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problems as the reason other thermometers disagreed with their own. The air was beginning to move from west to east, making the flat surface of the lake shimmer. Out on the big water, the surface began to jiggle in spots, forming near waves. Water that had been soaking up the July sun now threw off shards of light. From the shore it looked like sparks dancing just above the surface.
    To the two men drifting in the battered aluminum john-boat three hundred yards off the point of Pine Island, the sparkling effect was not noticeable. Axel Speeter first became aware of the afternoon breeze as a tugging sensation on his arm hairs. He looked at his forearm, at the forest of white hair, making sure that what he was feeling wasn’t something about to bite him. A variety of bloodsucking insects had been feeding on him all week, and he was tired of it. They never seemed to bother Sam O’Gara, the other occupant of the boat. Sam, about half Axel’s girth and a foot shorter, had been staying at his cabin on Pine Island for most of the summer, and he claimed he hadn’t given up but a thimbleful of blood. “The bugs know not to fuck with Sam O’Gara,” he said. “Besides, you’re bigger. You got more blood.”
    Sam was fishing with a lure he’d carved from the taillight lens of a ’65 Mustang. He twitched his rod tip, let the makeshift lure settle back toward the bottom, jigged it up again, let it settle, over and over, every five seconds, just like a damn robot. He’d been applying the same technique for over two hours without a strike.
    A deerfly buzzed Axel’s nose, veered away, did a loop around Sam’s greasy red baseball cap, landed on the bill for half a second, then buzzed off, apparently deciding not to fuck with him. Axel reeled in his line and examined the dying leech hanging from the hook. He lowered it back into the water. The three small walleyes he’d caught were hanging alongside the boat, waiting to be gutted, filleted, breaded, and fried. Axel was ready to call it a day, but he knew better than to suggest returning to the island. Sam would automatically object, and they’d be guaranteed another hour on the water. He pulled his cap low over his eyes and let his gaze wander down the shoreline. Maybe he should buy one of those cabins, have his own boat, his own place on the lake, fish when and where and for however long he wanted. How would Sophie feel about that? He shook his head, trying to derail that train of thought. The whole reason he’d come up here was to forget about Sophie and that crazy damn daughter of hers. The whole situation made him physically ill. He hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since Carmen had announced her engagement.
    He said, “Hey, Sam.”
    “What?”
    “How’s it going? You holding your end of the boat down?”
    Sam smiled and squinted, causing the number of wrinkles on his face to quadruple. “They ain’t biting, but I’m stayin’ dry.”
    It was a very Sam O’Gara thing to say. Axel did not know what the one fact had to do with the other, but when Sam put them together they sort of stuck. He remembered meeting Sam back in fifty-nine at a poker game in Sioux Falls. Sam hadn’t had the wrinkles then, but he’d had the mouth. Axel let a wave of nostalgia wash over him.
    “Hey, Sam.”
    “What’s that?”
    “How about you let me try out one of those Sam O’Gara originals.”
    Sam looked surprised, but pleased. “What you got in mind?”
    Axel thought for a moment. “You got anything in a fifty-nine Chevy?”
    For the first quarter of the three-hour drive up from the cities, Joe Crow had kept himself entertained by listing, one by one, all the women he had ever known to wear red lipstick. He tried to imagine each of them kissing his windshield, but could not come up with a plausible image. He was repeatedly forced to the conclusion that someone had mistaken his car for someone else’s, which seemed unlikely, since there were very few lemon-yellow ’69 GTOs