The Light in the Lake Read online

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Sarah R. Baughman

  Cover art copyright © 2019 by Ji-Hyuk Kim. Cover design by Karina Granda. Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Edition: September 2019

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Baughman, Sarah R., author.

  Title: The light in the lake / by Sarah R. Baughman.

  Description: First edition. | New York ; Boston : Little, Brown and Company, 2019. | Summary: As a Young Scientist, twelve-year-old Addie studies pollution in the lake where her twin brother recently drowned, while secretly continuing his investigation of the creature he believed lives in the lake’s depths.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018056973| ISBN 9780316422420 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316422413 (ebook) | ISBN 9780316422390 (library edition ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Grief—Fiction. | Family life—Vermont—Fiction. | Lakes—Fiction. | Water pollution—Fiction. | Vermont—Fiction. | Mystery and detective stories.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.B378 Lig 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018056973

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-42242-0 (hardcover), 978-0-316-42241-3 (ebook)

  E3-20190726-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  To my parents,

  who read to me

  and saved all my stories

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  Prologue

  Mama says people who think mountains don’t move are taking the short view of things. They’ve been moving, she says. All this time. Doesn’t matter that we can’t see it.

  If we could somehow watch time go faster, I think, or if we’d lived so long we’d felt the glaciers haul through here in the first place, we would see it. And then we’d know.

  In science class we learned that millions of years ago, our mountains used to stretch up higher than clouds. Sometimes I look at them for so long, I think I can see how they used to be: before my eyes, the rounded green tops rise, sharper than they are now, poking the sky. Then I blink and they settle into place. In those moments, it feels like everything around me—Maple Lake’s tossing waves, the sighing wind—is slowly breathing, in and out.

  But I’m only seeing what I know was once there. What Mama and my science textbook told me.

  Amos saw something else, and he wanted me to see it too.

  He loved floating in the lake, surrounded by mountains thick with mossy rocks and tangled cedars. The waves whispered secrets, he said; we just had to listen. He was so certain something lived in that cold water, something ancient and huge and shining.

  “You have to look,” he’d say, standing on the beach. “Look, Addie.”

  But when I’d squint at the water, at the glowing shape he insisted swelled in the middle, I’d shake my head. “A log,” I’d say. “That’s all.”

  It’s not that I didn’t see the shining, or that I loved the lake any less than he did. I’m the most myself when I’m near the water.

  It’s just that I had my way to look at the world. And he had his.

  People say we look so much alike: fraternal twins with the same leaf-green eyes and bony knees. Same hair, the color of sand and just as wind-whipped and rough.

  But what they don’t say, because they can’t see, is that underneath the eyes and hair and skin and bone, something stronger pulls us close. One side of his heart makes the other side of mine. I’m here because he is, and the other way around. For always. Things that solid aren’t supposed to go away.

  But sometimes they do. Glacier ice cut through these mountains and pressed down until the hard, sharp rock chipped clean away. And when the weather warmed and the ice went soft, then clear, it left us with Maple Lake, the deepest one in Vermont.

  Dad says lake water runs through our veins, and maybe that’s true. When Amos and I aren’t swimming with Mama, we’re casting lines with Dad, hoping for some of that trout and smelt and perch we fish for all year long.

  Fished, I mean. This spring Amos tumbled into the lake and slept, down there on the bottom where the stone that used to be mountain now lies flat and unseen.

  Now I have to say everything in past tense.

  Mama doesn’t talk about the mountains anymore. She doesn’t talk much at all.

  “You want to go skip stones, Mama?” I ask sometimes when I’m feeling brave. We could throw mountain back to mountain. Watch pieces skid across the water.

  But even now she can barely look at me when she says no.

  Chapter 1

  School is all noise and lights—kids yelling, backpacks bumping. We have cinder block walls and metal doors so heavy they take forever to open, then clank shut too fast. Our lunchroom always smells like canned green beans. But I guess that’s the good thing about school. It keeps going the way it is, even when nothing else does.

  I walk through the hall with my head down, my shoulder bumping Liza’s. She’s my cousin, and also my best friend. She doesn’t care how many times I bump her shoulder. Sometimes she touches her hand to my elbow, lightly steering me in the right direction.

  Ten steps, I tell myself. Ten… nine… eight… I’ve been doing this a lot the past two months: staring at my feet, counting steps. I guess I just don’t like thinking about all the kids trying not to look at me, their eyes full of whispers. My method works pretty well, except one time I walked right into a little kindergartner who had found her way into the middle school wing somehow. There’s nine grades in this one building, and we’re supposed to watch out f
or the littlest kids.

  We make it to science and I exhale, fast.

  Mr. Dale always stands outside his classroom door and sticks his hand out for us to shake as we walk in. I didn’t think he’d keep that up past September, but it’s the end of the year now and he’s still going strong, pumping our hands up and down.

  “Addie and Liza!” he says. “Welcome.”

  “Nice SpongeBob tie,” Liza says; she’s looking at me, holding a laugh in. We’ve both tried to figure out if he ever repeats a tie, or if he really has as many ties as there are days of school. This SpongeBob one is new. And pretty dorky.

  Mr. Dale just smiles. “I’m glad you have such good taste. My son picked it out; apparently it’s what all the Shoreland County preschoolers are wearing. Or wanting to wear.”

  Since it’s almost the last week of school, most of the teachers have stopped giving us homework, but Mr. Dale’s been making us chart the phases of the moon since May and he says there’s no reason to stop before the full cycle’s over. I realize as soon as Liza and the other kids start fishing their charts out of their backpacks that I forgot to look at the moon last night.

  As Mr. Dale moves around the room checking work, he pauses just for a second and taps my desk with one finger. When I look down, I see a little yellow Post-it stuck there with a message written on it: Deep breaths! Then there’s a smiley face with googly eyes, and his signature: Mr. D.

  Teachers usually walk right by when I don’t turn my work in these days, and they don’t say anything. Mr. Dale is the only one who leaves little notes that make me feel like maybe someday I’ll be okay.

  “Your sketches are looking good,” Mr. Dale tells the class. He picks Liza’s up and puts it under the document camera. On the board, her drawings slide into focus; I can tell she used the dark charcoal pencils she got for her birthday.

  “Liza,” he says. “Could you please describe the moon you saw last night?”

  “It’s still a crescent,” she says. “Smaller than two nights ago.”

  “Great,” he says. “And why is it continuing to get smaller? It’s a—what kind of crescent?”

  Waning, I think, just as Liza says it. Waning: getting smaller and smaller until there’s barely anything left. Liza’s perfect crescent shimmers in the thick charcoal defining her night sky.

  “That’s kind of weird,” I say. My own voice surprises me; the words sounded better when they were just thoughts, but it’s too late to go back.

  Mr. Dale nods, and I can tell it’s the kind of nod teachers do when they want to include you in the conversation but they’re not quite sure whether you’re going to help it or ruin it. “How so, Addie?”

  “Um…” I stall. Mr. Dale waits while the other kids start to fidget. “When you talk about seeing the moon, you mean the silvery glowing part.”

  “True,” Mr. Dale says.

  “But when you draw it on white paper, you can’t actually draw that part.” I look at the smudges Liza’s charcoal pencils made. “You have to draw the dark part instead, and kind of use the dark part to show the light part.” The words tumble out faster than my brain can really think them through. “So you’re not actually drawing the moon. You’re drawing the shadow that covers it up bit by bit until it looks like it was never there at all.”

  When I stop talking, the room’s so quiet I can hear the wind outside, rattling young birch leaves together. Liza’s just staring at me, her eyes big as full moons. The other kids stare too—kids I’ve known my whole life who have been trying really hard not to look at me since Amos died. Not wanting to look the wrong way, say the wrong thing. They don’t know there isn’t a right way. They might as well just look.

  But Mr. Dale doesn’t seem surprised. He just nods. “An excellent point, Addie,” he says. “Scientifically and philosophically relevant. Darkness allows us to see light.”

  Liza sticks her hand up. She knows I don’t like having all the focus on me, and she’s probably thinking fast, trying to help. “You can sort of see the dark part too,” she says. “I mean, it has a shape in the sky, if you really look.”

  “Can anyone predict when that darkness will cover the whole moon?” Mr. Dale asks. “When do you think this crescent will completely disappear and give us a new moon?”

  “How about never?” In the back corner of the room, Darren Andrews snickers. I roll my eyes. Amos was Darren’s friend—one of his only friends—since preschool.

  When Darren was little, he’d get in trouble for spinning around in the teacher’s chair when she got up to check assignments, drumming on his desktop, tickling other kids during story hour. We’ve never been close, but he used to at least nod at me in the halls, before. Now he just looks away like everyone else.

  Mr. Dale sighs. “Darren,” he says. “Let’s have a little more faith in the moon. It’s been around awhile. Anyone else?”

  “A day?” someone asks.

  “No way,” says Liza. “We’ve got longer than that.”

  “Probably not much longer, though,” says Mr. Dale. “Keep watching at night. See how long it lasts.”

  When class ends, Liza stays beside me instead of rushing out to the art room like she used to before Amos died. I zip my backpack—I know I’m taking too long, because Liza’s eyes keep darting toward the clock, even though she’d never tell me to hurry—and sling it over one shoulder as I get up to leave.

  “Addie,” Mr. Dale says, pointing in my direction, “can I quickly touch base with you? I’ll write you a pass to art.”

  I backtrack and stand next to his desk, waving Liza away. “I’ll look at the moon tonight,” I mumble in his direction. “I just sort of forgot last night. I—”

  “It’s not that,” Mr. Dale says. “I’m just hoping you’re planning to apply for the Young Scientist position we talked about.”

  I think of the crumpled Post-it note Mr. Dale put on my desk. Time to take that deep breath.

  I missed a lot of school right after Amos died. So once I came back and Mr. Dale told me about the chance to spend this summer on Maple Lake, learning from scientists about how to study the water, I knew he was just trying to catch me up.

  But I haven’t known exactly how to feel about Maple Lake. It used to be the place Amos and I both loved most. Now that he’s gone, it feels different. It’s a part of me that hurts to look at.

  I won’t say I didn’t listen to Mr. Dale when he first mentioned the Young Scientist position. It’s just that everything anyone said that month sounded like it was underwater. All the words gurgled, hard to hear, and most of them drowned somewhere outside me. I just couldn’t hold on to them.

  I look down at the papers scattered across his desk. “Um,” I say slowly. “I’ve been…”

  “… thinking about it?” he asks.

  “I kind of have, but—” I twist my backpack strap around my fingers.

  “You should consider it.” Mr. Dale leans forward and shuffles the papers, then starts working through them with a pen. Maybe he knows I need some time to think.

  As the Young Scientist, I would get to work at the biological station, a huge chunk of shoreline owned by the University of Vermont. Scientists go there to monitor water clarity and temperature, chart bird sightings, and study how cutting and using trees can keep the forest healthy. Amos and I used to play hide-and-seek on the nature trails there when we were younger.

  “So… it’s an everyday thing?” I ask.

  “You bet,” Mr. Dale says, still checking off papers. “The researchers are there five days a week, and so am I, now that I’m studying for my master’s. We’d like the Young Scientist to be there each weekday too.”

  Mr. Dale knows I want to be an aquatic biologist someday. The one time I admitted it in homeroom, when we were supposed to talk about what we wanted to do when we grew up, most of the kids just stared.

  But before I could figure out how to explain, Mr. Dale cut right through the silence and said that aquatic biologists can study not only the ocean
, but freshwater lakes and rivers too, which is exactly what we have in Vermont, in between all the mountains.

  “If you’re accepted,” Mr. Dale continues, looking up from his papers, “and everything goes well, you could join the Science Club next year, in seventh grade instead of eighth. We could make an exception.”

  That sounds pretty good to me. Science Club members get to ride the bus to the high school once a week to do cool experiments with the freshman earth science class.

  “What’s the project this summer?” I ask.

  “We’re looking at pollution levels in the lake,” Mr. Dale says. He sets his stack of papers aside and folds his hands. “You could learn about testing water samples, entering data—”

  “Pollution levels?” I feel my skin bristle. “Maple Lake’s not polluted. My dad says it’s the coldest, clearest lake in the state.”

  “The water might look clear,” Mr. Dale says, “but it’s getting to the point where it isn’t actually as clean as it might seem. Not according to some preliminary observations. And we want to know why.” He looks right at me. “You’ve spent a lot of time on that lake.”

  Tears sting my eyes. Most people don’t talk about Maple Lake with me anymore.

  “It can’t be easy,” he says, his voice soft. “With… everything that happened.”

  I look up. Say it, I think. Just say it. Nobody ever says it.

  As though he hears me thinking, Mr. Dale clears his throat. “With Amos,” he says. “With your brother.”

  Hearing Mr. Dale say his name helps somehow. It’s like the room had swelled to the point of bursting, a too-full balloon, and his name popped it. Everything settles, calms.

  “I don’t want to presume, Addie,” Mr. Dale continues. “Working at the lake might not sound like the best idea to you. I just…” He trails off, looks up at the ceiling.

  I clench the Post-it note so hard my fingernails dig into my palm. He’s right, in a way. But the strange thing is—not working at the lake doesn’t sound easy either.

  Mr. Dale turns his palms up and shrugs. “Okay, look. I loved science when I was your age,” he says. “When I became a teacher, I promised myself that if any of my students got as excited about it as I did, I’d help them out as much as I could. And this chance to study the lake seemed like an opportunity I should tell you about.”