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The cabin that made me.
I can’t help myself; I feel as if I’ve finally come home again.
—
“WHY DIDN’T JACOB HAVE YOUR last name?” I ask Walt as we climb off our four-wheelers.
We are parked on the edge of the woods. The dilapidated structure is several hundred yards ahead in a clearing. I already know Walt will recon the area before we advance. His paranoia, I can tell, is a lifestyle.
The old man shrugs. “He was called Davies when he was a kid. But his mom and I, we never married. Just two people who shacked up for a bit. I never thought to ask what might be on the birth certificate. Or maybe he changed it later. I didn’t ask.”
“How old was he when he and his mother split?” Keith asks, removing his helmet, shaking out his hair.
“Four or five. Little guy. Could shoot, though. I taught him that.”
“After they left, you never saw them again until... he came back?” I ask.
“Nope.”
“Never went looking?”
“Nope.”
“He just... showed up. What, forty years later?” I’m not sure I believe this.
Walt looks at me. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
“How did you know he was really your son?” Keith asks.
“A man always knows his own blood.”
“He’s your son,” I state without hesitation. “Having seen you both.” Then, because Walt is now unhooking the shotgun from his ATV: “Do you know how he died?”
“FBI killed him. It was on the TV.”
“The FBI didn’t kill him.”
Walt stops. He studies me for a long while. “Did you love him?” he asks, which isn’t what I was expecting at all. “Seems to me, that’s what drives most women to kill.”
“I didn’t love him. I thought he was a monster. I thought he needed to be wiped off this earth. But toward the end... He might have loved me a little. If monsters are capable of such a thing.”
Keith blinks his eyes at this revelation.
“Monsters can love,” Walt declares. “But that don’t change what we are.”
Keith and I fall in step behind Jacob Ness’s gun-toting father, and follow him toward the cabin.
—
MY FIRST IMPRESSIONS ARE MIXED. The structure isn’t a house as I’d always assumed, but more like a collapsing shack. There’s a tiny wooden porch with a sagging roof and rotted floorboards. The first step up isn’t even attached anymore, but lies a few feet away, nearly lost in the tall grass.
“Who owns this?” Keith asks, eyeing the building dubiously.
Walt shrugs.
“Jacob said he had to leave because the owner wanted it back,” I speak up.
“Nah. This place has been abandoned for decades. Mountains are dotted with shacks just like it. Old family homes, long since deserted. Custom is to let ’em be. Such things can come in handy for lost hikers, hunters, whatnot.”
