“No, Hudson,” Ben said, as the dog started sniffing the mess.
The smell was stronger here, but not as bad as Ben had expected. The pools of blood were liquid, rippling in the breeze. The absence of birds and other scavengers made Ben think this hadn’t been here long. A fresh kill.
His eyes scanned the ruined canvas of the animal and settled on a pair of prim gray hooves. A deer, Ben thought with some relief. The anonymous quality of the shredded viscera had made his imagination spin.
The beagle walked through the carnage and began nosing around the edge of the woods.
“Might have been a bear,” Ben told Hudson.
He’d heard coyotes at night, but the men in town told him there were black bears in the woods. They’d also told him that there were wolves and mountain lions up here on the Drop, but he’d actually seen the bear tracks for himself along the edge of the lake.
“Come on,” he said.
Hudson started to bark at the trees.
“We’ll have to hose you down before you go inside.”
Ben headed back toward the gravel drive, hoping the dog would follow. But Hudson wouldn’t stop growling at the forest. Ben squinted to see what might have caught the beagle’s attention. He was a good dog and rarely fussed without a reason.
“Let’s go, Hud.” Ben turned away from the woods and took some of yesterday’s bacon out of a plastic bag he kept in his pocket. “Look what I’ve got for you.”
Hudson veered around and licked the bacon fragments from Ben’s hand.
“Come on, you smelly dog,” he said, rubbing Hudson on the side of one ear. He took off in a jog back to the Crofts, and the beagle trotted after him.
A great elm stood a solitary watch on the lip of the Drop, and when Ben reached its shadow he glanced back at the woods by the ruined building. All he saw were trees rocking gently in the updraft from the valley.
2
The Crofts was a monster.
The lawyer who’d handled the sale told Ben it had been the original home of the Swann family, the first colonists to settle the Drop. It had begun as a simple residence, but he said they’d added to it over the years. Then again, that had been obvious.
Rising to four floors, the house had sixty-five rooms, five entry-ways, and four staircases. Though sections of the building had been constructed centuries apart, its exterior was wrapped in uniform walls of gray granite. It sat like a castle on the lip of the Drop, overlooking the village of Swannhaven and the rest of the valley.
It had been a farming estate and was ancient by the metric of the New World, built back when agriculture was the only game in the rambling North Country. It hadn’t been a fully operational farm since the 1940s, but the outlines of the old fields remained, as did the bones of stone walls and survivor strains of wheat, rye, and barley grown wild.
Ben had seen castles a third its size. And while the scale of the place was imposing, its opulence was tempered by its condition. Parts of the residence hadn’t been inhabited in decades, its last owners spinster sisters who’d lived their entire lives within these walls. Ben didn’t know what two old women were doing so far from the village in such a huge house, but he could see it hadn’t involved much in the way of home maintenance. Water stains marked the ceilings, warped planks buckled the floors, and windows rattled in their frames.
Sometimes he looked at the Crofts and saw a sprawling monument to impetuous decision-making. But in moments of hope, Ben saw an ember waiting to be rekindled. They were ready to put their sweat into the place; he hoped only that the Crofts would accept it.
“Windy out there,” he told Charlie when he opened the side door and stepped into the kitchen. He made right for the sink, giving the soap dispenser a double pump before nudging the handle to hot.
From their first tour of the place, Caroline had been convinced they could renovate the entire estate by themselves. Ben had his doubts. He had insisted that contractors add air-conditioning, install bathrooms in the guest rooms, and upgrade the plumbing and electrical. He could take his chances sanding floors and painting walls, but he thought anything involving pipes, wires, or gas lines was worth paying for. It had taken a team of live-in workers some months to get the house into shape before the Tierneys moved in.
Though budget-conscious, Caroline had taken up cooking again and spared no expense in updating the kitchen in a modern French country style. Two walls of custom-made cabinets flanked a professional Wolf range with two large ovens. The original floor had been ripped up in favor of wide-plank antique walnut. Gray granite counters gleamed under inset lighting.
When they weren’t working to renovate the rest of the house, they spent most of their waking hours here. At first it had been only for meals, then Charlie had begun reading in one of the corners instead of in his own room, then Ben and Caroline had moved their laptops to a side table. Ben told Caroline it might have been withdrawal from their close city living that led them to cluster together in this small room, but the truth was that he felt like an intruder anywhere else in the vast place.
“Where’s Hudson?” Charlie asked through a full mouth. He and Bub were seated at the table, which held four plates of pancakes, each stacked six inches high.
“He made a mess of himself out there,” Ben told him. “I’ll clean him off after I eat.” He watched the last of the blood-tinged water swirl out of sight.
“Mom made pancakes,” Charlie said.
“I can see that.” Ben dried his hands and kissed Bub on the head. The baby gurgled and showed him the pancake he was playing with.