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Despite everything, I feel a small smile curl my lips, imagining the two of them out in the woods for nine days and nights. The conversations those two must have had … “Muriel told me you helped her look for Deacon, way back when.”
He makes a sound but doesn’t respond.
I don’t care if he’s annoyed that I know. Let him yell at me for bringing it up; it’ll slide off me like water off a duck’s back. Or a goose’s back, perhaps. The goose wife who waits to find out if she has lost her raven. “Why’d you do it?”
Roy doesn’t answer for a long moment, his eyes roaming the dark, as if trying to make out the tree line from here. “Because I owed her. Because a long time ago, she was the one out there, searchin’ for my kin.”
I frown. “Muriel?”
“I don’t remember much, but I do remember bein’ hungry and cold and miserable, and listenin’ to my parents fight about food.” He picks at a button on his shirt. “My father went out to check the snares for rabbits. He couldn’t catch his own foot if he stepped in a trap, but the stubborn SOB was determined not to ask for help.” He smirks. “In case you were wondering where I get that from. My mother got tired of waitin’, so she bundled up and left our house in a blizzard with the last of our money. She was gonna go to the store and see what she could buy, so we wouldn’t starve. Told me to stay put. And that’s the last time I saw her. Alive, anyway.”
An odd sense of recognition tickles me as he tells this story, as if I’ve heard it before.
“When the locals caught wind, a bunch of ’em spent days combing the forest and the road, lookin’ for her. There was this one girl with ’em. She was older than me by a few years and had a gun slung over her shoulder. She seemed tough as nails. I told myself I needed to be tough like her if I had a hope in hell of survivin’ up here.” His lips quirk. “They finally found my mother. She was frozen solid. They figure she got lost ’cause she was way off course. Probably died that first night.”
Cold realization washes over me. “That cabin.” I point across the lake. “That was yours.” Roy may sound like a Texan, but there was a time that he and his family came to Alaska to try to make a life for themselves here.
And that tough-as-nails girl out there helping search for his mother was Muriel.
“Does Muriel know?” She didn’t sound like she did.
He shakes his head.
She doesn’t remember, and he’s never told her.
I struggle to piece the rest of the story together as I remember her tell it. “So, then … you and your father went back to Texas. No, wait.” I frown. “Muriel said you were from Montana?” The same place her own family was from. That much, she remembered.
“When we left Alaska, my dad didn’t want anythin’ to do with snow, so we headed south, all the way to a town outside Dallas. That’s where I grew up, buildin’ houses and barns with my pa. He was always real smart with wood. I learned from him.” His fingers trace the brim of his hat. “By the time I found my way back, the land was already sold to someone else. So, I took the closest lot available.”
“That cabin was built really well.” Steve the contractor was amazed at how well it has withstood the elements. Everything had been done right—the solid foundation, the right wood, the wide overhangs, the drainage slope. The fact that the area has overgrown has helped protect it from the sun. “You can go see it. I mean, if you want.”
His lips twist. “I’ve been by a few times over the years. To clean out the gutters. Phil woulda let it rot.”
I think Roy’s been doing more than cleaning out gutters. Steve said it looked like someone’s been treating the exterior wood—with linseed oil and turpentine, he guessed—and patching the roof.
Roy’s been preserving his family’s history in Alaska, however tragic it was.
“Why would you ever want to come back after all that?” He lost his mother and his brother to this wilderness.
And then he lost his wife and daughter to something else.
Wouldn’t be the first time a person ran here to escape somethin’.
That’s what Jonah had said, that night after I saw the picture of Roy’s family in his house, the day the wood came down on top of him.
Jonah …
I close my eyes against the terror that floods back to the forefront, dulled by a moment’s distraction.
Silence hangs in the cold, damp front porch, until Muriel barrels out with two hot teas, setting them onto the small outdoor side tables I ordered, along with a bowl of sugar and glass of milk. “That’s your goat milk, Roy,” she says before heading back inside, not waiting for a thank-you. It’s shocking that she never put the pieces together to Roy’s family history in Trapper’s Crossing, being the busybody she is. Then again, she was young, the Donovan family’s stint here was brief and secluded, and many decades have passed. Why would anyone suspect that the little boy who lost so much to this place would come back years later?
“What are the chances she’s put arsenic in mine?” he studies it warily. “Lord knows I’d deserve it.”
“Why?” I find myself asking. “What’d you do, Roy?” It’s a loaded question—did he do something bad to Muriel? Did he do something bad to someone else?—and I ask it freely, not caring about repercussions.
The clang of metal against china sounds as Roy fills his tea with three heaping teaspoons of sugar and stirs. “I wasn’t always this pleasant.”
