A door opened. Just that. The scariest sound in the world.

There was one more turn in the trail before he arrived at the open ground where the camp stood, overlooking the lake. He could see the gap in the trees, up ahead. He could see a corner of the woodshed but not the camp itself, not from here. If someone crossed the yard toward the outhouse, he’d see them, though he doubted they’d see him, even if they happened to turn and look; he was on the dappled path, just another shadow. He stood perfectly still, not sure what to do. There were only two properties at the north end: the Crows’ and the Hoebeeks’. After you passed the Hoebeek turnoff, the trail led directly to the Crows’ and nowhere else. The trail ended at the lake.

The door he’d heard opening now slammed shut. Nate let out his breath. It wasn’t his imagination. He thought it through. Something might have happened to the door. Maybe a bear had trashed it sometime last fall and it was swinging back and forth on its hinges. It was the outer door, the one into the sunporch. He doubted even a bear would have gotten through the heavy wooden door to the camp inside the porch. It had never happened before, but his father had told him tales about the damage bears could inflict. Which is why the camp had shutters on it with nails pounded into them, business side out, to douse the curiosity of any critter, animal or human. But there were no shutters on the porch door.

A door damaged by a bear: that was one possibility.

The other was that someone had just stepped out of the door and gone back inside again. By now Nate had stood stock-still for five minutes. The cold that suddenly coursed through him was only partially due to the temperature.

Dodge.

The idea poleaxed him.

He survived.

He’s set himself up at the camp, living off rice and —

No, this was stupid! Impossible. It was going on four months since he’d disappeared. And it wasn’t even his camp! For all Nate’s fantasizing, he couldn’t believe it. Calm down, he told himself. He summoned up his father: WWBD?

It’s winter. What’s the first thing you do when you arrive at the camp? Right: light a fire. And, to turn the old saying on its head, where there’s fire, there’s smoke. Why hadn’t he smelled smoke? He sniffed. Nothing. So maybe the door was unhinged for some reason. He felt unhinged himself. He risked walking forward, sticking well over to the side of the path, until he reached the woodshed, where he could peek out at the camp.

Smoke.

Smoke was pouring out of the chimney, all right, but the wind was strong from the southeast, blowing the smoke across the end of the lake. He could smell it now that he was this close.

He backtracked up the trail a bit until the opening in the trees was gone from view, then he stopped and looked around, looked back the way he had come. What was going on here? He had walked in on pristine snow. No human had come in before him, not on the trail. Which meant if there was someone at the camp, they’d have had to come in from the lake.

He shrugged off the Woods pack. The physical relief was instantaneous, but there was no mental relief. He hefted the pack into the bush beside the trail.

Now what?

Better not make tracks any closer to the camp. No one in the yard would see the path he’d left unless they actually headed this way. He walked back up the trail a little farther until he found a point he could enter the bush on the eastern side. The underbrush was not too thick. As quietly as he could, Nate pushed his way through, glad of his thick winter clothing against the snagging and whipping of branches intent on snarling a person up — especially a person with serving platters on his feet. Laboriously, he made his way toward the yard but well east of the cabin, over near where the outhouse stood on its own little path at the fringe of the fenced-in garden plot. When he could see the cabin door clearly, he settled on his haunches to wait. The door was intact. There had to be someone inside.

Maybe it was some friend of his father’s, someone who knew where the key was hidden. Unlikely; Burl didn’t share that information widely. Occasionally he would allow some hunter or fisherman friend to stay there. He never charged anything. Didn’t ever want the camp to become a rental property. Didn’t much like anyone coming up here at all, except family and close friends.

Nate waited, his eyes never leaving the camp. He was breathing hard, sweating like a pig from the exertion of fighting his way through the bush. But as soon as he settled in to watch, he could feel the cold wrap its thin blue fingers around his throat. He was out of the wind but deep in the shivering shade.

His father had built the cabin from scratch. It was on the site of a camp that had burned down twenty-five years ago. His father had come to know the man who’d lived there, an eccentric musician. Burl had inherited the property from him when he was only around Nate’s age. The Maestro was what Dad called him: Nathaniel Orlando Gow. Nate was named after him.

The Maestro had lived in a pyramid of glass, like nothing anyone in these parts had ever seen. Burl had built a more humble cabin out of logs on the footprint of that glass pyramid. He had taken years to do it — done it all himself, as a kind of tribute to the Maestro: harvested the trees; peeled the bark with a drawknife; built a shelter open on all four sides to dry the logs. He’d started the project when he was seventeen and had his first teaching placement before it was done. Now there was a closed-in sunporch at the front, which he’d added after marrying Astrid. When Nate was a baby, Burl had pushed out the back of the cabin to allow for two small bedrooms. But the place was still tiny: a kitchen-dining-living room in front and two bedrooms in back just big enough to stand up and turn around in, with storage areas under and over the beds, like cabins on a boat. The logs were whitewashed on the outside, with green trim around the windows and doors. It was a pretty little cabin, especially now — picturesque — the roof piled high with snow that protruded in undulating curves right out over the gutters, looking like the top of a giant mushroom. The snow was a couple feet deep except for around the chimney, where you could see the new green shingles they’d put up together two summers ago. A roofing bee — Paul and Dodge had been part of the crew. He looked at that patch of green and swallowed hard. The snow had melted, warmed by the heat in the chimney. And now that he looked closely, he could see someone had cleared the snow off the solar panels on the porch roof. Whoever was in the place had been here awhile.

Nate watched the smoke curl up into the blue, then bend under the wind.

There was a pair of snowshoes stuck in the snow by the side of the stoop, which was good and trampled down. He could see the snow riveted with yellow holes all around the entranceway. He’d peed off that stoop himself when they’d been up here in the winter, but the sight angered him now, as if some mongrel dog had been marking out his territory.

Despite a break of trees along the shore, the wind off the lake found Nate, making his eyes water. It was strong enough to raise the powder into swirling white gusts. The windbreak ended by the stairs down to the beach, right beside the cabin. The stairs were invisible now under the snow. About thirty yards out on the lake, this guy — he assumed it was a guy — had dug a hole for water. He could see the corners of a sheet of plywood with snow piled on it as insulation so that the hole didn’t freeze up. Whoever he was, the man was no stranger to the bush.

And he knew where to find stuff. The ice auger was kept in the work shed off the little garage where they kept the Kawasaki. And that shed key was hidden separately from the house key. Was this a good thing, maybe? If this trespasser knew where all the keys were, he must be someone familiar with the place. Maybe this was all just some weird screwup: maybe Burl had told the guy months ago he could stay there and then forgotten about it. Nate shook his head. His dad didn’t make mistakes like that. But maybe the friend had gotten the dates mixed up somehow.

Dodge.

Stop it, he told himself, angry now. No more denial. He’s dead — can’t you get that through your thick head?

Nate’s eyes wandered out to the lake again. There were no tracks on the snow beyond the water hole. No tracks at all.

How was that possible?

There should have been snowmobile tracks, or at least snowshoe tracks, unless the guy had been here for ages, since before the last big fall. When was that? Nate tried to think when they’d had a big snowfall in Sudbury. A couple of weeks or so ago, he thought. Maybe more.

Had this guy moved in?

Then the door of the cabin was suddenly flung open again and a man stepped out. Not Dodge. Not a boy, lean and blond, who ran cross-country, but a grown man in black jeans and a shapeless mustard-yellow sweater coming undone at the cuffs and waist. He had a colorful wool scarf wrapped around and around his neck. Nate knew that scarf, knew it was six feet long. His mother had knitted it. The man wore wraparound shades with glittery silver frames. The sides of his head were shaved, but he had a thatch of black hair and a few days’ growth on his chin. He took a long draw on a can of beer. While he might have been around the same age as Nate’s father, he didn’t look like any friend of Burl Crow’s. He stood staring toward the outhouse as if he wasn’t sure he could be bothered heading there. Then Nate realized his gaze was aimed higher, toward the steep hill to the east of the camp where the path meandered up to the cabin on the cliff. Why was he looking there? Nate shook his head. He was just imagining it. Nobody knew about the shack. Its owner was long since dead. The cabin was a Northender secret.

By now the man on the stoop was shivering from the cold. He tipped his beer for a last swallow and then hurled the can out into the snow before he went back inside. The wind immediately caught the empty blue aluminum can and danced it across the yard toward the bush. There were other beer cans there, like a flock of small birds huddling in the underbrush.

Definitely no friend of his father’s.

Which meant . . . What?

There was no going back. The Budd would have passed Bisco by now on its way northwest and wouldn’t be back this way until tomorrow afternoon. There might be someone at the south end of the lake, at Sanctuary Cove. Over the years he’d met a few people from down that way, but he didn’t know any of them by name apart from Likely La Cloche, and he got around on crutches these days, so it was unlikely he’d be up in March. Maybe some ice fishermen, but . . . No, the whole idea of trekking twenty kilometers into the teeth of the wind was nuts. It would be dark before he got there, with no guarantees there would be anyone to take him in.

Nate looked again at the camp. He tried to imagine knocking on the door. “Hi, my name is Nathaniel Crow and you’re trespassing.” He didn’t think that would go down any too well.

But there was somewhere close he could go.

He swallowed hard. He was shuddering already from the cold, but the thought of going over to the Hoebeeks’ made him shiver deep in his bones. But wait, there was somewhere else!

First sign of any trouble . . .

“Up the hill,” said Nate to himself. The miner’s shack. That made more sense. The path was nearby and he had been going to head up there anyway, to text his parents as soon as he could. Might as well let them know the camp had been invaded while he was at it. His father would know what to do. Nate even began to think there might be a silver lining to this escapade. After all, he’d caught an intruder red-handed. Instead of getting a dressing down, Nate might get a medal. Yeah, right.

He pulled back into the undergrowth and set out in a wide circle around the outhouse, not wanting the man to catch sight of his snowshoe prints when he did eventually come over this way. He looked up and saw the first of the orange plastic markers, fluttering on the branch of a naked alder. But even as he veered toward the path that led to the cliff, he saw something he really didn’t want to see, and it stopped him dead.

Snowshoe tracks leading up the hill in a zigzag path through the bush.

This was getting truly weird. Who was this guy who knew so much? Nate was too cold to stop and think anymore. The upside of this discovery was that he wouldn’t have to break trail and he could get up there all the faster. Then he did stop and think. He thought about the guy on the stoop staring in this direction. And even as he thought about just why the intruder might have been doing that, he looked up the hill himself and saw another one of them coming down.

The sunlight slanting through the trees hit the man, mercifully too busy keeping his eye on the steep path to bother looking beyond the toes of his snowshoes. Nate shrank back into the trees and waited silently, out of sight, trying to keep his chattering teeth from giving him away. This one was meatier, dressed properly for the cold with the hood of his parka up and the string drawn tight under his chin. There wasn’t a lot of face visible, but Nate could see he was frowning, deep in thought.

He was either concentrating on the path or worried about something. Then he reached the head of the outhouse trail and, with his ski poles in one hand, untied his hood, whipped off his toque, and shook his head like a swimmer coming up from under. As Worried Man hit the yard, Nate heard the door of the cabin open a third time, as if Shades had been waiting. He crossed his arms, looked amused.

“My, my,” he said. “You look like Santa didn’t leave you that new bike you were hoping for.”

“They can’t make it,” said Worried Man.

“Why am I not surprised?” Shades said, and laughed. There wasn’t anything cheerful about the sound.

“There’s some good news,” said Worried Man. “A chance to get outa here without the bird.”

“Well, well,” said Shades, on an enthusiastic upnote. “Bye-bye, birdie. Is this Brother Kev’s doing?”

“Yeah,” said Worried Man. “He has a plan.” By then, he had reached the cabin, where he ditched his poles and stood with his legs apart, his hands on his hips, his back arched, breathing hard. “We need to check back with him.”

Shades nodded, took off his sunglasses, and massaged his closed eyes with a thumb and forefinger. Worried Man kicked off his snowshoes, and whatever else the two men said was lost to Nate as they reentered the camp.

Any chance of heading up to the miner’s cabin was lost. If they were going back there to check with Kev, who knew how long he would have? Should he wait it out? No, he was too cold. He knew he could only make the trip if he could light a fire once he got there and get some food in him. He couldn’t take that chance now. He needed shelter right away, and there was only one option left. A place he knew well. A place he loved. A place he had spent many summers in and out of. And a place he could barely imagine entering.