Chapter 18
18
The day after the surprise winter storm, Maura skied into town and waited at Granny Apple’s Boarding House to see if any students had managed to dig their way out yet. No one appeared except for Steve Birdie, the caretaker.
So she taped a sign to the door—Class canceled until further notice.
“No school?” Birdie, who’d been shoveling a path to the wood shed, looked delighted by that news. He always hid in his quarters when the kids were around. He was a tiny man, having shrunk during the course of his eight decades, but tough as beef jerky. His weathered skin was as brown as a shriveled raisin, either from the time he’d spent in the elements or possibly because he was Native Alaskan. It was hard to tell, and Maura had never asked.
“We’ll be back,” she assured him with a smile. “Don’t get too comfortable.”
“We oughta go back to the brothel days,” he grumbled. “Dump the kids, bring back the hookers.”
“Come on now, what do you have against my students?”
“They’re messy. They laugh too much. They’re always playing.” He spat into a brass umbrella stand that from now on, Maura would consider to be a spittoon.
“So you’re just a basic grouch, is that it?”
“Ain’t changing now. This whole school thing will blow over soon and I’ll get my house back.” He waved at the building behind him, which was a rambling two stories and far too big for one person.
She wanted to object to the idea that she was going to abandon her students soon, but realistically, he was probably correct. What was she going to do, stay in Firelight Ridge past this winter? This was a hiding place for her, a short-term solution to the long-term problem of her life.
“A man came by right before the storm,” Birdie told her, as he dug around in his pocket. “Gave me something to give to you, but I didn’t want to. Had to wrestle with my conscience.”
A chill swept through her. A man. What man? Why was he looking for her? What strange man would be looking for her other than SS?
Birdie pulled out a damp wad of paper and put it in the palm of her hand.
She squinted at it. Whatever it used to say, it was an illegible blur of ink now. “Little help here, Birdie. What is this?”
“It’s a number to call in case you want to get internet for the school.” He spoke the word “internet” as if it was Satan. “I told him you don’t have the funds, but he said it’s free. That’s the devil talking if you ask me.”
She couldn’t resist. “Don’t you live here for free?”
“It ain’t free if I’m working my ass off, now is it? I gave this place the best years of my life. Now you’re talking about internet. ” Grumbling, he plunged the aluminum shovel into a wall of snow.
“You need to get laid,” she called after him, just low enough so he couldn’t hear her.
“You volunteering?”
Oops. He heard better than she realized. Maybe all those times he’d cupped his ear and pretended that he hadn’t caught something were fake.
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. What was the man like?” She indicated the wad of paper. “The one who came by.”
“Like? He was a man. Like any other. He came on a snow machine, a fancy one, a Thundercat ZR nine thousand. Those things retail at over twenty thousand dollars. I guess handing out free cell service pays well.”
A snowmobile—that was common enough, obviously. But such an expensive one? That was unusual. Mostly they were beat-up, patched-up, we-can-get-one-more-winter-out-of-it specimens. “Did he limp, by any chance?”
It was worth a shot. Anyone who’d gotten a wolf bite would be limping, and it still puzzled her that the victim had so thoroughly disappeared.
“Limp? I don’t know. He never got off the thing. He might have thought I’d steal it, which I might have done. Sweet piece of equipment.”
At least she knew Birdie’s soft spot now, even if she didn’t know anything about this mystery cell service salesman.
A few days later, Maura had read every single book on Pinky’s shelves, reorganized his kitchen, and learned the basics of crocheting. In that time, she hadn’t seen a single human being other than Pinky.
She couldn’t help thinking that being snowed-in would have been a lot more fun if Lachlan had just happened to be here when the storm hit.
After making sure the firewood was stocked and Maura wasn’t going to freeze, Pinky had put on his snowshoes and told her he was going to check on Solomon. “Might not be back for a couple days,” he’d warned her. “He likes to shut himself in with a buttload of whisky when it snows. Someone’s gotta keep an eye on him. He might wander into a snowbank to take a piss and fall asleep. It’s happened before.”
“You’re leaving me here on my own?”
“If you get into trouble, use my CB radio. It’s tuned to a channel that Bear monitors. Everyone uses it for emergencies.” He showed her how to use it, and made sure the batteries were fresh. “I’ve been watching you, you can handle yourself. You’ll be fine. Solomon, I’m not too sure about.”
This was Firelight Ridge watching out for each other.
Also, she appreciated his vote of confidence that she could handle a few days on her own. She felt safe here, in this little house nestled among the trees, covered in its safety blanket of snow. Every day, she would go for a quiet ski through the forest and check on the magpies and the snowshoe hares. She skied over to Lasse Ulstrom’s and watched him work with his rambunctious Siberian Laika dogs, who could tolerate temperatures up to a hundred degrees below zero. She breathed deeply of the pure air scented by spruce and snow, and every day, her fear subsided a little bit more.
But when a knock sounded at the door while she was in the kitchen, sorting Pinky’s extensive collection of glass jars, she nearly jumped out of her skin. Who on earth would have skied all the way out to Pinky’s? His road wasn’t plowed yet, so they had to have come on foot, and she hadn’t heard a snowmobile.
Just in case, she picked up a cast-iron frying pan and tiptoed through the arctic entry to the front door.
“Who is it?” she called.
“It’s Lila,” said a bright voice in response.
“And Molly and Ani and Charlie,” added a wry one. “Surprise!”
Astonished, Maura opened the door, only to watch the four women recoil. Right—she was still holding that frying pan, poised for attack. She set it on the bench next to the door, where Pinky sat to take off his outdoor gear. “Sorry about that. Nothing personal. Come on in. I mean, if you still want to. Why are you…” She sucked in a breath, commanding herself to be normal. “Come on in.”
All four of them were on cross-country skis, though Lila had already stepped out of hers. She bent to pick them up and stick them in the snow. “We heard you were on your own for a bit and thought you could use some company.”
“Can you?” Charlie asked bluntly. “This is entirely optional.”
Maura thought about it for a split-second and decided she did. “Sure, it’d be nice to talk to some other human beings instead of the occasional moose. Come in.”
After a bustle of stashing their skis and taking off their boots and hats and gloves, they all crowded into the living room.
“How did you know I was on my own?” she asked curiously as she dumped Swiss Miss into a pan and added milk. She placed it on the burner of the woodstove, which she’d gotten in the habit of using because it made the living room smell like chocolate.
“Lachlan. He’s holding things down at The Fang. I guess Pinky came by and reported in about Solomon,” Molly explained. Her extravagantly red hair glowed in the firelight.
“What he actually said was that you could use more friends here,” said Charlie bluntly. She sat on the floor, her long legs crossed at the ankle, elbows resting on the couch behind her.
Ani, who was curled up on the couch just above Charlie, gave her a little rap on the head. “You weren’t supposed to say that.”
“Well, I’m sorry if I offended anyone. It seems pretty normal to me that someone who just got here might need more friends.”
“It’s all right,” Maura said as she stirred the pot. To be honest, it touched her that Lachlan had heard her complaint about him being her only friend. “It was nice of him to send you, and nice of you to come. I’m not offended. Mostly I’m anxious to know if there’s any hot gossip from town.”
Lila clapped her hands together. She wore fingerless gloves that went all the way up her forearms, like leg warmers for hands. “Have you heard about the outhouse contest?”
“Oh crap. Did I miss that?”
“She said ‘crap,’” Charlie pointed out with a grin, making everyone laugh. “Very appropriate.”
After that, Maura relaxed and they all settled in for a wide-ranging conversation that went from the fact that the outhouse competition had been postponed (phew, she hadn’t missed it) to the worries Charlie had about maintaining a good relationship with Hailey and her mother.
“I mean, being a stepmother, there’s no manual for that, and I don’t much believe in manuals anyway. But the relationship between a child’s biological mother and their stepmother, there isn’t even a word for that. No Hallmark card, nothing.”
“Mortal enemies,” Molly suggested dryly.
“I refuse to see it that way. I was thinking I could hack into her e-mails and—” She was drowned out by a chorus of “no’s” and “don’t do it’s” from her friends.
Maura smiled into her hot chocolate. She liked these women. They were very…real.
“It’s all right.” Charlie held up her hands in surrender. “I’ve left my sketchy past behind. No more criming for me. Speaking of criming, Nick and I have been looking into this cell phone situation. It’s odd, let me tell you. We sorted through multiple layers of LLCs until we located the parent company. Have any of you heard of TNG Incorporated?”
Everyone shook their heads.
“Well, I guess that leaves us nowhere, then. It’s still a mystery.”
“Was there no information about it?” asked Maura.
“It used to be an oil and gas company, but it’s branched out and rebranded. That’s about it.” She shook her head. “I’ll go back to worrying about my new blended family. I figure Jill and I have one big thing in common, and that’s adoring Hailey.”
“Exactly.” Surprising herself, Maura decided to chime in. “Why should women automatically consider other women to be adversaries or competition somehow? I’ve never liked that.”
“Yesss.” Charlie reached toward her for a high-five. “Sister power. We’re all sisters here, possibly because we were all outcasts in high school. It was a bond forged in the fire of misfit-dom. But you weren’t a misfit, were you?”
“Why would you say that?”
“She might have been.” Ani jumped to Maura’s defense. She was naturally empathetic, Maura saw. “Just because she’s pretty and smart and funny and—are you okay, Maura?”
Maura realized she had tears in her eyes. She brushed them away. “Yes. Fine.” The four women watched with expressions ranging from concern to shock. “Sorry. I just…things have been tough lately, and you all are very kind and I’m…adjusting. Don’t mind me.”
“Cry all you want,” Lila declared as she scooted close to Maura and put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I do it regularly. It makes Bear worry, so I search out my friends instead. They’re used to it.”
“We are,” Molly agreed. “So if there’s anything you need to get off your chest, Maura, consider us all ears.”
She wanted to. Oh, how she wanted to. But still, something stopped her. “I’ll keep that in mind.”