Chapter 20 #2
Why would August not simply move himself to Maine? Because his lover could follow, and keep following him, with the inexhaustible resources of wealth, anywhere on earth he went.
What would Raberding do if he learned his trophy lover was alive and half-naked in a cabin with someone else? Laurie didn’t especially want to find out, and he wasn’t August. Raberding’s grief had seemed sincere, but his possessiveness equally so.
If all this turned out to be the truth… Chary Wright, darn it all, had had a damned good reason to lie to him. To be terrified of Laurie’s newsman presence in his home and in his life, no matter what Laurie said about confidentiality.
Laurie turned away from the fields, fresh with guilt and revelation.
He didn’t think he could bear to deceive Chary with more of his petty, childish ways and means.
Not this morning. But the pickers had half a morning’s work left yet, and so, he had some time before they would leave the barrens.
With August accounted for and occupied, getting his physical “workout” in, Laurie decided to indulge his curiosity about the man’s hideaway cabin.
He found it quicker than he expected. The path there and back was clearly marked now he was looking for it; not looking for it, the path could’ve passed for an overlarge deer trail.
Perhaps a caribou trail, if they hadn’t yet been poached to extinction by rich men.
(Laurie had observational basis for this assumption, not just his own bias: in the train dining car, he’d heard a pair of businessmen loudly grumble about the recent Maine law in force that prohibited hunting the beasts.)
Up close, the cabin looked to be at least two centuries old.
A fur trader’s cabin or a very early settler’s; Laurie wondered how much blood the thing had seen, animal and human.
Was it French-built or English? How many times had it housed men of industry and bloodshed?
The loggers who sold to plantation owners, the shipbuilders who built the ships for slaves, the settlers who fought and killed to stay rooted on stolen, blueberry-covered ground?
The glass in the windows was modern, thick and clear plate, four-paned: Chary’s doing, maybe.
On the house tour, the man had revealed a small glass furnace in the cellar, which at last bore fruit to that morning in March, when he had brought home a wagonful of silica-feldspar.
Chary’s hobbying had produced baskets of eyes and paperweights, sheets of stained glass and jars and bottles, all done under a perfectionist’s eye; a windowpane would probably be no more than a moment.
Laurie pushed aside the shutters, cupped his hands, and peered in. Dark, dusty, and empty. The not-a-butler Brasher wasn’t a butler there, either.
In the tradition of rural houses everywhere, the door was not locked.
Laurie earnestly doubted he’d find much interesting there unless August were careless.
Laurie always tried to check for carelessness, though, given the chance—humans were chronically lazy and often forgetful.
In the event carelessness were found to be lacking, that spoke of something too: paranoia.
Both paranoia and its younger brother caution had their reasons.
He shut the door behind him. It was immediately cool and damp inside, a haven in summer and probably fairly warm in winter; that was thanks to the wattle-and-daub plastering.
Dusty though it might have been around the corners and on the windowsills, no mice skittered away across the plank floor.
There was a bed, a table with basin and mirror, and two chairs.
A clothes, or maybe blanket, chest, cedar.
A cold cast-iron woodstove had been fitted after the fact into a stone hearth.
Beside it was a pantry-box, steel, welded in the new electric-arc way by someone who knew what they were doing.
This wasn’t locked either, probably because it was both latched and heavy enough to be effective against anything other than humans, or perhaps raccoons. Laurie hinged it open.
Jam: jars and jars of it, home-canned. “The hell?”
He picked up one jar. They didn’t look like the jars Chary had iterated upon beside his cellar-bound furnace; those had been regular Masons, which even Laurie could recognize.
These were little jars shaped like miniature, squat milk bottles, with no screw threads but a significant lip and a glass lid.
The face of it said in glittering all-caps: Heracles Strongneck.
What had Raberding said? The jar-canning seals August had stolen had failed utterly?
These had not. The lids were clear glass, round, sandwiched beneath their rim with rubber.
A steel wire bail held all three pieces—jar, seal, lid—together tight and snug.
The jam inside was perfect and glossy; it sloshed thickly when Laurie tipped it.
He undid the wire bail, daringly, and the seal remained.
Surprising. But worth killing gaffers for? He wasn’t sure.
Raberding said Brooklyn Glass had gone back to tin screw-ons. That the trade secrets August had stolen were useless.
He closed the pantry-box lid. Who’d lied and to whom? Raberding to him, or August to Raberding?
The bed looked lumpen in a shared kind of way.
There was nothing beneath the pillow. Laurie lifted the mattress and inspected the rope supports beneath—he couldn’t help but notice it had a fair bit more bracing than the usual frame—“Next thing, welds here, too, boys, Bethlehem Steel,” he murmured—but there was nothing. Dust beneath the bed, too.
The cedar chest, unlocked by a key left in it, held clothes and nothing else. No false bottoms or false lids or sliding compartments.
Laurie went out to the outhouse. He was amused by a little glass cloche specifically made to hold a roll of toilet paper, splinter-free. Priorities. But the outhouse yielded nothing hidden; at least, if there were anything, it wasn’t worth the trouble. He went back into the cabin.