The edge of the road may as well be the edge of the earth, the drop is so sheer. When I was little, I’d cower in the back with my hands over my eyes on roads like this, scared that the slightest shift of the steering wheel would send us right off the edge. Today I look out my window, first across to the other side of the gorge, which is thick with the green of aspen trees, and then down, down, down to the bottom, where icy snowmelt flows, fast and unforgiving. The sight of it makes me doubt everything I’ve come up with about the possibility of Julianna still being alive. It would take more than a miracle to survive the plunge from the road to the bottom of the gorge.
“I wonder what the hell they were doing out here,” Kat says from the back seat. “You know? This road is scary enough in broad daylight, with no snow on it.”
“Maybe it was an accident they ended up here,” Trevor says. “Everyone’s always said he was drunk when they left. Maybe they were trying to go out to the Grove or something and got confused. Who knows?” He shrugs, but keeps both hands firm on the steering wheel, his eyes never leaving the road as we wind around another curve. There could be a million different reasons, but there’s no one to ask.
We pass a yellow sign that says SCENIC OVERLOOK, with a picture of a camera on it, and then the dirt turnout it refers to. “Maybe they were looking for a place to talk . . . or park,” I say. “Like one of these spots.” It’s not an uncommon thing for kids in our town to go driving out into the boonies to “talk.” There are plenty of awe-inspiring spots with views that people go out to under the pretense of looking at them.
Kat leans forward on my seat. “I bet she told him about Orion that night—at the party, and that’s why they left. And then maybe they got in a fight, and he drove out here. That could happen if you were drunk and pissed off.”
“Yeah.” I nod. “It probably could.” I shiver a little at the thought of Julianna telling Shane on this road. In a snowstorm, when he’d been drinking. Finding out something like that might make it easy, in a moment of hurt or anger, to turn the steering wheel just enough to do something you could never take back.
We round another curve and pass another SCENIC OVERLOOK sign, and the view from this one really is worthy of the title. From this vantage point you can see where the icy water of the river tumbles into the lake and then disperses into the stillness of it almost immediately, like it’s been swallowed by the depth and the cold. Summit Lake is one of the deepest in the country, breathtakingly beautiful, and the quintessential summer image of our town. Every Summit Lakes postcard or calendar has a shot of this lake, a blue-green gem nestled at the base of glacier-carved granite mountains. It’s dramatic, and striking, but to me it’s always been a distant, cold, kind of beautiful. It’s a place with a history of tragedy. Shane and Julianna are just one chapter.
The road begins its descent as it wraps around to the south shore of the lake. We pull into the empty parking lot, and Trevor parks facing the water, then cuts the engine and is quiet a moment. Kat is too for once, and I think it’s because we’re all sitting here looking at the water, half in the shadow, half in the sun, thinking about Julianna Farnetti. I am. I’m wondering whether she’s beneath its surface, deep in the blue water so dark it looks black, together forever with Shane Cruz, like she was supposed to be according to everyone else; or whether she somehow escaped that fate, slipped out of the lake, and found her way to a new life, far away from here and from who she was before.
“Shall we?” Trevor asks.
I nod.
We all open our doors to get out, and when we shut them, the sound echoes off the sharp, sheer ridges of granite, like three muted shots. Then silence. Kat hugs her arms to her chest. “God, this place gives me the creeps.”
“Can’t imagine why,” Trevor says. “Between those kids that fell through the ice and the guys who tried to save them, and Shane and Julianna, it’s got its fair share of ghosts floating around.” He grins. “No pun intended.”
He’s right. It’s one of those places steeped in stories that go back even past our childhoods. There was a girl, probably around Julianna’s age, whose dad drowned in this lake, along with a school bus driver, when they both tried to save four boys who had walked out onto the ice and fallen through. Before that there was a bloody shoot-out between a group of escaped convicts and the sheriffs who’d chased them there—one that ended with the sheriffs being dumped in the lake and supposedly haunting its shores for years after. And long before that there was the legend of a Paiute boy who disrespected the lake’s power and was swallowed by the water, never to be seen again.
“Ha. Ha.” Kat rolls her eyes, then runs them over the surface of the water. “Funny, except nobody floats here. They all sink to the bottom, then slip down the center of the hourglass.” She shivers. “Ugh. You couldn’t pay me all the money in the world to go swimming in this lake. For exactly that reason.”
“Oh, come on,” Trevor says. “The bottom is so far down there, I’m sure they’re all long gone now.”
“Okay, that’s enough.” Kat turns to me. “Why did we need to come here again?”
“I just wanted to see if . . . if there’s anything else here to find out. Or . . . I don’t know.” I look across the glass surface of the water, blue-green around the edges and in the places the sunlight has reached. The rest of the water is a nameless color so dark it gives nothing away. It just reflects all my questions back, sharp and impassive, like a mirror. The stillness of it is unnerving. Like it’s holding its breath, waiting for us to do something.