Steff sighed and fanned the top of her breasts with the edge of her — halter. I doubted if it cooled her off much but it improved the view a lot.

«I don't want to scare you,» I said, «but there's a bad storm on the way, I think.»

She looked at me doubtfully. «There were thunderheads last night and the night before, David. They just broke up.»

«They won't do that tonight.»

«No?»

«If it gets bad enough, we're going to go downstairs.»

«How bad do you think it can get?»

My dad was the first to build a year-round home on this side of the lake. When he was hardly more than a kid he and his brothers put up a summer place where the house now stood, and in 1938 a summer storm knocked it flat, stone walls and all. Only the boathouse escaped. A year later he started the big house. It's the trees that do the damage in a bad blow. They get old, and the wind knocks them over. It's mother nature's way of cleaning house periodically.

«I don't really know,» I said, truthfully enough. I had only heard stories about the great storm of thirty-eight. «But the wind can come off the lake like an express train.»

Billy came back a while later, complaining that the monkey bars were no fun because he was «all sweated up.» I ruffled his hair and gave him another Pepsi. More work for the dentist.

The thunderheads were getting closer, pushing away the blue. There was no doubt now that a storm was coming. Norton had turned off his radio. Billy sat between his mother and me, watching the sky, fascinated. Thunder boomed, rolling slowly across the lake and then echoing back again. The clouds twisted and rolled, now black, now purple, now veined, now black again. They gradually overspread the lake, and I could see a delicate caul of rain extending down from them. It was still a distance away. As we watched, it was probably raining on Bolster's Mills, or maybe even Norway.