Lois is the main character of “Death by Landscape.” She is an elderly woman by the time the story opens and has raised two sons with her now deceased husband, Rob. Alone in her new condominium, she finds herself thinking increasingly about her girlhood friendship with Lucy, who disappeared on a canoe trip in her early teens.

While Lois and Lucy pretend to be sisters in the letters they exchange, Lois finds this pretense difficult to maintain because she sees herself as plain compared to her friend; where Lucy is strikingly pretty, Lois is “nothing out of the ordinary, just a tallish, thinnish, brownish person with freckles” (Part 3, Paragraph 11). She is also impressed by the fact that Lucy clearly comes from a wealthier family than she does. Lucy’s disappearance has such a profound effect on Lois in part because Lois envies Lucy and therefore feels on a subconscious level that she somehow caused her friend’s death.

Lucy’s disappearance is a turning point in Lois’s life and especially in the development of her personality. Although she is always the more cautious of the two girls, Lois does have an adventurous and romantic side that drives both her friendship with Lucy and her love of Camp Manitou.