“And tapes.”
“I know what’s in it.”
“Then you know why I’m taking it.”
Ren looked at her father.
“Tell her.”
Garrett rubbed one hand over his jaw.
“It might be better to keep it at the house.”
The answer hurt so much Ren almost laughed.
Sandra carried the box outside.
Ten minutes later, they were gone.
Ren remained on the porch until the cold forced her inside.
She did not cry.
Crying would not light the stove.
The woodshed contained perhaps half a cord of dry split pine, a chopping block, a hatchet, and an old coffee can filled with kitchen matches.
It took Ren three tries to get a fire going.
When the first strong flame finally caught, she sat back on her heels and watched it as though she had accomplished something enormous.
Maybe she had.
She found a kerosene lamp and half a jug of fuel. A water barrel stood near the door with a skin of ice across the top. The cupboards held old flour, coffee, beans, onions, tomatoes, and several jars of preserved food she was not yet brave enough to trust.
She ate two granola bars from her bag.
That first night, she slept badly.
In the morning, the storm had passed.
Ren stepped onto the porch carrying a cup of bitter coffee.
Fresh snow covered the entire clearing. Pines stood heavy and still beneath a hard blue sky. Far ridges rose beyond the timber, one behind another.
It was beautiful.
Almost painfully beautiful.
Apparently, she owned the view.
She could not eat it.
She could not call anyone from it.
And she could not drive eleven miles through snow with it.
But according to Sandra, it was hers.
That was when Ren heard a sound behind the woodshed.
A whine.
Then scratching.
She took the hatchet with her.
The dog was wedged between the woodpile and the wall, where the wind could not reach him as easily.
He was large beneath the starvation, some kind of shepherd. His ribs showed. Ice clung to the fur around his legs. One back leg seemed stiff.
When Ren crouched several feet away, he lifted his head.
He did not growl.
He simply watched her.
“Hey,” Ren whispered.
His tail moved once.
Ren returned to the cabin and brought back the heel of a sandwich and her last granola bar.
The dog ate both.
Then, with the strange trust of an animal too exhausted to pretend he needed nobody, he leaned his entire weight against Ren’s knee.
She put a hand against his side.
He was trembling.
“All right,” she said. “Come on.”
The dog followed her inside.
He fell asleep beside the stove as though he had slept there before.
Ren named him Dutch that afternoon.
She did not know why the name came to her.
It simply fit.
By evening, Dutch already looked up when she said it.
They spent the day learning the cabin together.
Ren swept.
She carried in wood.
She melted snow.
She found dried beans, tomatoes, onions, and enough salt to make a rough soup.
Dutch ate half.
After dark, Ren sat near the stove talking to him because the silence had become too large.
She told him about the diner where she had spent the last two years waiting tables.
She told him about the envelope of tips she had hidden behind a loose section of wall in her bedroom because Sandra had a habit of calling family money “shared money.”
She told him about the community college art classes she wanted to take.
She told him Sandra thought drawing was something people did when they had money to waste.
She told him the one thing that frightened her more than being alone on the mountain.
Her mother’s voice was becoming harder to remember.
Dutch listened with his chin on his paws.
No one interrupted.
No one corrected her.
No one told her she was being dramatic.
That alone made him better company than most people she knew.
The temperature fell sharply that night.
Ren moved the bed closer to the chimney.
Dutch slept against her back.
Still, her feet would not warm.
A steady current of freezing air flowed over the floor.
That was what led her to the rug.
And the rug led her to the hatch.
Ren lowered the kerosene lamp into the opening.
The room below was not large, perhaps six feet by eight, with fitted stone walls and a packed dirt floor.
Shelves lined two sides.
There were jars.
Dozens of them.
Beans.
Tomatoes.
Pickled vegetables.
Rice.
Dried corn.
Candles.
Lamp oil.
Blankets sealed inside feed sacks.
Rope.
An ax.
A sharpening stone.
A first aid kit.
Someone had prepared the cellar carefully.
This was not an abandoned cabin.
It was a house that had been waiting.
One jar caught Ren’s eye.
The label had been written in a child’s round printing.
PLUM.
Underneath was another word.
SYLVIA.
Ren crouched.
Her mother.
The date was from when Sylvia would have been about nine years old.
Ren touched the glass.
The preserves were far too old to eat, but someone had kept them anyway.
At the far end of the cellar sat a dull metal box and a heavier iron strongbox secured with a padlock.
The first box was not locked.
Ren carried it upstairs.
Dutch followed her movements closely.
She pulled the table nearer the stove and opened the box.
A folded sheet of lined paper rested on top.
Two words had been written across it in hard, slanting pencil.
For Ren.
She stopped breathing for a second.
Inside was a letter from a man Ren had been told wanted nothing to do with her.
Her grandfather.
Emmett Voss.
If you’re reading this, the letter began, then they finally brought you here, and I’m sorry it took so long.
Ren sat down.
She read more slowly.
Emmett wrote that he had built the cabin himself when Sylvia was four.
He had cut timber from his own land.
He had dug the cellar.
Built the furniture.