Bruce Lake

The pilot did everything right.

He'd been putting jumpers out over that county for nineteen years, and when the storm came in underneath and took his engine, he gave a position and gave it three times, and every word of it was accurate. They searched for eleven days. They were thorough. They covered every acre of the line between the field and the coast.

Nobody looked at Bruce Lake, because it wasn't there to look at.

Over the next forty years, other people find it. A canoeist watches his best friend taken apart on a rock in the middle of open water, and understands, too late, that the light on the far shore was never a light. A newly married couple climbs a thousand feet of bluff to see the lake whole, and finds something at the top that arrived by air and will be gone in three days. Three young men take a five-day job on a private island and are ferried out by two men who do not speak, and do not look back, and have done this before.

And one man, starving, alone, and given up for dead, climbs a hundred and fifty feet of white pine to look for a way out—and finds one.

Five interlocking stories about a body of water that does not appear on any map, and the people who found it anyway.