Two weeks prior, Lorna had fled into the wilderness to an old hunting cabin, the so-called Haugstad place, with her lover Miranda. Miranda was the reason she’d discovered the courage to leave her husband Bruce, the reason he grabbed a fistful of Lorna’s hair and threw her down a flight of concrete stairs in the parking garage of Sea-Tac airport. That was the second time Lorna had tried to escape with their daughter Orillia. Sweet Orillia, eleven years old next month, was safe in Florida with relatives. Lorna missed her daughter, but slept better knowing she was far from Bruce’s reach. He wasn’t interested in going after the child; at least not as his first order of business.
Bruce was a vengeful man, and Lorna feared him the way she might fear a hurricane, a volcano, a flood. His rages overwhelmed and obliterated his impulse control. Bruce was a force of nature, all right, and capable of far worse than breaking her leg. He owned a gun and a collection of knives, had done time years ago for stabbing somebody during a fight over a gambling debt. He often got drunk and sat in his easy chair cleaning his pistol or sharpening a large, cruel-looking blade he called an Arkansas toothpick.
So, it came to this: Lorna and Miranda shacked up in the mountains while Lorna’s estranged husband, free on bail, awaited trial back in Seattle. Money wasn’t a problem—Bruce made plenty as a manager at a lumber company, and Lorna had helped herself to a healthy portion of it when she headed for the hills.
Both women were loners by necessity—or device, as the case might be—who’d met at a cocktail party thrown by one of Bruce’s colleagues and clicked on contact. Lorna hadn’t worked since her stint as a movie-theater clerk during college—Bruce had insisted she stay home and raise Orillia, and when Orillia grew older, he dropped his pretenses and punched Lorna in the jaw after she pressed the subject of getting a job, beginning a career. She’d dreamed of going to grad school for a degree in social work.
Miranda was a semiretired artist, acclaimed in certain quarters and much in demand for her wax sculptures. She cheerfully set up a mini studio in the spare bedroom, strictly to keep her hand in. Photography was her passion of late, and she’d brought along several complicated and expensive cameras. She was also the widow of a once-famous sculptor. Between her work and her husband’s royalties, she wasn’t exactly rich, but not exactly poor, either. They’d survive a couple of months “roughing it.” Miranda suggested they consider it a vacation, an advance celebration of “Brucifer’s” (her pet name for Lorna’s soon-to-be ex) impending stint as a guest of King County Jail.
She’d secured the cabin through a labyrinthine network of connections. Miranda’s second (or was it third?) cousin gave them a ring of keys and a map to find the property. It sat in the mountains, ten miles from civilization amid high timber and a tangle of abandoned logging roads. The driveway was cut into a steep hillside—a hundred-yard-long dirt track hidden by masses of brush and trees. The perfect bolthole.
Bruce wouldn’t find them here, in the catbird’s seat overlooking nowhere.
——
Lorna arrived home a few minutes before nightfall. Miranda came to the porch and waved. She was tall, her hair long and burnished auburn, her skin dusky and unblemished. Lorna thought her beautiful—lush and ripe, vaguely Rubenesque. A contrast to Lorna’s own paleness, her angular, sinewy build. She thought it amusing that their personalities reflected their physiognomies—Miranda tended to be placid and yielding and sweetly melancholy, while Lorna was all sharp edges.
Miranda helped bring in the groceries. She’d volunteered to drive into town and fetch them herself, but Lorna refused, and the reason why went unspoken, although it loomed large. A lot more than her leg needed healing. Bruce had done the shopping, paid the bills, made every decision for thirteen torturous years. Not all at once, but gradually, until he crushed her, smothered her, with his so-called love. That was over. A little more pain and suffering in the service of emancipation—figuratively and literally—following a lost decade seemed appropriate.
The Haugstad cabin was practically a fossil and possessed of a dark history that Miranda hinted at but coyly refused to disclose. It was in solid repair for a building constructed in the 1920s—on the cozy side, even: thick slab walls and a mossy shake roof. Two bedrooms, a pantry, a loft, a cramped toilet and bath, and a living room with a kitchenette tucked in the corner. The cellar’s trapdoor was concealed inside the pantry. She had no intention of going down there. She hated spiders and all the other creepy-crawlies sure to infest that wet and lightless space. Nor did she like the tattered bearskin rug before the fireplace, nor the oil painting of a hunter in buckskins stalking along a ridge beneath a twilit sky, nor a smaller portrait of a stag with jagged horns in menacing silhouette atop a cliff, also at sunset. Lorna detested the idea of hunting, preferred not to ponder where the chicken in chicken soup came from, much less the fate of cattle. These artifacts of minds and philosophies so divergent from her own were disquieting.
There were a few modern renovations. A portable generator provided electricity to power the plumbing and lights. No phone, however. Not that it mattered—her cell reception was passable despite the rugged terrain. The elevation and eastern exposure also enabled the transistor radio to capture a decent signal.
Miranda raised an eyebrow when she came across the bottles of Old Crow. She stuck them in a cabinet without comment. They made a simple pasta together with peaches on the side and a glass or three of wine for dessert. Later, they relaxed near the fire. Conversation lapsed into a comfortable silence until Lorna chuckled upon recalling the bartender’s portentous question, which seemed inane rather than sinister now that she was half-drunk and drowsing in her lover’s arms. Miranda asked what was so funny, and Lorna told her about the tavern incident.
“Man alive, I found something weird today,” Miranda said. She’d stiffened when Lorna described shooting tequila. Lorna’s drinking was a bone of contention. She’d hit the bottle when Orillia went into first grade, leaving her alone at the house for the majority of too many lonely days. At first it’d been innocent enough: A nip or two of cooking sherry, the occasional glass of wine during the soaps, then the occasional bottle of wine, then the occasional bottle of Maker’s Mark or Johnnie Walker, and finally, the bottle was open and in her hand five minutes after Orillia skipped to the bus and the cork didn’t go back in until five minutes before her little girl came home. Since she and Miranda became an item, she’d striven to restrict her boozing to social occasions, dinner, and the like. But sweet Jesus, fuck. At least she hadn’t broken down and started smoking again.
“Where’d you go?” Lorna said.
“That trail behind the woodshed. I wanted some photographs. Being cooped up in here is driving me a teensy bit bonkers.”
“So, how weird was it?”
“Maybe weird isn’t quite the word. Gross. Gross is more accurate.”
“You’re killing me.”
“That trail goes a long way. I think deer use it as a path because it’s really narrow but well beaten. We should hike to the end one of these days, see how far it goes. I’m curious where it ends.”
“Trails don’t end; they just peter out. We’ll get lost and spend the winter gnawing bark like the Donners.”