“Mary!”

But she wasn’t returning my cry. I ran up the stairs to the two small bedrooms.

We rarely slept in the bedrooms—they were mostly for storing our clothes for the summer and where we’d go to change, and they were normally too hot at night. More often than not, we slept on top of sleeping bags on the dock, or on the couch or floor of the living room.

I had not been in the girls’ bedroom very often, but when Mary let out another cry, I could tell that’s where she was.

“Paul!” she screamed, and I barged through the door, not sure what I would find. An attacker? A wild animal? Something worse? At first I didn’t find anything—only a dark room, the shadowy outline of two single beds, a window that didn’t let in any light.

“Mary?” I asked.

A whimpering made its way across the floor. Mary had tucked herself in the far corner of the room, behind one of the beds, and I moved quickly through the darkness, banging my knee on the bedpost, crawling over the mattress, reaching for her.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Mary, what’s going on?”

“There was a woman outside the window,” she whispered, and her eyes flashed in the dark. “The same woman I saw in the field at your house last fall.”

A chill raced along my spine. “Mary, we’re on the second floor.”

Her eyes remained wide open.

“How did you know it was her?” I asked.

She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the wall before whispering, “Paul, I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

“Tom!” I shouted, but he was already bursting into the room and turning on the light. “Tom,” I said again, “some strange woman is outside the house. Mary saw her through the window.”

Shirley’s mouth dropped open in horror, and she came across the room and tucked herself in the corner with Mary.

“Stay here,” I told them both. Tom and I took the steps down from the loft two at a time, turned the corner, and went out through the front door into the warm summer night.

One might think that being in the middle of nowhere meant silence, but it seemed like those lakeside summer nights were the noisiest places on earth. Crickets in the undergrowth and cicadas in the trees and other insects I couldn’t identify whirred and chirped and sang. Bullfrogs along the lake’s bank were bellowing, giving their loud assent. Occasionally, bats would swoop through the light, snagging gnats and moths and mosquitoes. When the breeze gathered and moved among the leaves, there was the sound of a thousand trees, their leaves green and fluid, rustling.

We did a quick walk around the house, and the night was still warm. We were both wiping the sweat from our eyes. When we didn’t see anyone, we continued up the lane, into the deepest shadows under the trees, night within night. I tried to walk quietly, but every so often my bare foot caught a rock in the driveway and sent it diving into the leafy underbrush.