The Unshared Grave: What The Lake Keeps

The anchor chain snapped taut at 0600 hours, the diesel winch on Cal Riser's salvage barge coughing a plume of blue smoke into the still morning air. Etienne Voss watched from the weathered planks of the new municipal dock as the first diver, a wiry man named Hollis whose face looked stitched together from old rope burns, rolled backward off the gunwale and disappeared beneath the black water of Holloway Lake without so much as a splash. The lake gave up nothing willingly, Voss had learned that in the first week of October when the thermocline broke and the body count began to climb. Now, in the gray half-light of early November, the water had taken on the consistency of poured ink, and the search grid marked in fluorescent orange paint on the barges hull seemed to mock the very notion of finding anything down there in the silt and the cold.

Maren Holloway stood three paces to Voss's left, her arms folded tight against the chill, a woolen coat the color of wet bark buttoned to her throat. She had not spoken since they had walked down from the old stagecoach stop where Riser kept his office, a sagging prefab structure that smelled of cigarette smoke and diesel fuel and the particular loneliness of men who worked alone on the water. Her eyes were fixed on the spot where the diver had gone under, and Voss could see the small muscle working in the hinge of her jaw, the only outward sign that she was paying for this expedition out of her own diminished trust fund, the last of the land deeds her grandfather had salted away before the bank failures of ninety-three.

Riser himself squatted on the barge deck, one thick hand resting on the winch controls, the other holding a ceramic cup of coffee so black it looked like it could strip paint. He was a heavy man, thick through the shoulders and the waist, with a nose that had been broken at least twice and ears that stuck out from beneath a knitted watch cap the color of old mustard. He did not look like a man who cared much about what the lake kept or what it gave back, but his eyes, pale blue and sharp as a hawk's, missed nothing.

"Temperature at the bottom is forty-two degrees," Riser said, more to the cup than to anyone standing on the dock. "Visibility, maybe eight inches if we're lucky. The silt down there is fine as flour. Once we stir it up, we got about a fifteen-minute window before it settles back down like concrete."

Voss nodded, the collar of his own coat turned up against the wind coming off the water. He had been a sheriff's deputy for six years before the election that had put him in the office itself, and in all that time he had never learned to like the cold. It got into the joints and stayed there, a dull persistent ache that reminded him of every injury he had ever taken, every fall on icy pavement, every night he had spent in a cruiser with the heater on the fritz.

"How long for the first pass?" he asked.

"Two hours, maybe three. Hollis is good. He's found wedding rings in lakes twice this size. But this isn't a ring, Deputy. Whatever's down there, if there's anything at all, it's been down there a long time. The silt packs it in like a coffin."

Maren shifted her weight, the deck planks groaning under her boots. "And you're certain the grid covers the area my grandmother marked?"

Riser looked up at her then, the pale eyes moving over her face as if he were reading something written there. "Ma'am, I set the grid myself. Corner one is the old stone pier where the railroad used to load ice. Corner two is the submerged piling cluster from the lumber mill. Corner three is the bend in the creek where it empties in. Corner four is the old swimming platform, the one they took down in sixty-two. Your grandmother's map, the one you showed me, that X marks a spot right in the middle of that grid. If it's there, we'll find it. If it ain't, well, we'll find out that too."

The winch cable went taut with a sound like a plucked bass string, and Hollis's helmet broke the surface ten yards from the barge. He raised one hand, a signal Voss didn't recognize, and Riser grunted and moved to the capstan, feeding out cable as the diver drifted with the current. "He's found something," Riser said. "Or he wants to come up. With Hollis, it's hard to tell."

Three minutes later, Hollis was back on the deck, water streaming from his dry suit, his breathing loud through the regulator. He stripped the mask off and looked at Riser, then at Voss, then at Maren. "Got a contact," he said. "Hard object, maybe eighteen inches down in the silt. Felt like leather or rubber. I marked it with the flag."

Riser nodded and moved to the winch. "We'll need the lift bag. And the probe. You mark anything else down there?"

"A bunch of bottles. Old. And what felt like a tree stump, but it was too smooth. Maybe a piling." Hollis paused, then added, "There's a lot of metal down there. Nails, hinges, some of it might be from the old mill."

Voss looked at Maren. Her face had gone very still, the kind of stillness he had learned to associate with people who were holding themselves together by main force. "The X," she said quietly. "Did you find the X?"

"Ma'am, the X is on a map. Down here there's just mud and things that sank. I marked the contact. That's all I can promise."

An hour passed. Voss drank coffee from a thermos that tasted of the truck stop where he had filled it, burnt and thin. Maren stood at the rail, her eyes on the water, and Riser worked the lift bag with the practiced ease of a man who had pulled more strange things from more strange waters than he could remember. The sun came up somewhere behind the low clouds, turning the world a flat, colorless gray.

The first object came up at 0817. It was a sneaker, a child's sneaker, the kind that had been common in the late seventies and early eighties, with a Velcro strap and a faded cartoon character on the side that had been reduced by years of submersion to a smear of colored rubber. It was waterlogged, the canvas puffed and pale, the sole separated from the upper along one edge. Riser set it on the deck in a galvanized washtub, and Voss knelt beside it, careful not to touch it with his bare hands.

"Size?" he asked.

Hollis, still in his dry suit, looked down at the washtub. "Hard to tell. Swollen. Maybe a child's, maybe a small woman's. But the strap, that Velcro, they didn't put those on adult shoes much. And the cartoon, that looks like it could be a Smurf."

Maren made a sound, a small tight sound, and Voss glanced up to see her turn away, one hand pressed to her mouth. He rose and moved toward her, but she waved him off, a sharp little motion, and he stopped.

"We keep going," she said, her voice steady but thin. "There's more."

There was. At 0934, the lift bag brought up a melted candle stub, the wax fused into a shapeless lump around a wick that had long since turned to dark fiber. It was the color of old ivory, and there were traces of something green embedded in the wax, possibly pine resin, possibly something else. Riser turned it over in his hands, his thick fingers surprisingly deft, and set it beside the sneaker.

"Cathel," he said, and then caught himself. "I mean, candle. Old beeswax, looks like. Mixed with something else. They used to make candles like this for church, back in the day. And for other things."

"What other things?" Voss asked.

Riser looked at him, the pale eyes flat and unreadable. "You know what other things, Deputy. You're the law around here. You tell me."

The third object came up at 1048, and this one made Maren sit down abruptly on a coil of mooring line, her legs folding under her as if the strings had been cut. It was a strip of fabric, perhaps eighteen inches long and three inches wide, torn cleanly along one edge and ragged along the other. The fabric was cotton, printed in a small floral pattern, the colors muted by years in the dark water but still recognizable as the kind of dress material that had been sold by the yard at the general store in town for as long as anyone could remember. A child's dress, Voss thought, or the hem of one. He did not say it aloud.

Hollis stood beside the washtub, his face dripping, and looked at Maren with something that might have been pity or might have been the professional disinterest of a man who had seen too many strange things pulled into the light. "There's more down there," he said. "A lot more. I can feel it with the probe. But we'll need another day, maybe two. The silt is a problem."

Voss crouched beside the washtub, looking at the three objects arranged there in the flat gray light. The sneaker with its cartoon smear. The candle stub with its traces of green. The strip of floral fabric. They sat in the washtub like specimens in a jar, like evidence in a case that had no suspect and no victim and no crime that anyone had yet been willing to name. He thought of Bette Ohlin, the midwife who had delivered nearly every living soul in the county for forty years, and he wondered what she would say if she saw these things. He thought of the Widow of Sheriff Doane, who had lived alone in the big house at the north end of the lake for nearly a decade now, and he wondered what she knew. He thought of Phila Aungst, who kept the records at the courthouse, and of Doryan Pyle and his brother Gavin, who ran the gas station and the bait shop and seemed to know everything that happened in the valley before it happened.

He thought of all of them, and of the water that covered them all, black and cold and patient.

"We keep going," Maren said from her seat on the mooring line, her voice steadier now. "We go until we find what's under the X."

Riser looked at Voss, and Voss looked at Maren, and the lake went on giving up its dead in its own good time, one object at a time, each one a piece of a puzzle that no one in the valley seemed willing to look at directly.

The drive to Bette Ohlin's place took twenty minutes on roads that Voss had half forgotten, past the old Consolidated schoolhouse and the feed store that smelled the same as it had in the summers of his childhood, sweet and dusty, a smell like sun-warmed alfalfa and tractor grease. He and Maren sat in the cab of the county truck with the windows cracked, the morning air coming in cool and damp, carrying the scent of the lake even out here, a half mile from the water.

Neither of them spoke for the first mile.

Then Maren shifted in the passenger seat, and the vinyl made the sound it always made, a dry sigh.

"I should tell you something," she said.

Voss kept his eyes on the road.

"I've known Bette since I was a girl. She delivered me. She delivered half my classmates. She knows this valley the way a midwife knows a woman, all the seams and scars, the things that don't heal right." Maren paused. "She's also the most careful woman I have ever known. She's a Quaker. Plain speech, plain dress. She will not lie. But she may not tell you everything either. Not because she wants to hide it. Because she wants to be sure of it first."

"I understand careful," Voss said.

"I'm not sure you do." Maren looked at him, and he glanced over and saw the seriousness in her face. "Bette has buried two husbands and a son. She has seen more grief than anyone in this valley has any right to see. When she speaks of the lake, she speaks of it the way a woman speaks of a difficult birth. With respect, and with fear."

Voss thought about that.

They came down the long hill past the second-growth pine and turned onto the gravel drive that led to the white house with the green trim, the place where Bette Ohlin had lived alone since her second husband died, eight years now, in the same house she had been born in, the house her father had built in the year before the war. The garden was out front, mostly dead this time of year, but with the shapes of things still in it: the cedar posts for the tomatoes, the perennial border against the porch, the stone path worn smooth by generations of feet. A small dog came out from under the porch and stood in the middle of the path, looking at the truck with the patient, slightly judgmental air of a dog who has seen everything.

Maren knocked on the screen door, and Bette Ohlin opened it.

She was a tall woman, taller than Maren, with the long bones of her family and the kind of face that age had not so much weathered as refined, the way water refines a stone. Her hair was white and pulled back, and she wore a plain cotton dress the color of oatmeal, and her hands, when she took Maren's face between them, were cool and dry and strong.

"Little Maren," she said, and her voice was low and gentle, with the soft vowels of the valley but also something else, a clarity that had nothing to do with accent. "I heard you were back."

"I heard you were still here," Maren said, and they held each other's gaze for a moment, and Voss understood that whatever was between them went deeper than the recent past, deeper than the lake, back into the years before Voss had ever come to this valley.

Bette turned her attention to Voss, and her eyes, pale blue and very steady, took him in.

"Etienne," she said.

"Bette."

"Come in. The coffee is on. I had a feeling someone would come today."

Inside, the house was cool and smelled of dried lavender and wood smoke and something else, something faintly medicinal, like tincture of valerian. The kitchen table was the same one Voss remembered from a visit twenty years ago, white pine, scarred, with a bowl of dried apples in the center and a copy of the local paper folded to the gardening column. Bette poured coffee from a pot that looked older than Voss into two cups without asking, and set a glass of water in front of Maren without a word, and sat down herself with her hands folded on the table.

"Something has come up out of the lake," Bette said.

It was not a question.

Maren nodded.

"Maren called me an hour ago and told me what the probe found. The shape in the mud. She did not tell me what it was, and I did not ask her. But I have been waiting for this for a long time." Bette looked down at her folded hands. "Since before you were born, Etienne. Since before either of you were born."

Voss set his cup down.

"How long is that, Bette?"

She was quiet for a moment, and the kitchen was quiet with her, the clock ticking, the small dog sighing on the porch, the wind moving in the dry grass outside the window.

"There was a group," she said, "that came to the lake in the early part of the last century. They called themselves the Keepers of the Shared. They were not from here. They came up from the river towns, down from the mill towns. They were looking for a place, they said, where the water could take things from them. They had a teaching. They believed that grief could be given to water, that the water could swallow it if you gave the water something in return."

"What kind of something?" Maren asked.

"Something precious," Bette said. "Something you loved. Something you could not bear to keep anymore. A wedding ring. A locket. A child's first shoe. A ribbon from a dead woman's hair. They would wade out to the deepest place they could find, and they would sink it. And they would say a prayer. And they would come back to the shore feeling lighter. That was the teaching."

Voss felt the hair on his arms rise.

"How many were there?" he asked.

"Not many. Maybe a dozen families at the height of it. They met at the lake house that used to stand where the Widow of Sheriff Doane lives now. They had a leader, a man named Josiah Pine, who preached that the lake was a living thing, that it had feelings, that it could be hurt and it could be soothed, that it remembered everything that was given to it and held it safe. They believed the lake was a kind of mother."

Maren made a small sound, and Bette turned to her.

"My grandmother was one of them," Maren said. "She never told me. But she had a way of looking at the lake. I always thought she was afraid of it. She wasn't, was she. She was grateful to it."

"She gave it her wedding ring," Bette said quietly. "After Josiah died. She gave it the year before I was born. She told no one. But she told me, the night before she passed. She made me promise to watch the lake. To watch what it gave back."

The clock ticked. The dog sighed. Outside, a car passed on the road, the sound rising and fading like a wave.

"How did the group end?" Voss asked.

"It ended in the war," Bette said. "The young men went off, and the ones who came back would not speak of what they had done before. Josiah's own son put the teaching away. He would not let his children go near the lake. He would not let anyone speak of the offerings. He said the lake was just a lake. He was wrong, but he believed it. By the time I was grown, the Keepers were just a memory, and people were embarrassed to be connected to them, the way people are embarrassed by the strange beliefs of their grandparents."

"But they did not stop," Voss said. "Not entirely."

"No. They did not stop. They just went quieter. They came at night, mostly. They came alone. They brought their objects and they sank them and they went home and never spoke of it. And the lake kept them. It has kept them for a hundred years. And now, it seems, it is giving them back."

Maren set her water glass down.

"You said you had been waiting for this. What did you mean?"

Bette looked at her for a long moment.

"Because my grandmother was not the only one who gave something to the lake that she could not bear to keep," Bette said. "My mother gave something too. And her mother before her. And I have given something myself. And I have waited every fall since I was a girl for the lake to give it back to me, because I am not sure I had the right to give it. Because the lake has no right to take what we have no right to give."

Voss felt the room tilt slightly, the way a room tilts when the ground shifts under it.

"What did you give, Bette?"

She looked at him, and her face was the face of a woman who had borne other women's children and had buried her own son and had washed the bodies of the dead and had kept her mouth shut through it all, because keeping the mouth shut was the highest of the Quaker virtues and because she had seen what happened to women who did not keep their mouths shut in this valley.

"I will not tell you that," she said. "Not yet. But I will tell you this. What you found under the silt is not a body. It is not a boat. It is an altar. The Keepers built an altar at the bottom of the lake, in the deepest part, where the cold water does not move. They built it of stone, and they laid their offerings on it, and they weighted them down. And over the years, the offerings piled up, and the silt covered them, and the altar became part of the bottom. And the lake has held it all this time. And now, with the drought, with the water low, with the silt shifting, the altar is coming apart. And the offerings are coming up."

She looked at Maren.

"One of those offerings is mine."

She looked at Voss.

"One of them is something that belongs to your family."

Voss felt the floor of his stomach drop out.

"My family never came to this lake until I was twelve," he said.

"No," Bette said. "But your grandfather did. Before you were born. Before your father married your mother. Before he became the man you knew. He came to this lake one summer and he stayed at the lake house and he walked out to the deep water at night, and he gave the lake something he should not have given. And the lake has kept it for him all these years. And now it is coming back."

The kitchen was very quiet.

The clock ticked. The dog sighed. The wind moved in the dry grass outside the window, and the lavender on the counter gave up a faint, sweet smell, and the coffee in Voss's cup had gone cold, and the morning light had shifted on the table, and somewhere, on the other side of the ridge, the lake lay black and still and patient, giving up its secrets one object at a time.

Maren set her cup down with a small, careful sound, the ceramic touching the wood without clatter.

"And the commissioner who bought that land," she said. "What was his name?"

Bette did not answer right away. She picked up the cold toast and looked at it, then set it down again. The dog stirred at her feet, sensing the shift in the room, and laid its chin on its paws.

"Ask your father," she said. "He knows. He has always known."

Maren felt the old, familiar resistance rise in her, the one that came whenever Bette turned the question back on her, whenever the conversation became a circuit instead of a line. She breathed through it.

"I'm asking you," she said. "Because you know more than you're saying. And because my father is not here. And because I need to know who bought the land where the halfway house used to stand, and why."

Bette looked at her for a long moment.

"Commissioner Paul Kaine," she said. "The one they call Kaine of the South Branch. The one whose family has held the eastern precinct for forty years. The one whose grandfather gave the lake its first secret, and whose father gave it another, and who himself has given it more than either of them. He bought the storage company. He bought the warehouse. He bought the land. He bought the silence of the men who poured the concrete."

She folded her hands on the table.

"And he did it through a company that has no name on any sign, no office on any street, no officers on any paper. A company that exists only as a number in a filing cabinet in the basement of the county courthouse. A company that was set up by a lawyer named Gavner, who is dead now, and that was funded by money that came from a place that no one in this town has ever been able to trace to its source."

Voss listened, and his hand had stopped on the cup, and the dog had lifted its head.

"And the records of that company," Maren said, her voice very even, "are in the courthouse basement."

"Yes," Bette said.

"And you think my father has seen them."

"I think your father knows where they are," Bette said. "I think he has known since the night your mother died. I think he went to the courthouse that night and asked for them and was told no. I think he has carried the weight of that no ever since."

The clock ticked.

The wind moved in the dry grass.

The morning light had shifted again, and the shadow of the window frame had moved across the table, and the lavender gave up its small, sweet smell.

Maren stood.

"Then I'm going to the courthouse," she said.

Bette did not try to stop her.

Voss stood also, and the dog rose and stretched, and the morning light fell on the three of them standing in the kitchen, and the coffee was cold, and the toast was uneaten, and the conversation had reached the place where words could do no more.

Maren looked at Voss.

"You don't have to come," she said.

"I know," he said.

She nodded.

"Then we'll go," she said.

They left Bette in the kitchen, and the dog followed them to the door and then stopped, and the morning sun came up over the ridge and fell on the dry fields and the bare trees and the long, pale ribbon of the riverbed, and somewhere on the other side of the ridge the lake lay black and still and patient, and the altar at its bottom was giving up its offerings one by one.

They took Maren's truck, because Maren's truck was the one with the fuel, and Voss did not ask about the fuel, and Maren did not explain. The road down from the ridge was rough, and the truck bucked and rocked on the dried ruts, and the dust rose behind them in a long pale plume, and the sun climbed, and the heat of the day began to settle on the land like a weight.

Maren drove with both hands on the wheel, and she did not speak, and Voss sat beside her and watched the country pass, and the silence between them was the kind of silence that did not need to be filled.

They reached the town in midmorning.

The town was small, and the streets were empty in the way that small towns are empty in the heat of the day, and the courthouse sat at the center of it, a square red brick building with white columns and a clock tower that had not worked in twenty years. Maren parked at the curb in front of it, and they sat for a moment in the truck with the engine off and the windows down, and the heat came in, and the smell of hot asphalt and dry weeds came with it.

"I haven't been in here since the funeral," Maren said. "I came for the reading of the will. I haven't been back."

Voss looked at the building.

"Then we go in," he said.

They went in.

The lobby was cool and dim, and the floor was marble, and the air smelled of old paper and floor wax and the faint, sweet smell of magnolia that someone had left in a vase on the reception desk. The receptionist was a young woman Maren did not know, and she looked up from her computer with the polite, blank face of someone who has learned to ask no questions.

"Can I help you?" she said.

"I need to see the county records," Maren said. "The ones in the basement. The storage of the filing of the shell company filings."

The receptionist's face did not change, but her eyes did.

"Do you have an appointment?" she said.

"No," Maren said.

"Then I'm sorry," the young woman said. "The basement records are by appointment only. And the archivist is out today."

"Out where?" Maren said.

The receptionist's face went very still.

"I don't have that information," she said.

Maren looked at her for a long moment, and then she looked at Voss, and then she looked back at the young woman.

"Then I'll wait," she said. "I'll wait right here until the archivist comes back. Or until the commissioner comes down. Whichever comes first."

The young woman blinked.

"I can ask the clerk to come out," she said.

"Please do," Maren said.

The young woman picked up the phone, and Maren turned and walked to the wooden bench against the wall and sat down, and Voss sat beside her, and they waited.

They waited for a long time.

The lobby was cool and quiet, and the clock in the tower did not move, and the light came through the high windows and fell on the marble floor in long pale bands, and the receptionist typed and did not look at them, and the door at the back of the lobby stayed closed.

After an hour, a door opened, and a man came out.

He was not the clerk.

He was a tall man in a dark suit, with a narrow face and pale eyes and the kind of haircut that costs money, and he came across the lobby with the unhurried stride of a person who is used to being the most important one in any room he enters.

He stopped in front of Maren.

"Ms. Holloway," he said. "I don't believe we've met. I'm Paul Kaine. The commissioner for the South Branch precinct."

Maren stood.

"I know who you are," she said.

Kaine looked at her for a moment, and then he smiled, and the smile did not reach his eyes.

"Then you know I'm the one who can help you," he said. "Or not. Come into my office. Let's talk."

Maren looked at Voss, and Voss stood, and they followed Kaine down the hall to a door at the back, and Kaine opened it and held it, and they went in.

The office was large and cool, and the desk was mahogany, and the carpet was deep, and the windows looked out over the town. Kaine went around the desk and sat down, and he did not invite them to sit, and Maren sat down anyway, in one of the two leather chairs in front of the desk, and Voss sat in the other.

"What can I do for you, Ms. Holloway?" Kaine said.

"I want to see the records of the company that bought the storage facility on the old halfway house lot," Maren said.

Kaine's face did not change.

"That company is private," he said. "Its filings are sealed. By order of the county court. Twenty years ago."

"I know," Maren said. "I want to see them anyway."

Kaine looked at her.

"Why?" he said.

"Because the land has secrets," Maren said. "Because the secrets have been buried too long. Because someone in this town decided that what was done there should never come to light. And because my father has been carrying that decision alone for thirty years, and I am done letting him carry it."

Kaine's pale eyes went very still.

"Your father," he said, "is a good man. A loyal man. A man who understands that some things are better left where they are."

"My father," Maren said, "is a man who has been told no for thirty years. And I am not my father."

Kaine looked at her for a long moment, and the office was very quiet, and the light came through the windows and fell on the mahogany desk and the deep carpet and the two of them sitting in the leather chairs, and the clock in the tower outside was still, and the town was still, and somewhere, on the other side of the ridge, the lake was still.

Then Kaine opened a drawer and took out a key.

It was a small brass key on a leather fob, and it was old, and the leather was worn.

"This key opens the cabinet in the basement," he said. "The third cabinet from the left. The bottom drawer. The records are in a manila folder. The folder is unmarked. Take it. Read it. Then bring it back to me."

Maren did not reach for it.

"Why?" she said.

Kaine looked at her.

"Because your mother asked me to," he said. "Twenty-three years ago. The week before she died. She came to this office and she sat in that chair and she asked me to give you this key when you were ready. And I have been waiting for you to be ready ever since."

Maren felt the air go out of the room.

She reached for the key.

Her hand did not shake.

She took it, and the leather was warm from the drawer, and the brass was cool, and the weight of it was nothing and everything.

"Thank you," she said.

Kaine nodded.

"Don't thank me yet," he said. "Read it first. Then decide what you want to do with it. Some doors, once opened, do not close again."

Maren stood, and Voss stood, and they went out of the office and down the hall and through the lobby and out into the sun, and the heat of the day met them, and the dust rose under their feet, and the town lay quiet around them, and the key was in Maren's hand, and the basement waited.

They went back in.

The receptionist did not look up.

They found the basement stairs at the back of the lobby, behind a door marked Records, and the stairs went down into the cool dark, and the air changed as they descended, and the smell of old paper grew stronger, and the light grew dimmer.

The basement was long and low, and the ceiling was crossed with pipes, and the floor was concrete, and the cabinets were metal, and the aisles between them were narrow. The third cabinet from the left stood against the far wall, and the bottom drawer was stiff, and Maren pulled it open with both hands, and the drawer slid out with a long, low scrape.

The manila folder was at the back.

It was thick.

Maren took it out, and they sat on the floor of the basement with their backs against the cabinet, and she opened the folder, and the light from the single bulb above them fell on the pages, and they read.

They read for a long time.

When they were done, Maren closed the folder, and she sat for a moment with her hands on it, and Voss sat beside her, and the basement was quiet, and the pipes ticked, and the light was dim, and the air smelled of paper and dust and the faint, sweet smell of magnolia that had followed them down the stairs.

Then she stood, and Voss stood, and they went back up the stairs and out into the lobby and out into the sun, and the heat met them, and the town lay quiet, and the key was in Maren's hand, and the folder was under her arm, and the morning was gone, and the afternoon had come.

They got in the truck.

Maren did not start the engine.

She sat with both hands on the wheel, and she looked out through the windshield at the town, and the town looked back at her with its empty streets and its shuttered windows and its quiet, patient face.

"I know what they did," she said. "I know why the lake is giving it up. I know what my mother asked Kaine to do. I know what my father has been carrying."

Voss looked at her.

"Then what do you want to do?" he said.

Maren sat for a long moment.

Then she started the engine.

"I'm going to the lake," she said. "I'm going to take the folder down to the water. I'm going to read it out loud, where the altar is, where the offerings are. And I'm going to let the lake decide what happens next."

Voss looked at her.

"And me?" he said.

Maren looked at him.

"You can come," she said. "If you want. You don't have to."

He looked at her for a long moment, and the sun came through the windshield and fell on them both, and the heat rose from the asphalt, and the town was quiet around them.

"I want," he said.

Maren put the truck in gear.

They drove out of town, and the road climbed toward the ridge, and the dust rose behind them, and the sun climbed toward its height, and the lake waited on the other side, black and still and patient, and the folder lay on the seat between them, and the key lay on the dashboard, and the morning was over, and the afternoon was beginning, and the town fell away behind them, and the ridge rose ahead, and somewhere, at the bottom of the lake, in the deepest part, where the cold water does not move, the altar was giving up its last secret.