A Note to Readers
Welcome to Whiskey Pines.
If this is your first visit, here is what you need to know. Whiskey Pines is a small town on the Lake Michigan shore. It has one traffic light, two churches, a bakery that knows your name before you do, and the kind of quiet that sounds like wind through white pines until somebody does something they shouldn't.
On the lakeshore road, behind a gated entrance and a long gravel drive lined with old-growth pines, sits Pines & Needles. It is a crafting community for women over fifty, built on thirty acres of lakefront property. Twenty cottages, each one privately owned and painted in colors that say something about the woman inside. A Community Center with a sewing studio, a weaving corner, pattern drawers, and a locked notions cage that Hazel Pike guards with the focus of a woman who has seen what happens when people borrow without signing the log.
There is a cafeteria where Della Mae Rourke has been feeding people since 1987 and where the coffee is always fresh because Della Mae considers cold coffee a moral failure. There is a pool with cabanas and two young men named Tanner and Rico who carry towels, adjust umbrellas, and pretend not to hear the things these women say when the sun is warm and the lemonade is cold.
Roxie Maxx founded this place. She does not live here. She visits often, she solves what needs solving, and she brings her dog.
The dog is Kenzie. She is a Bichon Frise. She weighs twelve pounds. She communicates telepathically, which Roxie has learned to accept in the same way she has learned to accept that some problems do not come with instructions. Kenzie's opinions arrive in italics and they are never requests.
If you have been here before, welcome back. Pull up a chair. Della Mae will bring you something whether you asked for it or not, because that is how she loves people and she has never once needed permission.
If you are new, the same rules apply.
The common house fireplace has not gone cold since 1987. That is not a metaphor.
❧
Chapter One
The Check That Changed the Heir
I couldn't tell whether it was the number of zeros on the check or the leftover apple cider I'd reheated for breakfast that was making me dizzy. I went with the cider because it was a problem I could throw out. Behind me, twelve pounds of Bichon Frise rendered her verdict on the morning with one wet snort, the snort of a dog who does not approve of your judgment, your breakfast, or, possibly, the entire shape of your day.
My ex-father-in-law had dropped dead on a Tuesday and made me a millionaire on a Thursday. He hadn't done it because he liked me, but to ruin his son's morning. That was the long-game spite I respected in a man. I read the lawyer's letter for the fourth time. The first three had been for accuracy. This one was for the pleasure of it.
The check sat on my kitchen table like an unwelcome relative who had arrived early and meant to stay. I had been staring at it long enough to count the zeros twice, miscount them once, and decide that the lemon curd in the back of the refrigerator had better be retired before it organized a coup.
The kitchen at six in the morning was a small inventory: one cold coffee, one ticking radiator that knocked when the temperature dropped below twenty, one Bichon Frise pretending the embroidered cushion under her was a throne and not a hand-me-down from my mother's sewing chair, and me, in a robe my mother, Martha, had given me in 1972, I think. It had lived in the back of my closet until there was no way I could gracefully get out of wearing it. One night when Dut had tied one on, I snagged it off its hanger and wrapped myself in it, like a suit of ugly armor. It worked. He went out to a bar to maintain his buzz, and I slept the night through for the first time in a month. Now it was my favorite piece of clothing. In fact, I considered wearing it to Christmas dinner as a thank you to the woman who raised me.
I caught my reflection in the dark window over the sink and put a finger to the piece of hair that had gone independent overnight, because vanity is a young woman's hobby and I had given it up, and because the kitchen window does not lie about a woman who has not slept.
You've been staring at that thing long enough to memorize it. Either burn it or do something useful. Preferably something that involves my breakfast, Kenzie sent.
I looked over my shoulder at her. Twelve pounds of opinion in a white fur coat, dark eyes set deep enough to suggest she had been reading the room since 1926 and had not been impressed since 1932.
"Your breakfast is in your bowl, Your Majesty. That is, if you're not too lazy to waddle over there and check."
I'm conserving energy. It's called being sophisticated. Also, I prefer Your Royal Highness. We've discussed this, she sent.
"We haven't discussed this."
We're discussing it now. Keep up, she sent.
The laugh came out before I could stop it, which was a relief, because the kitchen had been the wrong kind of quiet since the certified-mail envelope had landed against the inside of the door at five fifty-two. I have always been a woman who laughs first when nothing else is working, a habit I inherited from my father, along with his soft heart and his deep, abiding distrust of any man who wore a pocket square he had not earned.
I picked up the letter again. Lawyers have a way of writing important news in the same flat voice they use for parking violations, and Dut II's lawyer was no exception. Pursuant to. Hereby given to you per the terms of the estate. Subject to verification. The Latin equivalent of a shrug, delivered on cream-colored stock at fifty cents a sheet.
But the name on the bequest line was not flat. Dut Steeplepuss II had left his money to his former daughter-in-law instead of to his son, and I respected the work.
That's a lot of zeros. Even for a Steeplepuss. Do you think there's a catch? she sent.
"There's always a catch with that family."
Present company included? she sent.
"Baby Dut isn't a catch. He's a cautionary tale I haven't finished telling yet. Possibly a Lifetime movie. I'm holding out for the right director."
I picked up the yellow legal pad off the table, the one that had been carrying my grocery list, the running tally of items I had been meaning to caulk, and a phone number for a man in Holland, who reupholstered chairs at half what they charged in town. I added a new line without planning to.
That's not a plan. That's a word, she sent.
"It's the start of a plan."
That's what people say when they don't have a plan, she sent.
"I'm aware."
The thing about the start of a plan is that you don't always know it's a plan when you write it down. Sometimes you write a word on a yellow pad, and the word writes the rest of your life around it while you're refilling the coffeepot.
I had not yet noticed that this was happening.
Kenzie had. Kenzie noticed everything and almost never told.
I capped the pen, slid it into my coat pocket without thinking, and addressed the crumb on the windowsill that had been there since at least Sunday. The crumb did not deserve to outlive my morning. Then I rinsed the cup, refolded the dish towel the way Martha would have refolded it (which is to say, correctly), and pulled the coat off the back of the chair.
❧
My hands knew where they were taking me before my brain caught on.
I drove south out of town along the gravel road that hooked toward the lake, past the property where the Brennan farmhouse had stood before the 1943 fire that nobody had explained to me as a child and that nobody intended to explain to me now. The Yugo rattled in solidarity, the way old cars do when they understand the assignment. The radio was stuck on a station that played Patsy Cline if you tapped the dashboard in the right spot. I tapped. Patsy obliged with the patience of a woman who had been singing to dashboards for thirty years and had not yet been thanked.
Thirty acres. Pine and scrub oak sloping toward Lake Michigan on the west side, butting up against the state forest on the east, with a frozen creek in the northeast corner. A stone foundation in the clearing where the farmhouse had been. At the western edge, where the land dropped toward the water, a stretch of private beach the locals had been pretending wasn't there since 1944.
I parked at the gate and stepped out into snow that came over my boots. Kenzie watched from the passenger seat with the dignity of a queen who had decided not to inspect the cellar personally.
Take a picture. I'm staying with the heater, she sent, then lifted her snout and looked the other way so I couldn't gesture her out of the car.
I left the engine running for her and trudged the path trespassers had broken in over the years. Hunters, kids, the occasional surveyor with bad shoes and worse judgment. The snow held their footprints in layers, like sediment, the way Whiskey Pines holds everything else. Nothing is forgotten or thrown away; everything is visible if you bother to look.
I let the thought arrive in its own time, which is the only way certain thoughts arrive.
Not a nursing home. Not a facility where women went to be managed until they stopped being inconvenient.
Cottages instead. Small ones. Private ones. A shared building in the middle where a woman could gather company when she wanted it and disappear when she didn't. Studios for sewing and quilting and card-making and all the work women have been doing with their hands since long before anyone thought to call it work and longer still before anyone thought to pay for it. A kitchen that smelled like butter and coffee and somebody else's good idea.
A place that did not require a woman to be small to be welcome.
I stood at the lip of the bluff longer than the temperature recommended. My eyes watered, which I blamed on the wind off the lake. The wind, which has been the chief co-conspirator of every woman who has ever stood at the edge of a Lake Michigan bluff and pretended not to be crying, did not argue.
On the way back to the car, I cut across the clearing where the old foundation lay. The snow was deeper there, drifted against the stones. I would not have noticed the disturbance if my boot had not gone through.
Six inches of snow over a patch of bare, freshly turned earth.
Crouching, I pressed my glove against the soil. It was loose. Not frozen the way the rest of the parcel was frozen. Somebody had broken this ground within the last two days. A small square, maybe a foot across, dug and refilled and powdered over with snow that had not had time to set.
Hunters did not bury things in February. Surveyors did not bury things at all.
I straightened. The pendant at my collar warmed against my skin. My grandmother's emerald had been issuing opinions since before I was born, whether anyone was prepared to receive them, and it had recently added me to its list of recipients.
The wind shifted. Behind me, the gate creaked. I had latched it on the way in. I was sure I had latched it.
I had not.
Or somebody had unlatched it after me.
Roxie. Get in the car, she sent. There was no humor in it. When Kenzie stopped being funny, I had learned to listen.
I walked back to the Yugo without looking over my shoulder, which took more discipline than I will ever admit out loud. I did not run. The snow knew the difference. So would whoever was watching.
Closing the driver's door, locking it, putting the car into gear, I let myself look at the rearview mirror only after my hand was on the shifter, my foot was on the brake, and the engine was already in conversation with the cold.
Tire tracks on the gravel road behind me. Fresh. They had not been there when I drove in.
Somebody had followed me onto the Brennan parcel.
And somebody had been there before I arrived.
❧
Chapter Two
The Paper Trail
Mabel's diner had been running on bacon grease, weak coffee, and a kind of pie nobody apologized for since long before I was old enough to be served any of it. The booths were red vinyl, cracked and patched with electrician's tape that had faded to a sadder shade of red than the vinyl ever was, which Mabel called "character" and the rest of us called "Mabel still owns her first dollar." Each table had a tabletop jukebox selector that nobody had touched since the Ford administration; the one at our booth was stuck on D-7, which, according to the index card taped to the side, was Crystal Gayle, "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue." I had been afraid to push the button for fifteen years. I am not proud of this. I am also not changing it.
Hazel Pike was sitting in the corner booth she had claimed thirty years earlier and never given up. At sixty-eight, she was tall and lean and dressed like a woman who decided in 1959 that she had figured out the assignment and was no longer accepting feedback. Silver bob cut to the millimeter. Gray eyes that missed nothing and forgave less. A manila folder lay open in front of her, a yellow legal pad next to the folder, a pen moving across the paper in the unhurried rhythm of a woman who had never in her life felt the need to write faster than she was thinking. If Maggie Smith had grown up Methodist in South Haven and gone to secretarial school instead of the stage, you would have had Hazel.
I slid into the seat across from her.
"You heard," I said.
"I heard you drove out to the Brennan parcel this morning." Hazel did not look up. "I also heard that Dut Steeplepuss the Second died with more money than sense."
"Word travels."
"In Whiskey Pines, it travels at the speed of before-you-finish-your-coffee." She closed the folder and looked at me over the rim of her glasses, which she did not need to wear and wore anyway because they were useful for closing folders over. "You're thinking about building something."
It was not a question. Hazel did not waste time on questions when she already knew the answers, which was most of the time. That was one reason Hazel was the only person in town I had told the whole story to, and the reason Hazel was sitting in this booth instead of the others.
"A community," I said. "For women. Private cottages, shared spaces, room to make things."
My fingers found the emerald at my throat without asking my permission. The chain was older than I was. The stone was older than the chain.
"My grandmother built something like it once. Under the dunes. I want to build something that lasts. Something above ground. Something legal."
"Roxanne's speakeasy lasted until Prohibition ended."
"This one will last longer. And nobody will have to hide."
Hazel's mouth did the thing that on another woman would have been a smile. On Hazel, it was a verdict.
She spread photocopied documents across the table. The pie plate had to move. I moved it.
"I went to the courthouse this morning," Hazel said. "The Brennan parcel deed is clean. But buried underneath it is a separate agreement. Maxx and Steeplepuss, dated June fourteenth, 1923."
I leaned in.
"A contract that says if either family ever acquires the Brennan parcel, the other has the right to purchase a half interest at market rate." She held up another sheet. "And in 1926, somebody added a codicil. Extends it to heirs and assigns. In perpetuity."
Agreements that lingered this long did not exist by accident. They existed to trip someone up. Specifically, they existed to trip up whichever family was feeling clever about itself sixty-four years later.
I was the family feeling clever about itself sixty-four years later.
"So if I buy that parcel ..."
"Dut Steeplepuss the Third could show up the next morning," Hazel finished, "and claim half ownership."
The cold that spread through my chest was the cold I had become familiar with over seven years of marriage. It was not panic. Panic was for people who had not been here before. This was the cold of a woman running an old calculation in a new room, looking for the door I had not yet found.
"There has to be a way out," I said in the quiet voice you use when you are giving the universe one chance to be reasonable.
"Maybe." Hazel leaned back. "The codicil includes a sunset clause. If either family line fails to produce legitimate heirs who aren't legally disinherited for two consecutive generations, the whole contract becomes null."
"Dut the Third doesn't have children."
"No. And his father left his fortune to you instead of him. Whether a court would consider that disinheritance is the question."
I studied the map Hazel had spread out under the documents. Thirty acres in topographic lines. Every contour line told a story. Every property boundary was a decision somebody had made, usually badly, usually drunk, and usually before lunch. I pulled the pen out of my coat pocket and circled the whole parcel, pressing hard enough to leave a dent in the paper underneath.
"Pines & Needles Crafting Community," I said.
Hazel raised an eyebrow. On Hazel, an eyebrow was a sentence.
"Pines for the trees. Needles for the work." I tapped the circle twice. "Life's too short for vague names and unclear intentions. Also, I've been married to a Steeplepuss. After that, you learn to say what you mean before somebody's lawyers try to interpret it for you."
"You realize you named it."
"I realize."
"Names are harder to back out of than contracts."
"I know."
Hazel looked at me for a long moment. Then she picked up her pen and wrote Pines & Needles Crafting Community at the top of her legal pad in her slow, considered hand. The hand of a woman who had decided.
"Then we had better make sure the contract holds."
I lifted my coffee cup. The coffee was cold. I drank it anyway, because there are mornings when cold coffee is one more piece of evidence that you have been thinking too hard. The laugh that came up surprised me, a small one, mostly into the cup. Hazel pretended not to notice. Hazel pretending not to notice was Hazel's second-highest compliment.
There was something else I needed to say, and I did not want to say it. I addressed the sugar packets, which had drifted out of formation, before I addressed the something else. The German half of me has always insisted on order before truth.
"There's ground broken on the parcel," I said.
Hazel's pen stopped.
"Define."
"A square of fresh dirt under the snow near the old foundation. Foot across. Maybe two days old. Whoever did it covered it back up with snow, but the soil isn't frozen."
"Could be hunters."
"Hunters don't bury squares."
"Could be kids."
"Kids don't bury anything that doesn't move first."
Hazel set the pen down. She closed the folder over the photocopies. The folder closing was Hazel's version of an alarm bell, and I had heard it three times in fifteen years.
"I don't like that piece," she said.
"Neither do I."
"Was anyone there?"
"There were tracks behind me on the road on the way out. Fresh. Not there when I drove in."
Hazel made a note. The note was three words and underlined twice. Hazel's notes did not waste space.
"You shouldn't be out there alone. Take someone with you."
"Are you volunteering?"
"I don't do snow."
"That's the most Hazel sentence you've ever produced."
"I know," she said, and the corner of her mouth produced a fraction of a smile that on another woman would have qualified as a hug.
❧
We drove home as the last light sank over the far side of the lake, the February dusk that turns the snow blue and the houses into silhouettes and the inside of an old Yugo into a confessional. Kenzie rode in the passenger seat with the silence she reserved for thinking and judging, the two activities being, in her case, indistinguishable.
Well? Are we doing this? she sent.
"We're doing this."
Good. I was getting bored with your moping, she sent.
"I don't mope. I deliberate."
You mope. It's sweet. It would also benefit from a deadline, she sent.
I laughed, which is the noise a woman makes when somebody small and white and judgmental gets her exactly right.
The kitchen was dark when we got in. The lawyer's letter was still on the table where I had left it, the heavy cream paper glowing faintly in the last light from the window like a thing that knew its own importance. I was reaching to pick it up when I noticed the red light blinking on the answering machine.
I did not love answering machines. I did not love the moment of pressing play without knowing whose voice was about to come next. It was one of the few moments left in modern life where you had to commit before you knew what you were committing to.
Like marriage.
I pressed play.
The voice was the one I had been avoiding for months. Confident. Smooth. Easy charm that had fooled me once and would never fool me again, although the man producing it had not yet been informed of that policy change.
"Roxie, it's Dut."
A pause. He was good at pauses. He used them the way other men used compliments.
"I'm calling about the money. Dad's money. We should talk about what we're planning to do with it."
So, we had become "we" again. I had not been notified. The dig went through me before I could stop it: this was the same man who had introduced me at the Christmas party in 1981 as "the wife," the way you might introduce a houseplant. Now we were "a we." I rinsed the inside of my mouth with the cold coffee still on the counter from the morning. It did not help.
Another pause. Longer. Underneath the charm was the thing I had spent seven years learning to hear before he meant for me to hear it.
"Where are you, anyway? I've been trying to reach you all day. I drove past the house earlier. Didn't see the Yugo. I figured you must be out enjoying that nice property south of town. The one off the gravel road."
A silence on the tape.
"Drive safely, Roxanne."
The machine beeped.
He had used my legal name on the way out, the way he always did when he wanted me to know he was the one in control of the conversation. Dut had named the parcel without naming it and that told me he knew where I had been.
The pendant at my throat warmed against my collarbone. I had been wearing it for less than a year, since my parents set the wooden box in my hands the week I came home, and it had done this three times before. Twice for reasons I had eventually understood. Once for a reason I had not.
That was him, she sent.
"That was him."
He sounds annoyed. Good. Annoyed is better than charming. Charming is when he's calculating, she sent.
"He's calculating now."
Then we calculate faster, she sent.
I looked at the letter on the table, then at the answering machine. I had locked and chained the door behind me out of habit, the way you lock a door when you have spent seven years living with a man whose footsteps you have learned to recognize from two rooms away.
The tire tracks on the gravel road, the dirt under the snow, the voice on the machine.
Three things I would not call a coincidence.
I picked up the letter. The pendant was still warm.
Whatever your grandmother put in that ground, she sent. There was no joke in the italics this time.
Somebody is already digging it up, she added.
Roxie Maxx
