He hefted the wood in the living room and set it beside a potbellied stove. Then he levered it open, balled up some newspaper, and stacked the wood around it. He struck a match, let the paper catch, and blew on it to get it going before levering the door shut once more.
“Make yourself at home,” Grizz told her while he went to brew coffee. From the corner of his eye, he noticed how she was eyeing the two matching blue recliners dubiously, probably not sure if once she sank into the cushion she could climb out again in her condition. “It’s okay,” he encouraged. “I don’t have fleas.”
She lowered herself and waited, rocking in the chair. Grizz went into his kitchen and fired up the gas burner under the percolator. This morning’s coffee, a little tarry on reheating, but his hospitality had limits.
“I added in cream and sugar,” he told her when he returned with two mugs. “The coffee’s a little thick otherwise.” He stayed standing, leaning against a bookshelf that held his collection of Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour novels.
Clara took it from his hands, mumbling her thanks. “You probably wonder why I’m here.” She took a sip, winced. Her other hand was in her pocket, and when she took it out, two hooked and bloody claws lay curled against the pinkness of her palm.
“Is that what I think it is?”
“It’ll live, I’m sure. I rescued it from a trap.”
“How’d you manage that?”
Her palm closed around the claws, and she pocketed them again. “I’ve heard talk that you and your son raised them.”
“Seth did. I didn’t want anything to do with coyotes. I warned Seth what might happen once they got big. They stayed out of trouble, till now.”
She watched his face. “I have a feeling they’re looking for him,” she said. “They don’t understand he’s gone.”
Grizz was quiet, thinking on how Seth loved the land in different ways than him. The farmwork he detested, anything involving machines. Had Seth inherited the land he would have let the lower forty, down near the river, become CRP land and return to its natural state. “I don’t want anything bad to happen to those animals. They’re a living reminder of my son.”
“What can we do?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
Her smile was faint, nervous. She still seemed agitated, her hands in that pocket as though claws were some kind of totem. Not many women would have gone to an animal in a trap or picked up something like that from the ground.
“There’s another reason I came, something I have to ask you. Around twenty years ago there was a car accident. A woman went off the road not far from your property. She tried to make it back through the storm. I was told a baby was rescued.”
The Duchess. Yes, those eyes. He knew her now.
Clara held up her damaged hand. “I was that baby.”
Grizz came over and sat down in the other chair. “Seth knew didn’t he? He figured out who you were.”
A log broke inside the stove and settled with a crackling thump. If Seth had known, then so had others. “Will you tell me the story? I’d like to hear it. The sheriff saved my life if what they say is true.”
Grizz rubbed the side of his chest where a knot had formed, a tightness in his breathing. “Saved you? That’s the story they tell?”
She nodded, and he tried to concentrate as she told bits and pieces of the story that had come to her from her father: her mother’s madness, the car abandoned in the storm, the snowy woods she tried to cross to safety. “Other people have recognized me. One old woman even called me Duchess, which is what they called my mother. There’s a lot my father never told me. I think he was still very angry with my mother.”
Grizz drew in a deep breath. “Not a winter passes when I don’t think about her. The man in the car with Sylvia, the one who broke his neck? He was my brother, Wylie. I was going to stay on the farm so Wylie could go away to school. He had a knack for languages, always did, but he was in all sorts of trouble. Fights at school. Hot-wired a car and ditched it in the river. Your father taught at the high school, thought all the boy needed was some purpose, direction. Wylie started correspondence classes in German from the university. He needed a