The road to Sleepy Lake sprouted northwest of Kerri’s neighborhood in Blyton Hills as a paved parkway crossing through ranks of semiordered cedars. Old people used to promenade along this part, as far as the wooden bridge if they felt adventurous, but the road went on farther than most locals cared to remember. It turned north soon after the bridge and tunneled through groves of older, less civilized trees; it crossed two ravines, or the same ravine twice, and finally reached the junction where once trucks filled with machinery and clean-faced mineworkers used to leave the lakebound path, taking the better branch to the shaft on Sentinel Hill. The worse branch continued northwest, slaloming the hills as it climbed upriver, burrowing its way through the forest, and along fifteen miles it managed to lose most of the features that defined it: road signs and milestones first, then asphalt, then gutters, then the respect of varmints, then a good five or six feet in width. And by the time it was but a shrunk, fickle snake of a dirt track serpentining among the massive, twisted roots of gigantic firs, the woods ended and a sunblast came crashing through the last line of trees.
Andy floored the brakes, bringing the amber cannonball to an earth-grinding stop ten feet from the water, a tail of dust and scared insects surrounding it. She had been driving too fast and had misjudged the breadth of the lake bank.
A bright sun glimmered off the surface of two hundred square miles of water.
“Okay,” Andy admitted. “It wasn’t a pond.”
—
Tim jumped out of the racing-striped caravel and ran to conquer the New World.
Andy’s sneakers felt the soft, grassy shore. In all her experience on the road, she could remember few places, including tundra deserts and national parks, where man had left as shallow a print as in Sleepy Lake. She could not tell precisely why. It was possible that pioneers first scouting the Pacific Northwest had once reached that spot, registered the lake in their notebooks, and moved on, anxious to finish charting out Oregon before dinner. But it was also likely that the place itself conspired to erase what little trace people had left throughout history. There were signs of human presence—a dock not far on the east bank, and the timorous shape of the house crouched under the firs on the faraway isle, but somehow the lake had taken them over, successfully convincing the visitors that the dock and the house were original features of the world, waiting to be found.
The three humans wandered around the car, timidly nearing the water, and took in the immensity of the lake that memory had surprisingly not exaggerated. It was in fact hard to size up: its edges broke into gulfs and capes, with heavily wooded peninsulas blocking a complete view. The opposite shore was far enough away to appear grayed out, even against the rainwashed sky.
At what might well be the geometric center of the lake, or not by a long shot, the tiny elongated isle lay low under the weight of colossal trees, whose original seeds had long ago flown from the mainland and landed with uncanny precision there to colonize it. A few pointy dormer windows spied from among the treetops.
“So here we are,” Kerri stated.
Andy scrutinized her profile, sunlight on her freckles and her orange hair glowing. She smelled the trees and the petrichor off the grass; listened to the Shanghai of birds; checked the summits of the firs rocking gently in the cold, damp air, looking like what the top of every tree is, no matter the size: a willful, sun-hungry bud.
“It doesn’t look that bad,” she judged.
Kerri just went “Hmm” and studied the landscape with a biologist’s eyes. An iridescent dung beetle caught her attention.
Nate was apparently covering the shore to the right of the car, therefore Andy wandered to the left, toward the edge of the bay where a pile of white polished rocks forming a rough cliff jutted into the water. She remembered this pile as being big enough to build a fortress, but it rose only three feet. She leaped to the top, small crayfish scuttling from under her feet and splishing into the water.
The lake bank had narrowed down to just a few yards there, and a natural path poked into the woods. She peeped inside, from the forest mud that the sun had lost all hope of reaching, up the umber pillars of the living cathedral, toward the vault of embracing branches of yellow leaves.
No slaughtered animals. No hanging bodies.
Something crashed into the lake behind her, splashing stinging cold water. Tim waded back to shore around the cliff, overly amused, giving Andy a transient look that said, You were right—this is the best. Place. Ever!
Then he ran away, zooming through the shallows and spraying water and mud like a herd of buffaloes all along the shore and eventually over Kerri, who was squatting for a close-up on the insects farther up, and who resignedly stood up and shouted after him: “If you so much as whimper next time I put you in a bathtub, I’ll kill you!”
—
The bank was widest on the right side and drier, so that was where they made camp, and as they unloaded the gear from the Chevy and pulled up the tent, the virgin land grew slightly hostile, like a general frown from the earth and the trees at the visitors’ insolence of coming uninvited. But it stopped bothering Andy once she’d started hammering the poles, like a boisterous announcement of their intention to stay. And the ominous sentiment she had anticipated from the lake never fully manifested that evening. Instead, what little uneasiness the motion of the firs and the burbling of the miniature waves breaking on the shallows had cast upon her mind was gradually nudged aside by the clanging of stacking cooking pots, the texture of her canvas rucksack, the bright colors of the gear they had exhumed from Kerri’s closet just an hour ago. And all this sensory feed was growing a new sensation inside her: something alien and unexpected tingling under her touch that, far-stretching though it felt, had all the characteristics of what people call bliss. Because she was just starting to realize, Nate and Kerri and herself, they were camping in Blyton again.
They had settled near the right end of the bay, not far from the old dock sticking out of the rocky horn, and that whiny structure was the only thing objecting to her complete happiness. For at the dock there was a rowboat, and oars inside.
The three gathered on the platform, staring alternately at the boat and the lonely isle ahead.
“Is this a clue?” Nate finally asked.
“Maybe,” Andy said. “You said no one came fishing here.”
“No one but us, that I know of,” Kerri argued.
The boat knocked gently on the dock’s pole, self-consciously, bound by a piece of rotting rope.
“Okay, so shall we go take a look at the isle?” Andy said, taking the hint.
“May I remind you,” Nate started, “that we’re here because an anonymous note told us to come, and now here’s an anonymous boat inviting us to go even farther?”