Lake Crosby isn’t a natural lake but a reservoir, its waters boxed in on the southern end by a dam that controls both water levels and underwater currents. The engineers are like gods, holding back the currents or letting them rip, manipulating everything with a flip of a switch. Their gate releases are a major happening in these parts, announced well in advance to give the falls watchers and adventure sporters time to plan. But the hike to the top of High Falls Trail is steep and overcrowded, a long line of suicidal crazies carting kayaks they use to shoot down the five-plus miles of class-four rapids. Once you’ve seen one thunderous tsunami barrel over a cliff, you’ve seen them all.

“The dam is shut down,” Chet says, flopping down on one of the matching white couches, plucking off his socks. If he could get away with going through life barefoot, Chet would throw away all his shoes. “There’s not been a release since July. The lake’s just choppy from all the rain.”

“So now what?”

Chet shrugs. “I heard one of the cops say it was time to call in the big guns.”

“Meaning?”

He shrugs again. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

I don’t know, either. The state police? The FBI? Earlier this year, when a couple of recreational divers swam up on a rusted-out Camaro containing a skeleton on the other end of the lake, Chief Hunt’s team got sidelined by state investigators. But that was because the divers called the media before alerting the cops, and some reporter had already connected the body to a decades-old missing persons case. Who are the big guns for a murder case?

I haven’t thought of that skeleton in months, even though for three weeks this past spring, it was all anybody could talk about. We’re a town that’s used to things living and dying underneath us, but the idea of a human trapped under our waters, a person rotting away in a car we didn’t know was there...well, it freaked us way the hell out.

I stare out the window into the fading light, watching shadows dance on the surface of the lake. That’s three back-to-back bodies the water has sent up from the darkness, three mysteries since I’ve lived near Lake Crosby’s shores. Decades apart, but still.

If I were a superstitious person, I’d call it an omen.

I don’t know what time it is when I come downstairs, only that it’s good and dark, the hills and the lake a smudge of blackness on the other side of the glass. Light from the kitchen shines on the back deck boards sparkling with frost, and I think of Paul, freezing in his hammock.