by Cindy Myers
“One look at the mine and Jake’s old place will send her running back to wherever she’s from,” Cassie said.
Lucille shrugged. “You never know. This country can take hold of a person. That’s what happened to me.”
“Plenty of people think they like it, until they spend their first winter here,” Cassie said. It took a certain toughness to thrive in these mountains, a toughness that had been bred into Cassie.
“We’ll all get a chance to meet her,” Lucille said. “Danielle and Janelle are talking about holding a kind of memorial service for Jake over at the café while she’s here.”
“I thought they already had a service,” Cassie said.
“Not really. Some of Jake’s friends got together and scattered his ashes, but we never had a real ceremony. I think it would be nice for his daughter.”
“Why should she care, if she hasn’t seen him in years?” Cassie asked.
“If it were me, I’d want to know what my old man was like,” Bob said.
Cassie sniffed. “She should talk to me. I could tell her what he was like.”
“Not everyone feels the way you do,” Lucille said. She gathered up her books. “See you around.”
Lucille and Bob left together. Cassie gave up on the newsletter and stared out the window. She had a view from here of Mount Winston. This time of year the crown of the mountain was heavy with snow, shining silver in the afternoon sun. Her family had once owned a good part of the mountain, and neighboring Mount Garnet, too. They’d probably even owned the land where the French Mistress stood, though she’d never been able to prove it. Her great-grandfather had thought all that rock useless and had been happy to sell it to the miners who came looking for gold. Fool’s gold, he’d called it, though he’d been the fool when so many of them found the precious metal and became rich.
The money in the family came from her great-grandmother, who’d had the foresight to open a restaurant and laundry to cater to the miners. Later, she’d added a general store and a hotel. She was the one who built the house Cassie lived in now.
Cassie came from a line of strong women who made a habit of falling for weak men. Jake hadn’t been weak, but he’d definitely been wrong. Cassie should thank her lucky stars she’d discovered his true nature before it was too late.
The house struggled up the steep slope like an old woman in long skirts, in danger of falling over with one good shove. The exterior was unpainted wood, weathered the soft gray of pencil lead. The roof was rusted to the color of dried blood. A silver stovepipe jutted from the peak of the roof, a tattered scrap of cloth fluttering from it.
“Is that . . . a windsock?” Maggie asked, squinting at the once-red tube of fabric.
“Yep.” Reggie pulled a set of keys from his pocket. “I’d better give you these before I forget. The keys to the Jeep and the snowmobile are on there. House key, too, though I doubt Murph ever used it.”
Maggie accepted the keys and climbed out of the car, which was parked on perhaps the only flat section of ground on her father’s property. Every other square inch slanted precariously. As she braced herself with one hand against the car door, a chill wind tugged at her clothes. “Whatever possessed him to want to live up here?” she asked Reggie as he joined her beside the car.
“It was probably just a matter of convenience at first. He needed a place to live and the house was here when he bought the place, though he’s done a considerable amount of work on it.”
She stared at the shack. One end of the front porch was supported by a pillar of dry-stack rocks, while the other jutted into thin air. On closer inspection, the siding was of varying widths of wood held together with rusting nails, and no two windows were the same size. “He did?”
“It’s a lot more sound than it looks,” Reggie said. “Why don’t we go inside?”
She followed him up a stone path to the porch, which, despite its appearance, felt solid enough underfoot. Reggie pushed open the door, then stepped aside to let her enter.
She hesitated, suddenly nervous. She’d wanted to come to Eureka to discover what her father was like, but what if she didn’t like what she found? A person’s home was so personal. Her mother had had a little embroidered picture on her bedroom wall: Home Is Where the Heart Is. Was she really ready to see her father’s heart, which she had at various times in her life pictured as black, or merely empty?
The house was not empty. Furniture and possessions crowded the front room, which, as it turned out, was the only room except for the little bathroom tacked on the back and the loft bedroom overhead. Maggie stood on a square rag rug just inside the door and tried to take it all in.
Directly in front of her was an overstuffed love seat and matching chair, each covered in old quilts, arranged in front of a polished black wood stove. Behind the love seat was a square wooden table with two chairs. A tall bookcase stood against the wall opposite the woodstove, while the back wall of the cabin was filled with kitchen cabinets, an old-fashioned refrigerator with rounded corners, and a narrow gas stove and deep enamel sink.
“Bedroom’s upstairs.” Reggie pointed to the steps next to the bookcase. “There’s a king-size bed up there and more bookcases. Murph was a great reader. The bathroom’s through that door in the corner.”
She nodded and moved a little farther into the house, like a swimmer acclimating to cold water.
“He put all these windows in about four years ago,” Reggie said. “You’ve got a terrific view now from every room—even the bathroom.” He nudged her a little farther into the room. Now she was standing directly behind the love seat, staring out at the world falling away—sky and clouds and distant mountains, like the view from an airplane.
But she wasn’t in an airplane. She was in a house, standing on a solid floor, though that, too, suddenly seemed to be falling away, as she tumbled over in a dead faint.
When Maggie came to, she was flat on her back on the hard wood floor, staring up at her own distorted reflection in Reggie’s glasses. “Wh-what happened?” she gasped.
“You fainted. Easy now.” Reggie supported her as she sat up.
“That’s ridiculous. I never faint.” She looked around, as if she might spot the culprit who was responsible for this embarrassment.
“It’s the altitude,” Reggie said. “You’re at ten thousand feet above sea level here. It takes some getting used to. I can take you back to the hotel in town. That’s only eighty-five hundred feet, so you should feel better there.”
“I feel fine,” she said, ignoring the buzzing behind her eyes. She struggled to her feet and stared out at the view again. “Are we really hanging out in space like this?” she asked.
“In a manner of speaking.” Reggie kept one hand on her arm, as if he expected her to tumble over again at any moment. “But remember, this house has been here at least a hundred years. And Murph installed all-new anchor bolts not long after he moved in. Two-inch-thick steel drilled into solid rock. You’re in no danger of sliding off into space, even if it feels that way.”
She continued to stare at the expanse of sky and rock spread out before her. She was reminded of the IMAX movies she’d seen as a kid, when the helicopter carrying the camera suddenly swooped over a canyon. She had that same stomach-dropping sense of the world falling away. Of flying. “It’s incredible,” she said.
“The view from the bedroom’s the same, while the kitchen and bathroom look up the mountain.”
“I want to see.”
She admired the view from the kitchen and dining windows of silver rock and gold aspen. A crabapple tree grew at the corner of the house, sheltered between a lee of rock and the old outhouse. “The outhouse still works,” Reggie said. “Murph kept it because it was convenient when he was outside working.”
She couldn’t decide if this proved her father was lazy, practical, or just eccentric, though she was leaning toward the latter. She climbed into the loft, sat on the edge of the quilt-covered bed, and stared at the dizzying view once
more. Reggie sat beside her, silent for a long while. There was something to be said for a man who knew when to keep his mouth shut.
A dark speck appeared in the sky and moved closer. A bird of some kind soared in lazy circles—some kind of hawk, or maybe an eagle. In all these books filling the bookcases, was there a volume that would tell her?
“Do you think, living with a view like that every day, you ever come to take it for granted?” she asked after a while.
“I don’t think Murph ever did. He always said he didn’t need a church as long as he had that view. For him, this place was heaven. That’s why he stayed here, even through the rough winters.”
She tried to imagine her father, a vague figure with features that weren’t clear to her, alone in this cabin surrounded by mountains and sky. What had he found here that had kept him here despite the hardships?
She’d felt empty since Carter left, but maybe before that, even. People made jokes about midlife crises, but was it really so surprising that someone should reach middle age and wonder if they’d really fulfilled their purpose in life? Other women her age were raising children, some even had grandchildren. Maggie had produced no family, built no career. Even before Carter left, she’d wondered sometimes if working in an office and cooking balanced meals each evening was the best use of her talents. She’d signed up for a yoga class, but whenever the teacher told her to lie still and focus on her breathing, she’d always ended up making a mental grocery list or replaying inane commercial jingles—as if her breath just wasn’t interesting enough. As if she wasn’t interesting enough.
That was her big fear, right there in a nutshell. Carter had left her because she was boring. And if she didn’t do something to change, she would bore herself right to death. She’d thought travel abroad would help broaden her perspective and inspire her to try new things—to be a different sort of person.
She gazed out the window at the world spread out below her. She doubted a person could find a broader perspective than this, or a place more unlike what she was used to.
“You don’t need to drive me back to the hotel,” she said. “I’d like to stay here.”
“Are you sure?” Reggie studied her face. “It gets cold up here at night, even in summer. You’ll have to start a fire in the stove. I don’t imagine you’ve done that much in Houston.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“All right, then.” He stood. “Do you have a cell phone?”
She nodded.
“You might have to walk up the road a ways to get a good signal.” He fished a card out of his wallet. “My number’s on there. You call me if you need anything at all.”
“Thank you. I’ll be all right. Really.”
She climbed down the ladder after him and walked with him to the door. She waited while he retrieved her suitcase, then watched out the front window, until the plume of dust from his car disappeared into the distance. Then she sat on the love seat and stared out at the view, alone in a silence deeper than she’d ever known, but for the first time in a long time, not really lonely. The view was a kind of companion, as if the world itself was embracing her. She wondered if this was what her father had felt when he said he was in heaven here. She didn’t know if she believed in heaven, but maybe spending some time here would help her find out.
Chapter 3
Maggie woke to the hazy gray light of dusk, cold seeping over her, and her stomach growling with hunger. She sat up, aware of another growling, too. A deep rumble, echoing through the house. It sounded like . . . a motorcycle?
She hurried down the stairs and looked out the front window at a black and silver motorcycle squatting where Reggie’s car had been parked earlier. A man in black leather—leather jacket, leather chaps, black leather boots—straddled the motorcycle. As she watched, he took off his helmet, revealing a shaggy mass of hair a shade darker than the chestnut goatee that framed his frowning lips. He stared up at the house, his frown deepening.
An icy fist of fear clamped around her heart as she realized she was literally in the middle of nowhere, alone, without even a telephone to call for help. What if this was some crazed serial killer who’d decided to take advantage of her vulnerability?
She looked around the room for some kind of weapon. Oh, why hadn’t she taken that self-defense course that had been offered at the Y last month? She picked up a stick of kindling from the bucket by the wood stove. Was it thick enough to knock a man out? Even if it was, how would she get close enough to hit him before he overpowered her? Oh God, what if he had a gun?
She crept to the window for another look. The motorcycle was silent now. And empty. The man in black had disappeared.
She fumbled in her pocket for her cell phone. Maybe . . . She flipped it open. NO SERVICE. Dammit! Who in their right mind lived in a place with no telephone? Then again, obviously her father had not been in his right mind. Men in their right minds didn’t desert their wife and infant daughter for no reason and without a glance back.
The scrape of gravel outside the other side of the house made her catch her breath. With the stealth of a cat burglar—or maybe just the caution of a terrified female—she crept to the window on that side.
The man was there all right, on the path that led toward the old outhouse. He had a stick in one hand and was poking at something on the ground. Watching him, anger began to edge out Maggie’s fear. She stalked to the front door and yanked it open, then ran to the end of the porch. “Who are you and what the hell do you think you’re doing?” she shouted.
The man dropped the stick and whirled around, the frown replaced by a look of astonishment. “I could ask you the same question, lady,” he barked.
“I own this place, and you’re trespassing. You need to leave before I call the police.”
“Call them on what? There’s no phone up here.”
Why did bluffing work in books and movies, but never in real life? “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I came to check on the place, make sure everything was all right.” He took a few steps toward her.
She held out the stick of kindling. “Don’t come any closer.”
He glanced at the wood, which, come to think of it, was pretty thin, and seemed to be fighting back a smile. But he stopped moving toward her. “You said you own this place?” he asked. “Who sold it to you?”
“No one sold it to me. I inherited it from my father.”
All humor vanished from the man’s face. “I knew the owner of this place and he never said a word about any daughter,” he said. “So try telling the truth this time.”
Maggie didn’t know whether to be more upset that this stranger was accusing her of lying, or that maybe he was telling the truth about her father never mentioning her. “Jacob Murphy was my father,” she said. “He and my mother split up when I was still a baby, but he left me everything he had in his will. If you don’t believe me, go talk to Reggie Paxton.”
Blinking back tears, she turned and headed toward the front door.
The stranger was on her with lightning speed. He grabbed her arm, pulling her away from the door. Maggie screamed and lashed out, and he stepped back so quickly she stumbled.
“Hey, it’s okay,” he said, holding both hands up as if to ward off a blow. “I didn’t mean to scare you. And I’m sorry I accused you of lying. You just startled me is all. I didn’t expect to find anyone up here.”
“Thought you’d be free to snoop around, didn’t you?” she said. “Maybe help yourself to whatever you wanted.”
“Hey, I said I was sorry for calling you a liar. No need for you to accuse me of being a thief.”
“Then what are you doing up here, especially this time of night?”
“I was on my way back from Telluride and thought I’d swing by and make sure everything was all right. And I was thinking about Murph, missing him. I thought it would be good to come up here and remember a bit.”
He was a very good actor or was telling the truth. Maggie
relaxed a little. Up close, the man was a little older than she’d first taken him for—early thirties, maybe. “What’s your name?”
“Jameso Clark.”
“I’m Maggie Stevens.”
“Pleased to meet you, Maggie.” He offered his hand, still clad in fingerless leather riding gloves.
His hand was big and warm, the leather soft against her palm. She tried to remember the last time she’d been this close to a man, and couldn’t. She reluctantly slid from his grasp. “Hello, Jameso.”
He peered into her face. “I can see the resemblance to Murph now. You’ve got his eyes.”
“I do?” Her mother had never mentioned she looked like her father, but then, her mother never talked much about Jacob Murphy, at least not until the end. And then those ramblings had been focused on the past—on a time before Maggie existed.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Jameso said.
“Thank you. But I really didn’t know him. You two were friends?”
“Yes and no.”
The cryptic answer puzzled her. Was he her father’s friend or wasn’t he? But before she could probe further, he put his hand on her shoulder. “It’s getting cold out here. Why don’t we go inside.”
“It’s not much warmer in the cabin,” she said. “I need to start a fire.” She still couldn’t get over the idea that it felt like February at the end of May. In Houston, she’d already been running the air conditioner for two months.
“I can do that for you.”
He followed her into the cabin, filling the tiny room with his presence. He squatted in front of the stove and began feeding wood into the box. “You want to surrender your weapon now?” he asked.
She glanced at the wood in her hand. “Oh, sure. Do you want some coffee? And maybe something to eat? I’m starved. I don’t know what’s in the kitchen. Well, I do know there’s a bunch of Lorna Doones. My dad must have really liked them.” She was babbling but couldn’t seem to stop herself. Silence felt too charged between them.
