Drawdown

About this book

Twenty years ago, Delia Ruark's older sister walked out of a doomed town and never came back. Everyone in Coldwater said Iris ran off with the Wendt boy the week before the valley was flooded for a reservoir, and Delia, fourteen and scarred from a house fire, learned to stop asking. Now she works where nobody can talk to her: underwater, on salvage dives out of Tacoma. Then the worst drought in a century pulls the lake down past its bathtub rings, and Coldwater comes back up. A steeple. A grain elevator. A hardware store with the Ruark name still on the brick, and a cellar someone sealed from the outside, with a body inside. It isn't Iris. Which means the story the whole valley has told for two decades is a lie, and somebody has been counting on the water to keep it. The rains are coming. Delia has until the reservoir refills to find out what her town buried.