Chapter 3
I woke up before sunrise on my first morning in the cabin. The room was dark and quiet. The air smelled like old wood and closed spaces, the musty smell of a building that had sat through a wet winter without anyone opening the windows.
My back hurt from the camp cot. The sleeping bag kept me warm enough against the chilly March air, but the wood stove in the main room was dark. I didn't trust it enough yet to light it.
I could have slept in the camper on the softer bed, but that felt like cheating somehow. Like I wasn't really committed to this place.
I lay still and listened.
The Olympic Peninsula in the early morning sounded like nothing I had ever heard.
Not silence but a layered quiet. I could hear the stream somewhere in the trees, a steady soft rushing sound.
A bird I couldn't name called from the wooded hill behind the cabin.
Three notes, over and over. The cabin itself made small sounds as the temperature slowly started to rise, the wood expanding, the building creaking and settling.
I had spent almost two years in RV parks. Nights filled with other people's children and dogs and TVs through thin walls. The background noise of people living close by pressing in from every direction.
This was different.
This was what I had been looking for.
I got up and put on jeans and a flannel shirt and walked barefoot into the main room.
The propane stove lit on the first try. I filled the kettle from the faucet and set it to heat while I ground beans with the fancy grinder I kept in my trailer stuff.
My French press was one of the few household items I had brought from my old life.
The coffee was ready in minutes. I poured it into my mug and carried it outside to the porch.
I looked over the clearing in the early morning light.
The pond sat with a layer of mist floating on the water.
The surface was perfectly still. No wind.
No movement at all. The wooded hill rose behind the cabin, towering evergreens standing dark against a sky that was changing from black to deep gray-blue.
I could hear the stream clearly from the porch now, the sound carrying in the still air.
Somewhere beyond the trees to the east was the James Farm. I couldn't see it from here, but I knew it was there. I wondered if Claire was awake yet.
I checked my phone out of habit. No signal. That hadn't changed overnight. I would keep using the satellite dish for calls and internet, which was fine. The satellite dish was set up at the trailer, and my Wi-Fi was working well enough.
I finished my coffee and set the mug down on the porch railing. I decided to walk the land before I did anything else.
I started at the back of the cabin and moved outward in an organized way that was completely normal for me. Twenty-two years as an insurance adjuster had taught me to map out space before checking it. You can't judge what you haven't looked at carefully.
The clearing was about two acres of flat ground.
The grass was waking from winter sleep, but not lush yet, still brown at the tips with new green pushing through at the bottom.
I crouched down and looked at the soil. Dark and rich.
Good drainage. This ground would grow things if someone planted them.
The cabin sat in the clearing's northern third, its back to the wooded hill, facing the pond. The setup made sense. South-facing for maximum light. The trees at the back blocking the wind.
The pond itself was maybe a quarter acre, bigger than it had looked in the listing photos.
The far edge pushed into the trees where willows grew close to the water.
Blackberry bushes crowded the eastern side.
The stream came in from the northwest, running clear and cold over stones I could see clearly from the bank.
I kneeled and put my hand in the water, enjoying the coldness.
A good stream. A steady stream.
I followed it into the trees.
The wooded acres rose behind the cabin. The slope wasn't steep, but it was steady. The forest was mixed. Douglas fir mostly, their trunks straight and tall, the bark deeply grooved on the older ones. Western red cedar in the wetter spots where the ground stayed damp all year.
Some of the fir trees were really old. Four feet across at the bottom, the bark gray and weathered like stone.
I walked along the upper property line, following it by the survey stakes at the corners.
Orange plastic ribbons still visible on the steel rods, placed during the land survey two months ago.
The upper line ran east to west along the ridge.
The land beyond it dropped away into more forest that belonged to someone else.
I looked back down the slope through the trees. The cabin's roof was visible below. The pond's surface caught the morning light, the mist mostly gone now.
From up here, the property made complete sense as a piece of land. The cabin on the flat ground, the water at the southern edge, the forest on the slope behind.
Claire's father had made a smart choice when he picked this specific spot for the cabin. It must have been something urgent that caused Claire to carve off these 22 acres from her farm and sell them.
I thought about Mark James at twenty. Standing somewhere on this slope with a map in his hands. Deciding where to put the cabin. Making the same judgment I was making now. That young man had made decisions that lasted for over fifty years.
There was much more land to explore in the woods both behind and in front of the cabin.
Twenty-two forested acres was a sizeable piece of property.
There were all kinds of valleys and ridges I hadn't walked yet.
The stream's full path from where it entered the property to where it fed the pond.
It was something to look forward to in the coming days.
I came down the slope slowly, picking my way between the trees, watching my footing on the damp ground.
I came out of the trees at the back of the cabin and stood looking at the building from behind.
The north wall needed work. I could see that clearly even in the early morning light. The siding was weathered, and the gutter above it was pulling away from the edge at one corner. Water had been running down the wall for years. That would be a problem.
A bird called from somewhere in the cedars. Three notes again, the same pattern I had heard from inside the cabin.
I took out my phone and opened the bird identification app. The app listened and recorded while I stood there. In the quiet, I let myself think about money.
I had emptied my retirement account to buy this place. The decision was made quickly but not without thinking. I checked the numbers over and over, considered other options, looked at all the practical reasons against it.
Every practical reason against it was right. You don't empty a retirement account at forty-five. You don't walk away from a career with no backup plan. You don't buy remote rural property with a cabin that needs major work and expect to keep making professional money at the same time.
Every practical reason against it was also meaningless.
I had been living a comfortable life and quietly drowning in it.
The drowning was so slow and so complete that I had stopped noticing it.
I had accepted the suffocation as the normal state of adult life.
The price you paid for a house in a good neighborhood and a reliable car and a wife who didn't love you and a job that used none of the things you had once been proud of.
I had been giving myself away for so long that I had truly lost track of what was left.
What is left, I thought, looking at the back of the cabin, is this. Whatever this turns out to be.
What remained in my bank account after buying the property was small. My expert witness work was bringing in good money. I had two active cases. A third inquiry I answered from my camp chair in an RV park.
But the work was still new enough that the money came unevenly, and I was managing my finances very carefully. I had a cushion, but it was worryingly thin.
The cabin needed a lot of work before the October storm season started. Most of that work I could do myself... I hoped. But a lot of it would need materials that cost money. I had checked the numbers enough times to know it was doable if nothing went seriously wrong.
The app flickered. I looked at the screen. Steller's jay. Spotted towhee. Dark-eyed junco. Common raven. A list of birds that lived on my land.
My land.
I smiled at the phone like an idiot.
Two hours later, I finished putting up the new mailbox at the end of my driveway.
A simple wooden post dug into the dirt, a bag of fast-setting concrete holding it in place. I checked the level, adjusting the post slightly until the bubble centered, then packed more dirt around the bottom and leaned on my shovel.
The mailbox was nothing special. Black metal with a red flag, the kind you buy at any hardware store for thirty dollars. My address numbers on the side in reflective vinyl stickers, slightly crooked.
I stood there looking at it for a long time. Is there any clearer way to claim a place than putting up a mailbox?
This is where I live now. This is where my mail comes.
It was a good moment. The only thing casting a slight shadow over it was what I had found near the driveway entrance.
Tire marks. Not mine.
Someone had parked their car in the little clearing just inside the trees. Not exactly hiding, but close enough to be worrying.
The marks were fresh, made the night before. I had walked the whole area looking for signs of trouble. No trash. No empty bottles. No used needles, thank goodness. Just the tire marks and some footprints in the soft ground.
Probably nothing. Kids looking for a place to park and make out, maybe someone who got lost and turned around.
I reminded myself to keep an eye on the entrance in case whoever it was came back.
After a quick lunch, I spent the afternoon carefully checking the cabin's interior.
I moved through each room with a notes app, writing down what I saw without deciding what to do about it yet. The list grew longer with every room.
The wood stove's firebrick was cracked in a pattern that showed heat damage over many years.
The cracks ran along the stress lines where the bricks met the floor and the back wall.
Fixable, wouldn't even need to replace all the bricks, maybe just a third.
I had done it before on a stove in my uncle's hunting cabin when I was seventeen.
The closet door in the main bedroom had jumped off its track. Ten minutes with a screwdriver.
The toilet ran. A rubber flapper. Two dollars.
The bathroom had no exhaust fan, just a small frosted window to open. A practical touch I liked, though the window glass needed replacing.
The kitchen faucet dripped.
The window in the second bedroom was stuck shut.
I wrote it all down, adding it to the list with the roof, the gutters, the siding, the septic certification. I didn't prioritize anything yet, just noting it.
The back bedroom had been used for storage. I cleared out a few cardboard boxes that held nothing but dust and shredded old newspapers. Then I crouched in the corner and peeled back a corner of the plastic sheet taped over it.
The floor along the outside wall was soft.
I pressed it with my thumb and it gave. Not badly, not through. But enough.
I peeled the sheet back further. The rot followed the outside wall for about six feet and went inward maybe eighteen inches at its worst. The wood was dark and spongy, the structure damaged.
Moisture had been getting in at the base for years. The source was almost definitely the broken gutter from outside, pushing water down the north siding and finding its way in at the foundation.
I sat back on my heels and looked at it.
Not the end of the world... but not two dollars and ten minutes either.
I took photos of it from several angles. Added it to the notes on my phone.
I spent the late afternoon working on my laptop in the trailer.
The current case was a fire damage claim out of Spokane.
Commercial building. The policyholder claimed electrical failure.
The insurance company thought it was arson.
My job was to review the paperwork and give an expert opinion on how the claim had been handled.
Whether the adjuster had followed the proper steps.
Whether the denial was justified by the evidence. My specialty.
I read through inspection reports and witness statements until my eyes started to get tired.
My phone beeped.
It was a notification from my cloud storage. One of those Memories features. "Twenty Years Ago Today."
I tapped it before I thought better of it.
The photo showed me and Sybil arm in arm. We were laughing at a party. I couldn't remember whose party it was, some work event of her father's, maybe. She was wearing the green dress that I had loved. I was wearing a suit that didn't fit quite right.
We looked happy.
I swallowed hard, remembering that night. How we had barely made it through the front door before she was pulling at my tie. How we had ended up on the living room floor because the bedroom was too far away. The look on her face when I said I wanted to put a baby inside her.
That was two years into our marriage. When everything was still new and exciting. When I still believed the life we were building together was the life I wanted.
Twenty years ago.
I went into the app's settings and turned off the Memories notifications.
I made a simple dinner on the propane stove. Eggs and the last of the bread I had bought two days ago. I ate on the porch, sitting in a folding camp chair from the trailer, watching the early evening light over the trees.
The pond had gone mirror-flat in the windless evening. The last light sat on its surface in a long gold stripe. The sky above the treeline was turning pink and orange and a deep purple that seemed to come from somewhere beyond the horizon.
I wondered what Claire Beaumont was doing now. What she was wearing.
I cleared my mind of thoughts of my beautiful neighbor, of her red hair and green eyes and the freckles over the bridge of her nose. The way her breasts swelled inside her shirt...
Quit it.
I shook my head. I didn't need the distraction of a woman I had just met. I had enough to think about without adding that complication.
I needed supplies. I needed to see Port Chasten and get a sense of what the town offered and what it didn't. I needed groceries. Some hardware. A conversation with someone who wasn't me.
If I was honest, I needed to be somewhere that wasn't this cabin for a few hours. Not because the cabin was wrong, but because being alone in a new place with a list of problems was a special kind of loneliness. A man could admit that without being defeated by it.
I would drive into Port Chasten in the morning.