The sunrise is a sickly pale glow on the horizon, and maybe I shouldn’t follow his footprints, maybe I don’t want to know where he’s gone. Yet, I push my hands into my coat pockets and clomp down the steps into the snow anyway.

A boy is dead. And maybe Oliver decided to leave in the middle of the night, tried to hike down the road to town. He’ll never make it if he did. Or maybe he’s gone somewhere else. Perhaps he has other secrets he’s trying to hide—a deep well of them.

Fin leaps through the snow happily, trailing Oliver’s tracks, and when we reach the lake, the footprints turn left, toward the southern shore.

The air whirls with flecks of ice; the morning sky is velvet—like fabric that was handwoven, marred by deep clouds and imperfections. Not machine made. And Oliver’s path around the lake takes me to the small marina, where docks sit frozen in the ice, waiting for spring. Canoes rest with their bellies to the sky.

In summer, tourists converge on this side of the lake, children sprinting down the docks to fling themselves into the water, orange and cherry and watermelon Popsicles dripping onto toes and down sunburnt arms. Normal kids with normal lives—a thing I never knew. The air always smelling of sunblock and campfire smoke, the afternoons burning so brightly that nothing dark and shadowy can possibly survive.

But now, the boathouse store sits boarded up for the winter, a CLOSED sign hanging crooked above the turquoise-blue door—the wind thumping it against the wood, a thwap thwap thwap that reminds me of a woodpecker searching for bugs in the trunks of spruce trees.

“Hello!” someone calls, and I whip around to face the lake.

Old Mr. Perkins is out on one of the docks, his green rain boots kicking through a layer of snow, the hood of his yellow slicker pulled up over his head—as if it were spring, as if the air were mild and drizzling.

“Morning,” I call back to him.

When Grandma was still alive, she and Mr. Perkins would often sit on the docks at sunset, chatting about the years that lay behind them—back before the tourists came, when you’d find gold on the bottom of your boots just walking around the shore, and fish swam in the lake as thick as mud. Now, from time to time, Mom and I will make the walk down to the marina to check on Mr. Perkins, especially in winter. We’ll bring along a thermos of hot cinnamon-apple tea, a sweet pumpkin cobbler straight from the oven, and jars of freshly sealed honey.

But this time, I haven’t brought pie.