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around his ankles, explaining the creature that had pulled him under.
    Lori had still drowned. Nothing would change the stark and irrefutable fact of her death. She'd gone night diving alone at a lake up north, and her oxygen had run out. Some deeper part of him had always expected Lori to leave and never come back. Each trip she took, a voice would speak up in his mind: This could be the last time you see her . He'd imagine Lori falling under the spell of some Svengali or religious guru, her mind so open to new experiences and ways of seeing the world, she'd let anything in. He would see her parachute sailing out into the blue, detached from its pack, and Lori hurtling, freefalling toward the earth. He would picture her mangled body in the high branches of a tree or some farmer's field, a cow grazing nearby, oblivious. He'd see her flung from her airboat in the Everglades, splashing into the swampy reeds to be gobbled up by gators. He'd watch her two-prop plane take a sputtering nosedive into lush green mountains; see her take a wrong step during a jungle trek into a waist-deep pool teeming with piranhas; the small, wooden planks on the sheer face of a cliff snapping beneath her feet; approaching an isolated South American tribe with her hands held out in peace only to be gunned down by a naked tribesman's Kalashnikov. Each time she left, he'd suffer these vivid premonitions and hug her with a ferocity that would make her laugh. "I'll only be gone a month!" she would assure him—or a week, or a day—as she readjusted the hefty knapsack on her strong shoulders. Lori must have thought she was invincible, her life as elastic as a bungee cable. But Owen had witnessed her death a hundred times. Her world was limitless, while his was well-ordered, routine.
    She had never told them her purpose for going up there, nor what she'd felt had been so significant or interesting about that particular lake, this Chapel Lake. She'd just left. He supposed she might have gone up there to some religious retreat, considering the name. Religion had never been a part of their household, yet Lori had embraced it, always going against the grain. He'd guessed it had something to do with her burgeoning relationship with her father—a concept Owen couldn't understand, his own father having left his life at the same age Lori's had left them—and his recent involvement with the cult of sobriety.
    The last time the Saddler children had been home together, Lori had shown up to dinner with a crucifix nestled against the unicorn pendant he'd bought her when they were kids. She'd claimed to have had a religious awakening while trekking through some war-torn country, and their mother had replied that it was all well and good, but she politely and firmly asked that her daughter remove it at the dinner table.
    Never seen Mom so mad , he thought.
    In the bathroom, the faucet dripped.
    Curious, Owen pushed himself out of bed. How long has that been running? he wondered. Since I shaved for the funeral? He skirted past Lori's room, past his mother's, to the bathroom. The floor was dry. That was a relief, at least. He watched the sink for a drip, and quickly realized the sound was coming from the shower behind him.
    He peered down into the darkened hall, to the lighted stairwell where the muted sound of canned laughter floated up, to his own doorway and the foot of his bed. The slit of darkness under Lori's door unnerved him. Anyone could be in there, lurking about. Anyone .
    Another heavy drop, not the hollow plink of water on enameled steel but the large plunk! of water into a tub already full of it. The plug must have fallen in and lodged itself in the drain. But the shower curtain was drawn. He'd left it open this morning, and he'd been the last to shower, he was sure of that much. Maybe his mother had drawn it closed before they'd left for the funeral. It seemed like something she might do.
    A shadow moved behind the clear frosted vinyl of the shower curtain.