Chapter 2 #2
Discord ran in the Williamson family, perhaps more strongly than the wavy brown hair and pale, freckled skin Thora inherited.
Her grandfather never even attended these reunions because he had some long-standing beef with her uncle George. Thora was
not privy to the reason for all this animosity, if one could be identified, but she hated getting whisked away from Juniper
when she was having fun with her cousins.
Rather than actually hashing out whatever their differences were, people in her family dug their heels in deeper and feuded
silently. Young Mack and Thora, blithely unaware, were always off chasing fireflies or catching crayfish in a creek, and the
foundations of their relationship grew on bedrock instead of sand.
“I’m not actually going to take the stuff for my mother, but I do want to see what’s there. And what shape the property is
in.”
“You’re going to buy it.”
Thora hadn’t been able to admit that to herself yet. The money Bryony gave her could result in this unimaginable gift. Her
family’s camp, no longer a place of family discord but a genuine and beautiful haven in the woods, the way she experienced
it in high school and college. And the way Uncle George always saw it.
They hopped in Mack’s car and headed out of town toward Moonrise Mountain, where Juniper stood. Moonrise Mountain Road wound steeply up, and the driveway to Juniper was little more than two muddy ruts sprinkled with gravel, veering off to the right after the third switchback.
The house was not visible from the road, more or less by design. In contrast to Hamptons estates and Newport cottages, Adirondack
camps were not meant to be admired from afar. They were meant to be an escape from—or maybe actually a return to—real life.
Traditionally made from the materials available on the property, their timber frames and cobblestone chimneys had a characteristic
charm.
On one hand, Thora appreciated the getaway nature of Juniper. But it was still a preposterous monument to wealth, a place
where people pretended to live a simple life while still having servants cook and clean for them, if the camp was sufficiently
large and the family sufficiently wealthy. As the Williamsons used to be.
Upon arrival, Thora immediately noticed that Uncle George’s bulbous vintage truck was gone. Maybe he had gotten rid of it
himself before his death, or some enterprising relative hotwired and made off with it.
The clearing around the camp was overgrown. The forest encroached on the cabin, threatening to swallow it back up. Eventually,
without sunlight on the structure, moss and lichen would thrive, gradually reintroducing that timber to the forest floor,
where new growth could emerge from the decay.
The structure itself was stately as ever, with the unique architecture specific to Adirondack great camps.
While not as opulent as the ones with bowling alleys and follies on their grounds, Juniper was a simultaneously humble and pretentious log house designed by someone with an Ivy League degree and the title of élève from L’école des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Most camps of its age had either burned down or rotted back into the earth decades
ago; Juniper was hanging on for dear life.
Built into the slope, the first level facing the driveway was a basement garage with imposing locked doors. Above that, two
stories of covered porches invited people to relax. The house was entirely made of timber, grayed with age and crisscrossing
in decorative patterns. Visitors could walk uphill around the back of the camp to enter through the kitchen door, or ascend
the rickety old staircase to the lower porch.
“Race ya!” Mack said, bolting for the stairs. Thora delighted in the girlish spirit that returned to her at this camp, and
took off after Mack.
As Mack was halfway up the first flight of stairs, a sickening crack split the air. Mack screamed. A rotted tread had given
way, sending her through the staircase. She dangled, holding on to another tread like a life preserver. Fuck. Thora ran to her.
Hooking her arms under Mack’s and leaning back with all her weight, she walked backward down a couple of steps until Mack
could sit on the solid tread below the splintered one.
“Holy shit,” Mack said, laughing nervously.
“Are you okay?” Thora asked desperately as her cousin began to inspect herself.
She could see a cut on Mack’s shin, nothing too deep, but scary nonetheless.
“Guess it’s about time for that tetanus booster,” Mack said, hissing as she gingerly removed pieces of rotting wood from her
skin.
“I didn’t even think about that,” Thora said.
Mack swiveled around on the stair, stood up, and walked back down the ground.
“Let’s go in the kitchen door instead. And I will not race you.”
“Don’t you want to go to urgent care?”
“Not until I see inside. We came all the way up here. My jaw isn’t gonna lock up if we leave in half an hour instead of now.”
“It would take a lot more than tetanus to get you to shut up.” Her cousin was notorious for being a yapper.
“Whatever it is, I hope it’s contagious,” Mack countered.
Thora stayed with Mack as they rounded the building. The kitchen door was locked, which was a good sign. Thora feared they’d
find evidence of people setting up camp in the house and potentially stealing things. Out this far, it wasn’t uncommon for
a stray hiker to break into a camp for shelter or mischief. She was more worried about her family members, though. Given how
many people had keys to the house, it might already be cleaned out.
Thora kept her access to Juniper, a classic old skeleton key, on a chain around her neck. The place was close to her heart,
metaphorically and physically. She pulled the chain over her head and fit the key into the lock. It sprang open with a satisfying
click.
The kitchen was nothing like she remembered. She’d forgotten about—or more likely blocked out—Lee Halliday’s renovations.
Lee and George hit it off the one time she invited him to Juniper, and then he spent the entire summer after their college
graduation doing these renovations. She’d cut her own visit short that summer. Once Lee started trucking in sheets of drywall,
she was too pissed off to watch him butcher the beautiful house. Maybe she too was guilty of the Williamson tendency to view
the place as a shrine.
The appliances were the same as always. An enameled gas stove with a confusing amount of hatches for an oven, and an old refrigerator that surely was called an icebox in its day, with the same rounded aesthetic as George’s old truck.
The big white sink was deep enough to bathe a small child.
It was looking a little stained from hard water, but nothing a good scrub couldn’t fix. What was unrecognizable were the walls.
Juniper was a wooden structure, inside and out. George only lived there in the summer because the harsh winters were virtually
unimpeded by the cabin. The bitter cold air creeping in made the camp impossible to keep warm.
But the kitchen’s walls were no longer uneven planks of wood whose cracks and crevices let honeyed beams of light seep into
the room. They were like any builder-grade rental property kitchen, with starkly painted walls and a tile backsplash.
She walked over to the pantry doors. Inside was the kind of all-in-one bathroom found in small European hotels. There was
a drain in the floor, making the entire room a shower. The toilet paper was tucked up into the wall, but otherwise, everything—the
toilet, sink, and mirror—was in the path of the shower’s spray. This sleek little space was like an escalator in a Gothic
cathedral. Perfectly useful and even practical, but not at all the vibe.
This was also Lee’s work.
Mack called from the camp’s one indoor communal area, known as the Great Room.
“I keep forgetting that it doesn’t look like a log cabin in here anymore,” she said.
Thora followed her in. The giant stone fireplace was the same as ever, but everything else had been updated.
Carpet on the floor, new walls, new windows.
Despite these updates, some of the old tchotchkes remained on the new windowsills.
George’s whittled figurines, made from fallen branches, populated the room with spritely little tree people.
Antique bottles caught the scant sunlight penetrating the forest canopy and glowed like gemstones.
She was spitting mad. Lee had done all this work with no permission from anyone except George, who only held some small fraction
of the property himself.
She was also mad that she had only visited George once or twice in the time between these updates and when he died. Bryony
kept her so busy that she didn’t have the time in the summer to get away to Juniper as she always had during her college years.
Bryony knew how to boil a frog, whether she realized it or not. Transcribing notes, managing correspondence with everyone
other than her editor, and helping with novel research didn’t seem especially taxing. Then the research turned into trips.