For about five minutes we all just stood there, looking down over the edge of the cliff. The dogman had vanished.

The ATV hadn’t. It’s back end was sticking up out of the shallow water just along the shore. And even from up there, and even with it mainly covered with water, you could see it was badly messed up. Post-toast.

“This might be a problem,” Ben said.

“No shit, sherlock,” Louis said.

“We’ll figure something out,” I said. “We always do.”

Ingrid didn’t say anything. She just turned and walked off into the woods.

Louis shrugged and went after her, and Ben and I followed his lead. We do a lot of following Louis’s lead, mainly because he’s usually charging off ahead of us. At least this time there wasn’t a rabid dog or skunk or escaped multiple-murderer involved.

Stories for another time. Maybe.

Ingrid didn’t go all the way back to Lion’s Roost, because, unlike us, she wasn’t staying there. We reached a dirt turnaround area just off the county road that took tourist types like us from the main highway to the thousand resorts and hotels that were packed in and around the Dells and Lake Delton. I’d say we said our good-byes there, but we didn’t. She just got on her bike and rode off. Louis kind of stood there looking after her like a dope. I think “wistfully” is what you in the English biz would call it.

Filed that away for future use as blackmail material. Pining[Reference later?] after Ingrid Halverman. Geesh.

As we walked back to the Roost, we devised this genius plan for covering our tracks and making sure no one connected us to the missing ATV, the site of the epic battle with the dogman, or any traces of bloody fabric still clinging to the thorn-whips. We went over the details a dozen times to make sure we all had it straight, to make sure none of us would mess it up, crack under pressure should we be captured and interrogated. I was pretty confident Ben and I would be OK with the mum-keeping. I was a little worried about Louis.

Here was our cunning plan: say nothing. Admit nothing. If offered the chance to say something smart, play dumb.

Zip the lips, and seal them with Gorilla Glue. And solder. A cross-t arc weld with a plutonium base — which everyone knows is the strongest weld known to human science, the epitome of the welding art, which requires the welder to have completed a four year apprenticeship with a Grandmaster Welder, of which there are only three at any one time, and after which the apprentice welder must swear an oath never to reveal the secret of the cross-t arc weld, after which the apprentice surrenders someone very dear to them — a child, a parent or sibling, a husband or wife — who will be kept as a hostage to forever secure their silence.

It’s a serious weld. We were going to be that mum.

Lion’s Roost is this kind of ramshackle lodge sitting at the hub of a spiderweb of dirt paths that lead back to a bunch of ramshackle cabins, with a patch of dirt to one side with a few septic hook-ups for campers. The cabins all had names of Native American tribes — and yeah, when we first started going when I was a little kid there were all of these really pretty racist pictures of natives or racist little statues of natives or little plaques with Tonto-talk and words like “wampum” and “heap-big” and stuff, the kind of thing some people could get away with because no one who was really offended by it had much say in anything.

We headed right for the lodge, because that’s what we would usually do and we all knew that acting completely normal was exactly what the situation called for. Cool as cucumbers, we were going to be. Cool as cucumbers on ice. At the foot of a glacier. On Pluto.

Louis bee-lined for the door, bee-lined in, letting the screen slam shut behind him before Ben or I could grab it, bee-lined through the porch with its stuffed animal heads and one recliner that looked old enough to have been the recliner Lincoln was shot in, if theaters in those days had recliners instead of…well, theater seats, I guess.

Ben opened the screen door, pushed it open behind him to let me through. I was getting a sinking feeling in my gut. Inside, Louis was still bee-lining to the pop machine in the back. Right past where my Dad, his dad and big sister, Annabelle, who is in college now and who I have never had a crush on, and both of Ben’s parents were playing a game of pool.

My sinking feeling got a sinking feeling.

“Louis, kiddo” Louis’s dad hollered out. Yes. He said “kiddo.”

“Nowhere!” was Louis’s cool as a Plutonian glacier cucumber response.

Louis’s dad was lining up a shot, so he was focused. But Annabelle of the golden hair and sapphire eyes, gave him a look like he’d just broken wind.

“Where was that?” she asked, cocking one oh-so-elegant eyebrow, curved like a yellow caterpillar curled up for a good nights sleep on her alabaster brow.

I feel like that metaphor went a little sideways. Let’s ignore it.

But Annabelle did cock an eyebrow, and I’d known her and known Louis and known the two of them for too long not to know she was setting him up, because she knew right away he was up to something because she was not only lovely as the rarest diamond of the furthest firmament, but also whip-smart. Really, the perfect woman for a young man of keen intelligence and boundless optimism.

Is what I would have been thinking if I’d had a crush on her and absolutely no ability to control where my mind wandered when I was in the same room as her. Which I don’t and don’t, because I do…I think.

Anyhow — Annabelle was cocking her eyebrow and asking “Where was that?”

Louis dropped his head down and hunkered his shoulders, obviously trying to look as guilty as he possibly could. “Nowhere by the lake. Nowhere!”

Annabelle smiled. It was to herself because she knew she was going to get Louis to reveal whatever he was up to — and it was obvious even to the mounted deer head above the pool table, which was not only dead, but which had some kind of industrial filling where its brain used to be — that Louis was up to something. But when she smiled, even to herself, my heart kind of skipped a beat. Kind of sat out for five or six beats, actually.

If I’d had a crush on her, I would have been one poor, smitten fool.

“By the lake?” she asked. Three simple words. But poor Louis…he never stood a chance.

“We didn’t do it! What makes you think we —”

“Yeah — dance party!” Ben hollered. He stood by the old-fashioned juke box in the corner, looking a little bit crazed and frantic as he punched in a letter and a number. Hopefully at random. Because the song that started blasting out was “Dancing Queen”, a relic of the days of the disco and the Swedish pop group.

Ben’s dad looked at him like he was off his rocker. Ben got that look from him a lot. Usually when he was covering for Louis. Louis’s dad was still lining up his shot. Annabelle gave Ben a dirty look, because she knew exactly what he was doing, then turned toward Louis, still determined to get out of him whatever it was he didn’t want gotten out.

My dad set his pool cue on the table and belted out the chorus of “Dancing Queen” which, of course, it turns out he knew by heart. And he started doing something like the Funky Chicken, if the chicken trying to do the Hokey Pokey while trying to swat away a swarm of bees.

My dad wasn’t so much a dancer. Or a singer. But points for trying, right?

Louis had stopped dead in his tracks. You could tell he was trying not to look at Annabelle, which he did by looking directly at her, but with this miserable look on his face that said he knew he shouldn’t be.

I had to put a stop to this.

I rushed him. I thought about tackling him, but realized that would just raise more questions.

So I danced with him. I boogied. I woogied. And Louis — who would also do darn near anything for a laugh — woogied and boogied back. Over by the juke box Ben waved his arms in the air like he just didn’t care, and my Dad hokey-chickened around the pool table.

It all went on for way too long. Until the end of the song, which I’m pretty sure was some kind of extended, three-hour dance version. I’d say I’d never been more embarrassed in my life but, well, this is me, so we all know that isn’t true.

But when the song finally stopped, I grabbed Louis and Ben to line them up for a quick bow, and dragged them out the door like we were being chased by dogs. Or dogmen.