She paused. “Do you know the name of that lake? It’s called the Lake of Grief.” She paused again, watched for a reaction from Noah, saw none. “Arch Wheeler made a famous statement about it—at least famous for this community. Building the lake cost him a lot more money than he thought it would, and one day when somebody asked him about it, he said, ‘If I’d known how much grief it was going to cause me, I’d never have built it.’ After that, everybody called it the Lake of Grief.” She looked toward the swaying head of Beatrice Cunningham. “For me I guess it’s the right name,” she added softly. “People around here think it’s haunted. That’s why no one ever goes there. You can hear all kinds of stories about it. Dogs chasing game around there and coming back out of the woods whimpering, their hair turned gray. Hunters telling of seeing lights at night moving across the lake. That sort of thing. It’s the kind of talk you hear a lot of in the mountains. I’ve never met anyone who hasn’t seen at least one ghost, and if they haven’t, they know someone who has. Boyd used to laugh about it. He used to say he liked going there so he could have a conversation with Arch Wheeler’s ghost. Said he and Arch were drinking buddies.” She paused, looked at Noah. “It was his way of trying to scare me, I think, but it was a waste of time. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

The drive from the house to the pull-off of the lake was taken in silence. At the pull-off—a wedge of open land that had the faint look of a place where a house might have been—she stopped the car and turned slightly to face Noah.

“Could I ask you something?” she said.

“All right,” he told her.

“When you were at Dachau, you saw a lot of children in the camp, didn’t you?”

Noah dipped his head. “I did,” he said quietly.

“Did you want to bring one of them home with you?”

For a moment, Noah did not answer. He looked out of the window, at the dimming light, the gathering of darkness under the trees. In his memory, he could see the hollow-eyed faces of boys standing motionless behind chain fences. Then: “I guess so. I guess everybody did, in one way or another. Not much anybody could do for them. Give them some food, things like that.”

“It’s not easy to talk about, is it?”

“No,” he said honestly.

“My husband met a little girl at the camp his company liber-ated,” she said. “He wrote me that he wanted to bring her to America. I didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t like him-not at all. He’d never had much to do with children. Even told me once that it didn’t much matter to him if we had any, but it seemed like he just couldn’t get her out of his mind.”