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the bad dreams, he woke fresh and strong.
    And that night, he’d had a dream.
    He woke early, at first light, pulled on his Speedo and his goggles, and hit the lake. Every day he swam, every day a little farther. He started when dawn colored the water with a cold, gray light, and he moved steadily, stroking his way north, heading out into the center of Iron Lake where the water turned dark and fathomless beneath him. He never tracked his distance. He swam for another reason, a reason that led—twisting and turning—ultimately back to vengeance.
    When he drew abreast of North Point that morning,he paused and saw that the sun had risen, a feverish red through the smoke in the sky. The lake around him had turned a bloody hue. The same moment that he noticed the color of the water, he heard an explosion from the direction of Aurora. Beyond the town, a black column climbed into the sky like a snake out of a charmer’s basket, but John LePere watched with only mild curiosity. Whatever the cause, it was the concern of other men. His only concern was keeping himself strong for the work that had become his life. As the siren in town sounded, calling the volunteer firefighters to their duty, LePere turned back and focused on cutting through the blood-colored water toward home.
    He’d had the bad dreams so often over the years that he’d learned to keep himself from thinking about them by focusing on physical chores. By the time he’d showered and shaved that morning, he wasn’t thinking about the dream at all. He dressed in clean creased jeans, a crisp white shirt, blue canvas slip-ons. He fixed himself breakfast—oatmeal with raisins, a sliced banana, brown sugar and milk, whole-wheat toast, and a tall glass of orange juice. He ate slowly, alone in the quiet of his small cabin on the shore of a cove off Iron Lake. When he’d finished, he did up the dishes. Finally, he lifted his Leitz binoculars from where they hung on a steel spike hammered into the cabin wall near the back door, and he walked out onto his dock. He settled himself in a canvas chair and watched the big log home more than a quarter mile north across Grace Cove.
    His own cabin was simple. His father had built it in the space of a single summer when John LePere wassix years old. LePere remembered that summer well—the building of the cabin and the feel of working with his father, a serious man who spoke little but never raised his voice or his hand to his son. The cabin was meant as a retreat whenever LePere’s father tired of fishing Lake Superior for the herring and whitefish and lake trout that, for his living, he caught and sold to smokehouses along the North Shore. Fishing on Iron Lake, he didn’t care if he hung a line in the water all day and caught nothing. There, he fished for other reasons.
    When his father bought the land in the late sixties, the price was cheap. The shore of Iron Lake was still quite empty, especially along the eastern side south of the Iron Lake Reservation. Much had changed in thirty years. To build the big log home—the only other dwelling on Grace Cove—Karl Lindstrom had had to pay a fortune for the land, LePere had heard. Lindstrom bought everything up to LePere’s property line. He even tried to buy LePere’s land, offering better than a good price, but John LePere had refused to sell. Between the cabin and the Lindstrom home lay woods full of birch and aspen and a few magnificent spruce. The property line ran along a little stream—all dirt and rock now in the long, dry summer—called Blueberry Creek. Before Lindstrom bought most of the cove, it had been called Sylvan. Lindstrom had changed the name to Grace Cove, after his wife. LePere didn’t know what sylvan meant, and although he liked the word
grace
attached to the beautiful inlet, he hated the ease with which money changed a thing that had been set on maps and in people’s thinking for over a hundred years.
    The great home, built of yellow pine logs, lay in