Bitterroot Lake

by Alicia Beckman

  Sarah struggled to sit up, the wool blanket slipping on the leather couch. Too dark to see the clock on the fireplace mantel, so she grabbed her phone, good for something. Half past twelve. That made it Wednesday, nineteen days since Jeremy’s death.

  She’d have sworn she hadn’t slept a wink, if not for the dream. Even with her eyes open, she could picture the woman running along the lakeshore, silhouetted against the night sky, a bit of moon, a tree whipping in the wind. Who was it? Surely not herself—she was watching the dream unfurl. And the woman was light-haired. Or, in the way of dreams, had she been both watcher and watched?

  No sign of the cat. She unwound the blanket and stood, then made her way quietly through the dark to the powder room. Holly had taken the other couch. Nic and Janine were sleeping in the cabin where Janine had holed up that first night—ever the Girl Scout, Nic had brought sleeping bags. More cleaning tomorrow. The dust clung to these old logs as if it wouldn’t have a life without them. Where did dust go when you wiped it up? She remembered Abby asking her that once while the cleaning woman was working, the two adults having no answer and trying not to laugh.

  Finished, she turned off the light before opening the door, and was surprised to see a soft light glowing in the tiny windows of the kitchen doors. She hadn’t noticed it a few minutes ago. She picked her way around the furniture and across the room, then pushed open one swinging door.

  In the light coming from over the stove, she saw Holly sitting at the table, long legs outstretched, one hand resting on the Formica table next to a half-empty glass of red wine. The other hand cradled the cat, who raised her head, spotted the newcomer, and lowered it.

  “At least one of us can sleep,” Sarah said, nodding at the cat. She gestured to the wine. “Leave any for me?” Her stomach growled. Janine’s mac and cheese dinner had smelled great, but Sarah had only taken a few bites, pushing it around on her plate.

  She poured a glass and found the leftover pasta in the fridge. Scooped a mound onto an ironstone plate—this one bore the familiar green and gray mountain scene, with the Rocky Mountain goat silhouette—and sat across from her sister.

  “Oh, give me that.” Holly snatched the plate and stuck it in the microwave. The motor whirred and Sarah took a long sip of the cab, letting the jammy red wine roll over her tongue and slide down the back of her throat.

  Beep. Holly popped open the oven, made a “yeow—hot!” noise, and set the plate in front of her. “Just because you look like death warmed over doesn’t mean you can’t warm up your dinner.”

  “Do I look that bad? And thanks. For the nuke job, I mean. Is it safe? Those are old dishes.”

  “Oh, who cares? It’s one dinner. As long as it doesn’t set the house on fire, you’ll be fine. And to answer your question, yes. You look that bad.” Holly gathered her gray plaid wool robe around her and sat. “Not that I blame you.”

  A gust rattled the mullioned windows and sent a scattering of pine cones across the metal roof.

  “Nic shouldn’t have—” Holly said at the same as Sarah said “I’m glad Nic—”

  They stopped. Sarah spoke first. “I’m glad she called you. That’s so like her. And I’m sorry I snapped when you got here.”

  “You’re allowed,” Holly said. “You’ve been through hell and I have been a lousy sister.”

  Sarah picked up her fork. “Goes both ways.” Another gust. She put a bite in her mouth, listening. “How’s work?”

  “It’s okay.” Holly took another sip.

  “I thought you liked your job.”

  “Liked. Past tense. Let’s not talk about it tonight.”

  Sarah worked a piece of pasta loose from a tooth with her tongue and eyed her sister over the rim of the wine glass. She was about to get smart-alecky and ask what Holly did want to talk about when a loud crack stopped her.

  “Holy crap. What was that?”

  “Tree splitting. Let’s hope it didn’t hit the house.” Sarah opened the door to the deck, holding tightly as another gust tugged at it. “I don’t see anything out here.” She shut the door firmly, then checked the front. “Nothing there either. Stove clock’s blinking. Power must have gone out.”

  “For about the third time tonight. I tried resetting it, but it wouldn’t stay reset. Electronics never work right here.”

  She’d forgotten. It had driven Jeremy nuts.

  “So Janine found the cat when she got here?” Holly continued, working one silky ear with her fingers. “We should ask around.”

  “Ask who? The nearest neighbor is George Hoyt and his house is half a mile away. Besides, I don’t figure George for an indoor cat. A mouser in the barn, maybe.”

  “If she isn’t lost, someone may have taken her out to the country and dumped her. Crazy that people do that, but you know it happens. Anyway, she needs a name. What’s that Egyptian cat goddess? The name of the cat in the house behind us in town.”

  “Bastet.”

  “That’s right. You always were better at history than me,” Holly replied and Sarah glanced up sharply. An innocent comment or a barb, a swipe at her tendency to hold on to the past? She couldn’t tell. “It’ll be nice for you to have the company when we leave.”

  “I’m not staying long,” Sarah said. “Oh. You mean Mom has other plans for me? What has she said to you?” Her fingers tightened on the stem of the glass.

  “Nothing. Well, she asked what I thought about suggesting you come here for a while.”

  “To help her clean. Decide whether to sell.”

  “Oh, no. No, she thought you and Abby might spend the summer here. It always was your happy place. The whole family loved it, but you most of all.”

  Had she misunderstood her mother’s intentions for the house? Certainly possible; she’d misunderstood a lot of things lately.

  But if Peggy imagined Abby might spend the summer here, she hadn’t told Sarah.

  She pushed away the plate, not quite empty. Holly pushed it back. She couldn’t eat another bite, or sit here any longer, or let other people tell her what to do. She just couldn’t.

  No, she was not going to feel guilty just because her sister felt bad. She hadn’t hurt anyone; she hadn’t done anything wrong.

  Her wine glass was empty. Fine. Eating and drinking this late at night wasn’t good for her anyway. Outside, the wind had given way to rain, pounding against the logs and windows. As a child, she’d loved the rain. Now, it scared her.

  “You don’t have any idea why Lucas sent you the letter?” she asked. “You and Janine.”

  “No.”

  But there were too many secrets, too many silences between them for the words to be convincing. “Let’s go back to bed. Mom will be here at the crack of dawn, snapping her dust rag at us.”

  “You go.”

  What was bothering her sister? Had it been Holly she’d seen in the dream, her hair lit up by the moonlight, running with the wind as it whipped the trees?

  The thought kept Sarah awake for hours.

  * * *

  Something tickled Sarah’s cheek.

  Two green-gold eyes stared at her, inches away.

  “You little sneak,” she said. While she’d been sleeping, the cat had wormed its way under the blanket and Sarah had instinctively wrapped her arm around it. Her. Abby’s cat used to do the same thing.

  She freed her fingers from the blanket and stroked the soft black-coffee fur.

  Coffee. That’s what she smelled. And something baking. Happy smells in her happy place. She tightened her grip on the cat and sat up. Outside, the lake glistened as if last night’s storm had blown all worry away and left the world shiny and smooth.

  Why hadn’t her mother hired professional cleaners? Even just for the windows. She could afford it. She didn’t need Sarah here for free labor. Trying to keep her close and busy. Fine. She’d inventory the furniture and artwork and figure out where Mary Mac’s glassware had gone.

  And what to do about the cat. Bastet. She buried her face in the
soft fur. Thank God the dream that woke her had not returned when she came back to bed after her late-night snack.

  No sign of her sister, not even a rumpled blanket. Had Holly gone for a run?

  She put her feet on the floor. What was that? Glanced down. Shivered, despite the blanket wrapped around her, the warm cat in her arms.

  The first time Jeremy left her a penny on the floor, she hadn’t known it was from him. The coin had been on the rug in the upstairs guestroom where she’d been sleeping, or not sleeping, the night he died. Sarah didn’t think she’d dropped it—she kept her purse downstairs. Only the housekeeper had been in the room—she’d come to the house, unscheduled, when she’d heard the news, knowing Sarah would be overrun with visitors the next few days. Just to “tidy up,” she’d said. But it was unlike her to drop something and leave it, even something as inconsequential as a penny.

  The second time, last week, Sarah had been alone. The kids had gone back to school, her family had all gone home. Jeremy’s mother had dropped by, but they’d sat in the breakfast nook, nursing coffee and grief. There was no way her mother-in-law had dropped three pennies on the rug in Sarah’s second-floor closet.

  She’d heard stories. Pennies from Heaven. Feathers. Sightings of a special bird or butterfly. She’d overheard a woman in a coffee house tell a friend that her late husband often left a light on for her when she was out late and had forgotten. Creepy or comforting? Could go either way.

  But what was Jeremy doing here? And what was he trying to tell her?

  “Why couldn’t you pick a butterfly, Jeremy? Who doesn’t love butterflies?”

  The cat in her arms, Sarah shuffled to the kitchen. As she neared the door, the sounds of conversation leaked out, low and furtive. She pushed it open with her hip and the conversation stopped. Were those guilty looks on the faces of her sister and their old friends? Had they been talking about her?

  “What smells so good?”

  “Scones,” Janine replied, shoving her chair away from the table and standing, though there was no need. A fourth chair sat empty, and the plate of scones held plenty. “I’ve been getting up at three to bake for so long, I wouldn’t know what else to do.”

  The cuckoo clock above the deep white farmhouse sink said midnight, or noon. Dead battery? The stove clock flashed two forty-one. So no one else had been able to set it correctly, either. “What time is it?”

  “Seven thirty,” Holly said. “We didn’t want to wake you.”

  She was still in her robe, not running clothes. Had she even been to bed?

  Sarah set the cat on the floor and refilled the food and water bowls.

  “Anybody take a look at the storm damage?” From their blank faces, clearly not.

  They were up to something, but she didn’t have the bandwidth to guess what it might be. One foot in front of the other, her therapist had said. Decide what has to be done, do it, and let everything else wait. Like the bag from the mortuary filled with condolence cards she’d hauled in that first night and left next to the couch, untouched, unread.

  At the front door, she shoved one foot into her shoe, but the other balked. She bent to untie the laces and slip it on. She was still wearing her pajamas—faded black yoga pants and an old sweatshirt of Jeremy’s she’d started wearing when he got too sick for her to share the bed and she’d moved into the guest room. She intended to sleep in his shirt until it fell off her. She grabbed a jacket from the coat rack. A blue fleece. Nic’s, she guessed, from the roominess. The shortest of the four of them, sturdy but not fat, Nic always dressed like she thought she was bigger than she was.

  The skies were clear, the air chilly for May, and she huddled into the jacket, her pants too thin for warmth. It was the calm after the storm, one of those glorious mountain mornings that make you think you’d imagined all the wind and the rain. Though the cones and branches littering the gravel drive said the gusts and torrents had been very real.

  Her head and heart said so, too.

  She bent to pick up a knobby branch from a larch. Tossed it to the edge of the lawn. Beneath it lay a cedar shake, split down the middle, a hole at the edge where it had torn away from the nail. More shakes lay scattered amid the blowdown. They’d been cut decades ago at her family’s mill. Did they still make them?

  Careful of the debris, she stepped backwards for a better view of the lodge roof. One bare patch, a few shakes still waiting for the next big wind to finish the job, but no other damage visible from here.

  The carriage house roof looked no worse than it had yesterday, but a gap had opened between the gable and the side of the building, a birch bough lying awkwardly across the roof.

  How had the other buildings on the property weathered the storm? The cabins, and the small McCaskill horse barn on the trail where she’d seen the woman looking for wildflowers yesterday. She’d better check. It had been years since she’d ridden. Neither of the kids had been interested, and eventually she’d given it up. Maybe now …

  “Oww.” She dropped the broken shake. A splinter had driven its way into the soft flesh at the base of her thumb. She pried it out with her fingernails, then pressed the spot.

  A movement on the east end of the lodge caught her attention. A squirrel. A squirrel running down a tree that stood at an angle trees didn’t take naturally.

  Squeezing her hand against the sharp pain, she picked her way down the drive to that end of the lodge.

  Where she saw the explanation for the loud crack she and Holly had heard last night. The top of an old spruce had sheared off and hit the roof, then slid down and struck the second-floor balcony. The decking had pulled away from the house, and the pine rail dangled loose. She pressed her hands into her face.

  The sound of an engine broke into her fuzzy brain. A pickup came into view, the engine loud, the muffler rattling.

  George Hoyt? Was he seriously still driving that old Chevy, its exterior a patchwork of rust, primer gray, and the original olive green? It had been past its prime when she was a kid. So had George, or so her younger self had thought. Now, as the truck slowed and the man behind the wheel rolled down the window, she guessed him to be north of eighty.

  “Sarah McCaskill,” he said. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?”

  “George, you need glasses.” She leaned in the open window and kissed the grizzled cheek. “What are you doing out so early? And what brings you down here?”

  “Early? You’ve gone soft in your city ways. When you were a kid, you and your sister would have ridden those horses of yours up to the ridge or out to Granite Chapel and be halfway back to the barn by now. That blood on your cheek?”

  She touched her face, then glanced at her palm and held it up. “Splinter. Roof shake.” A black-and-white dog sat on the seat next to the old man. “Hey, Shep. Good dog. It is Shep, isn’t it?”

  “I forget whether he’s Shep the eighth or Shep the ninth, but at least I never forget his name.” George grinned, then his well-lined face turned somber. “I heard about your husband. Stinks. You gotta wonder sometimes what the Big Guy upstairs is thinking.”

  “Thanks. My nephew thinks God needed a technical consultant, to keep track of everyone’s good deeds and bad.”

  George snorted. “Then your man’s got his work cut out for him. That was some storm last night. Gusts up to forty, I heard. How’d the old girl fare?”

  Took her a moment to realize he meant the lodge, not her. “Not so good. Crunched gable on the carriage house, and you can see that spruce tore the balcony off the east end. I haven’t been upstairs yet to check for damage inside.”

  He got out and together they surveyed the damaged balcony, Shep beside them.

  “Looks bad,” the old man said.

  “I’ve got to call the insurance agent, and my mother. But cell service is iffy down here, and the landline’s disconnected. Guess I’ll be going into town later.”

  “You be careful who you hire,” George cautioned. “Lotsa builders think they can do anything.
Throw up trophy homes, sell ’em to rich fools who pat themselves on the back for being eco-friendly while they drive them big SUVs and race their speedboats up and down the lake. Folks who don’t know a thing about the history of this town and don’t care. Spend two mill building a place you visit six weeks a year? It ain’t right. A house wants to be lived in.”

  “It’s not for us to judge, is it, George? Their lives, their money. Besides, wealthy families have always built their retreats and vacation homes. The lodge started out as a summer camp for a railroad executive and his family, before my great-grandparents bought it.” Why it had been sold, she’d never known. Financial trouble, or the original owners discovered that keeping a summer home was more work than they wanted. Their loss; her family’s gain.

  “You be careful,” George said as if she hadn’t spoken. “Not just anybody can work on a jewel like this.”

  “Thanks. Long as I’m outside, I guess I’ll hike up and see how much blowdown we have in the woods.”

  “Hop in. Shep and I’ll help.”

  In her pajamas and a borrowed jacket. Her city friends would be appalled. She followed George back to the truck. The passenger door stuck and she reached across the seat to open it from the inside. She grabbed the roof strap and pulled herself in.

  George shifted to make room for the dog between them, and his worn denim jacket slipped open, revealing the holstered gun on his hip. Another sight she’d gotten out of the habit of seeing. Without a word, he tugged his jacket over the gun and continued down the narrow lane to the cabins. Small branches littered the ground, and a tree had bent the edge of one metal roof, but the cabins appeared otherwise unharmed.

  Then they drove the property, George squeezing the pickup down narrow lanes and up half-abandoned logging roads on both sides of the highway. Several times, Sarah hopped down to drag branches out of their way. Twice, they had to back up, the road blocked. No storm damage at the horse barn, thank goodness, although barn was a fancy word for the two-stall shed her father and grandfather had built when she and Holly got serious about riding. In the distance, she could make out the roofs of the larger Hoyt horse barn and the ice house.