Warrington's Lodge is a long-established resort on Dark Score Lake, combining recreation, lodging, and waterfront gathering spaces. It is where Lance Devore meets Mattie Stanchfield during a summer softball game, and where the narrator later encounters a disturbing stranger at The Sunset Bar. The lodge’s role changes sharply when Max Devore buys the property rather than leave the area, making a once-shared local destination part of his presence during the custody dispute.

Setting and Facilities

Built around the beginning of World War I, Warrington's Lodge is a large barnboard complex that locals sometimes call the country club. The main lodge and its satellite cabins provide accommodation for summer guests; the site also includes a restaurant, a bar, a stable, riding trails, a six-hole golf course, and a two-lane bowling alley. At the bowling alley, players must take turns setting up the pins, a small detail that gives the resort’s leisure facilities a practical, informal character.

The lodge stands beside the lake, with a long dock reaching out to The Sunset Bar, a smaller building where summer guests gather for drinks at day’s end. The resort’s reach also includes shoreline along The Street, the lake’s shared public access. Its position is therefore both social and geographic: it hosts visitors and recreation while occupying an extensive stretch of the lakeside landscape.

A Meeting Place for Locals and Visitors

On Tuesday nights, pickup softball games at Warrington's bring together town residents and summer visitors. Lance Devore, who stays across the lake on the Upper Bay, regularly canoes over to play. Tall and gangly, and prone to stuttering, he is nevertheless an accomplished player whose batting and fielding make him welcome on either side. He is comfortable moving between the locals and the summer people rather than belonging exclusively to one team.

Mattie Stanchfield, who grew up just over the line in Motton, has taken a summer job as a waitress at the lodge. She is seventeen when she meets Lance, who is twenty-one. Their meeting at Warrington's becomes the beginning of their relationship and links the resort’s everyday recreation to the later history of the Devore family.

The lodge also serves as a point of orientation for the narrator. While walking, he realizes he has reached Warrington's and takes in its scale and amenities before noticing a woman standing on the porch beside The Sunset Bar. The encounter turns the familiar resort waterfront into an uneasy scene: the woman’s stillness and watchful presence startle him. The location’s public, summery sociability contrasts with the threat suggested by this unexpected figure, without changing the ordinary appearance of the resort itself.

Max Devore’s Purchase

The lodge becomes entangled with the custody dispute when Max Devore decides he will not move away after the season. When Hugh Emerson tells him the lodge closes after Thanksgiving, Max says that he is comfortable where he is and intends to stay. His decision means he will not need to relocate to a hotel in Castle View or rent a house while the case is under way.

Max then buys Warrington's Lodge through his friend Richard Osgood, paying by personal check. The purchase includes nine buildings—the main lodge and The Sunset Bar among them—twelve acres of woods, a six-hole golf course, a bowling alley, a softball field, and five hundred feet of shorefront on The Street. The price is four and a quarter million dollars. The extent and completeness of the acquisition make clear that Max has not merely arranged a place to stay: he has taken ownership of a substantial resort and its grounds.

Narrative Significance

Warrington's Lodge connects several strands of the story through one landscape. Its softball games bring Lance and Mattie together; its dining and recreation facilities establish it as a destination shared by residents and seasonal guests; and its dock and bar supply the setting for the narrator’s unsettling encounter. The resort is thus more than a backdrop, moving from a communal meeting place to a place marked by private power.

Max’s purchase is a decisive change in the lodge’s status. What had been a resort with a seasonal rhythm and broad public-facing uses becomes property acquired by a central figure in the custody conflict, including a substantial frontage on The Street. The contrast between the lodge’s familiar social life and its new ownership gives the property narrative weight: the same grounds that hosted a courtship and local games now register Max’s intention to stay and his capacity to reshape the setting around the dispute.