Part 2
“Eighty-six thousand?” Ruth opened the door but kept one hand on the poker. “How much went to the bakery?”
Jenna stood in the storm with Ruth’s red parka bundled against her chest and an insulated tote hanging from one shoulder. Snow crusted her lashes. Behind her, the path to the shack was already filling, and a pair of truck headlights glowed dimly through the trees where she had left the vehicle at the old logging gate.
“Fifty-two,” she said. “Fifty-two went to the bakery. I thought it was Claire’s money until the first notice came.”
Ruth stepped aside. Jenna entered, shut the door quickly, and set down the tote. Before she did anything else, she looked at Ruth’s stockinged feet and began to kneel.
“Don’t touch them.”
“I brought dry socks.”
“Then put them beside me. Not near the stove.”
Jenna obeyed. She had also brought a sleeping bag, two chemical warming packs, a thermos, Ruth’s blood-pressure pills, and the old green boots from the mudroom. The collection was so exactly what Claire would have chosen that Ruth knew who had packed the family’s emergencies for the past twenty years.
“Where’s my heart medicine?” Ruth asked.
Jenna went still. “It wasn’t in the drawer.”
Ruth had taken the last tablet that morning. Claire had picked up the refill in town, and Ruth had last seen the bottle in her purse. Whether leaving it behind was carelessness or something worse, Ruth could not yet tell, and she would not turn suspicion into truth simply because she was hurt.
“Your phone got one call through before I left,” Jenna said. “I told dispatch Claire had locked you out and you were headed for Tom’s shack. Then it cut out. Claire started packing your coat and the emergency tote. She told me to wait until dispatch called back, but I took the gear and the spare truck key.”
“You left the house anyway.”
“I couldn’t wait another minute.” Jenna looked at the floor. “Not again.”
Ruth pulled the red parka over the blanket, then eased the wet socks from her feet. The toes were waxy and pale, the skin on both heels mottled. She wrapped them loosely in a dry dish towel from the tote and lowered them onto the sleeping bag.
Jenna crossed to the window and looked down at the tracks beside Ruth’s uneven trail. “Those are wolf prints.”
“I know.” Ruth drank from the thermos. The water was warm, not hot, with the faint metal taste of Claire’s emergency kit.
“Did it lead you here?”
“It took the sheltered route. So did I.” The clearing was empty now. A wild animal did not have to love her for its path to matter.
Jenna crouched across the stove from her, twisting the wedding ring she still wore though the marriage had ended. The bakery had been her third attempt at beginning again after Wade left: first a cleaning company, then handmade soaps, then a narrow storefront in Duluth where she sold cardamom buns from Tom’s recipe. Ruth had lent her twelve thousand dollars and told Claire it was four.
“Start at the beginning,” Ruth said.
“Last April. The roof estimate.”
Ruth remembered signing papers at the credit union after cataract surgery, Claire’s finger guiding hers to yellow flags. Twenty thousand for shingles and chimney work, she had believed. Claire already held a durable power of attorney for Ruth’s bills. The line had been approved for far more.
“The freezer compressor died in June,” Jenna continued. “Then my landlord said I owed six months of common-area charges. Claire said she could bridge it until Christmas. She transferred the first draw into my business account.”
“And when Christmas came?”
“I was still behind.”
The second draw covered the first payments. Another paid overdue property tax on Ruth’s house and the private nurse Claire had hired during Tom’s last month, a bill Ruth had believed insurance settled. Some went to Claire’s credit cards. Most went into a business that had never earned enough to carry its rent.
“She said selling this place would put everything back,” Jenna said. “The loan, your apartment, all of it. Nobody would have to know.”
“I would know.”
“She said you’d be safer in town.”
“Would I?” Ruth looked around the shack, at the rust freckles on the stove and Tom’s initials carved under the table edge. “You two decided safety meant where I couldn’t stop you.”
Jenna’s mouth folded inward. She had cried easily all her life, often before anyone else had time to be angry. No tears came now.
“I kept telling myself Claire would fix it,” she said. “She always fixes things.”
“And I always paid after.”
Jenna nodded.
The blunt agreement hurt more than an excuse. Ruth thought of every rent check called a Christmas gift, every secret wire transfer, every time she had told Claire not to be hard on her sister. Claire had learned that competence earned her another burden. Jenna had learned that collapse summoned hands.
Ruth had called both lessons love.
“Why did you wait?” she asked. “You watched her lock that door.”
“I thought she’d let you in after a minute.”
“You heard me ask for my coat.”
Jenna stared at the poker between them. “Yes.”
“You saw me leave the porch.”
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“Claire said if I opened the door, she’d call the lender in the morning and tell them the bakery took the money. She said they’d come after me first. I sat there.” Jenna pressed both hands to her face, then dragged them down. “I sat there for eleven minutes. I counted every one.”
Ruth had expected denial. The precise ugliness of the answer left her with nowhere to put her anger.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” Jenna said. “Tell the police whatever happened. I’ll tell them too.”
“Even if it closes your bakery?”
Jenna glanced toward the empty clearing. “It should close before it costs somebody else more.”
An engine strained beyond the ridge.
Jenna rose so fast she struck the table. Light moved between the trunks, vanished, then reappeared closer. A door slammed. Ruth heard someone forcing through brush with the angry, efficient pace of a person who knew exactly where she meant to go.
Claire entered without knocking, leaving her snowshoes outside and carrying a red medical kit. Her dark hair had come loose from its clip, and there was blood along one cheek where a branch had cut her. She looked first at Ruth’s face, then at the wrapped feet, then at the distance between them and the stove.
“Good,” she said, dropping to her knees. “You kept them away from the stove.”
Her hands hovered without touching. For one second Ruth saw the daughter who had charted Tom’s morphine doses in three colors and slept upright beside his bed because Ruth could not bear the night sounds he made.
Then Claire looked at Jenna. “Dispatch called the house. They’re sending search and rescue.”
“They should.”
“Do you understand what happens when they get here?” Claire’s voice remained low, almost steady. “The loan, the unauthorized draws, what happened at the back door—it all comes out.”
“The way you left her,” Jenna said.
Claire flinched. She turned back to Ruth and unzipped the medical kit. “Mom, listen to me. Tell them we argued and you walked out. One sentence. That’s all it takes to keep both your daughters from being charged…”
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