“Really? That’s when I was thinking of buying the place. February. Or March.”

The young woman added quickly, “No, I mean I was going to take the year off. A couple years maybe. I wasn’t going to work at all.”

“Oh.” Lis straightened one of the sandbags, which teetered between the two women. “And do what?”

“Travel. Club Med it for a while. I wanted to learn how to windsurf. Demon of the sea.”

“Just… not do anything?”

“I hear that tone, Mother.”

Lis fought down the wave of anger. “No, I’m just surprised.”

“Maybe I’ll do Europe again. I was poor when I did the backpacking routine. And, God, those trips with Mother and Father? The pits. Señor L’Auberget, fascist tour guide. ‘Come on, girls, what the hell’re you up to? The Louvre closes in two hours. Portia, don’t you dare look back at those boys…’ Ha, and you-you were probably the only kid in the history of the world who went to bed without dinner because she bitched about leaving… what was that?”

“The sculpture gardens at the Rodin museum,” Lis said in a soft voice, laughing wanly at the memory. “A culture victim at seventeen.”

After a moment Portia said, “I don’t think so, Lis. It wouldn’t work.”

“For a year. Try it. You could sell out your share if it isn’t for you.”

“I could also lose the money, couldn’t I?”

“Yes, I suppose you could. But I won’t let it go under.”

“What does Owen think?”

Ah, well, there was that.

“He had some reservations, you could say.”

You could also say that it nearly broke up their marriage. Lis began thinking about opening a nursery just before their mother died and it was clear that the sisters would be inheriting a large sum of cash. Owen had wanted to put money into conservative stocks and invest in his law firm, hiring several attorneys and expanding into new offices. That would be the best return on the investment, he’d told her.

But she was adamant. It was her money, and a nursery would be perfect for her. If not the Langdells’, then another one somewhere nearby. Always the practical counselor, he rattled off a list of concerns.

“You’re crazy, Lis. A nursery? It’s seasonal. It’s weather-dependent. With landscaping, there’re major liability issues. You’ll have INS problems with the workers… You want to garden, we’ll build another one here. We’ll get an architect, we can-”

“I want to work, Owen. For heaven’s sake, I don’t tell you to stay home and read law books for fun.”

“You can make a living at law,” he’d snapped.

The more he argued, the more insistent she grew.

“Jesus, Lis. At best, you’ll probably clear a few thousand a year. You’d make more if you put it in the bank and earned passbook interest.”

She flung a Money magazine down on the table. “There’s an article on profitable businesses. Funeral homes are number one. I don’t want a funeral home.”

“Quit being so damn pigheaded! At least in the bank the money’s insured. You’re willing to risk it all?”

“Mrs. Langdell showed me the books. They’ve been profitable for fifteen years.”

He grew ominously quiet. “So you’ve talked to her about it already. Before you came to me?”

After a moment she confessed that she had.

“Don’t you think you might’ve asked first?”

“I didn’t commit myself.”

“You haven’t even got your hands on the money yet and you’re pretty fucking eager to throw it away.”

“It’s my family’s money, Owen.”

Most scripts of domestic confrontation would call for a little parrying at this point. Your money? Your money? I supported you when the teachers went on strike… When you lost your big bank client two years ago, it was my salary-a teacher’s salary!-that got us through… I’m doing all the estate legal work for free… All those months when we couldn’t pay the light bill because you joined the country club…

But Owen had done then what Owen did best. He closed his mouth and walked away. He grabbed his old.22 pump rifle and walked out into the woods to plink cans and hunt squirrels and rabbits.

For several hours Lis was left alone with the distant pops of gunshots and the memory of the coldness in his eyes when he’d walked out the door.

And for several hours she wondered if she’d lost her husband.

Yet when he returned he was calm. The last he said about the nursery was, “I’d counsel against it but if you want to go ahead anyway, I’ll represent you.”

She’d thanked him but it was several days before his moodiness vanished.

Tonight, Lis started to tell her sister some of Owen’s concerns but Portia wasn’t interested. She simply shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

After a moment Lis asked, “Why?”

“I’m not ready to leave the city yet.”

“You wouldn’t have to. I’d do the day-to-day things. We’d get together a couple times a month. You could come out here. Or I could go into the city.”

“I really need some time off.”

“Think about it, at least. Please?” Lis exclaimed breathlessly to her sister’s face, pale and obscure in the darkness.

“No, Lis. I’m sorry.”

Angry and hurt, Lis picked up a large sandbag and tossed it onto the edge of the levee. She misjudged the distance though and it tumbled into the lake. “Shit!” she cried, trying to retrieve the bag. But it had slipped deep beneath the surface.

Portia spun some strands of hair once more. Lis stood. Several waves splashed loudly at their feet before Lis asked, “What’s the real reason?”

“Lis.”

“What if I said I didn’t want to buy a nursery. What if I was all hot for a boutique on Madison Avenue?”

Portia’s mouth tightened but Lis persisted, “What if I said, Let’s start a business where you and I travel around Europe and try out restaurants or rate châteaux? What if I said, Let’s start a windsurfing school?”

“Lis. Please.”

“Goddamn it! Is it because of Indian Leap? Tell me?”

Portia spun to face her. “Oh, Jesus, Lis.” She said nothing more.

The surface of the lake grew light suddenly, as a huge flash, bile green, filled the western horizon. It vanished behind a slab of thick clouds.

Lis finally said, “We’ve never talked about it. For six months, we haven’t said a word. It just sits there between us.”

“We better finish up here.” Portia seized her shovel. “That was some mean son-of-a-bitch lightning. And it wasn’t that far away.”

“Please,” Lis whispered.

A groan filled the night, and they turned to see the boathouse slide completely off the pilings and into the water. Portia said nothing more and started shoveling once again.

Listening to the chunk of the sandbags filling, Lis remained near the shore, gazing out over the lake.

As the boathouse sank, a vague white form appeared in the trees behind it. For a moment, Lis was sure that it was an elderly woman limping slowly toward the lake. Lis blinked and stepped closer to shore. The woman’s gait suggested she was ill and in pain.

Then, like the boathouse, the apparition eased off the shore and into the water, where it sank beneath the still, onyx surface. A piece of canvas tied to a cleat on the frame, or a six-mil plastic tarp, Lis supposed. Not a woman at all. Not a ghost.

She’d just imagined it. Of course.

The night Abraham Lincoln died, after spending many hours with a horrid wound in the thick mass of sweat-damp hair, the moon that blossomed out of the clouds in the eastern part of the United States was blood red.

This freak occurrence, Michael Hrubek had read, was verified by several different sources, one of whom was a farmer in Illinois. Standing in a freshly planted cornfield, 1865, April 15, this man looked up into the radiant evening sky, saw the crimson moon and took off his straw hat out of respect because he knew that a thousand miles away a great life was gone.