Lawrence River so that it looked like stretches of a concrete highway cutting through the darkness. Below and a little to the left, the night was blackest, and here Ronnie located the deserted village.

For a moment he thought he could picture the black, inky water covering the land as the floodwaters rose behind32 the proposed dam. The thought of such a thing happening sent his stomach sinking.

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Then suddenly his eyes widened. He blinked a few times to make sure he wasn’t seeing something that wasn’t there.

It was there all right! Directly in the center of the black patch of night where he had located the village, a halo of light lay shimmering over the roof of one of the buildings. It moved a little to the left, then shifted back again slowly, faded slightly, and brightened again.

Ronnie rubbed at the windowpane to clear the glass. But he couldn’t erase the light he had seen—not for another minute or two anyway. Then it disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared.

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 Chapter 5

Ronnie was up bright and early the next morning. All the time he was washing himself and brushing his teeth, he was trying to figure out what it was he had seen the night before.

It had looked somewhat like a flashlight beam hitting the thick foliage from underneath a tree. But that wouldn’t account for the way the light had reflected from the sloping-roof surface of one of the buildings.

“I reckon that was just about where the boarded-up building is,” he told himself.

He wondered if he should tell anybody about what he had seen. Nobody was likely to believe him. In fact, he was having a hard job trying to convince himself that his eyes hadn’t been playing tricks on him. Sometimes the netting in the screens made lights take on strange shapes and do crazy things. Or maybe it was the moon coming out suddenly from behind a cloud and lighting up the roof of the building. Yet this wasn’t the first time he had gazed out over the deserted village from his bedroom window, and he had never seen the light before. He pulled on his trousers and went down to the kitchen where he found his father34 at the table finishing a bowl of cold cereal. “Morning, Dad,” he said.

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“Morning, 

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