A Ripple at Cedar Point

For a hundred summers, the same families have shared the docks at Cedar Point — same regatta, same bonfire, same fudge counter at the Boathouse, where Nora Quinn keeps the store, the lending library, and an unofficial ear for every grudge on the lake. Nora has seen the colony through a lifetime of small dramas, but nothing prepares her for the morning the colony’s beloved matriarch is found drowned in the knee-deep shallows below her own dock. The town settles quickly on a sad accident — she was old, she was frail, she must have slipped. Everyone agrees, except Nora, who knew the old woman was the strongest swimmer on the lake and never once stepped onto the dock without the reading glasses now folded too neatly on the boards beside her.

When suspicion lands on Sam — the dock hand Nora helped raise, the son of her late best friend — she can’t sit behind the counter and watch a good boy take the blame. Between scoops of fudge and rounds of cribbage, with a portly spaniel and a one-eyed heron for company, Nora starts pulling at the threads no one else will touch: a wet canoe with no entry in the logbook, a centennial scrapbook full of old regatta photos, and a thirty-seven-year-old grief the lake never quite let go. To clear Sam’s name, Nora will have to prove that the calmest water hides the oldest secrets — and that this drowning was no accident at all.