The Far Shore

People who fall in the water don't take their shoes off first. They don't set them down side by side, neat as you please, at the end of the dock. Augie Vance notices things like that. It's the only thing he's really good at anymore.

Two summers ago, Augie's little brother went off the end of a dock nine feet away, and Augie stood there and did nothing — didn't move, didn't shout, didn't so much as open his mouth. Since then he's been a project. A kid to sit near the wall. A kid to walk to the bus. So when a letter comes offering him a summer as junior counsellor at Camp Tamarack — the half-empty lakeside camp his mother begged him not to choose, because it has a lake, because everything here has a lake — he takes it. He came to find out if his mother was right about him.

Tamarack has one ghost. Thirty summers ago a fifteen-year-old scholarship camper named Birdie Lott walked into the dark, took out a canoe, and never came back. The town still floats a candle for her every August. Everyone agrees the story is better left alone.

But Augie can't stop checking the corners. A canoe signed back in the night Birdie drowned. A date carved a week too late. A postcard that has arrived every single summer for thirty years, with no name on it. And a cook who goes somewhere far away the moment she hears Birdie's name.

With Marisol Reyes — sharp, funny, and the granddaughter of the man the whole town blamed — Augie pulls one careful thread, and the secret Camp Tamarack was built to keep begins to come loose.

Now the camp is about to be sold. The truth is about to be paved over for good. And the quietest kid at Tamarack, the one who froze when it counted most, is running out of summer to finally do something.

Some stories are kept alive so the truth can stay buried.