Storm Warning
“Great. Okay, well.” She felt a jittery jangle of nerves. She knew the price of handcrafted cupboards. Her budget only had so much in it. “But we’ll need to talk price.” She added quickly, “I also have to order new appliances—dishwasher, fridge, stove, one with two ovens and a separate warming oven. And I’ve got my budget down to the penny.”
“What’s wrong with that stove?” Steve pointed at the stove up against the wall.
She stared at him. “That’s a wood stove.”
“Yeah? So? It’s a classic.”
“I know it’s a classic. And it’ll stay there. I just don’t think I’ll be using it to actually cook things.”
“No,” he said. “You gotta use it. It’ll really warm up the place, too.”
“Well, even if I use that as a stove, I still want a new, proper, energy-efficient oven. And dishwasher. This washing dishes by hand is for the birds.”
Before she had even finished talking Steve was up and examining the cupboard next to the sink. It was empty inside. He closed it, opened it again. She watched in silence while he ran his fingers over the wood as if reading Braille.
He turned. “I can fix you up with brand-new cupboards. We can look at woods. I would recommend something dark. I think that would fit in with the decor of the rest of this old kitchen.”
He went on. “If you’re going to run a guesthouse and retreat center you’ll want the best. Nothing prefab for here.”
She furrowed her brow and looked at him. “How did you know I plan to open a retreat center?”
“A little birdie told me.” And then he chuckled deeply. “Actually, Marlene may have mentioned that.”
“Oh. Right.” Marlene at Marlene’s Café was one of the few people she’d gotten to know. Nori didn’t have Internet access at Trail’s End yet, so took advantage of the free Wi-Fi at Marlene’s Café at least once a day.
While Steve and Nori drank their coffee, she went over the rest of her list and pictures. Next was a tour of the lodge. Steve had a lot of good ideas. When she asked him how he had learned so much about interior design he told her it was the influence of his parents. “My dad did the carpentry work and my mother did the designing.”
“So, you worked with your father?”
He didn’t answer her question and the tiniest of frowns settled between his eyes.
After they’d gone through every room in the lodge, they decided to take a look at the cabins since the rain had lessened.
The sun began to glisten through wet tree branches as the two of them headed outside.
“Why don’t you get your dog?” she said.
After Steve let Chester out of his truck, Nori commented on what a remarkably well-trained pooch Chester was.
“He’s had a bit of police training.”
“Wow. That must be interesting.”
“It is,” he added.
Beyond them the lake lapped gently against the shore. It was hard to believe that an hour before it had been a maelstrom.
About an hour later, she and Steve and Chester ended up back in the kitchen going over numbers and ideas. At the end of another pot of coffee and some cookies she had bought at the bakery in town, they came up with a workable plan. Steve would head into Shawnigan tomorrow and look at woods for her cupboards. He had promised her that he could do it for her budgeted amount. Then he would organize work crews. “You’ll like the kids from the church,” he said.
“I’ve met Selena, Marlene’s daughter. Does she go to church? She’s the only young person I know. She seems a bit quiet, though,” Nori said.
“All the kids around here are a bit quiet,” he said.
She thought that was an odd statement, but didn’t pursue it. Instead, she asked, “Are you from around here. Steve? You don’t have the accent.”
“I’m a transplant. Been here three years.”
“Where did you come from?”
“Boston.”
They both noticed the smoke at the same time, but Steve got to the fireplace first.
“Sometimes that fireplace smokes.” Nori was close behind him. She knelt down beside him and watched him work on the flue.
“Do you think the chimney works properly?”
He fiddled with the knob. “It’s the flue. It wasn’t opened all the way. It was a bit stuck. I think I got it. But I would get it cleaned. That’s part of the problem.”
“I’ll do that.”
“I could give you names.”
“Please.”
Their faces were at the same level and he was so close she could catch the scent of him. He smelled like the out-of-doors—canoeing and camping.
He said, “Who split all this wood?”
“I did.”
He looked at her and raised one eyebrow. “I’m impressed.”
“I’m used to hard work.” Nori looked away from him. The truth was, she wasn’t. Splitting a few logs had taken her hours and she had the blisters to prove it.
The fire was burning nicely now. He said, “I’m glad someone’s taken over this place,” he said. “It’s too good a place to let go.”
There was something so tender in his gaze that she found herself backing away lest she be drawn too closely into those deep eyes. Standing, they were face-to-face with her framed photos on the mantel. There were pictures of her daughters, several of her late husband, Marty, one with the girls draped on either side of him, smiles all over everyone’s faces.
“My daughters,” Nori said by way of explanation. “They’re twins. Sixteen. They’re working in a church camp this summer. That’s their father…”
He looked at the picture for a while without saying anything. “I have an eight-year-old son myself. Jeffrey. He lives with his mother down South.”
“I’m sorry,” Nori said, finding her voice again.
He looked back at the pictures of Daphne and Rachel. “Your daughters are very pretty. You said they’re at a church camp?”
She laughed a bit at that. “Yes, a church camp. I haven’t been to church in a while, but my daughters never lost the faith their mother did.”
Nori hadn’t been to church since her husband’s funeral. Sometimes she wondered if God had forgotten all about her. He had looked the other way when that drunk had barreled into her young, strong husband, out for an early morning jog. It felt to her that God’s back had been turned on her ever since.
“I’m sorry that you lost your faith.” His words sounded genuine. He paused before he said, “I just found mine. I’m still finding mine. I still have a lot to work out. Not in God’s love to me, but in my own life.”
It was an odd sort of moment. She’d had the idea that Steve might be someone she could talk to, that he was a listening sort of man, that he would somehow understand everything she had gone through and why it was that she had lost her faith. But then he had stiffened and his face darkened.
They said goodbye and she stood on her porch and watched until his truck was out of sight.
As she made her way back inside something felt curious. She was sure she’d left all the windows open when she went kayaking. Had Steve shut them all? When would he have had time to do that?
TWO
Nori Edwards was nothing like he expected. Steve leaned against the gas pump at Earl’s Gas and Convenience and filled his truck. From Marlene and her husband, Roy, he’d heard a lot about the woman who had bought Trail’s End, but he hadn’t met her until today. Everyone in town had a comment or two about “that woman who bought Trail’s End.”
The place had a history, he knew. Five years ago Earl had bought Trail’s End from the couple who had run it for fifteen years. They were tired of the upkeep. Earl wanted to winterize the cabins and turn it into a winter rental place.
Shortly after he bought it, Earl fell off a cabin he was roofing and broke a leg and injured his back. It had turned into something that was chronic. He put Trail’s End up for sale shortly after he realized his back wouldn’t get better.
Yes, the place had a history.
There was nothing wrong with Trail’s End. The workmanship in the lodge was exquisite. The location was superb. The view was magnificent. Trail’s End had a lot going for it.
It was something else.
It was all about what had gone on out there two years ago. Steve frowned as he hung the gas nozzle back up and went inside to pay.
He plunked his credit card down on the counter. “Chase around?”
Joe, who’d been out of high school for two years, was a year older than his brother Chase. The sons mostly ran the place, now that their father, Earl, was laid up. Chase worked here part-time, but did a lot of other jobs in town.
Joe leaned his long body into the counter and cracked his gum. “Haven’t seen him. Why?”
“I may have some work.”
Joe picked up the credit card and regarded him with his small eyes. “What kind of work?”
“What I have is general work—heavy lifting, clearing brush, groundwork, digging, drywall, lots of hammering and nailing. If you see Chase let him know I’m looking for him, will ya?”
“I think he went out shooting.” He rubbed the side of his thin nose with the end of a pencil. He was staring at Steve.
Steve shook his head. He was not pleased that Joe and Chase kept guns. Steve used to own guns. He didn’t anymore.
Joe said, “That work you’re talking about, that’s up at them cottages, right? Them ghost cottages.”
Ghost cottages. Steve put his credit card back into his wallet and said, “They aren’t ghost cottages.”
He wished Joe and Chase would get back into the church—all the kids for that matter. Many of them had this idea that Trail’s End was cursed, inhabited by ghosts, and that serial killers roamed the forest behind the lodge and cabins. There was nothing that he or the pastor in their church could do to shake that. And it all went back to two years ago when a girl, one of their group, had disappeared from that very place. Or so it was thought.
“How was it out there? What’s that lady like in real life?” Joe asked.
Steve tried for a deadpan. “Yes, Joe, I’m here to report that I was out there. She was howling at the moon. Already all the cottages are burning, and sacrifices are being offered.”
At this, Joe’s reptilian eyes went as wide as Steve had ever seen them. He rubbed at a spot beside his nose. “You kidding me, right?”
“No, I’m not kidding. It really happened. Of course I’m kidding.”
Steve signed the credit card slip, slapped the countertop with his hand and said, “Just let Chase know I’m looking for him, will ya?”
Back in his truck, Steve tore open some candy and withdrew a few pieces of licorice. “Hey, Chester, whaddya think? You think everyone around here is nuts?”
His dog, who’d been sitting on the front seat, wagged his tail and came over for an ear scratch.
“Back,” Steve ordered.
Chester immediately obeyed and jumped into the backseat.
Steve had a couple more stops to make before home, where he and Chester would go for a long run along the lake. On the way out to find Connolly, another recent high school graduate who had worked for Steve in the past, he thought about the cottages. He knew they weren’t haunted, but he also knew that “something” had happened out there, something that so terrified the kids in the town that many of them wanted nothing to do with Trail’s End. The mere mention of Trail’s End around Selena or Chase made them clam up and turn away. And Nori had bought the place with no knowledge of any of this, as far as he could tell.
He thought about her. He had noticed her wedding ring right away Where was her husband? Her eyes had seemed so sad when she talked about her daughters and their “father.”
She hadn’t said “my husband,” she had said, “their father.” Obviously, she and her husband were estranged. Maybe this was a trial separation. Perhaps they were trying to work things out. And then another thought—maybe her husband was, even now, in Iraq or Afghanistan. He knew from experience that some military wives didn’t like to talk about deployments. Maybe this accounted for the sadness in her eyes.
God, he prayed. Help me to be her friend.
And then there was the matter of her faith. Her daughters went to church. She didn’t. She had lost her faith, she said. Did that have to do with the estrangement?
For someone to have found the faith and then deliberately move away from it was something Steve couldn’t understand. When he found God it was like a whole new place opened up in his life, a place he had walled off and protected for so many years. Years lived emotionally distant from his wife and son.
But by the time he found God, it was too late. His wife had left him and taken their son and gone to Florida.
He used to blame his former job for wrecking his marriage. Steve had been a part of an elite corps of the military. It wasn’t until finding his way to faith in God that he realized it was him, and not his job.
He remembered pleading with his ex-wife, Julie, not to leave and take their son to Florida with her. “How can you leave? How can you take Jeffrey so far from me?” he had demanded, crying. It was the first time he had actually wept real tears in a decade. He had seen so much in the military. He had walled off so much of his life. It was like all of his emotions up to that point had been cauterized.
Julie had flipped her blond hair behind her ears and retorted, “And that matters to you all of a sudden? You’re never here anyway. You haven’t been here for any of Jeffrey’s moments. Not Jeffrey’s soccer games, not Jeffrey’s school plays, not the first time Jeffrey rode a two-wheeler, not Jeffrey’s music recitals—do you even know what instrument Jeffrey plays? You’ve been too busy out saving the world from terrorists.”
After Julie had announced that she was also in love with somebody else, Steve had taken the ferry across to Vinalhaven, Maine. Halfway across, he’d removed his wedding ring from his finger and thrown it as far as he could into the choppy ocean. That was three years ago.
He still felt he would never be the kind of man any woman could love. He had so much to learn, so far to go.
It was quite ironic. Two months after Julie left, he did just what she wanted. He separated from the military, escaped to Whisper Lake Crossing and went back to the quiet pursuit of cabinetmaking. He loved it. Whenever Alec, the local sheriff who also happened to be his friend, would offer him full-time police work he always had the same response; “Full time? Not interested.” Occasionally, Steve helped with something that really caught his fancy—like the disappearance of the girl from church and her boyfriend.
That was the last time Steve had been out to Trail’s End. They had been out there looking for any sign of two teenagers. They had to satisfy their curiosity by just walking the grounds. Earl refused to let them search the place, and because the evidence was so flimsy, Alec had never been able to get a search warrant.
He quickly found the small house where Connolly lived with his parents and four siblings. When he told Connolly’s mother the nature of the work, she pushed her glasses up on her nose, shook her head and said, “No. I don’t think he’ll want to work out there.”
“Come on, Rita, tell him about the job at least. I took the job out there and she needs help.”
“I’ll tell him. That’s all I can promise. If he doesn’t want to go, I won’t be forcing him. You know those kids are still traumatized.”
Steve got back into his truck and drove down the driveway to Flower Cottage, where his friend Bette and her son Ralph lived. The white house with the flower baskets under each window came into view. As always, the place looked pristine. It reminded Steve of a quaint little English country cottage. Not that he would know what a quaint little English country cottage looked like.
Bette and her thirty-year-old son, Ralph, had emigrated from England forty years ago and Bette had brought with her, her English accent and her country garden ways. Ralph was a bit slow and simple, yet capable of a good day’s work. Rumor had it that when Ralph was about five, Bette’s husband went back to England. He just couldn’t take the responsibility of a mentally disabled son. No one had heard from him since and Bette never talked about him.
Steve parked his truck next to Bette’s Volvo and as he and Chester got out, Boris, their springer spaniel, ran over, tail wagging and tongue flapping. Steve had a certain affection for the old dog. Despite the male name, Boris was Chester’s mother. The two dogs took off down the expanse of lawn that Bette still referred to as a “garden” even though she’d been in Maine for years.
Bette and Ralph were out back piling dry weeds into a wheelbarrow. Bette waved when she saw Steve, and came toward him, pulling off garden gloves.
“Hello, Steven. How lovely that you’re here.”
He smiled and said hello. It was like this little place on the planet was infused with peace. Coming here was like coming home. Bette had become almost a mother to him.
“Are you staying for supper?” she asked. “I’ve got a chicken in the Slow-Cooker.”
“Didn’t come for that express purpose, but I’ll never refuse an offer of a meal here. I came about work.”
By this time, Ralph had appeared, wearing a grass-stained pair of khakis and a baseball cap.
“Hey, buddy,” Steve said. “How’s it going?”
“Good. Good. Good. Working hard. Working here. Lots to do.”
“You want to work with me for a while?”
Bette’s eyes lit up. “Really, Steve? You have a job for Ralph?”
Steve nodded and grinned, and then to Ralph he said, “But it’s hard work. You up for a bit of hard work?”
“Yes, Steve. I can do hard work. I can.”
Ralph was a big man with a big heart. Steve had used him before on work projects.
“The work is up at Trail’s End, for someone named Nori Edwards.”
Ralph dropped the handles of the wheelbarrow, and it clanked down onto the flagstones. He frowned and shook his head. “No. No. Can’t go there. Not there. No. Not over there. Mum. No.”
“Ralph,” Bette said. “It’s okay. Nothing out there can hurt you.”
But the young man was shaking his head over and over. “Can’t go there. Can’t go there. Can’t go…” He kept repeating it over and over.
Bette put her arm around her son. “You’ve been listening to Earl’s boys. They put all sorts of silly things into your head. There is nothing to be afraid of there.”
Yet Ralph’s eyes were wide. “But there is…there is…”
Bette, her arm still around her big son, smiled up at Steve. “He’ll come. We’ll talk about it over tea.”
Lately, Nori always had the feeling that she was forgetting something. She would walk out of a store and when she got to the door she would make a point of turning and looking back to make sure she hadn’t left anything on the counter. Or when she got out of her car she would mentally count the items she was carrying—bag over shoulder, sunglasses on head, keys in hand, cell phone in pocket. Even when she counted, even when she looked back, she still felt as though she was leaving something important behind.
It didn’t used to be like this. Marty always told her that she was the most organized person he knew. She had to be. When you were married to the most head-in-the-clouds individual on the planet, one had to compensate. Marty, her sensitive, artist husband, could be so into a painting that he would lose track of everything—time, appointments, meals. She was the one in the family who made sure the girls got to piano lessons and gymnastics on time. She was the one who would make sure they had regular family meal times and that Marty was called in, precisely at six, from whatever piece of art he was working on. She made him see the importance of that.
When Nori complained that she had to do all the thinking around the place, all the organizing, all the setting down of schedules, Marty would take her in his arms and call her his primary color, the color from which all other colors got their hues; that without her, there was no color at all.
The color thing wasn’t entirely true. If she had been the primary color, then Marty had been the palette where the colors were mixed and made usable, because when he’d died her whole world had faded into a kind of pale, soupy, grayish monochrome.
“Ma’am?” Nori turned in the doorway of Malloy’s Mercantile. Back at the cash register, the checkout girl was waving Nori’s plastic bag of purchases. “Don’t forget your bag.”
Nori retraced her steps and made an effort to smile as she took the proffered bag. As she walked away she made some comment about forgetting her head if it wasn’t attached.
She had purchased a package of flimsy, cheap towels that might make good rags, plus a six-pack of heavy, wool work socks. In her former life, Nori never wore this kind of footwear. Her city socks were mostly light trouser ones that she wore underneath dress pants. Sometimes at home she would put on funky socks with flowers or diamond patterns. After a few weeks of blisters here at Whisper Lake though, she decided she needed something heavier inside her work boots.
Before she reached her truck she stopped and counted, just in case. One—Malloy’s Mercantile bag, two—shoulder bag, three—sunglasses, four—cell phone. Keys? In pocket. She threw the plastic shopping bag on the passenger seat and grabbed her backpack, which contained her laptop, closed the truck door, aimed the remote and locked it, and off she went to Marlene’s Café.
Grief and stress, she told herself. What had everyone told her? Don’t make any major life changes for a year? Well, maybe in her case eighteen months wasn’t long enough. Stress and grief were making her forget things. Like packages.
Stress and grief were turning her into a loony woman, a crazy sleepwalker. She was nowhere near over mourning Marty. She should have realized that because sometime during the night she had sleepwalked herself into her kitchen and opened up her cupboard doors and left them that way.
This morning when she woke, she had felt marvelous. She’d had a long night of uninterrupted dreamless sleep. It was rare for her to sleep that soundly and for so long. Maybe it was knowing that she finally had someone who would work for her that allowed her to rest. The sun was shining and the day was promising to be lovely and warm. Today, she would face her fears of the storm and go back out in the kayak. Today, she might even mount the steps into her loft and get out her paints.
Nori was a muralist. Essentially, she painted what people told her to, which was mostly humongous scenes of old country towns on the sides of buildings. It was her work and she loved it. Yet since Marty died, she hadn’t touched a paintbrush. She just couldn’t bring herself to. It was like that part of her—the artist part—had died with him.
But today, with the sun streaming into her window and leaving ribbons of gold on her walls, it would be different. She would paint. Today would be the day when she would get back to being an artist. It had been too long.
After she had woken up this morning, she had gone into her kitchen. The cupboards next to the sink were wide-open and the cups she and Steve had drunk coffee in yesterday were up on the shelf. She had stared, perplexed. She hadn’t remembered putting them there. She had left them in the sink. Hadn’t she? And how had she left the cupboard door open?
She was always fastidious about keeping her cupboards closed. Marty was the one who was forever leaving them open and when she would complain, he would take her in his arms, dance around the kitchen and say, “Ah, my little Elnora.” And he would push her hair off her face and plant a kiss on her mouth.
She would playfully push him away and say, “You know, that’s not going to get you anywhere, and don’t call me Elnora. That’s my grandmother’s name. My name is Nori.” And she would one by one close the cupboards, making a point of doing so.
When she went to close the cupboards, something way in the back caught her eye. A bit of color. She reached for it. It was a tiny bell. It looked to be a cream-colored china bell with a decorative hand-painted purple flower on one side.
