Dark Sky
Chapter One
The lake still smelled of summer. Juliet Longstreet, her jeans rolled up
to midcalf, stood in water up to her ankles. Its warmth surprised her,
although it shouldn't have. As kids, she and her brothers had gone
swimming in the small lake into October, not that the water was warm then.
But in late September, in the early days of autumn, anything was possible.
She dug her toes into the soft, muddy bottom, looking across the rippling
water to the opposite shore, nestled amid the hills of east central
Vermont. The leaves were beginning to turn. She could see dots of red,
patches of yellow. She breathed in the clean air and suddenly was sorry
she had to head back to New York in a few hours. She'd already packed up
her tent and rolled up her sleeping bag.
Her work was in New York, if not her life.
But she didn't know that her life was here, either. She glanced behind her
and took in the small clearing where she'd pitched her tent, the cluster
of granite boulders amid birch trees, the tall pine trees with their dead
underbranches, the huge, ancient sugar maple on the edge of the path to
the dirt road that encircled half the lake. She could have stayed with her
parents just over the hill, in her old bedroom overlookin ... read full excerpt from Dark Sky ebook
