The Writing on the Wall A Novel - By W. D. Wetherell Page 0,3

too, from the mud in the gullies. Black-eyed Susans grew everywhere, with purple nettles and tough-looking gorse. Flowers had always been her joy in life, wildflowers especially, so this, she decided, is where she would come during breaks in work.

The sign turned out to be farther away than it looked. She walked for another ten minutes, and what she found when she got there surprised her considerably.

You are standing on the 45th parallel it read, in dignified bronze script. Halfway between the Equator and the North Pole.

And this time she did smile—tentatively, surprised at herself, but finally letting it have its way. What amused her was to think that Jeannie’s house lay a quarter mile closer to the Arctic than it did the tropics, and how this must explain the feeling, so strong when she arrived during the night, of sliding toward the planet’s edge.

Irony was good for her—joined with the sunshine it sharpened her vision so she could see things plain. She turned and faced the direction of the house. It lay centered in a frame made by the steep hill behind it and the winding trout stream across the road—bigger than it seemed up close, boxier, uglier, squatting with a hasty, improvised look on its overgrown scrub of an acre, despite the fact it had endured there almost a century. The sharp eaves she had stood under during the night were plainly visible splitting the house in two, only now it seemed less like a steeple than a stubby guided missile ready to be launched from the metal gambrel of the roof. The siding, with the sun slanting against it, was a chocolate color fading toward leather, though many boards were in the process of dropping off. The chimneys, all three of them, tilted toward the roadside, and the one that sagged furthest pressed against a rusty TV antenna that was almost bent in half.

Lower, partly obscured by trees, was the porch, with screens blackened from mildew and totally opaque. The bay windows, bulging out on either side, seemed like the turrets of a battleship ready to blast anything approaching from the road. And that was what the house suggested, seen from the distance—great fragility and great strength, so she simultaneously felt surprise that it was there in the first place and certainty that it had been there forever.

“Quaint,” Jeannie had called it, when all other adjectives failed. But it was the exact opposite of quaint.

Well beyond the house, just before the road curved out of sight, was a smaller, even shabbier, house, but it was too far away to tell if it was occupied. The hill directly behind Jeannie’s was steep and rocky, cutting off any view toward the west, but the hills on the sides sloped more gently, so perhaps a sunset sometimes managed to sneak through. The fields around the house were open, but overgrown and swampy, and it was impossible to tell whether anyone cared after them. The forest started at the base of the hill, with thicker, more serious looking trees than the handful clustered around the house.

There was something Western in the landscape that surprised her, at least if you faded out the green. Not so much where she and Dan lived, but the high northern tier of Montana where they had gone on camping trips when Cassie was little. Jeannie had warned her that she would find the sky small and claustrophobic compared to what she was used to, but it wasn’t that way at all, and to the northeast, across the stream, the hills uncoiled toward Canada, widening the horizon. In walking back to the house she noticed two parallel tracks worn deep into the meadow grass, reminding her of trails left by pioneers back on the prairies. Had wagon wheels cut them? She taught middle school science, not history, but she was reasonably sure the settlers who came here first had not used covered wagons.

She approached the house from the rear this time, pushing her way through the wild honeysuckle separating it from the meadow, scaring up some robins. There were shabby outbuildings, one filled with soggy black firewood, the other looking like a cross between a chicken coop and a barn. Swallow nests drooped in pendants from the rafters, but they were dry and sterile looking, fit for ghost birds, not live ones. Both buildings, in Jeannie’s plans, were doomed to immediate demolition. A neglected stone wall marked the back of the property, now just a rock pile,