necessity or device, as the case might be, who’d met at a cocktail party thrown by one of Bruce’s colleagues and clicked on contact. Lorna hadn’t worked since her stint as a movie theater clerk during college—Bruce insisted she stay home and raise Orillia, and when Orillia grew older, he dropped his pretenses and punched Lorna in the jaw after she pressed the subject of getting a job, beginning a career. She’d dreamed of going to grad school for a degree in social work.
Miranda was a semi-retired artist; acclaimed in certain quarters and much in demand for her wax sculptures. She cheerfully set up a mini studio in the spare bedroom, strictly to keep her hand in. Photography was her passion of late and she’d brought along several complicated and expensive cameras. She was also the widow of a once famous sculptor. Between her work and her husband’s royalties, she wasn’t exactly rich, but not exactly poor either. They’d survive a couple of months “roughing it.” Miranda suggested they consider it a vacation, an advance celebration of “Brucifer’s” (her pet name for Lorna’s soon to be ex) impending stint as a guest of King County Jail.
She’d secured the cabin through a labyrinthine network of connections. Miranda’s second (or was it a third?) cousin gave them a ring of keys and a map to find the property. It sat in the mountains, ten miles from civilization amid high timber and a tangle of abandoned logging roads. The driveway was cut into a steep hillside; a hundred-yard-long dirt track hidden by masses of brush and trees. The perfect bolt-hole.
Bruce wouldn’t find them here in the catbird’s seat overlooking nowhere.
* * *
Lorna arrived home a few minutes before nightfall. Miranda came to the porch and waved. She was tall; her hair long and burnished auburn, her skin dusky and unblemished. Lorna thought her beautiful; lush and ripe, vaguely Rubenesque. A contrast to Lorna’s own paleness, her angular, sinewy build. She thought it amusing that their personalities reflected their physiognomies—Miranda tended to be placid and yielding and sweetly melancholy, while Lorna was all sharp edges.
Miranda helped bring in the groceries—she’d volunteered to drive into town and fetch them herself, but Lorna refused and the reason why went unspoken, although it loomed large. A lot more than her leg needed healing. Bruce had done the shopping, paid the bills, made every decision for thirteen, tortuous years. Not all at once, but gradually, until he crushed her, smothered her, with his so-called love. That was over. A little more pain and suffering in the service of emancipation—figuratively and literally—following a lost decade seemed appropriate.
The Haugstad Cabin was practically a fossil and possessed of a dark history that Miranda hinted at, but coyly refused to disclose. It was in solid repair for a building constructed in the 1920s; on the cozy side, even: thick, slab walls and a mossy shake roof. Two bedrooms, a pantry, a loft, a cramped toilet and bath, and a living room with a kitchenette tucked in the corner. The cellar’s trapdoor was concealed inside the pantry. She had no intention of going down there. She hated spiders and all the other creepy-crawlies sure to infest that wet and lightless space. Nor did she like the tattered bearskin rug before the fireplace, nor the oil painting of a hunter in buckskins stalking along a ridge beneath a twilit sky, nor a smaller portrait of a stag with jagged horns in menacing silhouette atop a cliff, also at sunset. Lorna detested the idea of hunting, preferred not to ponder where the chicken in chicken soup came from, much less the fate of cattle. These artifacts of minds and philosophies so divergent from her own were disquieting.
There were a few modern renovations—a portable generator provided electricity to power the plumbing and lights. No phone, however. Not that it mattered as her cell reception was passable despite the rugged terrain. The elevation and eastern exposure also enabled the transistor radio to capture a decent signal.
Miranda raised an eyebrow when she came across the bottles of Old Crow. She stuck them in a cabinet without comment. They made a simple pasta together with peaches on the side and a glass or three of wine for dessert. Later, they relaxed near the fire. Conversation lapsed into a comfortable silence until Lorna chuckled upon recalling the bartender’s portentous question, which seemed inane rather than sinister now that she was half- drunk and drowsing in her lover’s arms. Miranda asked