The lake didn’t cause dying, the men concluded. It just seemed that way. Had to do with the name, they offered. Lake of Grief. Good Lord, if Arch Wheeler had said building the place made him laugh, they might have called it Laughing Lake, and then what would people be saying? You could bet there wouldn’t be any talk of ghosts. Talk of angels singing sweet church music, maybe, but not of ghosts.

They talked of Arch Wheeler.

Lord, Arch Wheeler had deserved his little lake. Pity how quick he died, just when he had everything lined up to do nothing with his life but fish and ramble around the valley showing off his new Nash car and talking politics. Lord, he loved talking politics, and if you didn’t mention Roosevelt, he would, being a Roosevelt man. If he had been around during the war, he would have been stealing plow points for scrap metal, just to help Roosevelt make more guns.

Same couldn’t be said of Boyd Cunningham, the men agreed, throwing fidgety glances toward the house to make sure Eleanor was not in earshot of their talk.

Boyd had come back from the war a changed man, they said. Touchy. Quick to anger. Acting funny at times. Spending more money than any soldier had the right to have, but dodging friendly questions about it.

One of the men said, “I asked him one time, said, ‘Where’d you get all them twenty-dollar bills, Boyd?’ and he said it weren’t none of my goddamn business and if I kept on about it, he’d show me what war was all about. I never saw a man get so hot under the collar so fast.”

Another said, almost in whisper, “I heard some talk about him having a woman in Germany, and it got to weighing heavy on him, and that’s maybe why he shot hisself.”

“That’s just talk,” said another—the man with the stubble of beard and sun-brown face. “I was over there. They was women everywhere, some of them easy enough for the taking. A candy bar would do it, or some cigarettes. But I didn’t see nobody wanting to bring one back home with him.” He turned to look at Noah. “You was there, weren’t you? Whitlow said you was.”

“I was,” Noah answered.

“You see anybody wanting to stay over there because of a woman?”

“Can’t say that I did,” Noah replied.

“It’s all just talk,” the man repeated. He glanced again toward the house, added, “He had him a fine woman waiting at home.”

The men nodded in agreement.

“What’s anybody heard about the fishing tomorrow?” one of the men asked.

“I heard Howard wanted it to go on,” Moody answered. “He was guessing they’d bury Matthew on Sunday, but they got to wait for Milton.”

“Any guess on when he’s coming in?”

“Early this afternoon is what Howard was saying.”

“It’ll hit him hard.”

“It will.”

“Maybe they ought to put off the fishing until next week.”