The Forgotten Coast

It should have been two college friends on a simple fishing trip. Two days of relaxation. That's what they were going after. It's not what they found.

John is twenty-eight, six years out of law school, billing a hundred hours a week at an Atlanta firm and quietly coming apart. So when an old fraternity brother texts about a lodge he stumbled on down in the Florida marsh, a place where they can load up on redfish in January, John says yes before he can talk himself out of it.

Slueter's Fish Camp has no website, no reviews, no photographs of smiling families holding up stringers of fish. The only thing John can find is a five-year-old newspaper item: two men drowned in Apalachee Bay, bodies never recovered. Their guide, a man named Lamie Slueter, was the lone survivor.

Then the rain sets in, and it doesn't stop.