The town cop stopped by the new cabin.
Leaving the patrol car on the road with the flashers on, he walked the rest of the way through the bulldozed woods to reach the packed earth around the new cabin. There was a damp bite to the air still. The two men working a dozen feet away had the bulky look of several sweatshirts atop one another but the shaggy haired man finishing his cut wore only a half buttoned wool shirt.
Just looking at Sullivan made the cop cold.
He waited till the circular saw whirred to a stop and then watched the wool-shirted man swing the big saw clear and set it aside like it weighed a single pound and not nearer twenty.
"They're putting through the paperwork again," he said abruptly. "I try to stall them much longer, I'm going to look like the town fool."
Greg Sullivan shoved the four planks off the work table onto the pile on the other side and then bent and one at a time, pitched the scraps toward the pile at the edge of the clearing.
It was the end of March. From what Sullivan had heard, the lawyer had lost control of things months ago. It couldn't take much longer before the estate accounting would reveal his negligence and put him at risk for legal action. It couldn't take much longer.
The last scrap hit with such force it kicked another piece free and on towards the woods.
"How many times you have to swing through the yard and come up empty to cover your butt?"
The cop shrugged. "Two. Three."
The massive, shaggy-haired man in his half buttoned wool shirt had not waited this long to give up now. Not when it had to work any time. Not when he had come so close. He looked around him at the raw scar in the woods and back to his friend. Then, his eyes slid beyond both to that official car and another possibility appeared to him. Something simple enough that would serve both their purposes.
"Can you pick up the patrol car twenty minutes early?"
The cop frowned and then shrugged. "I suppose so. Why?"
"Get the car early, swing by my place, let me set a cup of coffee in front of you and then I'll - step outside for a minute," Sullivan said. "Ten minutes tops, I'm back and you can turn around and go there first and there won't be anybody in sight."
The cop wouldn't exactly be doing anything wrong. He'd done worse years back before he'd turned right and Sullivan had started circling. The shaggy haired man could see he wasn't liking it but neither was he working himself up.
"Are you sure of this?"
Stubbornly, the man in the wool shirt stood his ground. His friend threw up his hands and walked away.
ILENIE TOO HAD HELD HER GROUND. IN A WAY.
IN THE SIXTY ODD YEARS THEY HAD LEFT HER - THAT HE HAD GIVEN HER - SHE HAD NOT YIELDED.
SHE HAD DONE THAT MUCH.
And once, Rachel had thought she glimpsed the difference between life and mere survival, but struggling for one had nearly cost her both. Settling on survival, the other had been forgotten.
In her dreams - it was usually winter.
The air was clear and cold, with an earthy underbite. Under a steel gray sky, the wide bare sloping hill upon which she stood was a bluish brown with the reddish undertone of hard winter, the stubble underfoot gone past straw to damp decay.
Except for a single bare limbed oak upon the crest of the hill, the landscape was deserted, clean and clear and still, with a stark ascetic beauty. Perfection itself.
But there was an edge to the cold clean winter - a line beyond which was hot sun and singing leaves and giant ferns - a line beyond which the air was rich and foggy, the water murky with microscopic creatures and life was - dangerous.
Looking away from the edge, she turned back to the single oak, turned her back on the edge, the fog, the danger...
Back to the man outside her window.
Stupid. She hadn't made such a stupid mistake in a long time. Not since she'd tried to change the oil in her truck soon after she'd settled in there - when she'd thought she could do everything herself and gotten stuck with half the job done and an oil filter wrecked but not off and no way out but to ask for help.
She'd been a slow learner. It shouldn't have taken another galling mouthful of failure to convince herself to take more care in the battles she chose to fight. But she HAD learned.
Two years she'd gone before this mistake. Maybe she was getting tougher. This one she could cope with. This one she could live through. Ask for help without some sick nausea tying her stomach in knots. Or maybe it was just Russ who'd made it easier.
Ignoring the computer behind her waiting to be turned on, the work waiting to be finished, she watched a slender man in jeans moving comfortably around the edges of her small world. A man a little older than her, a little taller, a bit quieter, and a lot wiser - contented in the solitude that HE preferred and that she clung to for safety. A man with sherry colored eyes and quick, skilled hands. A capable man, strong, well muscled, comfortable with himself.
For someone who made her living now with her imagination, it made no sense to be so fascinated by skill, by pure ability, by excellence. Especially in the tangible. Like watching a middle aged man in workboots and heavy coat working at winching her pickup out of the hole she'd dug when she'd slid off the drive a week ago.
He made it look so easy with his steady steps, practised movements, calm manner. Russ made everything look easy. Two out of three times she went to town, she stopped by his farm on her way back. Spent an hour watching him work on whatever he was fixing for someone, or on the furniture he made, or the old house he restored - just watched him.
He even made that easy.
Rae watched the man outside stop and take all the time in the world to pour tobacco from a small pouch into a folded cigarette paper. Making a small ceremony of it. Like he had the one time, back near the beginning, when he'd turned the conversation towards a personal question.
She thought that he'd suggested they consider personal aspects of their ease with each other. At least she THOUGHT that was how he'd put it.
It had been so smoothly done, lightly done - she'd hesitated before freaking long enough for him to read the answer for himself. The clear, sherry colored eyes had studied her for a long moment and then slid away and reaching for the tobacco pouch, he had started his little project. He'd focused so completely upon what he did, he'd drawn her eyes to the small, delicate movements of his battered brown fingers tapping tobacco into the folded paper trough.
Telling her about how relaxing it was, doing it that way, making a real ceremony of a physical pleasure, making her forget until much later how easily he'd skated around an awkward moment. How easily he'd steered her around, so that later, when she remembered - something - she couldn't exactly remember if she needed to avoid him, if he'd become something she needed to avoid.
More skill. She smiled at the shadow of the man outside, leaning back against the fender of her truck, having his smoke, studying the woods around her cabin. Watching. Enjoying.
Letting her enjoy watching him dig her out of her foolishness, getting her truck stuck, sliding off her own driveway and then not having sense enough to have stopped right then and wait till the ground froze again. If she'd just left her truck there overnight till the treacherous slimy layer of mud had refrozen, she could probably have driven back up onto the gravelled road without problem. If she hadn't lost her temper, had to keep trying, let the wheels spin and dig and sink three of four tires deep into spring thaw mud.
Dug so deep, she'd just glared at the truck for three days before making herself call Russ and admit her folly.
He hadn't even laughed at her. He could have, she thought now she could have handled his laughing at her, but he hadn't, his reasons, his choices, clear only to himself, as they'd been from the beginning.
Choice. It kept coming back to choice.
Rae looked down at the letter she still held and then spun her chair around, away from Russ and the afternoon.
Away from everything but the letter she tossed onto her desk and a blank computer screen.
Outside, one truck started. His, with the winch secured to a sturdy pine. Rae stared stubbornly at the blank screen, refusing to turn and look, let any sliver of light into her questions. A few minutes later, she heard another engine start - hers - and the sound of her truck being driven up near the porch and parked in her usual place.
Silence. A space where he waited to see if she'd emerge. Then, his truck again, starting, retreating, leaving her to herself again and to the past - and to a letter from home - a demanding scream ripping through the quiet.
The silence of the little cabin, with its three rooms down and one up, just intensified the shriek while the clamor intruded between her and the outline she wove for the new project.
Stubbornly, she focussed on the screen, not about to yield now to something she had pushed aside for months. But the words danced and then blurred, running together, dripping down, forming and reforming until she broke free - letting her eyes move back to the window beside her. Outside, only the faintest touch of new yellow-green warmed the red-brown of passing winter. Beyond the narrow strip of lawn surrounding the cabin, pines with the all the lower undergrowth trimmed away roofed over a smooth floor that stretched out forever.
At least she could tell herself they stretched so far. It added to their mystery, to the blue-green depths. Pines were supposed to protect. The grove separated her even from the road nearly a quarter of a mile away and wrapped the narrow drive so that it was a tunnel, a transitional passage into and out of her safe harbor. At least it had seemed safe. Until another letter slid through the guards. Until another letter threatened it all. Threatened because of a debt. And a gift.
A gift she could look away from. But a debt...
With a sigh, she let months of stubbornness flow away, like a jailer tired of guarding his keys. She fooled nobody but herself, telling herself lies and trying to convince herself of their truth. She had known the debt could not be looked away from - even if she had only recognized it when repayment had become impossible.
In the frozen snow-covered landscape, it had seemed easier to push aside, since all the harm had already been done. It was always easier to retreat in winter. To go dormant, like everything around her. But in the approach of spring, with a handful of warm days having broken the back of winter - the sun nudged things into movement, into life...
She had survived by seeking out bits of gleaming excellence. In her need, she had not been fussy. She had not drawn any lines, chosen to drink only from some pools and not others. There WERE rules and principles, costs and - compensations.
She had learned, and survived, and now she could not look away from what had helped her come through. There had been a debt and now there was a calling for repayment. To ignore another summons in a time when life itself demanded movement, stirring from stillness - was to deny all that had supported her. One could not deny one strand and expect support from another. To fragment oneself so -
With a ragged movement, she swung around and seizing the unwanted envelope, ripped it open and read the letter enclosed. A long minute later, she let the pages slide through her fingers to the cluttered desktop and turned to stare blindly out at the pines.
It had grown dark before she moved, lighting the lamp on the desk and then getting to her feet with a weary stiffness, switching on the lights at either end of the worn old couch.
She craved light suddenly. Pushing the ashes aside in the fireplace, she hurriedly stacked kindling and then set a match to it, watching with odd intensity as the flames licked up through the stuff and strengthened until she laid split wood over it and straightened even more slowly. Her bones suddenly felt twice their thirty-six years.
Her truck was free again. She could go spinning down back roads, go into town, to the market. Drift through a little pocket of bright lights, an annonymous woman in jeans and flannel, chestnut hair tied carelessly back, two years overdue for cutting, invisible. Just one woman the town had grown used to. She could do that. God knew she'd been mad to do that that morning and the one before that. Probably the only reason she'd broken down and called Russ to come get her out.
That and that she'd finished another big piece of the new book and usually she treated herself to a ride for such accomplishments. Each project she did got more complex; she had to vote herself small rewards here and there and that morning, waiting for Russ to turn up, she'd intended going to town afterward, go out around people. Not WITH them, but near. Close enough to watch others milling about. Even that morning, things had been good.
She had a book being considered by a good publisher, another underway that her agent was making favorable sounds over, her third 'skin' book had just been picked up. She had money in the bank, a two year old truck paid for. She'd managed to look away enough to not quite see this, the bomb that had been ticking away for weeks now.
Russ again. He came and rescued her and did nothing wrong, said nothing to give her excuse to hit back. He left her alone and THAT undid her. Or comparing herself to an adult undid her.
Things HAD been good.
Now she felt four times her age. Forgetting the bread she had laid out on the counter, she left the lighted kitchen and returned to that other desk, the one behind the computer table where the screen had gone dark in patient waiting. Where - she had tossed it there somewhere. She never lost things even if she wished she could - scrabbling through forgotten ads and letters from her agent, she found the last letter and then, the one before that.
Sinking cross-legged to the carpet before the fireplace, she opened those earlier letters to see if she had deliberately not understood or if only this last message revealed the extent of the threat.
The first - the first had been to notify her of her stepfather's death. She sat holding it for some time before unfolding it. It had been left to a lawyer to inform her of the death of a man who had been kindness itself to her, understanding, supportive - a man who had deserved better than helping her to escape and then being avoided as though he had been part of her problems. She read it through again, flogging herself, finding in its formal empty phrases no hint of the nature of the problem. Beyond the fact of his dying, it held only meaningless and unimportant words of the disposal of his property having been left to her.
Property.
She refolded the letter, sliding it precisely back into its envelope.
The second letter had arrived nearly two months later. The second she remembered as being almost strident in its surprise at her not having contacted that lawyer for more information. In her long fingered hands, the paper crackled in her irritated movements as she closed the folds over words only concerned with her lack of attention to something the lawyer evidently felt deserved reverent appreciation. A perusal of the work HE had done in recording her stepfather's wishes, as though he were solely responsible for the undeserved generosity of a kind and gentle man.
The new letter lay reproachfully upon the carpet before her crossed legs.
Property? What this newest letter spoke of wasn't 'property'. It was a nightmare, convoluted beyond belief. How could he have DONE that to her? HOW could he have done that? WHY had he?
Dimly, she remembered him mentioning some kind of investment he was making just before she had come away from there. It had faded before the cacophony of her own troubles and the death of an eccentric old woman -
Even now, she refused to bring ghosts alive by name. That that place might change hands might have occurred to her but that too had carried its own hurt and she had closed that even farther away than things of no interest.
That her stepfather might have combined the two things...
She had spent the winter turning her back on one danger without comprehending the extent of the threat. It wasn't a question of an unwanted legacy, but purgatory, revealed only because the lawyer had let a bad situation get completely out of hand. And NOW, because of that, he was screaming for her return. Now HE had bungled things, her return was demanded. No longer a question of her lack of courtesy but of legal responsibilities of which she had no notion, for which she had to answer.
His excited letter juxtaposed the wrong two elements. Two completely incompatible facts. Along with one fact from which she could not look away and one concept too deeply ingrained to escape now. There was a debt. And a responsibility. If she had to go back...