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Someone had recently tapped into the cabin’s water supply.

Suze stared at the patterns in front of her, shades of brown with flashes of white running through it, and thought about leaving the hole for Andy to find when he came along the road in two or three hours. But without knowing quite why, she found herself scraping the dirt back over the pipe, slowly at first, then more rapidly, as if she had heard the old man’s truck chugging up from the road. She scraped and tamped and scraped some more, getting up to walk the fresh mound flat with her boots. She kicked some of the leaves back over the trampled earth, and then went across the drive to the inside curve where the gravel accumulated and scooped up one trowel-load after another, flinging the gravel over the offending patch until it had obscured in her vision.

When she was finished, she was satisfied to note that a legally blind woman could do a better job of concealment than her thieving neighbor had at night. She scrubbed at her caked hands, then climbed cautiously down the confusing darkness of the stream bank to where the water played, and washed the dirt from her hands and the trowel blade, humming under her breath.

When Andy drove up later that afternoon, she had coffee for him, money for the two bottles he brought her, and questions. She made it seem like a friendly chat, sitting him down on the porch to talk over the projects he was near to finishing up, suggesting one or two more things that Janna might have had in mind (the roof, for one—Andy didn’t think the flat area had been done right, and was going to leak come a heavy storm.)

Then she casually asked, “Do you have a lot of illegal building around here?”

“What, like people neglecting to call the building inspectors when they’re adding a room? Sure.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of building from scratch.”

“That’d be tough to do,” he said after a moment’s judicious thought. “Hard to hide the access road, for one thing. The neighbors might not report them, but the inspectors are up and down these hills all the time; they’d spot it eventually.”

“What if you didn’t build an access road?”

“Then how’d you get in and out? It’s a fair walk to town. And how’d you take delivery of building materials? Unless you’re talking about a teepee, or a cave with a bush dragged over the mouth, you’d need wood, cement, window glass. There’s only so far you can carry a sheet of plywood through the bushes. Why do you ask?”

“I was just wondering how hard it would be to live completely off the land in these hills.”

“Pretty tough. Oh, there’s probably a few here and there, but I’d doubt they stay for long. One winter’d do it for any Thoreau fantasies. You haven’t been bothered by any strangers, have you?” the old man said, suddenly catching on to the gist of the conversation.

“Oh, no. Just something Courtney and I were talking about the other day, got me to wondering. Now, about that roof . . .”

The next night, Suze was not disturbed by the sound of digging. Nor the next, and although she knew that she should report her mysterious, water-usurping neighbor, it seemed to her that if all he wanted was a little clean water, she couldn’t really begrudge him. After all, she was living here off the goodwill of a woman she barely knew; why not this Thoreau in the woods?

And then came the call from the nursing home, the long-awaited, nearly despaired-of call to say that Janna seemed to be waking up and alert, and maybe Suze would like to come and talk to her? In the flurry of the days that followed, in the exhilaration of feeling that limp hand finally squeeze back, in the first slurred words from the long-empty mouth, the digging noises were forgotten. The weaving was neglected for long hours at the nursing home, and Courtney’s housekeeping and shopping skills were supplanted by those of driving Suze and pushing Janna’s chair through the grounds.

Two weeks later, on a spectacular summer’s Sunday afternoon, Janna’s doctor asked Suze to stop