Stepping onto the grass, he realized what phenomenon floated before him, a work of nature that seemed profoundly unnatural. The cloud was a swarm of hundreds of fireflies—perhaps a thousand or more—their soft abdomens pulsing incandescently, each a tiny lamp, but in aggregate producing enough light by which to read a book.
He had seen fireflies before, most often in his youth, on summer suburban evenings. But on those occasions, the insects had numbered far fewer than this, each a beacon signaling along a route that it patrolled alone.
If the idea of fireflies had occurred to Wyatt independent of this unexpected display, he might have thought they didn’t exist in Montana, and he would never have entertained the notion that they swarmed in such numbers. Liam O’Hara hadn’t spoken of this when he had described either the magical or the frightening events that caused him and his family to cut short their first vacation at the ranch. Although mysterious, this spectacle was enchanting rather than fearsome, and the longer he studied it, the more wondrous it became.
The traceries of throbbing light suggested that these tiny insects were aligned in numerous skeins, rather than each traveling a random route. The skeins wove complex integrated patterns with fantastic precision, without the slightest interference of one with another. He thought of the convolutions of a brain, each firefly like a neuron firing.
A score of fireflies were able to sail through the night with such effortless grace that they were as soundless as the movement of light itself. However, these much greater numbers produced a low susurration, as though in their flight they must be whispering some secret that, if understood, would draw back the veils that obscured the truth behind the world.
The beauty of the manifestation was such that, much like a spellbound child, he reached toward the swarm with his right hand, hoping one of them would alight on a finger and allow him to study it more closely.
Instead, the communal pattern they created abruptly morphed into a throbbing stream of light, like a comet with a tail, swooped three times around him, and glimmered away from the house. Crazy as it seemed, he felt certain that the triple spiral was an invitation, and he followed the swarm across the lawn, toward the lake in which the moon admired its reflection, the moment having turned somewhat Disneyesque.
The swarm led him to a dock, where the comet coalesced again into a cloud above the man-size door to a boathouse of weathered mahogany. Upon Wyatt’s arrival, the fireflies dispersed, cascading away into the darkness like the fading sparks from Independence Day pyrotechnics, and were gone as if they had been an apparition.
When he lowered his gaze, the moonlight revealed that the boathouse door stood ajar. He was certain it had been closed tight when he arrived.
From Liam O’Hara, he’d learned the history of the property. For twenty-three years, it had been in the possession of Roy and Ivy Kornbluth, from whom the billionaire acquired it. The Kornbluths had sustained a successful horse-breeding operation. During their time at Rustling Willows, evidently nothing outré or even particularly dramatic had happened. Prior to Roy and Ivy, the owners were Emelia and Samuel Chase. Emelia drowned in Lake Sapphire. Only two weeks later, Samuel had been mauled and killed by a bear.
In spite of the fact that those deaths were far in the past, some potential buyers might have had a superstitious aversion to buying a place where two such tragedies occurred, one especially horrific. Liam and Lyndsey didn’t believe in curses. To them, this history was colorful, not problematic.
The long stillness of the day suddenly relented to a breeze out of the forested mountains to the north, rippling the image of the moon on the dark water and ruffling Wyatt’s hair. Under the soft wind’s gentle hand, the boathouse door eased inward on creaking hinges, revealing nothing other than darkness deeper than the night.
Emelia Chase came here on the last day of her young life and launched the skiff, never to return. Her body had washed ashore. Her spirit didn’t haunt this place twenty-four years later.
Yet as the water lapped at the pilings under the dock planks, Wyatt had the curious feeling that the door wasn’t opening under the influence of the breeze, but was being drawn open by someone inside, in a wordless invitation to . . . To what?
Within the boathouse, something thumped softly and after a few seconds thumped again. Maybe a skiff or small motorboat was moored in there, left in the water, knocking against the rubber bumpers that protected it, as the lake rhythmically swelled and receded under the craft.
He hadn’t brought a flashlight. But inside, to the right of the door, would be a switch. He could feel for it and flip it up without stepping across the threshold.