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In the last few days, the birch and maple had gotten leafier, the tiny green triangles on the snowberry unfolding into actual leaves, the wild roses bursting with promise.
“I hope George doesn’t mind us coming down here,” she said as they passed the small clapboard house where Mrs. Hoyt had lived when they were kids. The house George lived in now. No sign of his truck. Still in town, no doubt.
“Oh, he won’t mind. He likes us,” Holly replied.
That was then, this is now. They owned his property, and he didn’t know. Though it was clear from the look on his face in the Spruce that he had suspicions.
As she climbed out of the SUV, Sarah spotted a stone chimney, the top visible through the gaps in the woods created by the blowdown. “Look. You can almost see the lodge from here.”
They were standing between the ice house and the pond, the homestead shack a few hundred feet away. “Holly. I need to tell you—” She brok
e off, listening. George returning? No. His truck had an unmistakable sound. She was hearing nothing more than the noise of traffic filtering down from the North Shore Road.
Holly craned her neck, gazing up at the weathered, two-story building, louvers on the cupola serving as a vent. “This place is fascinating. I’ve been thinking, Sis.” The wooden door creaked as she it pushed open and walked inside, leaving Sarah to follow.
For a long moment, she couldn’t see a thing. Light filtered down from the cupola and streamed in through broken boards on the side of the building, where ice had been loaded onto waiting carts through a sliding door. As her eyes adjusted, she could make out metal tools hanging along one wall.
“You said”—Holly’s words came from the shadows, and Sarah could just see her, standing in the middle of the main storage room, hands on her hips. “You said Becca needs someone to do property management. To handle rentals and work with the snowbirds. I could do that.”
She could. Much of her museum work had been on the operations side. She knew how to maintain and upgrade buildings, many of them historic, and raise the money to keep them running.
“But”—Holly continued—“I’m also loving diving into the history. Not just of our place and family, through the letters and scrapbooks, but the whole valley. The Ladies’ Aid Society, the immigrants. Did you know Pam Holtz’s grandfather was the last steamboat captain on Bitterroot Lake? Anyway, I could combine the two somehow, helping owners piece together the histories of their homes and land. Not sure how, but I could figure it out.”
“That sounds seriously perfect,” Sarah replied. A raven flew overhead, letting out a single caw, and left through the opening made by the missing planks. What she needed to tell her sister could wait.
It would have to. Her sister was nowhere in sight.
From the rear, or outside, she heard a loud crack. A floorboard, or a branch? But Holly didn’t shout for help, so she turned her attention back to the wall where tools hung on nails pounded into two-by-four crosspieces. She’d seen similar tools in the carriage house. Ice saws, tongs, a pointed bar her dad had called an ice hook. Leather cords and ropes. Splitting bars and forks, long poles with a flat blade or pointed prongs, used to break the slabs of ice apart after they’d been cut. Holly had talked about preserving history. This place was ripe with it.
A shadow flickered across the floor. The movement kicked up dust and she sneezed.
“Oh, there you are,” she said when she got her breath back. But the shadow did not belong to her sister. “Renee. What are you doing here?”
“You aren’t going to stop, are you? Poking around. You can’t help it.” Renee Taunton Harper stepped into the dim beam of late afternoon sunlight and Sarah saw the menacing look on the legal secretary’s face. “You and your brother, you think the world exists for you. Your whole family.”
What was she talking about? And where was Holly?
“You think you deserve every good fortune in the world. You’re not as bad as Lucas, but that’s not saying much.”
“Lucas?” Sarah heard her voice crack. “What does he have to do with anything? Renee, what is this about?” Though she was beginning to suspect she knew.
“This is about”—the woman took a step forward and Sarah steeled herself not to step back. She could not let herself be trapped. Where was Holly? “This is about me getting what I was promised. What I deserve. The entire plan was my idea, you know.”
“What plan? Ohhh. The plan for McCaskill Lumber to buy the Hoyt land through an intermediary?”
“Owned and financed by a rich in-law.” Renee took another step closer and Sarah’s skin prickled. “Now, to be fair, although life never is, your husband didn’t make me any promises. Not directly. I doubt he ever knew I existed, let alone that I cooked up the whole thing. Ran the numbers, laid out the steps, showed Lucas how it could work. Not that it would ever have occurred to Lucas to give credit to anyone else, especially not a woman. If an idea popped into the air near him”—she lifted a hand, fingers curved as if holding a light bulb—“he would snatch it up and call it his.” She closed her fingers with a flourish, crushing the imaginary glass.
“There are men like that. Entitled narcissists, psychologists call them.” Sarah had seen the term while flipping through Abby’s textbook, wondering how the intro to psych class had changed in thirty years. The terms, yes; human experience, not so much. “I’m not surprised. What else did Lucas do to you?”
Keep her talking. That bulge in the woman’s jacket pocket, the pocket she kept patting, had to be a gun. A .38, she guessed. The one she’d taken from Lucas’s desk before shooting him and leaving the office. A lucky break, running into Becca—anyone who knew the two women would easily believe Renee’s lie that she’d been trapped in the P.O. by chatty Becca.
“What he did was break his promise. I”—Renee pointed at her chest—“I was supposed to get half his commission for brokering the deal. And every month, there was a processing fee tacked onto the loan payment. Fifty percent of that was supposed to be mine, though I did all the work. But he wouldn’t give me a cent. Not one penny.”
“I know you’ve worked hard for what you have, Renee. Do you know our families go way back, a hundred years or more?” Though the last thing this desperate woman would want to hear was how Caro had loaned money to—who? Renee’s grandmother? Great-grandmother?
“Oh, spare me the history lesson. If I’d had half the opportunities you’ve had, everyone in this town would know who I am like they know you and the rest of your clan.”
She heard a scurrying sound somewhere in the distance. Renee heard it too. Too loud for mice. What other wild creatures had taken up residence in the ice house?
