Bitterroot Lake

The cuckoo clock above the deep white farmhouse sink said midnight, or noon. Dead battery? The stove clock flashed two forty-one. So no one else had been able to set it correctly, either. “What time is it?”

“Seven thirty,” Holly said. “We didn’t want to wake you.”

She was still in her robe, not running clothes. Had she even been to bed?

Sarah set the cat on the floor and refilled the food and water bowls.

“Anybody take a look at the storm damage?” From their blank faces, clearly not.

They were up to something, but she didn’t have the bandwidth to guess what it might be. One foot in front of the other, her therapist had said. Decide what has to be done, do it, and let everything else wait. Like the bag from the mortuary filled with condolence cards she’d hauled in that first night and left next to the couch, untouched, unread.

At the front door, she shoved one foot into her shoe, but the other balked. She bent to untie the laces and slip it on. She was still wearing her pajamas—faded black yoga pants and an old sweatshirt of Jeremy’s she’d started wearing when he got too sick for her to share the bed and she’d moved into the guest room. She intended to sleep in his shirt until it fell off her. She grabbed a jacket from the coat rack. A blue fleece. Nic’s, she guessed, from the roominess. The shortest of the four of them, sturdy but not fat, Nic always dressed like she thought she was bigger than she was.

The skies were clear, the air chilly for May, and she huddled into the jacket, her pants too thin for warmth. It was the calm after the storm, one of those glorious mountain mornings that make you think you’d imagined all the wind and the rain. Though the cones and branches littering the gravel drive said the gusts and torrents had been very real.

Her head and heart said so, too.

She bent to pick up a knobby branch from a larch. Tossed it to the edge of the lawn. Beneath it lay a cedar shake, split down the middle, a hole at the edge where it had torn away from the nail. More shakes lay scattered amid the blowdown. They’d been cut decades ago at her family’s mill. Did they still make them?

Careful of the debris, she stepped backwards for a better view of the lodge roof. One bare patch, a few shakes still waiting for the next big wind to finish the job, but no other damage visible from here.

The carriage house roof looked no worse than it had yesterday, but a gap had opened between the gable and the side of the building, a birch bough lying awkwardly across the roof.

How had the other buildings on the property weathered the storm? The cabins, and the small McCaskill horse barn on the trail where she’d seen the woman looking for wildflowers yesterday. She’d better check. It had been years since she’d ridden. Neither of the kids had been interested, and eventually she’d given it up. Maybe now …

“Oww.” She dropped the broken shake. A splinter had driven its way into the soft flesh at the base of her thumb. She pried it out with her fingernails, then pressed the spot.

A movement on the east end of the lodge caught her attention. A squirrel. A squirrel running down a tree that stood at an angle trees didn’t take naturally.

Squeezing her hand against the sharp pain, she picked her way down the drive to that end of the lodge.

Where she saw the explanation for the loud crack she and Holly had heard last night. The top of an old spruce had sheared off and hit the roof, then slid down and struck the second-floor balcony. The decking had pulled away from the house, and the pine rail dangled loose. She pressed her hands into her face.

The sound of an engine broke into her fuzzy brain. A pickup came into view, the engine loud, the muffler rattling.

George Hoyt? Was he seriously still driving that old Chevy, its exterior a patchwork of rust, primer gray, and the original olive green? It had been past its prime when she was a kid. So had George, or so her younger self had thought. Now, as the truck slowed and the man behind the wheel rolled down the window, she guessed him to be north of eighty.

“Sarah McCaskill,” he said. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?”

“George, you need glasses.” She leaned in the open window and kissed the grizzled cheek. “What are you doing out so early? And what brings you down here?”

“Early? You’ve gone soft in your city ways. When you were a kid, you and your sister would have ridden those horses of yours up to the ridge or out to Granite Chapel and be halfway back to the barn by now. That blood on your cheek?”

She touched her face, then glanced at her palm and held it up. “Splinter. Roof shake.” A black-and-white dog sat on the seat next to the old man. “Hey, Shep. Good dog. It is Shep, isn’t it?”

“I forget whether he’s Shep the eighth or Shep the ninth, but at least I never forget his name.” George grinned, then his well-lined face turned somber. “I heard about your husband. Stinks. You gotta wonder sometimes what the Big Guy upstairs is thinking.”

“Thanks. My nephew thinks God needed a technical consultant, to keep track of everyone’s good deeds and bad.”

George snorted. “Then your man’s got his work cut out for him. That was some storm last night. Gusts up to forty, I heard. How’d the old girl fare?”

Took her a moment to realize he meant the lodge, not her. “Not so good. Crunched gable on the carriage house, and you can see that spruce tore the balcony off the east end. I haven’t been upstairs yet to check for damage inside.”

He got out and together they surveyed the damaged balcony, Shep beside them.

“Looks bad,” the old man said.

“I’ve got to call the insurance agent, and my mother. But cell service is iffy down here, and the landline’s disconnected. Guess I’ll be going into town later.”