The opening

A Saturday in June

He stopped at the store out on the highway at twelve past seven and bought eleven gallons of gas and a bag of ice.

He did not need the ice. He had nothing to keep.

He was at the campground ramp by half past seven, and he backed the trailer down and floated the boat off it on the first try, because he had been backing trailers down that ramp since he was fourteen.

There was nobody to see him do it. A camera had stood on a pole at that ramp for two years, but it had not worked since the spring. Everybody on that end of the lake knew it, complained about it, and knew nobody in the county had done one thing to fix it.

Then he sat on the water.

He sat on it a long time — out past the sandbar where the boats had gone home, with the motor off and the running lights off, in the last of the light and then in no light at all, and there was no moon that night, and a man out there with no lights is a man nobody looks at twice because there is nothing to look at.

He could hear them across the water. Somebody’s speaker. A dog. A screen door. A whole cove of people three hundred yards off doing what they do on a Saturday in June, and not one of them with any reason on this earth to turn around.

Around ten he started it and idled off and came down that shoreline at forty, in the dark, without once slowing for anything, because he knew every foot of it and there was nothing out there that could surprise him.

Then somewhere down that shoreline he came off plane, and the water went down off the hull, and it got very quiet.

Chapter One

There was a hundred and forty dollars of ribeye in the back of Dennis’s Audi and no ice in the cooler, and they were forty minutes out.

“It’s fine,” Dennis said on the phone.

“It’s ninety-nine degrees.”

“It’s in a cooler.”

“With no ice in it.”

“With no ice in it,” Dennis agreed. “Which is a detail I’d have preferred you not establish in front of my wife.”

“How far back are you?”

“Forty minutes and one charging stop I’m not prepared to discuss.”

“Dennis.”

“I said what I said.”

Tim could hear Lisa in the background saying something with the word steak in it. Then Dennis saying something back. Then both of them laughing, and then the call dropped, the way it always dropped right there, where the pines came in over the road.

“Are they behind us?” Christy said.

“They’re behind us.”

Harper Harmon was eleven and had asked to ride with the Eatons because her parents’ car didn’t have a sunroof. She put her feet on the dash exactly the way Christy did.

“Feet,” Christy said.

“You’ve got your feet up.”

“I’m fifty-four.”

Harper took her feet down and got them back up a mile later, and Christy didn’t say anything the second time, which was about the size of the rules for the next three days.

They came off Farm Road 115 and turned north onto Sandy Acres Main Street, and Tim slowed, because everybody slowed here.

“Why’re we going slow?”

“Dogs.”

Harper sat up.

Sandy Acres is a neighborhood. That’s all it is. Thirty-odd households in the same town as the lake houses, same school, same fire department, same zip code — a subdivision that never got developed, three quarters of a mile of pine between the highway and the water.

It has a street called Main Street, which is a joke nobody down there is making. There’s no store on it, no post office, no light. Sandy Lane and Sandy Lake come off it into the trees, and so does Sandy Oil, which is named for a lease that never made a barrel and a derrick nobody alive has seen, and the houses sit back in there on cleared patches you mostly can’t see from the road.

What you can see goes by in a certain order, and it had gone by in that order for eleven years.

A brown dog came off a porch and ran alongside them thirty yards without barking, then quit and stood in the road, watching the boat go by. Six mailboxes on one post.

Then the shrine.

It sat right at the edge of the road on the left — a plywood box about knee high, painted, with something inside it, and things set out on the ground in front.

Harper had her phone up before Tim had finished registering that she’d moved.

“What is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? You drive past it.”

“I drive past it,” Tim agreed.

A hundred yards on, a camera on a pole with a solar panel angled south. Then cars in the yards — not one or two, five, six, in the weeds, some with hoods up, some under tarps, some just sitting. A washing machine under a tree. A trampoline with no mat on it, just the frame and the springs, like something a bird had picked clean.

Smoke somewhere. There was always smoke somewhere.

And a car that did not belong, pulled off on the shoulder at the end of somebody’s drive with the engine running and a man in it.

That is all it was. A clean gray sedan on a road where nothing is clean, air conditioning going, a man in the driver’s seat with a clipboard against the wheel and his head down, waiting on somebody to come out of a house or waiting on somebody to give up and go back in.

Christy looked at him going by and he did not look up.

“Somebody’s selling something,” Tim said.

“Out here?”

“Insurance, probably. Or church.”

She turned around in her seat and looked at it through the back glass until the road bent, which took about four seconds, and then she quit thinking about it for eleven weeks.

“Whoa,” Harper said.

“Harper.”

“What? I didn’t say anything bad.” She was up on her knees with her chin on the dash. “Why does that house have a nativity?”

Tim looked. Under a little tin roof somebody had built out of two-by-fours, Joseph and Mary and one shepherd and a plastic cow stood in the weeds. A cord ran back to the house. The bulb was on.

“It’s June,” Harper said.

“It is.”

“So why is it on?”

“I don’t know.”

They passed a yard with three folding tables under a blue tarp, covered in bread machines and lamps and a car seat and an artificial Christmas tree lying on its side, and a hand-painted sign at the road that said OPEN.

“Is that a store?”

“It’s a yard sale.”

“On a Friday?”

“It’s always there,” Tim said, and heard himself say it, and did not have anything to add to it.

They passed goats. Seven of them, along a fence line, all facing the road, and one of them standing up on the fence with its front feet the way goats do, and Harper made a noise about that which lasted most of a hundred yards.

They passed a swing set with two swings and a slide and no chains on either swing.

They passed a house with four keep-out signs wired to the fence and a flag hung in the front window where a curtain would go, and two dogs on chains that came up to the end of them and did not bark.

They passed a trailer with a wheelchair ramp built onto it out of treated lumber, better built than anything else on the property, with a rail on both sides and a landing at the top big enough to turn around on. Somebody had spent money on that ramp. Somebody had spent a weekend on it.

They passed a school bus stop sign bolted to a post at the end of a drive, which meant children, and Christy had never in eleven years thought about the fact that a bus comes down this road at seven in the morning.

They passed a burn pile, cold.

They passed a satellite dish on a pole in a yard with no house behind it that Christy could see.

And they passed a broken-down ice cream truck sitting on its rims, serving window propped open on a stick, a lawn chair set up inside it.

“There’s an ice cream truck.”

“There is.”

“Does it work?”

“No.”

“Then why—”

“Harper. Honey. We’re here till Sunday and you’re going to run out of questions.”

“I have never run out of questions in my life,” Harper said.

Tim thought about that more, later, than he expected to.

Christy had not said anything for a while.

What she was doing, and had been doing since the mailboxes, was counting houses — not on purpose, the way you count stairs in the dark. Thirty-one that she could see from the road, which is not the number anybody up the hill would have guessed and is not the number Tim would have guessed, because Tim had been driving this road for eleven years looking at the road.

She did not mention it. It did not seem like a thing to mention.

A truck came the other way just short of the bridge and they had to ease over for each other, because two vehicles and a concrete rail is more than that road wants at one time.

Tim lifted two fingers off the wheel.

The man in the truck lifted two back without turning his head, the way everybody down there does to everybody, and went on south with his elbow out the window, and that was the entire event.

Then the bridge.

It’s a county bridge over the gulch, two lanes and a concrete rail, forty feet down to trees on either side of you. There’s no sign on it. You cross it in about four seconds.

On the near side it’s Sandy Acres. On the far side the pavement gets better and the pines thin out and the yards go green, and Main Street becomes Cartman Road, and there’s no gate and no guard and no marker of any kind, because officially nothing has happened. Same road. Same town. Same county, same school district, same volunteer fire department. It just has a different name on the other side of a creek.

It took two and a half minutes. Christy had timed it once on her phone without telling him why.

In the mirror Tim watched Dennis’s Audi come through behind them with a hundred and forty dollars of warm ribeye in it.

Harper was turned around in the seat, up on her knees, looking back down the road.

“That guy waved at me.”

“What guy?”

“The one sitting in the ice cream truck.”

Neither of them said anything, because neither of them had seen a man sitting in the ice cream truck.