Keep the Count

Three years of drought have peeled Bethel Reservoir down to the town it swallowed in 1953 — fence lines, a stone church footing, and a concrete icehouse whose iron door has been waiting. Tonya Beeler reads the falling water twice a week and tries not to remember the brother the lake took. Then her son and his friends pry that door open, and one of them comes home humming nine notes. Something down there keeps a ledger, and it has never forgiven a debt.