Lance Devore’s fatal lightning accident is a sudden death during a storm near the family trailer at Dark Score Lake, but its consequences extend well beyond the fall: it brings his estranged father, Maxwell Devore, back into the family’s life and helps set the custody conflict over Kyra in motion.

Causes and Circumstances

Lance had bought a small satellite dish and installed it on the trailer. As a storm gathered toward evening, he remembered that he had left his socket wrench on the roof and climbed back up to retrieve it, hoping to keep it from getting wet and rusty. He was descending the ladder with the wrench when lightning struck nearby. The bolt hit a tree across the way, not Lance himself; the fallen tree left a visible stump near the junction of Wasp Hill Road and Route 68.

The danger came from proximity rather than a direct strike. Bill describes the lightning as passing overhead with the force and menace of a drunk driver veering into someone’s lane before swerving back. Its effects made the air seem charged and frightening, but Lance survived the bolt itself. The sudden thunder startled him, and he fell from the ladder to the ground.

The Fall and Death

Lance broke his neck in the fall. The storm’s thunder was loud enough that Mattie did not hear him fall or cry out. A minute or two later, when hail began and Lance still had not returned inside, she looked out and found him on the ground, lying with his eyes open and looking up into the hail. The ordinary task of retrieving a tool had turned, within moments, into an irreversible death.

The accident’s details sharpen the distinction between being struck by lightning and being killed in the storm’s immediate aftermath. Lance was not hit by the bolt: the lightning struck across the way, and he died from the neck injury caused by falling off the ladder. The storm supplies the setting and the shock, but the fatal consequence comes through the fall.

Family Consequences

Maxwell Devore had not attended Lance and Mattie’s wedding. He came to his son’s funeral, however, and remained at the lake afterward. Bill’s account makes the change in Maxwell’s presence clear: although he had previously wanted nothing to do with Mattie, his interest was in the child. The funeral therefore marks not a reconciliation with Lance’s widow but Maxwell’s renewed entry into the family through Kyra.

That shift has immediate stakes for Mattie and her daughter. By the time Bill recounts the accident, Maxwell’s effort to obtain custody is approaching a hearing in Castle County Superior Court. Bill expects the judge to decide whether Kyra will be handed over to her grandfather or whether a ruling will be delayed until the fall; he believes the result will ultimately favor Maxwell. Lance’s death thus leaves Mattie bereaved while creating the opening for a custody contest that threatens her life with Kyra.

Narrative Significance

The accident is recalled through Bill’s account, rather than presented as a continuous scene. Its sequence is compressed around a few concrete facts: the wrench left on the roof, the lightning-struck tree, the ladder, and Mattie finding Lance in the hail. That recollection places the death inside an ongoing conversation about Maxwell’s legal campaign, making the storm a point of origin for the family’s later conflict.

The contrast between the bolt’s near miss and Lance’s fatal fall gives the accident its particular force. The lightning passes across the way, yet its thunder and proximity precipitate the fall that kills him. The storm’s apparent escape from direct injury is therefore no reprieve: Lance’s death changes the family’s future, and Maxwell’s arrival at the funeral redirects the consequences toward Kyra’s custody.