Cold River - Carla Neggers [16]
She stepped among the evergreens, her snowshoes and ski poles sinking into the fresh powder. The snow sparkled in the midday sun. There was no wind. The air was cold and dry, the trees creating still shadows under the cloudless, clear late-December sky. Exertion and her layers had kept her warm on her hike. She’d kept hydrated with sips of water, and although not hungry, she’d forced herself to eat a couple of energy bars.
Devin had found Drew’s body at the top of the shorter, steeper trail up the north side of the mountain, two hundred yards back through the woods. By then, much of the wet spring snow had melted and there were no tracks left to follow, at least none that anyone had noticed. As a result, no one had known about the cabin until five weeks ago, when Nora Asher, with Devin right behind her, had discovered it.
On sleepless nights, Devin would describe the cabin’s location in detail. He’d drawn maps and noted landmarks—the trail, the tree-covered but distinctive knoll, the cluster of spruce trees.
This was the right place.
A clump of snow dropped into a drift as Hannah brushed past a gnarled spruce.
A chickadee fluttered out from among the evergreen branches and flew up into a tall, bare oak tree.
She couldn’t remember when she’d been to a place so quiet, so isolated.
Why had she come alone?
“You don’t let emotions dictate your actions,” Drew had told her.
Well, she just had.
“I wouldn’t feel nearly as crazy if I’d brought a dog,” she said half aloud. Rose Cameron, Drew’s only daughter, trained search-and-rescue dogs and handled one of her own. She could have recommended a dog who’d have appreciated a good run in the snow.
But Hannah couldn’t make herself smile. She continued past the spruce into a small clearing, which Devin had also described. After years of searching, Drew Cameron had finally come upon what he’d believed to be the site of the original Cameron dwelling in Black Falls. He’d cut down trees in the immediate area and, in apparent secret, had built a post-and-beam cabin on the old foundation.
Hannah spotted a tiny, batten-wood cabin on the far edge of the knoll and almost sank to her knees with emotion. This was it—this was Drew’s cabin.
This was the place where Devin and the three people with him had almost died.
Where his would-be killer had died.
Her snowshoes almost floating in the drifts, she hardly made a sound as she crossed the clearing. She had no time to waste. She leaned her poles against the exterior of the cabin and squatted down, using both hands to scoop snow away from any exposed section of the foundation.
About ten inches of the foundation extended aboveground. She wasn’t a stonemason herself, but she could see it was rubble-stone construction, which made sense. Two hundred years ago, breakage would have been more practical—easier to find, dig up and haul—than whole stones.
Drew had placed a thick sill beam on the foundation, creating even more of a protective barrier between the ground and the cabin itself.
Hannah dug as much snow as possible out of the rock and saw that both the remains of the original foundation and any rebuilding Drew had done were dry construction. That meant he hadn’t had to figure out how to get mortar up here or decide between using an old-style lime-and-sand mortar or a modern cement. A strict historic renovation would have called for original materials where possible.
Hannah had crawled around in enough old cellar holes to have an idea of the work involved in rebuilding a foundation that had been left to the elements for generations. She remembered the fallen stones, caved-in dirt, trees and brush often growing right in the middle of what had once been someone’s home.
She stood up on her snowshoes. Drew hadn’t rebuilt the original chimney, opting instead for a woodstove that he hadn’t lived to hook up. He could have