Bitterroot Lake

“I think so. It would have been different, though. Can we make things different now?”

“Depends on your cousin, doesn’t it?”

“Leo?” Peggy said. “Would someone please tell me what’s going on?”

Sarah had almost forgotten her mother. “Sit,” she said, and her mother sat. Sarah explained about the letter. Their theory that Lucas feared Janine would resurface and derail his campaign for whatever office he’d planned to seek. The gruesome discovery that led her to take refuge at the lodge.

As Sarah spoke, the cat jumped up next to her, and she stroked the thin back.

Peggy’s face paled. “But that’s all in the past. Janine, I hate that he never paid for what he did to you, but it was all a long time ago.”

“What about what he did to the boys?” Sarah demanded. “To Jeremy, and to Michael Brown.”

“It was an accident,” Peggy said, voice rising, glancing from Sarah to Janine and back.

Sarah studied her hands, not trusting herself to speak.

“I get that men with flawed histories can still live decent lives,” Janine said. “Even without deliberately making amends. But what I don’t get, why I came up here, is why threaten me to keep me quiet?”

“Right,” Sarah said. “Once you try to silence someone, the threat becomes the bigger story. People—voters, donors—would assume the worst, no matter how much he denied the attack or repeated his claim that you let it drop.”

“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” Peggy said.

“I didn’t let it drop,” Janine protested. “The sheriff—”

“I know, I know.” No point digging it all up and picking through it all again. Not now. Later, if they had to. If she had to, to clear her own conscience.

“Now I see why you asked about the cross,” Peggy said after a long moment. And to Janine, “and why you feared being compared to your mother. No one here remembers any of that. It was far too long ago.”

Janine’s lips parted, her brows dipping slightly. Sarah shared her disbelief. When your mother went to jail for shooting a man, it wouldn’t be hard for people to believe you’d do the same.

She shifted her gaze to the cold waters outside.

Why was the past rushing forward now?

7

Roots had broken through the forest floor. Snowberry and mahonia, the tiny yellow flowers about to open, had narrowed the path, forcing Sarah to wriggle through the branches while ducking her head and pushing aside maple vines and usnea. Old man’s beard, the gray-green lichen that dangled at exactly the wrong height. She’d followed the path along the lake past the cabins, then up into the woods, where it had become little more than a deer trail.

There was a metaphor in there, she knew, but she didn’t have the patience to dig for it right now.

After their conversation about the letter, Peggy had suggested a cup of tea. Earl Grey cures all ills. Not a bad theory, in ordinary times. But things had not been ordinary in a

long time, and they were showing no sign of improving. When Sarah put on her jacket and her white tennis shoes and said she needed a walk, Peggy had said she might as well leave, too. She’d laid a hand on Sarah’s cheek, her eyes moist, and Sarah had felt like an ungrateful child, wallowing in her internal muck. But she hadn’t said “don’t go.”

The trail widened, opening up as it gained elevation, and she pounded forward, onward, upward, the warmth of the late afternoon sun filtering through the fir and pines, the spruce and birch, releasing the soft scent of spring.

A good half mile from the lodge, she stopped and bent over, the heels of her hands digging into the tops of her thighs as she worked to catch her breath. Pushing the air out, pulling it in, unable to tell the difference between the physical pain and the emotional.

Finally, she straightened. In the spring, when she was a kid, her father and uncle had sharpened the saws and clippers and cleared fallen trees from the trails around the lodge. This overlook had gotten extra attention, a special place. A sense of elation spread through her as the warmth returned to her skin. Around her were more shades of green than she could name, new growth at the tips of the boughs, sunlight dappling the forest floor. Across Bitterroot Lake, though, the forests grew so thick and dark that the hillsides appeared nearly black. It was a matter of perspective, another metaphor she chose to ignore. Roofs clustered in small clearings, closer and more dense as they neared town. The church camp across from Whitetail Lodge was still in use, unlike many of the small camps that had once dotted western Montana’s lakeshores, and in a few weeks, the sounds of children would drift across the water and campfires would dot the shoreline in the evening.

Above her, a birch bough waved in the wind. When she and Jeremy were first married, they’d driven over every summer for two or three weeks. Then the children came, Noah, and two years later Abby, and she’d relished the days at the lodge with them and the rest of the family. But Jeremy’s business began to take more of his time, and though she and the kids sometimes stayed when he went back to Seattle, she hadn’t liked being apart. As the kids got older, their summers filled with soccer camp and music camp and time with their friends. They’d been lucky to squeeze in a week in Montana, and to visit every other Christmas. The kids hadn’t been here since her father died three years ago; last summer, she’d come alone. Her cousins didn’t use the place much. Holly stayed in town when she visited. That left Connor, too busy to use the place much.

Maybe it was time.

She sat on the giant rock outcropping, too spent to cry.

The landscape where you grew up shaped you. Maybe you didn’t need to own it, or visit often. Maybe it always lived inside you.