“My mom’s plan. Dad used to tease her about it, how they could have saved a ton of money and just camped out under the stars.” He headed for a door off the dining area, and Maggie hurried to catch up with him and open it. “Thanks.” He trudged into a room—a combined office and workshop—and gently perched the sculpture on a butcher-block counter.

A voice from overhead called sharply, “Sam?”

“Down here.”

Maggie heard footsteps on the stairs and a fast stride across the great room. Thomas Blake appeared. He gave Maggie a distracted nod, then scowled at his son. “I’m late for work.”

“Sorry, I was—”

His father, already half-jogging toward the mudroom, held up a hand without turning. “We’ll talk about it later.” The door to the garage slammed shut.

Sam winced. “Great. He’s pissed.” Then he hollered, “Kate?” When no one answered, he strode out of the workshop toward the foot of the stairs, beckoning Maggie along with a hauling motion of his arm. “Daddy’s home!” When silence greeted this announcement, he called even louder, “Kate?”

“I’m busy,” his daughter said.

“Doing what?”

“Writing a book. Jeez!”

He smiled at Maggie and started climbing the stairs. “Come on up.”

She followed slowly. Kate wasn’t going to be thrilled to see her, but this house was cool. Maggie wanted to check out the second floor. To her left, framed maps, brown with age and ragged-edged, decorated the staircase wall. She paused to examine one that she recognized by the label on a bluff: Devil’s Tongue. The elegant script curved across the protrusion. No lanes or drives bisected this portion of Lake Ontario’s shoreline. No parkway ran parallel to the water. Except for a thin horizontal road marked The Ridge at the very bottom of the map, everything south of the water, for what must have been miles and miles, was dense forest. Across the sketched canopy flowed two words, and Maggie read them aloud: “Black North.”

“That’s what the settlers called this area. It was a wilderness for a long time, decades after the Holland Land Company sold off its parcels southwest of here.”

“How come?”

“Probably because of the quality of the land. Swampy.” He stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets and trudged up the rest of the stairs.