The workman charged eighty bucks for the job, and the sand has never moved just as well, you know, you can't put a sandy beach in on your land now. Now that the sewerage runoff from the booming cottage-building industry has killed most of the fish and made the rest of them unsafe to eat, the EPA has forbidden installing sand beaches. They might upset the ecology of the lake, you see, and it is presently against the law for anyone except land developers to do that.

Billy went for the flag — then stopped. At the same moment I felt Steff go rigid against me, and I saw it myself. The Harrison side of the lake was gone. It had been buried under a line of bright-white mist, like a fair-weather cloud fallen to earth.

My dream of the night before recurred, and when Steff asked me what it was, the word that nearly jumped first from my mouth was God.

«David?»

You couldn't see even a hint of the shoreline over there, but years of looking at Long Lake made me believe that the shoreline wasn't hidden by much; only yards, maybe. The edge of the mist was nearly ruler-straight.

«What is it, Dad?» Billy yelled. He was in the water up to his knees, groping for the soggy flag.

«Fogbank,» I said.

«On the lake?» Steff asked doubtfully, and I could see Mrs. Carmody's influence in her eyes. Damn the woman.

My own moment of unease was passing. Dreams, after all, are insubstantial things, like mist itself.

«Sure. You've seen fog on the lake before.»

«Never like that. That looks more like a cloud.»

«It's the brightness of the sun,» I said. «It's the same way clouds look from an airplane when you fly over them.»

«What would do it? We only get fog in damp weather.»

«No, we've got it right now,» I said. «Harrison does, anyway. It's a little leftover from the storm, that's all. Two fronts meeting. Something along that line.»