LITMIR.BIZ

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laughed a bit at that. “Yes, a church camp. I haven’t been to church in a while, but my daughters never lost the faith their mother did.”

      Nori hadn’t been to church since her husband’s funeral. Sometimes she wondered if God had forgotten all about her. He had looked the other way when that drunk had barreled into her young, strong husband, out for an early morning jog. It felt to her that God’s back had been turned on her ever since.

      “I’m sorry that you lost your faith.” His words sounded genuine. He paused before he said, “I just found mine. I’m still finding mine. I still have a lot to work out. Not in God’s love to me, but in my own life.”

      It was an odd sort of moment. She’d had the idea that Steve might be someone she could talk to, that he was a listening sort of man, that he would somehow understand everything she had gone through and why it was that she had lost her faith. But then he had stiffened and his face darkened.

      They said goodbye and she stood on her porch and watched until his truck was out of sight.

      As she made her way back inside something felt curious. She was sure she’d left all the windows open when she went kayaking. Had Steve shut them all? When would he have had time to do that?

      TWO

      Nori Edwards was nothing like he expected. Steve leaned against the gas pump at Earl’s Gas and Convenience and filled his truck. From Marlene and her husband, Roy, he’d heard a lot about the woman who had bought Trail’s End, but he hadn’t met her until today. Everyone in town had a comment or two about “that woman who bought Trail’s End.”

      The place had a history, he knew. Five years ago Earl had bought Trail’s End from the couple who had run it for fifteen years. They were tired of the upkeep. Earl wanted to winterize the cabins and turn it into a winter rental place.

      Shortly after he bought it, Earl fell off a cabin he was roofing and broke a leg and injured his back. It had turned into something that was chronic. He put Trail’s End up for sale shortly after he realized his back wouldn’t get better.

      Yes, the place had a history.

      There was nothing wrong with Trail’s End. The workmanship in the lodge was exquisite. The location was superb. The view was magnificent. Trail’s End had a lot going for it.

      It was something else.

      It was all about what had gone on out there two years ago. Steve frowned as he hung the gas nozzle back up and went inside to pay.

      He plunked his credit card down on the counter. “Chase around?”

      Joe, who’d been out of high school for two years, was a year older than his brother Chase. The sons mostly ran the place, now that their father, Earl, was laid up. Chase worked here part-time, but did a lot of other jobs in town.

      Joe leaned his long body into the counter and cracked his gum. “Haven’t seen him. Why?”

      “I may have some work.”

      Joe picked up the credit card and regarded him with his small eyes. “What kind of work?”

      “What I have is general work—heavy lifting, clearing brush, groundwork, digging, drywall, lots of hammering and nailing. If you see Chase let him know I’m looking for him, will ya?”

      “I think he went out shooting.” He rubbed the side of his thin nose with the end of a pencil. He was staring at Steve.

      Steve shook his head. He was not pleased that Joe and Chase kept guns. Steve used to own guns. He didn’t anymore.

      Joe said, “That work you’re talking about, that’s up at them cottages, right? Them ghost cottages.”

      Ghost cottages. Steve put his credit card back into his wallet and said, “They aren’t ghost cottages.”

      He wished Joe and Chase would get back into the church—all the kids for that matter. Many of them had this idea that Trail’s End was cursed, inhabited by ghosts, and that serial killers roamed the forest behind the lodge and cabins. There was nothing that he or the pastor in their church could do to shake that. And it all went back to two years ago when a girl, one of their group, had disappeared from that very place. Or so it was thought.

      “How was it out there? What’s that lady like in real life?” Joe asked.

      Steve tried for a deadpan. “Yes, Joe, I’m here to report that I was out there. She was howling at the moon. Already all the cottages are burning, and sacrifices are being offered.”

      At this, Joe’s reptilian eyes went as wide as Steve had ever seen them. He rubbed at a spot beside his nose. “You kidding me, right?”

      “No, I’m not kidding. It really happened. Of course I’m kidding.”

      Steve signed the credit card slip, slapped the countertop with his hand and said, “Just let Chase know I’m looking for him, will ya?”

      Back in his truck, Steve tore open some candy and withdrew a few pieces of licorice. “Hey, Chester, whaddya think? You think everyone around here is nuts?”

      His dog, who’d been sitting on the front seat, wagged his tail and came over for an ear scratch.

      “Back,” Steve ordered.

      Chester immediately obeyed and jumped into the backseat.

      Steve had a couple more stops to make before home, where he and Chester would go for a long run along the lake. On the way out to find Connolly, another recent high school graduate who had worked for Steve in the past, he thought about the cottages. He knew they weren’t haunted, but he also knew that “something” had happened out there, something that so terrified the kids in the town that many of them wanted nothing to do with Trail’s End. The mere mention of Trail’s End around Selena or Chase made them clam up and turn away. And Nori had bought the place with no knowledge of any of this, as far as he could tell.

      He thought about her. He had noticed her wedding ring right away Where was her husband? Her eyes had seemed so sad when she talked about her daughters and their “father.”

      She hadn’t said “my husband,” she had said, “their father.” Obviously, she and her husband were estranged. Maybe this was a trial separation. Perhaps they were trying to work things out. And then another thought—maybe her husband was, even now, in Iraq or Afghanistan. He knew from experience that some military wives didn’t like to talk about deployments. Maybe this accounted for the sadness in her eyes.

      God, he prayed. Help me to be her friend.

      And then there was the matter of her faith. Her daughters went to church. She didn’t. She had lost her faith, she said. Did that have to do with the estrangement?

      For someone to have found the faith and then deliberately move away from it was something Steve couldn’t understand. When he found God it was like a whole new place opened up in his life, a place he had walled off and protected for so many years. Years lived emotionally distant from his wife and son.

      But by the time he found God, it was too late. His wife had left him and taken their son and gone to Florida.

      He used to blame his former job for wrecking his marriage. Steve had been a part of an elite corps of the military. It wasn’t until finding his way to faith in God that he realized it was him, and not his job.

      He remembered pleading with his ex-wife, Julie, not to leave and take their son to Florida with her. “How can you leave? How can you take Jeffrey so far from me?” he had demanded, crying. It was the first time he had actually wept real tears in a decade. He had seen so much in the military. He had walled off so much of his life. It was like all of his emotions up to that point had been cauterized.

      Julie had flipped her blond hair behind her ears and retorted, “And that matters to you all of a sudden? You’re never here anyway. You haven’t been here for any of Jeffrey’s moments. Not Jeffrey’s soccer games,

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