Cold River - Carla Neggers [5]
Sunrise wouldn’t come for another hour, but she could see white drifts of new snow on the ice and exposed rocks of the shallow river, and, on its banks, the silhouettes of naked trees, dormant for the long, cold northern New England winter.
She’d finally given up on sleep and was dressed and finished with her to-do list for Sean Cameron. She’d itemized everything his house on the town green needed, from painting the woodwork to replacing the gutters and fixing the leak in the cellar. He hadn’t asked for a list, but the holidays were over, things needed to be done and he was in town.
Strike while the iron is hot, her mother would say.
As Hannah turned from the window, she admitted to herself that she wasn’t ready to crack open her law books and start her marathon of studying for her bar exam in a few months.
She still had too many images of the past five weeks to keep at bay.
She made her bed, pulling up the simple patchwork quilt her mother had sewn for her, using scraps of fabric she’d collected from people at work. Hannah had debated putting it in mothballs, but her mother had never been one to not use what she owned—and she’d sewn things to be used. They’d been living in the hollow out on the river then. Mary Shay had never liked town. She’d learned the names of the different birds in the area and had enjoyed putting up feeders during the winter. She’d aspired to so little and yet had suffered so much. She’d fallen for the wrong man. She’d been bitten by the wrong tick.
Hannah shot out of her bedroom. Better to think about how to get her absentee landlord to spring for needed maintenance on his Vermont house.
Anything, she thought, to keep her mind off cold-blooded killers.
She headed up the short hall to the small kitchen. Its window—one of the ones that needed replacing—looked down on Elm Street and the jut of the one-story ell that had been added to the house eighty years ago and was now part of the Three Sisters Café.
Neither of her brothers was up yet. She hadn’t heard Devin pacing in the night or tossing and turning in his bedroom next to hers. She hoped that was a good sign. He’d graduated high school in June but hadn’t decided on a course for his life. He’d moved out over the summer, living up at Black Falls Lodge while he worked for A.J. and Lauren Cameron, but he’d returned home just before Thanksgiving, after nearly becoming a victim of the hired killers who’d left Drew Cameron to die in the cold in April.
Although not specifically targeted by the killers as Devin had been, Toby wasn’t unaffected by the bloodshed in November, but he was optimistic and driven by nature. He’d already made plans for the future. In two days, Sean Cameron would fly the younger of her two brothers, his mountain bike and all his mountain-biking paraphernalia to Southern California for a minimum of three months as an exchange student. Toby would be living with the family of a mountain-biker friend, another avid downhill racer. Hannah had met them all last summer. As much as she would miss him, she had no worries for her brother’s safety or care. Toby was still a minor and had needed her permission to go to school in California, but how could she have denied him this chance?
She noticed a mountain-biking magazine he’d left open on the table. She’d done her best by both her brothers, never pretending she was anything but their older sister. She knew their relationship was different—given the gap in their ages, it would have been even if both their parents had lived.
Hannah peeked at the thermometer in the window above the table.
Seventeen degrees.
She smiled to herself. It wasn’t mountain-biking weather, but it wasn’t bad for a late-December dawn in northern New England. She wouldn’t mind a break from the long Vermont winter herself, but she had friends who were such serious winter-sports enthusiasts,