CHAPTER TWO
The Last of the Season
The campground had thinned down to its usual late autumn handful by the time the last stragglers of the season began rolling in that week, campers who came, most years, precisely because the crowds had cleared out and the lake had gone hushed enough to actually hear yourself think beside it, and I spent that Tuesday morning at the front desk with a fresh pot of coffee and a stack of registration cards, watching a small, distinct parade of new faces pull up the gravel drive one after another.
The first was an older gentleman driving a modest, well kept camper that had clearly seen a good many miles, and he came into the office with the particular unhurried courtesy of a man raised somewhere that still valued taking your hat off indoors, though he wasn't wearing one, just an old wool coat buttoned neat against the cold.
"Everett Boyle," he said, offering his hand across the desk, his grip warm and steady despite the chill outside. "I called ahead a few weeks back. I hope I'm not too much trouble arriving this late in your season."
"Not trouble at all, Mr. Boyle. We've got plenty of room this time of year." I pulled his card from the stack, already prepared, and slid it across for his signature. "Staying through the winter, or just passing through?"
"Through the winter, I think, if the weather allows it.
" Something quiet and a little sad crossed his face, gone as quickly as it had come, replaced by a gentle, easy smile that reached all the way to his eyes.
"I lost my wife two years back, and I've found I don't much care for spending the cold months alone in a house too big for just me.
Better to be somewhere with people about, even strangers, than sitting in all that still by myself. "
"Well, you'll find plenty of people about here," I told him, and meant it, already liking him in the easy, immediate way you sometimes liked a person before you'd fully gotten to know them at all. "We've got a good crowd, most of them more family than customer by now."
"That sounds like just what I was hoping to find," he said, and signed his card with a careful, old fashioned hand, and I watched him walk back out to his camper with an unhurried dignity that made me think, watching him go, that whatever quiet grief he was still carrying, he carried it the way some people carried heavy things their whole lives, gently, without ever once setting it down where it might trouble somebody else.
The next arrival that same afternoon was a woman traveling alone in a compact, no nonsense sedan, and she came into the office with her chin already set at an angle that told me, before she'd said a single word, that she wasn't in the mood for chitchat.
"Deloris Vance," she said, sliding her identification across the counter without waiting to be asked. "I'll need a site with decent cell reception, if you've got one, and I'd rather not be right next to anybody with small children, if it's all the same to you."
"I'll see what I can do," I said, pulling up the site map, and found her watching me with a sharp, assessing look that didn't waver the complete time I worked.
"How long has this campground been in your family?" she asked, abrupt, the question landing more like an interrogation than idle small talk.
"A good many years now. It was my father's before it was mine, and his father's before that." I glanced up, curious despite her prickly manner. "Are you familiar with the area?"
"Passing through," she said, closing the subject as firmly as she'd opened it, and I let it drop, sensing, correctly I suspected, that pushing further would earn me nothing but a colder shoulder than the one already on offer.
She took her site assignment with a curt nod of thanks and drove off without another word, and I found myself, watching her go, more curious about her than I probably had any right to be.
Otis Rowe arrived not long after, a slight, bookish man somewhere in his fifties with wire rimmed glasses and a canvas satchel that looked considerably heavier than its size suggested, and he set a battered laptop case down carefully on the counter before he even introduced himself, the gesture of a man who'd learned the hard way not to let his work out of arm's reach.
"Otis Rowe," he said, mild and a little distracted, glancing around the office with open, unhurried interest. "I understand there's some local historical material out this way. Old land records, that sort of thing."
"There's a good bit of that in Miller's Creek, at the historical society. My friend Vivian runs it, she'd be glad to help you if you're doing research."
"I am, as it happens." Something quietly pleased crossed his face, the specific light of a person whose favorite subject had just been handed to them unprompted.
"I'm working on a book about land fraud cases across this whole region, going back a hundred years or more.
Fascinating, dispiriting material, most of it.
People losing what was rightfully theirs to someone with better lawyers and worse conscience.
" He caught himself, apologetic. "Sorry. I do tend to run on about it."
"Don't apologize. It sounds like important work."
"I like to think so." He accepted his registration card with cautious hands, and I noticed, watching him settle it into his satchel, that his fingers lingered a moment longer than necessary over the campground's own brief history pamphlet sitting in the rack beside the counter, tucking a copy away with the soft, hungry attention of a man who never quite stopped collecting.
The Callahans came in together that evening, a young couple who couldn't have been more than twenty five between them, and I clocked the strain between them before either had said a word, the particular careful distance of two people who loved each other and were also, for reasons I couldn't guess at, deeply exhausted by whatever they'd been carrying together.
"Nina and Jared Callahan," the young man said, his voice pleasant enough though his eyes kept flicking toward the window, toward their car, packed to the roof with far more belongings than any short camping trip could possibly require. "We're not sure yet how long we'll be staying."
"That's fine, we can figure it out as you go." I glanced past him at the loaded car, curious despite myself, and caught Nina watching me watch it, her expression going carefully blank in a way that told me she'd noticed exactly what I'd noticed.
"We're between places," she said, quiet, before I'd asked anything at all. "It's a long story."
"You don't owe me the story," I told her, gentle, and watched some part of it in her shoulders ease, just slightly, grateful, I suspected, for one person in the last several days who hadn't demanded an explanation she wasn't ready to give.
The Pruitts arrived last, and announced themselves from clear across the parking lot before they'd even reached the office door, three children spilling out of a minivan in a chaotic tumble of boots and mittens and at least one dropped stuffed rabbit that the smallest of them, a girl who couldn't have been more than four, wailed about with tremendous, short lived tragedy before her older brother retrieved it from the gravel and handed it back with the weary patience of an eight year old who had clearly done this exact rescue mission many times before.
"Grady and Renee Pruitt," the father said, arriving at the counter slightly out of breath, grinning wide despite it. "And that's Milo, Wyatt, and Daisy, in case any of them introduce themselves to you before we do, which honestly, with this crew, is a real possibility."
"We like to camp somewhere with a lake," Renee added, cheerful and entirely unbothered by the chaos trailing behind her, "on account of it tires them out enough that they actually sleep through the night, which I understand is a luxury not every parent gets to enjoy."
"You've come to the right place," I told her, laughing, already charmed despite the noise, and watched the three kids tumble out toward the tree line the moment their father turned his back, Milo already narrating some elaborate expedition to his younger siblings in the confident tone of an eight year old certain of his own authority.
By the time I closed up the office that evening, the campground held a stranger, more varied handful of guests than it usually did this late in the season, and I found myself, walking back toward the farmhouse under a sky gone hard and clear with the first real cold of the year, turning each of them over in my mind, Everett's hushed dignity, Deloris's guarded prickliness, Otis's bookish focus, the Callahans' deliberate distance, the Pruitts' cheerful chaos, and thinking that whatever else this certain winter turned out to bring, it certainly wasn't going to be boring.
Sam met me on the porch, Pepper trotting ahead of him to greet me properly, and I told him about the day's new arrivals over a late dinner, the entire strange, distinct little collection of them, and he listened with the particular attentive interest he brought to anything involving people he hadn't met yet, filing details away the way he always did, out of habit as much as genuine curiosity.
"Sounds like a full house for the last stretch of the season," he said.
"Feels that way," I agreed, and had no idea yet just how full that house was about to become.