Bitterroot Lake

That’s great, honey, she texted back. Just saw your grandmother’s new paintings—stunning!

Cool! Love you, Mom!

The screen went dark. She stared out the window at the branches shivering in the cold wind. The sky had turned a hard gray. It wasn’t going to snow, was it?

The place was deserted. She zipped up her jacket, cinched the belt, and stepped out, bracing herself against the hard wind. The cemetery dated back to homestead and railroad days. In the older section, granite crosses and statuary were common, gradually giving way to a mix of styles and materials—granite, marble, bronze, every grave a story.

She found the McCaskill plot easily, the small stone markers for Tom and Mary Mac, the gray-and-white marble monument for Con and Caro, the stone lamb for Sarah Beth. She crouched, fingertips grazing the smooth white marble. What had it been like, losing the much-loved little girl? Caro had responded by making the lodge and her family her refuge.

“Is that what all this is about, Caro?” she said. “The dreams, the discovery of the old trunk. Are you telling me, as your daughter’s namesake, that I’m the one to continue the legacy of Whitetail Lodge?”

But the stones kept their tongues.

She stood, aware that she wasn’t quite as steady as she ought to be. Breathe in, breathe out. Where to begin? Swedish housemaids got no grand markers, no stone angels. She wandered past familiar names—Holtz, Hoyt, Smalley.

Holtz. Hoyt. H.

Then, as if a hand beckoned, she wound her way toward a section where simple graves marked by small flat stones lay beneath the outstretched arms of a weeping birch.

There it was. Anja Sundstrom, 1900–1922. God has called His Angel home.

The tears surprised her, and she blinked them back. “What happened, Anja? What happened to you? And what do you need from me?” She brushed away a few of last year’s dried birch leaves. “If you want us to tell your story, we can do that.”

She could persuade her mother to display the paintings at a local gallery. At the wine bar, or whatever shape the restaurant took, if she and Holly convinced Janine to let them help her pursue her dream. As investors, or advisors. Who knew what else they’d find in the old trunks? Holly could track down the Lacey family and see what details the descendants could provide. They could tell the story of the girl with the crown of yellow braids, and of the Lakeside Ladies’ Aid Society, dedicated to making a woman’s lot a little less rough, a little less lonely.

Was that it? Was that all Anja wanted?

Sarah wasn’t sure. She had more questions to ask, questions that might make the story a little more complicated.

A lot more complicated.

She bowed her head and made a promise to the girl, the young woman, in the simple grave.

28

“He’s on the phone, Mrs. Carter,” Steph, the lumber company desk clerk, told Sarah, and she could see her brother through the window between the front desk and the office. Connor held up two fingers, an inch apart, signaling that he’d just be a minute.

Not telling her the daily details of the business she understood, but they’d been talking about expansion and land and George Hoyt and he hadn’t said a thing.

The front end of McCaskill Land and Lumber was as far from the hip showrooms of designer Seattle as you could get. Scuffed linoleum floor. A patchwork wall, lengths of rough-cut lumber tacked up next to samples in various finishes, and another displaying varieties of molding. A Mr. Coffee as old as the one at the lodge perched on a 1950s step table in the corner. The acrid odor of sawdust drifting in from the shop floor, accompanied by the whine and whirr of saws and sanders and planers.

Refreshing, to know your stuff was so good that you didn’t need to prove how cool you were.

Connor was standing now, his broad back to her. That minute was stretching itself out.

The final waiting room wall was hung with photos that had been there for decades. Her great-grandfather Con, looking the part of the prosperous early twentieth-century businessman in his dark suit and starched collar. Two lumberjacks wielding a crosscut saw standing next to the largest old-growth Ponderosa she’d ever seen. And in a thin black frame, a yellowed newspaper article with a photo she’d never paid attention to, three men posing before a giant machine, men in work shirts in a half circle behind them.

She leaned in to read the caption. “Deer Park Lumber Company founder Cornelius McCaskill, Frank Lacey, and G. T. Hoyt show off the new electric circular sawmill installed recently at their Deer Park lumberyard, the largest of its kind in the Inland Northwest.”

Their dark business suits were quite different from the tuxes they’d worn in the photo of the Laceys’ New Year’s Eve party, but she recognized them in an instant. Con, Frank, and the man who’d stood on the steps looking down at the young housemaid, the man whose name on the back of the photo had been smudged into ob

scurity.

A date had been handwritten on the side of the clipping and she tilted her head to read it. June 21, 1921. Six months before Anja’s death.

“We gave that old sawmill to the historical society ages ago,” Connor said, coming up behind her. “Getting it there was a bugger.”

“G. T. Hoyt,” she said, turning to him. “George’s grandfather?”