The directions indicated that at the foot of the ramp Devlin was to cut a hard right onto County Road 517. He had asked Mrs. Quinn if 517 went through Newton. No, she had said, it went to Sparta and after that she didn’t know. Devlin had not thought of Newton in decades, part of an old world buried in his heart: Newton, Sparta, and the town of Sussex, the county seat, Branchville, Augusta, and Lafayette, whitewashed dusty places he had seen only in the summers, when insects buzzed in the relentless sunshine. Now the signs pointing to housing tracts, and others offering land for sale, showed that Sussex had become the far edge of The Big Town, impaled under developers’ beady eyes. From what he could see, all Frank Devlin had learned in his youth about life outside New York City had ceased to exist—and he might have never have known it if not for the most remote of connections, an almost random arrow out of the universal darkness.

Three and a half miles on 517, the directions said, and then three sharp rights around the lake. The shadows cast by the thick foliage were so dark that Devlin had to turn on the headlights to read the tiny, TOYTOWN, U.S.A., street signs as he wound through the last three right turns. He couldn’t get a good look at the lake. Lake Tranquility. Devlin knew nothing about Lake Tranquility, except that it was in Sussex County. What Devlin himself remembered was that Sussex was dotted with lakes—Owassa, Culver’s, Paulinskill. Great fishing lakes, he had been taught in his teenage years, back when the men who had taught him fished at night so they wouldn’t get caught by fish-and-game wardens. The fish went on the table or into the freezer, never to waste. The men had evolved a quiet, mysterious way to live, half off the land, so poor they had to be outside the law. Devlin supposed that many of them were ghosts now—or half-deaf old goofs, hardly the freebooting outlaws slugging out their Saturday nights at Poison Pete’s, the ramshackle bar, bowling alley, and motel across the highway from the Culvermere Hotel, where city secretaries stole summer weekends with their soft, manicured bosses, unaware of the fierce, silent energy whirling outside.…

Probably no one in all of Lake Tranquility had ever heard anything of the area’s old days. Lake Tranquility was another conventional, split-level suburb, the landscaping almost mature, with some of the lots butting onto a puddle too big to be called a pond. The numbers on the mailboxes indicated that Devlin was heading to a house with waterfront footage. Irene Quinn had the New York accent for life. Her brother, Cummings, had none of the accent, but Cummings had that N.Y.P.D. attitude-of-command crap in him. Devlin had heard it immediately in the way Cummings had tried to fix Devlin’s identity.