“I don’t know.” Caroline stretched out the last word sounding like a whiny guilty child.

“Please look at me,” Jo said. “And tell me you didn’t sneak out of your room last night and mess with Stimpy’s traps.”

Caroline dipped her head and hid her face under the visor of her baseball cap. “I didn’t,” she said in the same whiny guilty voice.

“That’s enough,” Gram said. “She said she had nothing to do with releasing those snappers, and I believe her.”

Over the top of Caroline’s lowered head, Jo read Gram’s lips. Leave her alone.

Jo looked away. So Gram was taking Caroline’s side. Not once in all of Jo’s life had Gram ever stuck up for her. Not when she had been a pregnant teenager, a time when she had needed her most. And not now, when Gram clearly understood that Caroline had broken a law. For an instant Jo felt envious of her own daughter, and at the same time she felt petty and childish, too.

“Who’s this?” Caroline asked, and pointed to a photograph in the album.

Gram looked down through the reading glasses she had perched on the tip of her nose. “I’m not sure,” she said.

They both ignored Jo at this point. It took everything Jo had not to yell that she was her mother, demand Caroline answer her questions, but she happened to glimpse at the colored photo and did a double-take. It was a picture of Billy at his cabin. He was holding up a lake trout. Jo had taken the picture. Dee Dee was in the shot, along with a little girl Jo couldn’t place.

“Where did you get these?” she asked, but she already knew the answer. They were stored in the back closet all these years, the one Gram had finally decided to clean out.

Caroline kept her finger on the little girl in the photo. “She looks like Sara, the little girl who drowned.” She looked up at Jo, a little frightened.

“Oh my god,” Jo said. “That’s not Sara, that’s Pattie Dugan.” Patricia. “Dee Dee used to babysit Pattie every summer. Pattie is Sara’s mother.”

“I’ll be,” Gram said. “I remember her parents, Bob and Jean. They rented the Sparrow for many summers. Nice people. Good people.”

Good people meant lake people, regulars who were accepted in the association and community. It meant Pattie had been one of them this entire time. Jo touched her neck and throat.

Gram continued. “But they stopped coming when Bob lost his job. I heard later they divorced,” she said. “But that’s all lake rumors. I don’t know if any of that is true.”

Jo had to sit down, and she plopped onto a wicker rocking chair across from Caroline and Gram and the photo. It wasn’t the shock of seeing a picture of Billy that made her knees weak, although that was a part of it. It was the surprise to find out she had known who Patricia was all along. Patricia Starr was little Pattie Dugan.

Pattie must’ve been nine or ten years old in the photograph. It was no wonder Jo didn’t recognize her now that she was an adult. It all seemed logical except the part about Billy.

Was it possible Patricia, Pattie, didn’t know Billy had drowned that summer?

Jo tried to think if she had seen Pattie in the summers since then, but how could she be sure? Jo had only been able to stay with Gram for a couple of days at a time before taking off. She hadn’t spent an entire summer at the lake since she was sixteen.

“Do you remember what summer they stopped coming?” she asked Gram.

“My goodness, I’d have to think about it. I’m not sure.”

Jo didn’t like the feeling that crept up her spine.

“This changes everything,” she said. “It’s Pattie’s little girl out there. She’s one of us. They must not know.” She was referring to the lake association and even Sheriff Borg. “Heil will have to continue searching. He can’t leave a regular out there.”

The logic was twisted but true. A first-timer, an unknown without any attachment to the lake community, someone who didn’t contribute year after year to help line the pockets of Heil and the locals, wouldn’t be treated the same. If the lake people had any rules—hell, if they had any conscience at all—it was their unwavering loyalty to their own kind. They may have reopened the beach when Billy had drowned, but they had never stopped searching or limiting their search like they planned to do with Sara. This was because Billy was one of them and Sara wasn’t, but now it seemed as though she was.

“Mom,” Caroline said.

Jo looked from Gram to her daughter. She had almost forgotten Caroline was there.

“Is that Billy?” Caroline asked.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Gram slammed the photo album shut, startling Caroline.

“That’s enough reminiscing for one afternoon,” Gram said, and stood. “Is anyone hungry? I’ll make sandwiches.” She rushed to the kitchen, taking the photo album with her.

Caroline looked to her mother for an answer to her question, an explanation. Was the boy in the picture the same boy who drowned? Was it Billy, her mother’s old boyfriend and her father’s friend? But Caroline could tell from her mother’s expression that she had already lost her. Her mother had retreated deep inside herself to those dark places Caroline recognized and wished she didn’t. It was anyone’s guess when her mother would surface. The only thing that surprised Caroline was that her mother hadn’t raced out the door.

“Forget it,” Caroline said. She’d find the answers to her questions on her own somehow, some way.

She returned to her bedroom where she found the new sneakers. She pulled on a pair of socks and then slipped the sneakers on. She’d get them a little dirty and no one would be the wiser. Gram had promised she’d keep her secret once she explained to Gram her reasons, the same reasons she used with Adam, although she didn’t mention his part, not wanting to implicate him. She was willing to take full responsibility for the two of them if it came down to that. It was her idea, her plan, her doing.

When she had told Gram she couldn’t stand the thought of what those snappers would do to Sara, Gram had more than understood—she had agreed and believed Caroline brave for taking a stand albeit an illegal one.

“Sometimes,” Gram had said, “doing the right thing means you have to break some rules.”

They agreed to keep it between themselves. It would be their secret and theirs alone. Gram wouldn’t tell Caroline’s mother what she had done, and this suited Caroline just fine. Her mother may suspect, but she would never know for sure, if Caroline could help it. Now Caroline and Gram had secrets too. Take that, Caroline whispered to herself about her mother.

Gram appeared in the doorway. “I’ve got everything out on the table.”

“I’m not hungry,” she said. “I think I’m going to find Megan instead.”

“Well.” Gram pressed her lips together in frustration at having set out food no one was going to eat. “Why don’t the two of you come back here? There’s more than enough sandwiches and you can play board games or cards, do something fun for awhile.”

“I don’t know, but I’ll ask her.” She didn’t want to hurt Gram’s feelings, but she didn’t want to play games. She wondered if she would ever feel like doing anything fun again.

She stepped outside. The air was thick with humidity from the earlier storm. The day was hot. She rubbed the sides of her sneakers into the dirt where the grass would never grow. She kicked a couple of rocks to give the white tops a broken-in look, and hopped on her bicycle.

The seat was still wet from her ride in the rain that morning. She had gotten up and went straight to the lake to discover her plan had worked. The men weren’t on the water searching for two reasons: the storm and the fact that their turtles were gone. They were standing on Stimpy’s porch. She could just make out their cross faces from where she sat on her bike in the parking lot.