I’d prefer if ya didn’t smoke in my truck.” Ammon thrust his chin at her cigarette. She ignored him. She smoked on, the luxurious feeling of nicotine coating her throat, entering the delicate fronds of her pulmonary capillaries, her blood, her heart and brain. Maybe what she’d needed, all along, was just a cigarette.
Ammon drove her north, a road almost mindless in its calendar-photo prettiness, the farms, the cabins, the white houses, the patchwork fields, and rolling hills. The mild-mannered red barns.
Only the high-rise granite slab of the Willoughby Gap surprised her. With Nordic severity, the 1,000-foot cliff face plunged into an electric blue glacial lake. Here, summer continued, unperturbed: kayaks and canoes, flat-bottomed fishing boats, the scent of barbecue when they passed a nest of lake-side cabins.
After Willoughby, the land flattened, as if those bold high thrusts of rock had taken all the seismic energy. The woods, now without geological relief, created a viewless channel, trees and more trees, the occasional cabin or trailer popping up road-side. At last, Ammon turned off the main road onto a graded dirt road, and then another, each road diminishing so that they were turn by turn siphoned onto a narrow track, the overgrown trees and brush slapping and scratching the side of the truck.
Kay continued to smoke, one cigarette after the other. Fear had quite gone; something heavier had taken its place, leaden and dense, as if her mind knew it was pointless to be afraid. She must not waste what was left on fear.
The track broke out into a clearing at the edge of a lake, a cabin hunkering to the right of the scene. It was a beautiful spot, the blue water, the emerald green grass under a clear summer sky.
Ammon turned off the engine. “Here we are.”
There would be a trick, Kay knew. Ammon would pull a dead bird from the magic hat, instead of a white rabbit or a bright scarf. She got out, her ribs aching, her legs uncertain beneath her so she braced herself against the truck’s sun-hot flank. Even if she wanted to run, she couldn’t—not far, not far enough into the seamless flow of woods.
“In the cabin.” Ammon flicked his hand toward the low wooden structure, slightly more than a shack with a porch and windows, forlorn and dilapidated. The grass had grown up around it. Rust smeared the tin roof like cancer. The light reflecting on the glass in the windows made it impossible to see in.
Regardless, Kay stepped toward the cabin. She’d been moving toward it for some time, since she’d seen it in the photo above the sink. She’d been moving toward its peace, its menace.
She climbed up the wooden steps, carefully, as they were loose, unpinned and rotting, details she hadn’t seen in the photograph. Across the porch, until her hand was on the door. She was here, here we are, here we are. So she opened the door.
The shift from light to dark blinded her for a moment. She blinked as her pupils adjusted, seeing only outlines, a table, cabinets, a person. At that moment, she heard Ammon’s truck start up, she turned to see him pull away, giving her a cheery wave. When she turned back, she could see Ben sitting at the table.