On Mt. Jobe Road, each house was marked with a modest wood post and slightly madcap letters, naming the places with a mix of homage and play—THE AERIE, CAMP TAMANEND, TOE-HOLD, WEOWNA CAMP.
Preston’s parents had bought their place, Shuh-shuh-gah, in the eighties, after Jean Hacking had a falling-out with her sisters and decided they would henceforth stop going to Osterville. Mrs. Hacking fit soundly into the social scene with her headbands and fleeces and creased pants, her pantryful of good red wine, her patrician East Coast roots, her competitiveness in hearty summer sports such as sailing and rowing, and her pronunciation of “hurricane” as “hurriken.”
Though the Hackings had only been there three decades, a batch of newer arrivals had turned the Hackings into something of the old guard in Lake James. On the hill side of the road, away from the water, were people from Los Angeles and Florida and South Carolina who had bought plots of land without water rights just for the privilege of saying they had Adirondack camps. They had installed gravel drives and granite statues of bears or eagles and were forever fighting with the town’s zoning board over adding satellite dishes to their camps.
Making a screaming left turn, Nick bumped into a wooden ditch and back out again, and Evelyn watched with some alarm as Scot’s dark head nearly hit the roof.
Around the last turn, at the bottom of the hill, Evelyn spotted Shuh-shuh-gah’s welcoming brown-wood boathouse with its green window frames. The Hacking house at Lake James was part of an Adirondack great camp, one of many built by railroad, banking, and timber barons in the late 1800s. It was initially a hunting camp, with separate platform tents for cooking, sleeping, and drinking. Once upper-class women started joining their husbands in the Adirondacks, trading up from the passé getaways of Saratoga Springs and Cape May, the tented buildings were turned into wooden structures, though still with a rustic, unfinished quality that tried to make visitors feel like they were still living in nature.
Only a handful of the camps had been kept in one piece, and the Hackings’ was not among them. What served as their main house had once been stables, and their boathouse was grand, with two covered docks and one open dock and sleeping quarters upstairs. The other parts of the original camp were now cut off from the Hackings’ portion by copses of trees.
The first time Evelyn had come, it was raining when she’d arrived, a silver Adirondack storm, and she’d slipped down to the boathouse porch before joining Preston’s graduation party. Thin pines that were bare for the first sixty feet of their trunks ended in thick daubs of green, like those in a Japanese silk painting. Through the gray, she could see only a few lights of houses across the lake, and the only sound was of the rain hitting the wooden railing and the dock below her. For a moment, Evelyn felt like everything was quiet.
Then she went to the party. Preston’s older brother, Bing, had a bunch of his friends up, and they were drunk and arguing about rugby. The girls were pretty and mean and made jokes that Evelyn couldn’t follow. Nick Geary, whom Evelyn had met several times by then, kept calling her Sarah. There was a regatta that Preston’s mother shanghaied Evelyn into helping with, and Evelyn had rigged one of the boats incorrectly and was publicly chastised by Mrs. Hacking, and then it was one dinner on the lake followed by another dinner on the lake where Evelyn was clearly the dud guest. Everyone had worn embroidered whale belts; everyone but Evelyn.
This time, she had a whale belt—a never-worn birthday gift from Babs—and she was prepared. She could see the edge of the main house down a stone path to her left. Evelyn opened the car door and hopped out, removed her duffel from the back, and set off on the wide stone stairs toward the house’s kitchen entrance.
The Hackings’ Scottish deerhound, Hamilton, after Alexander, who was always having to be fetched from neighbors’ houses after he paddled up to their shores on long and unauthorized swims, nosed open the screen door from the kitchen and greeted Evelyn with a welcoming snout jab. Evelyn followed Hamilton inside, where Preston sat on a stool next to the kitchen’s central island, holding a bunch of grapes up to the light.
“Ah. Greetings to you, Evelyn Beegan,” Preston said, rising. He wore an extremely old pink oxford, dark khakis, and monogrammed velvet driving slippers with a giant moth hole over his left little toe. He shook the cluster of fruit in front of her. “Would you care for a grape?”
“I’m good, thanks.” Evelyn swung herself onto a stool. There wasn’t a dish, clean or dirty, visible in the entire kitchen, just the photo-shoot-ready bowl of fruit.
“Where are your travel companions? And what is happening with your hair?” Preston asked.
“Coming down in a second, I think. And I straightened it. Thanks for letting me crash. The People Like Us recruitment continues.”
“The drama continues here this weekend, too,” Preston said, tossing a grape into his mouth and looking amused. “You remember Bing.”
“Sure.”