Excerpt

“Mom, I’m going up the ravine!”

The voice came from the kitchen from an old, well weathered, but still attractive cottage on Blue Water Point. The message was intended for Lisa Keyser, who was making a beds on the upper floor of the cottage, and she quickly abandoned her chore and hurried downstairs.

“Do you really have to?” Lisa knew that this was a silly question, that her son would announce that of course he did and that she would acquiesce in his plan after telling him to be careful. She was a chronic worrier, and she worried that her hyperactive boys would do something foolish that would lead to an accident, resulting in a broken bone or the need for stitches.

“Aw, come on, Mom. It’s okay. Billy’s already gone, and I promised to bring cookies for lunch.” Darrell was stuffing a handful of chocolate chip cookies into a ziplock bag as he spoke.

“You know I don’t want you climbing up any of those banks. Just stay down on the level.” Lisa had never been up the ravine, but had heard enough stories that she had formed a fairly accurate picture of its topography. “You should really put on your sneaks. Those flip-flops are no good in the ravine. Come on, do it for your mother.”

Darrell reluctantly changed his shoes, assured his mother that he and his brother would take care of themselves, and raced out the back door, slamming it behind him.

It was a chilly and windy morning on a weekend in late April, much too early in the season for swimming in the lake, but otherwise no deterrent for two boys enjoying their spring break from school, visiting their grandparents and escaping from the confines of city living. In warmer weather, they would strip off their clothes and take a dip in one of the pools. Not today, however. The water would be icy cold, and in any event they were hoping to find a few crayfish for fishing. Billy and Darrell Keyser made their way quickly up the ravine.

“Gonna go climbing?” Darrell asked his older brother as he jumped across a suddenly deeper slot in the bed of the ravine. Their mother would disapprove, but there would be nobody around to watch, and what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her — or them.

“Don’t know. Maybe.” Billy was supposed to be his brother’s keeper, or so his mother told him, but in fact, he was the less responsible of the two boys, the greater risk taker.

They came to a stretch of the ravine where the serrated shale formation rose sharply on either side of the stream, making it difficult to maintain footing. The boys, one after the other, grabbed onto the branches of overhanging trees and pulled themselves along until they came again to even ground. Just beyond a sharp bend in the ravine a fallen tree lay across their path.

“There it is,” Billy said as he ducked under the tree. Some fifty yards ahead of them rose a steep bank some forty or fifty feet high. Bushes crowded the bank on both sides, and between them a thin sheet of water made the rock look like a wet, misshapen blackboard. Near the far corner of the bank a more turbulent stream of water poured over the ledge, cascading down the bank and into a large pool that had been carved out of the soft shale below.

This was as far as the Keyser boys would go that morning. Whether they would have been tempted to try the treacherous climb to the top of the bank, and whether they would have confessed to doing so if their mother had asked them, will never be known. Their morning’s adventure came to an abrupt and altogether unanticipated end when they reached the pool at the base of the bank. And it did not end with Billy’s bucket full of crayfish.

“I bet we get a dozen,” Darrell called out as they scrambled the last few yards up the ravine to their goal. By this time both boys’ shoes were soaking wet, their feet cold, but neither seemed to care.

“Are you kidding? We’ll be lucky to find any. I’ll bet it’s too cold for ‘em.” Billy was remembering that they usually found crayfish in the lake’s warm shallows in the summer.

Whether there were any crayfish in what the boys had come to call “Grandpa Brock’s Pool” quickly became irrelevant.

“Hey, look at this.” It was Darrell who had reached the pool first and who was thus the first to realize that something was wrong.

The boys squatted at the edge of the water, staring down into the bowl that the tumbling rocks and falling water had created at the foot of the bank. It was roughly seven feet across at its widest point, and was now full of water to a depth of something like four feet. What the boys saw in “Grandpa Brock’s Pool” was a body, unmistakably human, entirely submerged except for a hand that broke the surface of the water at a corner of the pool where a large rock had become lodged.

“What happened?” It was Darrell’s question.

“I guess she fell,” was Billy’s answer. He looked up at the bank, and for the first time since he had heard their mother tell them it was dangerous to climb it, he realized that maybe she knew what she was talking about.

Darrell got up and went over to a pile of brush and tree limbs that had washed down the bank and collected at a corner of the ravine near the falling water. He pulled out a branch, came back, and started poking with it at the body in the pool.

“Hey, don’t do that,” Billy snapped at him. “What do you think you’re doing?”