The Starlight Claim
Page 19
Nate wasn’t sure what woke him up that night at the camp. It wasn’t any nightmare. He listened to the silence, heard the sound of his parents breathing on the other side of the wall. There was no threat in this darkness. No snowmobiles racing through the woods toward them. No ghosts.
He climbed out of his bed and entered the front room. He filled up the Ashley, left the door open a moment, enjoying the leaping flames. Then he closed it up and walked out onto the sunporch. The weather had broken over the last week. It was still below freezing at night, but the melt was on. Real spring was on its way, a month or so later than for anybody else in the world, it seemed.
He slipped on his gum boots and stepped outside. The sky was wheeling with stars, but he was looking for one particular constellation. Where was it? There. The Ram truck. He picked out the headlights, the gun rack, the taillights. And there was George Star at the wheel, bright as ever. But there was another star there, too, faint but holding its own. It looked as if George had picked himself up a passenger.
My first novel for young adults, The Maestro, was written in 1995. Among various titles it garnered as it was published elsewhere were The Survival Game, in the United Kingdom, and The Flight of Burl Crow, in Australia. The story was about both those things: an act of survival and a flight — an escape — from cruelty. To this day, kids still write me to ask what happened to Burl, and they often add suggestions as to what should happen to his nasty father, Calvin Crow. For quite a while I thought of writing a sequel but . . . well, I never got around to it. Then suddenly, just a couple of years ago, I had a good idea for a sequel — part of an idea, anyway. And when I mentioned it to my wife, Amanda Lewis, she supplied the crucial second idea that made it impossible not to write this book. Except so much time had gone by that Burl would have been old enough to have a teenage son of his own. Great! I’d write an intergenerational sequel.
The truth is I wanted any excuse to get back to Ghost Lake.
When I wrote The Maestro, my family and I were visitors to the real “Ghost Lake” (I’m keeping the name a secret). We were guests of our good friends Geoff and Carolee Mason, to whom that book was dedicated. Since then, we’ve bought into a camp at the north end, and for the last umpteen years we’ve made it our home away from home, and not just during the summer. In fact, it was a trip one very snowy March that helped inspire this book. Survival takes on a whole new meaning in the winter, and I knew that any son of Burl Crow would be up to the task.
The tragedy at the heart of the story is based on a real incident that happened on the lake many years before my first visit. Most of a family drowned in an accident similar to the one I describe here. That said, let me be very clear that Dodge Hoebeek and his family are entirely fictional characters.
Do criminals really escape from jails by helicopter? Believe it or not, they do; that was the first impetus to write this story. Look it up.
For the purposes of this story, I have set two camps at the north end of Ghost Lake, but there are actually three, and one of them I commandeered for Nate to hide out in. Thank you, Janice and Michael Stephenson. Please excuse the “renovations” to your lovely camp, not to mention the mess. I know that Nate will clean it up spotlessly when he gets a chance — and fix that broken door.
The idea of sending a cell phone up in a drone to try to get reception was suggested by another Northender, Matt McLean. Thanks, Matt.
I have to thank Geoff Mason, yet again, for his wealth of knowledge about all things camp. Geoff read an early draft of this book, and I can assure you, dear reader, that anything in the book that looks wonky or just plain wrong falls on me.
And finally, I want to thank Amanda for that conversation on the back deck where you said, “Why not bring in the boating accident? How would that affect Nate?” Let’s keep having those conversations on the back deck forever.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2019 by Tim Wynne-Jones
Epigraph copyright © 2004 from The Maestro by Tim Wynne-Jones
Cover photographs: copyright © 2019 by Robert Seitz/Getty Images (house);
copyright © 2019 by R_Koopmans/Getty Images (figure)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First electronic edition 2019
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2019939008
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