My father’s death brought me back to Lark’s End, a forgotten lakeside town where the water runs cold and the pines whisper secrets.
He’d left me his cabin, a rickety structure perched on stilts at the edge of Blackwater Lake—a place locals avoided after the summer of 1972.
That year, a fishing boat capsized during a storm, claiming six teenagers.
Their bodies were never found.
Now, standing on the creaking dock, the lake’s surface eerily still, I felt the weight of those unsolved tragedies.
The air smelled of wet moss and something metallic, like blood.
When the first corpse floated ashore at dawn, bloated and tangled in fishing line, I told myself it was an accident.
But the second body wore my father’s watch.