FULL POOL
The drought is the worst in sixty-five years, and Salem Lake is down thirty-eight feet. The steeple came up in May. By August the whole town is out of the water - streets, seventeen chimneys, a brick church, and a graveyard that was supposed to have been moved in 1961 and wasn't.
Nell Petree keeps the land for Yarrow County, North Carolina. She is a widow whose husband is somewhere in that lake, and she is the only person alive who can read what the deed books are saying: twelve parcels condemned by the power company and never conveyed. In law, the bottom of Salem Lake still belongs to the people who were moved off it.
And they have come back for their own.
They cannot take. They can only ask. They come up dry, and they look like your people, and the only thing wrong with them is their hands.
As the rain builds off the Gulf and the water starts to rise, a county that has spent sixty-five years not saying a thing out loud is going to have to say it - before the lake closes over the town again and takes everything it has been given.
A standalone novel of the Carolina Piedmont.
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