled his puckering skin. He climbed back up on the dock and the feathery little clouds dissipated against or into his body. A trace of red lay over the dark trees on the eastern horizon.
In jeans, a shirt, and a warm sweater, he got back to the deck in time to see the top of the red sun move up over the trees. The curls of mist on the lake vanished as the light touched them, and the surface of the water turned transparent, showing the dark blue beneath, like a second layer of skin. Separate rays of light struck the docks, and sparkled off the windows of the club and Sarah’s lodge. At the north end of the lake, reeds glowed in the early sun. Tom moved down off the dock when the sun had cleared the tops of the trees on the horizon.
He walked around the side of the lodge and began moving north on the track, feeling as if he were seeing everything for the first time. The world looked impossibly clean, cleanly opened to reveal itself. Even the dust on the path sparkled with a secret freshness the day would gradually conceal. Past the compound, past the old cars against a whitewashed fence at the club; around the north end and the narrow marsh, where the reeds thrust up out of the ooze and a hundred silvery, nearly transparent fish the size of his little finger darted away in unison when his blunt shadow fell among them.
Tom walked through the trees to Lamont von Heilitz’s lodge and looked for broken windows or scratches on the locks, any sign of actual or attempted break-in. The doors were locked, and every shutter was locked tight. The intruder must have heard him coming and fled up the path into the woods.
