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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
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
DUTTON CHILDREN’S BOOKS
A division of Penguin Young Readers Group
Published by the Penguin Group
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WC2R 0RL, England
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of
the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Elizabeth Holmes
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Holmes, Elizabeth Ann, date.
Summary: Spending the summer with his father at a run-down house between a railroad track
and a polluted section of a lake, twelve-year-old Jake gets involved with a fourteen-year-old
neighbor who is hiding a secret within his home.
eISBN : 978-1-101-02246-7
[1. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 2. Secrets—Fiction. 3. Lakes—Fiction.
4. Family problems—Fiction. 5. Mental illness—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.H7355Trc 2009 [FIc]—dc22 2008034223
Published in the United States by Dutton Children’s Books,
a division of Penguin Young Readers Group
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
www.penguin.com/youngreaders
For Paul, Liam, and Austin
CHAPTER 1
It’s somewhere along here,” Jake’s mother said, slowing the car.
For miles the road had been high and level, passing through open farm country, everything spacious and wide. But just now, just before his mother spoke, the road had curved broadly to the left, and for the first time they glimpsed the lake, long and narrow, over to their right. Then the road began to descend, and wooded slopes closed around them, the lake flashing erratically through the trees.
There were more houses now. The ones on the left had tall vertical faces, and their back ends were buried in the hill; some of them looked as though they were about to slide into the road. The houses on the right, next to the lake, were invisible, except for a few roofs and chimneys, because the ground dropped off so steeply.
The June sun was glinting off the hood of the old blue Toyota, and off the oncoming cars and the mailboxes and the glittery speckles in the asphalt road and driveways. “Watch the numbers on the mailboxes,” Jake’s mother ordered. “It’s twenty-three thirty-two.”
Jake was irritated. “Like you haven’t told me ten times already.” Okay, maybe not ten times, but she had told him, and only about five minutes ago. He wasn’t a little kid who had to be told everything over and over; he was twelve years old. And he didn’t like her bossy tone. She sounded tense, and he felt sort of like that himself.
He expected her to tell him to stop being mouthy, but, as he saw out of the corner of his eye, she only clamped her lips together and peered anxiously from the roadside to the rear-view mirror and back again.
“Forty-seven eighteen,” Jake read off a low sign at the end of a driveway.
“Oh, so we’re not that close.” The Toyota accelerated a little.
Glancing back, Jake saw four or five cars close behind them and felt as if the cars were pushing them down the hill, hurrying them on to this place they’d never seen. The twitchy tightness in his stomach twitched again.
A few minutes later the descent became less steep, and the land on both sides opened up a little. “Twenty-three sixty!” Jake said, more nervously than he’d meant to. The next time he kept his voice offhand. “Twenty-three forty-eight.”
His mother signaled right and pulled way over, slowing to a crawl to let the cars behind them pass. In a moment, signal tinkling, she turned into a bumpy little road that quickly aligned itself parallel to the main road, and there she stopped the car.