Summer at Willow Lake Read Free Page A

hairpin bend in the path, and a loud, steady rush of water greeted them.
    “Whoa,” Connor said, tilting back his head to look at the hundred-foot waterfall. It gushed from some unseen source high above, tumbling over rocks, droplets turning to mist on impact. Everywhere the sunlight shone through, rainbows glowed. “That’s awesome,” he said, his cranky mood apparently forgotten.
    “Meerskill Falls,” she said, raising her voice over the roar of the falling water. “One of the tallest in the state. Come on, you can get a good view of it from the bridge.”
    Meerskill Bridge had been constructed in the 1930s by a government work crew. Dizzyingly tall, the arched concrete structure spanned the gorge, with the falls crashing wildly below. “The locals call this Suicide Bridge because people have killed themselves jumping from it.”
    “Yeah, sure.” He seemed drawn to the cascade, which misted the trail on either side, cultivating a carpet of moss and lush ferns.
    “I’m serious. That’s why there’s a chain-link fence over the top of the bridge.” She scrambled to keep up with him. “It was supposedly put up, like, fifty years ago, after two teenagers jumped off it.”
    “How do you know they jumped?” he asked. The mist clung to his dark hair and his eyelashes, making him look even cuter.
    Lolly wondered if the mist made her look cute, too. Probably not. It only fogged her glasses. “I guess they just know,” she said. They reached the bridge deck and passed under the arch formed by the safety fence.

    “Maybe they fell by accident. Maybe they were pushed. Maybe they never existed in the first place.”
    “Are you always such a skeptic?” she asked.
    “Only when somebody’s telling me some bullshit story.”
    “It’s not bull. You can ask anybody.” She stuck her nose in the air and marched to the end of the bridge and around the bend without waiting to see if he followed. They hiked along in silence for a while. By now, they were seriously lagging behind the rest of the group but he didn’t seem to care, and Lolly decided that she didn’t, either. Today’s hike wasn’t a race, anyway.
    She kept stealing sideways glances at him. Maybe she would experiment with liking this guy, just a little. “Hey, check it out.” She lowered her voice to a whisper as the path skirted a sloping meadow dotted with wildflowers and fringed by birch trees. “Two fawns and a doe.”
    “Where?” He craned his neck around the woods.
    “Shh. Be really quiet.” She beckoned, leading him off the path. Deer were not exactly rare in these parts, but it was always amazing to see the fawns in their soft-looking spotted coats and their big, shy eyes. The deer were in an open glade, the little ones sticking close to their mother while she browsed on grass and leaves. Lolly and Connor stopped at the edge of the glade and watched.
    Lolly motioned for Connor to sit next to her on a fallen log. She took a pair of field glasses from her fanny pack and handed them to him.

    “That’s awesome,” he said, peering through the glasses. “I’ve never seen a deer in the wild before.”
    She wondered where he was from. It wasn’t like deer were rare or anything. “A fawn eats the equivalent of its body weight every twenty-four hours.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Read it in a book. I read sixty books last year.”
    “Geez,” he said. “Why?”
    “’Cause there wasn’t time to read more,” she said with a superior sniff. “Hard to believe people hunt deer, huh? I think they’re so beautiful.” She took a drink from her canteen. The whole scene before them was like an old-fashioned painting—the new grass tender and green, the bluestars and wild columbine nodding their heads in the breeze, the deer grazing.
    “I can see clear down to the lake,” Connor said. “These are good binoculars.”
    “My dad gave them to me. A guilt gift.”
    He lowered the glasses. “What’s a guilt gift?”
    “It’s when your