Chapter 4 - The Cabin on Blackwood Ridge
The logging road wasn't meant for standard cruisers. The four-wheel-drive Tahoe we took bounced through three-foot washouts, its skid plates screaming against the limestone boulders hidden beneath eight inches of wet, unplowed snow.
Detective Miller drove with his lights killed, running only on the amber fog lamps that barely illuminated the hemlock boughs hanging heavy with ice over the ruts. I sat in the passenger seat, my coat zipped to my chin, holding an iron wrench I had pulled from the emergency kit beneath the back bench. My hands weren't shaking anymore. The cold had gotten into my knuckles, turning them white and rigid, but the panic that had choked me in the hospital corridor was gone, replaced by a gray, immovable resolve.
"The cabin’s around the next switchback," Miller said, dropping the transmission into low gear as the tires ground through a drift of wet gravel. "If she’s got a generator running, we won't hear it until we’re on the porch. These hollows hold sound like an iron kettle."
We rounded the crest. The cabin sat in a small clearing between two massive rock faces where the old steam skidders used to haul hemlock trunks out of the ravine. It was a low, squat building constructed of creosote-soaked logs, its tin roof patched with tar paper and secured with rusted iron wire. A single chimney of river stone rose from the west gable, and from its mouth drifted a thin, greasy ribbon of woodsmoke that smelled of pitch pine and burning varnish.
"There's light," Miller whispered, killing the engine sixty yards back beneath the cover of three white pines. "Second window from the door."
We stepped out into the knee-deep snow. The wind was howling down the gap from the north, carrying needle-sharp grains of frozen rain that stung my forehead. We moved along the edge of the tree line, Miller with his service Glock drawn and pressed against his chest, his boots making almost no sound in the soft slush.
As we reached the corner of the dry-stack stone foundation, the sound drifted down through the chinking between the logs.
It wasn't weeping. It wasn't the frantic rustling of a fugitive packing a canvas rucksack.
It was music.
A small, battery-operated radio was playing an old big-band tune from the forty-watt station out of Clearfield, the horns sounding tinny and warped through a five-inch speaker. Above the music came the rhythmic, scraping sound of steel against wood.
Miller signaled me to stay flat against the siding beneath the window sill. He rose an inch, his eyes clearing the lower pane of wavy, grease-filmed glass, then dropped back down immediately.
He leaned his mouth toward my ear. "She’s alone. She’s got three kerosene lamps on the trestle table. She’s burning files in the woodstove."
I didn't wait for him to check the perimeter. I didn't wait for the tactical unit that was still fifteen miles behind us on the lower highway.
I stepped up onto the two hemlock slabs that served as the front porch and hit the latch with the heel of my boot.
The pine door wasn't locked; it swung inward with a dry screech that cut through the radio music like an axe through birch.
Evelyn was standing beside an iron potbelly stove in the center of the single room. She was still wearing the gray tweed skirt she had worn to the birthday breakfast, though her cardigan was gone, replaced by an old sheepskin coat that had belonged to her husband thirty years ago. Her hands were blackened with soot to the wrists, and on the pine planks at her feet lay three green metal lockboxes, their lids pried open with a crowbar that lay across the table.
She didn't drop the bundle of letters she was holding over the stove door. She simply turned her head, her silver spectacles catching the yellow flare of the kerosene wick, and looked at me as if I were a delivery boy who had arrived ten minutes late with the groceries.
"You should have wiped your feet, Rachel," she said, her voice smooth, level, and entirely devoid of surprise. "The floor is hemlock. It stains if you let the road salt sit on it."
Miller stepped through the door behind me, his weapon leveled at her breastbone. "Evelyn Miller. Put the documents on the table and step away from the stove. Keep your hands where I can see the palms."
Evelyn glanced at the gun with mild distaste, as though it were an ill-mannered dog that had wandered into her parlor. "Don't be dramatic, Detective. You’re Arthur Miller’s boy from down by the feed mill, aren't you? Your father owed my husband two thousand dollars for the limestone he used on his silo in seventy-four. He never paid the interest."
"The documents, Evelyn," Miller repeated, his voice dropping into the steel tone of an arrest.
Slowly, almost casually, she dropped the papers into the open mouth of the stove. The flames caught the yellowed vellum instantly, sending a shower of orange sparks up against the soot-caked baffle.
"It doesn't matter," she said, turning her back to the fire and leaning her hips against the heavy timber table. "The county records in the cellar are forty years old. The ink is iron gall; it’s faded to gray water. Without my personal journals from eighty-eight, there isn't a judge in the state who can prove which parcels were held in trust and which were titled to the general estate."
"We don't need your journals, Evelyn," I said, walking to the edge of the table until the smell of her lavender water and the greasy pine smoke filled my throat. "Mark found the assignment in the safe deposit box at First National."
For the first time since she had walked into my kitchen with that ribboned casket, her spectacles slipped an eighth of an inch down her nose. The small, triangular muscles at the corners of her thin lips twitched once, twice, before freezing.
"The assignment was revoked," she said, her voice losing its smooth cadence, becoming sharp, dry as dead leaves. "He was thirty years old. He didn't know what he was signing."
"His father signed it," I said, leaning forward until I could see the tiny broken red veins across her cheekbones. "And it wasn't revoked. It was executed at midnight on Tuesday morning. Lily is the executor. Mark and I are her guardians. You don't own the mineral rights, Evelyn. You don't own this cabin. You don't even own the shoes on your feet. You stole two hundred and forty thousand dollars from the timber escrow over the last five years, and the state attorney is filing for emergency seizure of your home in town by nine o'clock tomorrow."
She stared at me. Her silver hair, usually so neat, had slipped from its pins, a gray wisp hanging across her forehead like an old cobweb.
"She was supposed to be blind," Evelyn whispered. The words weren't spoken in anger; they were delivered with the terrifying, cold logic of an accountant whose ledger had failed to balance by a single penny. "A blind girl can't survey four thousand acres of timber. A blind girl can't sign a division order for six gas wells. She would have stayed in the house with you. You would have had twenty thousand a year for her nurses, and the valley would have stayed whole."
"You burned her eyes out for gas wells?" Miller shouted, his professional detachment finally cracking as he stepped forward with the handcuffs. "She’s ten years old! She's your son's child!"
"She's a stranger!" Evelyn hissed, her face contorting into an ugly, snarling mask that stripped away forty years of church-choir respectability. "She has her mother's blood! The Millers never had brown eyes until Mark brought her home from the state college! This valley belonged to the Blackwoods and the Mercers before the state even had a highway through the gap! I wasn't going to let some shopkeeper's daughter from Altoona sign away the ridge to a pipeline company so she could buy new rugs for that split-level monstrosity on the pike!"
She lunged.
May you like
Not toward the door. Not toward Miller.
Her hand shot toward the small, third rosewood box sitting behind the bread tin on the shelf. The one with her own initials marked in grease pencil on the blue tape.
