The road north scrubs city noise from my ears until I can hear tire hum and my own breath. Pines crowd the last mile; resin sweetens the air the way burnt sugar stains it near the studio. I roll down the window for the turn by the old mailbox. Wind enters with lake-cold teeth and a memory: a younger me practicing radio sign-offs to bullfrogs.
Tessa stands on the porch already, hoodie zipped, fingers wrapped around a chipped mug. She doesn’t wave. She watches. I cut the engine and the quiet feels like a held note waiting for a release it can trust.
“You made good time,” she says. “And you didn’t call.”
“If I called, you’d have cleaned,” I answer, and try a smile that won’t stick. “Hi.”
She raises the mug. “You’re shaking.” Then she steps down the three creaking stairs and hands me coffee that smells like dark chocolate and the kitchen radio that raised us.
I wrap both hands around the heat. “I needed to see the dock.”
“I figured.” She nods toward the water. “You told the world about the lake once. You didn’t tell them which one.”
“He doesn’t need a map,” I say. “He needs devotion. The Night Choir could triangulate a sapling.”
“They better not.” Her jaw tightens. “Elena texted me. She said you were bringing… supervision.”
“She’s coordinating with county,” I say. “Patrols, forensics. I came early to get eyes on and to ask permission.”
“Permission for what?”
“To look under the dock,” I say. “And to remember out loud without making you the story.”
Tessa’s knuckles tap the mug. “You taught me to swim here at dusk,” she says. “You promised me the dark water cares more about the moon than it does about girls. If a man turned that into a riddle, I want his teeth.”
“I know.” I hand her the thermos I brought. “Backup.”
We walk down the path we wore as kids, the one pine roots keep punching through no matter how many summers we tamp them flat. The water breathes against stones. A loon calls from the far end, a lonely laugh that never meant humor. The dock sulks where it always has, gray boards bowed, nails rising like old regrets. I can smell damp wood, gasoline from some neighbor’s boat two coves over, and the mineral bite of the lake itself.
“I found a page at the Orpheum,” I say. “Script format. Stage directions aimed at me. Watermarked with a cherub mask.”
Tessa’s mouth hardens. “Cherubs. Cute holiness. Fake safety.”
“Under UV, the face smiled without eyes,” I say.
“So we check here in daylight,” she says, and crouches at the dock edge without waiting for my nod. “You coming?”
I drop to my knees. Cold leaks through my jeans. The boards smell like wet coin and old algae. I tuck my hair into my collar and run my hand along the first two planks, feeling for the loose one I pried as a kid to hide letters and contraband jellybeans. The third board flexes the way I remember.
“Here,” I say.
Tessa passes me the short crowbar from the boathouse. I brace my palm on the board and work the claw under the soft edge. The wood resists, then relents with a husky sigh. A spider skitters from under the gap; I let it go like a penitent.
“Careful,” Tessa says. “If there’s a trip line—”
“He’s theatrical, not wired,” I say, but I lay the board back gently. Beneath, a dark slit glints. I lean lower. Lake smell surges. My breath fogs the little cavern and ghosts it.
I see plastic.
“There,” I whisper. “Left side.”
Tessa lies flat, sweatshirt soaking, and reaches two fingers in. “It’s double-bagged,” she says. “And there’s something else.”
I grip her ankles for balance while she pinches the corner and coaxes a clear sleeve free. It slides against wet wood with a sigh and rests between us like a trapped fish reconsidering air.
Inside: a single cream page and a black cassette, micro with its screwdriver-scarred shell and a strip of masking tape across the top. On the tape, in my childhood all-caps, a title: LAKE HOUSE—TAKE ONE.
The ground shifts under everything I call professional.
“He found the cassette,” I say. “Or he made a copy and returned it.”
Tessa swallows. “You promised me we’d never share that publicly.”
“I didn’t,” I say, and the not said part crawls over my skin: I played six seconds once, in episode one, just the water and our laughter, no names, no place. “I only used ambience.”
“Ambience is a door,” she says. She pushes wet hair from her forehead with a hand that shakes once. “Open the page.”
My hands decide to work like I’m at the bench in the Glassbox. I peel the sleeve with my nails, avoid skin on paper, and slide the script out by its corner. The stock is heavy, buttery, too fine for mail. The title sits centered: THE LAKE, ACT II.
Below, the cast list again: DIRECTOR (UNSEEN), HOST (MARA KEENE), SISTER (SWIMS IN DUSK), WATER (APPLAUSE).
The words tilt the world.
Tessa reads over my shoulder and stills on the phrase in parenthesis. She doesn’t look at me. She looks at the lake like it might answer for him. “That’s our sentence,” she says, low. “Mom’s phrase. She used to shout it from the porch when the porch light came on: Where’s my sister who swims in dusk? She said it to tease me back to shore.”
The coffee turns to tar in my stomach. “I never said that on air,” I whisper.
“You didn’t even write it in your college essay,” Tessa says. “I checked.”
Wind rakes the cattails. A muskrat’s wake scribbles across the inlet and erases itself. I swear I can hear a metronome the way I did on the van’s anonymous call, but it’s just blood in my ear.
“Read,” Tessa says. “Let him hang himself with his own stage directions.”
I scan the page. Lines arrive like cues timed to breath:
DIRECTOR: ‘A bow is acknowledgement. Kneel where it began.’
*[HOST lifts the third board. HOST takes the tape labeled TAKE ONE in the right hand and the page in the left. HOST will understand that memory is a set.]
HOST: ‘No one owns a memory by themselves.’
DIRECTOR: ‘But some rehearse it better.’
[SISTER enters with dusk on her shoulders. SISTER brings coffee. SISTER fears the megaphone.]
Tessa exhales through her teeth. “He wrote me in like a prop.”
“He wrote you in like a cue,” I say. “And he used our porch time stamp.”
The bottom third holds beats I can’t ignore:
*[HOST to cue county, not CHOIR. HOST to keep cameras down. HOST to cut music.]
DIRECTOR: ‘Give the lake its applause. Then take a bow where you learned to listen. If you lie, the water will tell.’
Then a final line in small type I need to squint to catch: [Sister knows the word you never aired.]
“What word?” Tessa asks.
I hear my own thirteen-year-old whisper recorded crooked on cheap plastic: syzygy. The word for three bodies in a line—sun, moon, earth—our favorite tongue trick when the full moon welded the water to the sky. We used it to mark nights too clear to waste.
“We said it at the end of the tape when the moon went whole,” I say.
“He knows the word,” Tessa says. “So he listened to the tape. Here. Or he recorded us new.”
I look at the cassette and taste metal. The label’s torn at the edge. A fresh piece of clear tape holds one corner that didn’t need holding. My hands obey training again; I hold it up to the light, check for pried tabs, and see a tiny scrape by the screw like a jeweler’s screwdriver kissed it.
“He cracked it, duped it, or planted a copy,” I say. “Either way, he touched our first story.”
Tessa sits back on her heels like the dock told her to. “I live here,” she says. “This isn’t your set.”
“I know,” I say, and the truth hurts both of us. “We call Elena. We mark the chain, we bag the page and the tape, and we get prints if we’re lucky. We don’t speak about locations on air. We don’t post a frame.”
“And the Night Choir?”
“They get silence and a pledge,” I say. “They’ll live.”
She studies my face for the part of me that always wants to throw a spotlight and wait for applause. I pull my phone and text Elena a single line with a pin. Found Act II page + childhood cassette. Under dock. No public.
Elena’s reply lands hard and practical: Hold. Do not touch further. Deputies en route.
I read it out loud. Tessa nods once. “Then we wait,” she says, and slides the loose board across the gap like a lid. “We stand watch together.”
We sit cross-legged on wet wood with mugs between our knees and watch the inlet’s black glass knit and unknit itself. The breeze brings pine and damp rope and the powder smell of Elena’s latex gloves even though she’s not here yet. My shoulder presses Tessa’s. When we were smaller, we pressed like this to keep warm while the porch light judged us.
“You going to play the tape,” she asks, “when you get permission?”
“Not on air,” I say. “Not one syllable without you.”
She nods. “You always wanted to be heard. I always wanted to be safe.”
“I can have both,” I say, and the sentence trembles in the air like a bridge strung too wide. “I can build both.”
“Then do it.” She taps the page inside the sleeve. “Start with not making me a character.”
“He already did,” I say. “My job is to refuse his blocking.”
Micro-hook: If he choreographed us to bow, what cue does he expect when I refuse?
A loon calls again. This time another answers from nearer, and the echo folds into something like radio feedback. I stand to scan the tree line. Moonlight drapes the far pines; the last of the dusk leans on the water. A mosquito whines by my ear. I swat it and stop halfway—not wanting to smear anything else tonight.
“Did you leave the boathouse door open?” Tessa asks.
“No,” I say. “Why?”
“Because the padlock is hanging,” she says, pointing.
We walk the plank to the shore without disturbing the nook where the page and tape lay. Gravel whispers under our boots. The boathouse cants the way it always has, leaning like an elderly aunt toward gossip. The padlock swings from the latch like an ornament with no holiday to belong to.
I touch the metal. It’s cold and prints my skin. The hasp is straight; no pry marks. I push the door; the wood lifts and shifts on its tired runners.
Inside smells like damp tarps and small engines. Dust prints curve across the floor where we dragged kayaks last summer. Today there’s a new scuff, a shallow crescent by the workbench next to the box of spare screws Mom labeled twenty years ago in blue marker. On the bench: nothing missing, nothing broken. In the corner: a clear plastic bag like the ones the pages ride in, crumpled.
“He was here,” Tessa says. She doesn’t whisper. “Not last year. Not last month. Here.”
I kneel and pick up the bag with two fingers on the edge. The static clings to my skin and to the anger climbing my spine. I hold it to the light and read a tiny print code near the seam—batch and manufacturer. Details I can give Elena and use to build a chain that doesn’t let charisma wriggle free.
“We lock down the house,” I say. “Lights, blinds, windows. We wait for deputies. We don’t open the dock again until they arrive.”
“And then?” Tessa asks.
“Then we move out of town for a week,” I say. “You can stay with me. Or I book you somewhere he can’t script—no water, no stage.”
“I don’t want to leave my house because a man wants an audience,” she says, and the way she says man tells me I’ve been giving him too much title.
“I don’t want to bury my sister because a man wants applause,” I say.
We hold each other’s stare until the old language between us translates. She nods. “One week,” she says. “Then I come home with cameras of my own.”
Headlights rake the road through the trees—deputies, probably, or a neighbor who finally noticed we arrived. I step outside and lift a hand. Gravel pops. An engine downshifts.
That’s when the cattails on the far side of the inlet wink.
Not fireflies. A pinpoint reflection at the exact height of a lens.
“Mara?” Tessa says, voice low.
“Don’t move,” I say, and the words taste like I stole them from Elena. “Left stand of reeds. Third clump from the birch. There’s glass.”
The light winks out. The night becomes ordinary again in the worst way.
I ease my phone up and zoom with the camera. Grain floods the screen. The cattails show me only green on black and the suggestion of a path pushed through from the road.
Deputies’ headlights enter the drive fully now. Tires crunch. A radio cackles. I lower the phone and find Tessa’s wrist with my hand. Her pulse talks too fast.
“He knows the word syzygy,” she says, not looking at me.
“He knows too much,” I answer.
The cruiser door opens. Boots step onto our dirt like punctuation. I take a breath I can use on record and another I can save for my sister, then turn to meet the officers.
Behind me, the lake claps the dock once against its pilings, a hollow applause I didn’t earn. The thought lands clean and cold: the Director didn’t want only a bow.
He wanted company on the stage.
“Elena?” I say into my phone as I dial, eyes still on the cattails. “We have the page, the tape, and a watcher in the reeds. And Elena—he wrote Tessa in the script by name.”
I don’t blink. The night has too many exits. The next cue might belong to me, but I will not let him call it.