Two weeks earlier, the morning after the snowstorm had rolled down from the mountains, I woke to find my house draped in snow. Ice coated the windows, the roof moaned from the weight, and the walls bowed inward as if nails were being pushed free from the wood. The radio had said we’d get twelve to eighteen inches of snow. We got nearly four feet—in a single night. I crawled from bed, the cold leeching up from the floorboards, and went outside into the snow.

The landscape had changed overnight.

I walked down to the lake’s edge and found the forest dripping in white marshmallow fluff. But it wasn’t quiet and still like most winter mornings. Voices echoed across the frozen lake, coming from the boys’ camp. They shouted up into the trees. They stomped around in their heavy snow boots and sent birds screeching unhappily into the bleak morning sky.

“Morning!” Old Floyd Perkins called, waving a hand in the air as he trudged up the shore, head bowed away from the blowing wind, shoulders bent and stooped with time and age and gravity. When he reached me, he squinted as if he couldn’t see me clearly—cataracts clouding his already failing vision. “A bad winter,” he said, tilting his gaze upward, soft flakes falling over us. “But not as bad as some.” Mr. Perkins has lived at Jackjaw Lake most of his life. He knew my grandmother when she was still alive, and he lives at the far south end of the lake in a small cabin beside the boathouse store that he runs during the summer months—renting out canoes and paddleboats and selling ice cream sandwiches to the tourists under the hot, wavy sun. And every morning, he walks the shore of the lake, his gait slow and labored, long arms swinging at his sides, arthritis creaking in his joints. Even in the snow, he makes his morning rounds.

“What’s happening over at the camp?” I asked.

“A boy went missing last night.” He rubbed a knuckled hand across the back of his neck, gray hair poking out from his wool cap. “Vanished from his bunk during the storm.”

I looked past him up the shore to the camp. A few boys were shoveling snow away from their cabin doorways, while most of the others moved up into the forest, calling out a name I couldn’t make out.

“Talked to one of the counselors,” Mr. Perkins continued, nodding grimly, considering the gravity of the situation. “Boy might’ve just run away, made it down the mountain before the snow fell last night.”

The wind roiled up from the surface of the frozen lake, and it made me shiver. “But they’re looking for him up in the woods.” I crossed my arms over my chest and nodded to the trees beyond the camp.

“They have to be sure he didn’t get lost, I suppose.” He raised one thick gray eyebrow, his gaze solemn. “But if that boy went up into those woods last night, there’s a good chance he won’t make it back out. And they’ll never find him.”