Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
She was back with it within a couple of minutes.
Then, for the first time since I’d returned to the living room, I left Vansi and Kaea alone to go stand on the kitchen veranda with Grace and Darcie, all three of us focused on the men struggling against the snow and the wind.
I took a couple of snapshots and thought of how quickly we’d digressed to traditional gender roles. Then again, Aaron and Ash together were stronger than the three of us. But if it looked like they were beginning to get dangerously cold, I was going to make one of them stay in the kitchen to warm up, while I did a round, and then we’d swap.
I had a feeling Grace would back me on that; every muscle in her body was taut, her eyes narrowed as she fought to keep Aaron in sight in the low visibility. “I can’t see them anymore,” she said just then. “Darcie? Luna?”
I shook my head; I’d lost sight of them long before her.
“No, they’ve gone too far.” Darcie pointed at the bright pink rope tied to the veranda railing. “It’s taut. They’re still unrolling it as they go.”
Grace exhaled long and slow—and kept on glancing at the rope. Until too much time had passed, our cheeks burning with cold and our lips chapped. “Why aren’t they back yet?” she demanded.
“Let me check the rope.” But when I tugged on the roughness of it, it was to a sense of laxity. No tension. Either they were stacking firewood onto the wide wooden cart that Ash had told us Jim kept in the barn for that purpose, or something had gone wrong.
My mouth grew dry. “How long should we wait?”
Darcie responded first, her answer pragmatic but her gaze trained in the direction of the barn. “The snow’s deeper than it looked from the inside. They’re probably having trouble pulling the cart through it. The wheels aren’t designed to navigate snow and it’ll be heavy weighed down with firewood.”
She had a point.
But Grace was a shivering, wild-eyed mess nonetheless. She began to gnaw on her fingernails. “Sorry.” She hid her hands behind her back when she saw me glance at her. “Bad habit. Can’t stop when I’m nervous.”
“I get it.”
Aaron’s voice emerged from the white at the same moment.
We called back in unison, and as soon as they got in sight, we bounded out to help them pull the heavily laden cart as close to the kitchen steps as possible. Then all five of us pitched in to carry the wood inside and to one corner of the kitchen. It’d be easy enough to take logs into the living area as needed.
The guys did two more runs before we decided we had enough to get us through the next two or three days.
My bones ached from the cold from just standing on the veranda and the quick exposure to the snow when I’d helped unload, and I didn’t begrudge Ash and Aaron their prime positions in front of the fire as they tried to thaw themselves out in the aftermath.
Grace plied both men with mugs of coffee while fussing over Aaron.
“We’re such city folk,” Ash muttered after he’d stopped shivering. “Jim would take one look at the lot of us and be ashamed at the youth of today.” He glanced up at the array of dead stag heads. “We haven’t even added a single animal head to the walls. Disgraceful.”
“No stuffed small creatures, either,” Darcie inserted, her tone as dry as the pelts of the unfortunate animals in this space. “Especially after I committed the cardinal sin of throwing out a pair of moth-eaten stuffed possums with green marble eyes.”
Aaron folded his arms. “You’re making that up.”
“Scout’s honor. One of my ancestors took up taxidermy for a hobby—only he wasn’t that good. The possums kept falling over because he stuffed them lopsided.”
Laughter, the rest of us teasing Darcie about her trophy-hunting-obsessed ancestors, and teasing one another about our descent into soft adulthood . . . until suddenly it was as if we remembered what had happened, that one of us was dead.
The silence that fell was so big it crushed.
We separated without discussion, each claiming an area of the living room as our own. Mine was against the right wall not far from the fire, the space defined by a double mattress that Grace had dressed with a floral bedspread.
A pile of spare blankets sat on an unused armchair.
We weren’t in danger from the cold here, but the same couldn’t be said for the rest of the house. Place would be an icebox. I wasn’t looking forward to visiting the toilet, and hoped I could hold it off as I sat cross-legged on the mattress, my eyes on my laptop . . . and another page of Clara’s clandestine journal, the words hidden among the images throwing me back in time.