I feel cold suddenly, even though sweat drips from my temples. I think of the boys at the bonfire, how they said they heard voices, something in their cabin, in the trees. Not the voices of miners, but maybe something else. Someone else.

Max.

“Those early settlers were superstitious,” he adds, circling around a point he’s trying to make but not quite getting there. “They would make offerings to the trees, to the mountains.” He taps a finger against the chair, his expression turned serious. “They thought it would appease the darkness that lived in the Wicker Woods. They dropped their most precious items into the lake, letting the water swallow them up. They believed the lake was the center of everything, the beating heart of the wilderness.”

“Did it work?” I ask, feeling like a little girl asking about a bedtime story, a fairytale that was never real. “Did it calm the woods?”

His eyes squint nearly closed, mulling over the question. “Perhaps. Who’s to say where a bottomless lake might end.” He pushes up from the rocking chair and walks to one of the front windows, looking out at the frozen lake, a cluster of empty summer homes, and a boys’ camp across the way. “But you can’t always blame the Wicker Woods,” he adds, “for the bad things that happen.”

I push my hands into my pockets and look past him through the window, at an ocean of spiky green trees for as far as I can see. And beyond, the snow capped mountains poking up into the dark clouds. A place that is rugged and wild. Where bad things happen.

A boy goes missing.

A boy dies.

Who’s to blame?

The morning sun breaks through the clouds, and for a brief moment it passes through every window in Mr. Perkins’s home—illuminating every dark corner, every dust mote tumbling across the wood floor, the stacks of books lining the walls, the old picture frames hanging from bent nails, the cobwebs sagging between the rafters like silky ribbons.

I had hoped for something in coming here, but I’m not sure what. Answers to the wrong questions, answers that Mr. Perkins doesn’t have. If my grandmother was alive, I would go to her and she would draw me into her broad arms and hum a melody only she knew until I drifted off to sleep. And in my dreams, she would whisper answers to all the things I needed to know. When I woke, my heart would feel clear and raw and new, a feeling like being untethered. A dizziness that made you want to laugh.

But she is gone and my mom is not here and all I have is Mr. Perkins.

I am alone.