Preview the first chapter of my new book THE LAKE. CHAPTER 1 The Judge couldn’t sleep.  He quietly shifted the covers off, and stuck one bare foot and then the other off the antique four-     poster bed and onto the cold wood floor.  From there he raised his considerable bulk to sitting, slid off the bed, tiptoed across the floor, tottering out into the hall and down the stairs to the cabin’s main floor.  At the foot of the stairs he passed the tall grandfather clock that had belonged to his great great grandmother. It read 1:33 a.m. He let his breath out in the living room, apparently successful in not waking his young bride, twenty years his junior. The cabin was old.  Even older than the Judge. Built in 1908, it stood testimony to the pioneer spirit that settled Lake Arrowhead in the early 1900s.  It was originally a two-story cottage, built at the bottom of its lot, hanging over the Lake and a private dock. It was a place of plywood interiors aged in golden brown and a huge fireplace in the great room crafted from local stone. The Judge’s family had modernized it here and there over the generations:     forced air heating, new kitchen, basement built out into a game room and a bedroom, attic now a combination bedroom and office.  The footprint hadn’t changed, but the space had grown vertically to some 2,500 square feet. The Judge had inherited the cabin when his mother died. Whispering Point was its name.  And although his busy schedule precluded him from visiting Lake Arrowhead often, it was still a sanctuary of sorts for him.  Clean air, the crystal-clear lake reflecting sparkling blue skies, and nights filled with a thousand stars. The cabin was set on a semi-peninsula jutting out into the Lake.  In the evenings the lapping water of the lakeshore whispered up through the pines to the cabin’s interior, hence its name. In the great room were       the old     almost floor-to-ceiling window, opened to let in the night air.  The Judge stood before them, looking out. There was a large yellow moon shooting a broken yellow ribbon across the Lake surface, rippled by a gusty wind.  Winter would be here soon. He could hear, almost taste, the soft lapping of the Lake’s edges against the shore, sending a calliope of sound floating up around the cabin.  It was very peaceful. Like an empty church. A boat started up across the Lake, over toward Lake Arrowhead Village.  A speedboat with big engines and noisy pipes, droning like a distant bee in the background, making the surrounding silence even more precious.  Someone was up late. Perhaps heading home on the water after a pub-crawl in the Village. The Judge took deep breaths, sucking in scents of the Lake, the trees, and the intermittent brush, feeling his soul replenished in some measure by the air and the quiet romance of the place and the night. But there [...]