Chapter Nineteen #2
“Some did, believe it or not. The hardy ones did, anyway. Those that had fireplaces were kept going all night, but it still must have been colder than a witch’s you-know-what.
Most of the winter people stayed nights at the inn or a motel out on the highway—it’s closed now—but yeah, some folks stayed in the cabins.
Originally, the camp was for sportsmen, hunting and fishing, but Maxine stopped permitting hunting on her land around 1990.
Only hunting since has been strictly with a camera.
She said she got as many campers with cameras as she had with shotguns and rifles. ”
Kit listened as she walked around the room, seeing it all through Greta’s eyes. “It sounds like a magical place.”
“It was, in its way. I always considered myself lucky to be here and treated like a member of the family. There were always lots of fun things to do, and the food was always the best. Your grandmother was a great cook,” Greta said.
“And a great baker as well. For those all-camper nights, she always made pound cake with blueberries for dessert. She’d send Maxine and me with the campers’ kids to pick the berries earlier in the day with strict instructions to be alert for bears.
Your grandfather always made a big deal out of giving them whistles in case they got into trouble.
We’d have the berries with the pound cake that night.
Made the kids feel part of the whole experience, you know?
Like they contributed like the ones who’d caught the fish. ”
“What, no s’mores? I thought they were the traditional camping treat.” She paused. “Were s’mores even invented when you were a kid?”
“Bite your tongue. They’ve been around since your grandmother was a kid.
My mother was a Girl Scout leader and she had a cookbook with the recipe in it.
Your grandparents put in that firepit down near the lake, and they’d do s’mores there just about every night.
Anyone who wanted to join in was welcome. ”
“Did they tell ghost stories around that campfire?” Kit recalled many a tale of hooked hands and ghostly sightings in the woods the years she went to a girls’ camp in the Pocono Mountains.
“Oh yeah. We heard some good ones.” Greta chuckled.
It was inconceivable to Kit that all that food would have been prepared in the small farmhouse kitchen by her grandmother, and she said so.
“Oh, your grandmother was something else. Like an iron woman. She’d be getting ready for the fish fries a few days in advance, and she always had her daughters helping her out, and me when I was around.
Which was most fish-fry nights. It was the best night of the week.
” Greta chuckled. “When we were in our teens, Maxine and I used to look over the boys who were up here with their families, and we’d flirt something awful with the cute ones.
’Course nothing ever came of any of it because most of the time the boys were only here for a week and Maxine and I were kept pretty busy. But it was sure fun.”
Kit tried to imagine the room filled with chatter, like a really big family dinner, and the image conjured up made her smile.
What good times they must have had. No wonder their former campers had loved coming here, enough to spend many of their summers there, enough to bring their children, and their grandchildren.
What she wouldn’t give to have sat at one of those tables, eating freshly caught trout and corn on the cob, chatting with old and new friends, and planning the next day’s fun.
She felt a little cheated that she hadn’t had the chance to do that when she was younger.
She imagined herself and Beth helping their grandmother in the kitchen and making s’mores at the firepit with the campers.
“Thanks, Greta, for helping me to see it. I wish I could have been here for some of those nights.”
“They were the best nights of the summer.”
“I bet they were.”
Kit stayed in the room for a long time after she and Greta had hung up. She wondered how it was possible to feel nostalgic for something she’d never experienced.
Not for the first time, she thought Beth should be there.
If the camp were to be sold, her sister should have the same experience of discovery as she was having.
Maybe between Ned and Abby to watch over the café, Beth could take a few days.
A week would be better, but even a few days would be better than never having seen the Camp in the Meadows at all.
Kit went back into the kitchen and hung the key on one of the nails near the back door.
She began sorting through three drawers of dish towels, some with embroidery that looked handmade, and mused over whose hands might have held the needles.
Her grandmother’s, great-grandmother’s, or some branch of her family tree further back still?
The house was quiet, but after the past few days, she enjoyed the silence, which was broken only by the call of a crow outside, or the ticking of the clock that hung on the wall next to the table.
She had already decided that when she left, she was taking that clock—a black cat with a tail that swung back and forth as it marked off the seconds.
Once she’d finished the kitchen project, she found herself with two boxes of unwanted implements to donate. She took the first box into the front hall and stacked it atop one of the boxes of old clothes.
What next?
She looked for the card with Hal Anderson’s phone number on it, then tapped it into her keypad.
When the call went to voicemail, she said, “Hal, it’s Kit Porterfield.
I was wondering if it would be okay if I took that stack of magazines from Maxine’s room.
Please give me a call back when you get a minute. ”
She’d no sooner hung up than the phone rang.
“Well, that was fast,” she said after she’d tapped “Accept.”
He laughed. “I’ve found some days I need to screen my calls. Today is one of them.”
“Let me guess. Word has gotten out about the investigation out here—”
“Oh yeah. I guess I don’t need to remind you this is a small town.”
“I’m surprised no one said anything to me when I was in Ruthie’s this morning.”
“What time were you there?”
“Early. Before seven.”
“I guess word hadn’t gone out yet. My first call came in at—hold on a minute, let me check my phone log—eight seventeen a.m.”
“So I guess I need to lay low for a few days?”
“Nah, it takes more than a few days for things to die down around here. Just accept it and go with it. People who are going to ask you about it will still want to ask when you surface, so no sense in trying to hide out, but hey, how are you feeling?”
“I’m better today, thanks for asking. I spoke with Greta earlier, and once she got over her need for a little drama, she sounded fine.”
Hal laughed. “Glad to hear she’s recovered. So you wanted to know if you could take the magazines from Maxine’s room?”
“Yes, I’m curious about why she kept a stack of old magazines so close.”
“The investigation at the house is completed. There really wasn’t any evidence to speak of.
There were no signs of injury on the remains, no blood, and as you know, Doc Steele suspects we’re dealing with a premature birth that very likely was stillborn.
No one believes a crime was committed at this point.
We’re just waiting until all the i’s are dotted and the t’s crossed to officially close the case. ”
“It will be a relief when that happens.”
“I’m sure it will be, and I’ll be sure to let you know once I know. But in the meantime, go ahead and take the magazines.”
“Thanks. And thanks for calling me back.”
“Anytime, Kit.”
She disconnected the call and slipped the phone into her pocket, then went up the steps and into Maxine’s room.
Dark powder covered the magazine covers and some of the pages.
White powder covered the dark leather of the chair and the dark wood of the dresser.
Kit picked up the pile of magazines and took them downstairs and outside.
Standing at the porch railing, she shook the magazines, one by one, over the rails to try to dispense as much of the powders as possible.
She went back into the kitchen and used a paper towel to rub off what remained.
She set the stack of magazines on the kitchen table and sat down to go through them, searching for a common theme.
It didn’t take Kit long to find what she was looking for.
As reflected in the magazines from the late 1970s and early 1980s, Miles David Easton had been posthumously discovered.
His books were the talk, not just of the town, but of most of the country.
He was the author everyone was reading. His books were the ones everyone was talking about.
There was endless speculation over who would play Conrad Morehead, who would play Penelope Greene, when the movie of The Acorn was cast. The following year, the chatter began all over again, when his second book, The Clearing, was republished, with all the same talk shows discussing who would play the leads once the film rights were sold.
Every article had photos of Miles. Handsome Miles at a book signing in Chicago, dressed in a dark suit, shirt open at the collar, his hair slightly mussed.
A softly smiling Miles, dressed as Kit had seen him in the photo next to Maxine’s bed, light-colored trousers, a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows in front of a bookstore in New York City.
The man was, in the words of one of the articles, a dreamboat.
She’d had to swallow back tears several times.
It was no wonder Maxine had kept the magazines at her elbow.
She could open any one of them at any time she chose and look at her beloved’s beautiful face and remember.
Her devotion to the man she loved had been endless.
Kit wondered if Maxine had been comforted by his constant presence or tortured.
Kit had read The Acorn and had seen the film, but not The Clearing. She could look it up online. And she’d completely missed his next three books. But reading an interview he gave in the summer of 1969 sent a shiver up her spine.
In the review, he’d revealed the title of his next book: A Cabin in the Woods: A Love Story.
Realizing Miles’s last book must have been his and Maxine’s love story was the last straw for Kit.
She let the tears fall. It was just too sad, too heartbreaking.
And to think the book—their love story!—had gone down in the plane with Miles before Maxine had even read it added more sorrow upon sorrow.
Had Maxine known he was writing about them, about her?
Maybe she did, and maybe that was why she’d burned down the cabin—if in fact she had been the one who struck the match. Had she? Had Maxine been the type of person who’d act out in such a way? Maybe it had been an accident. Maybe she’d lit the match and then regretted it the second the fire caught.
Kit really wished she knew someone who had the answer.
Someone other than Banks, of course. Though he hadn’t seemed to believe she’d set the fire.
Kit was pretty certain he wasn’t bluffing.
If he’d known either way, he’d have said something like, I can’t discuss that in that annoying tone he had whenever he knew something she wanted to know that he wasn’t going to tell her.
No, he’d said he didn’t know if Maxine had set the fire, and Kit believed him.
She sat for a long time gazing out the window, her mind free-falling: Assume Maxine set that fire on purpose. Why would she have wanted to destroy the cabin?
Maybe because that was where they’d fallen in love, the place where they’d laughed and made love and dreamed their dreams. After losing Miles, would the memories of what they’d shared beneath that roof have been so painful, and she so bereft, that she couldn’t bear to look at the place where they’d spent many happy hours?
Had her heart broken a little more each time she saw it until she reached a point where she could no longer bear to see it?
Kit wished she knew.
Dwelling on the tragedy all day, right down to the time she turned off the light for the night, led into dreams where she was there, standing by calmly, watching the flames devour cabin eleven.
She felt conflicted, as if she were supposed to be doing something but didn’t know what.
In the dream, Maxine wanted her to know something, but she hadn’t told Kit what.
She had leaned close to Kit’s ear and whispered, “You should know.”
Kit got out of bed grumbling and headed for the bathroom.
“Yes, I should know a lot of things. Like what happened between you and my mother, or whose baby that was and why it was there,” she muttered. “Oh, and thanks for swearing Banks to secrecy. So helpful.”