“It’s Lori”—and here his voice broke. “She’s out there in the lake. I think she—she was out there in the lake and I tried to, to—”

“Come on now, it’s all right, Fitz, it’s okay,” Ken said, and then, sharply, to the woman in the sundress, “could you find us a towel or a blanket or something? Please?”

“Julius,” he said. “She was like Julius, remember Julius? She’s dead, Ken.” His voice rose, he couldn’t help it: “Dead, you get it? Lori’s dead!”

Ken didn’t move. He just smiled at him, and it was a condescending smile, the sort of smile you’d give to a child or to a friend and colleague whose wife you’d shared mutually and was showing every sign of hallucinatory derangement. “Hey, come on, old buddy,” he said, “calm down, everything’s all right—I just saw her five minutes ago. She was right here.” He turned to the boyish woman. “The dark-haired girl in the black bathing suit? The one who was a little out of it?”

“Oh, yeah,” the woman said, “yeah, of course, she was right here,” though Fitz was no longer listening. He just watched her lips move and her lips told him nothing he didn’t already know.

In the next moment he had hold of Ken’s arm and was insisting that he come down to the lake with him, because if he didn’t he was going to go into the house and call the cops himself, an ambulance, the fire department, people to dredge the lake, because he’d seen her, he’d seen her go down, and she was dead, she was dead and drowned and everything was so narrow and constricted, so foreordained, so wrong.

“Okay, okay,” Ken said, and here was the woman with the towel and Ken was wrapping it around his shoulders, “but only if you promise me you’ll get out of those wet Jockeys and put some clothes on, all right?”

“Later,” he said, his teeth chattering, “I’ll do it later,” and he was already moving and Ken was beside him and they were off into the night, the two women tagging along. The light of the fire receded behind them but somebody—Ken—had a flashlight and here was the path revealing itself as a pale line drawn down the center of a field of dark ragged grass. The crickets roared. Fireflies hung in the air. He was shivering, his feet were killing him, and Ken kept saying, “I swear it, Fitz, I swear I saw her, isn’t that right, Melanie?” And Melanie—the one in the sundress—kept saying, “Yeah, absolutely. She’s around here someplace.”

The lake was black. The dock hung pale above it. The other woman said, “God, it’s beautiful out here—isn’t it great to be out in the country?”