PART I
POWERS THAT BE
At the end of the summer of 2018, high atop a nearly inaccessible gorge deep in the Adirondack forest of New York State’s North Country, three women had an unusual monument set in place. Elegantly tapered, nearly ten feet tall, a hand-chiseled obelisk of native bluestone inscribed with brass capitals caught the light of the sun. Weighing in excess of two thousand pounds, it had the solemn presence of a memorial to war dead. A marker worthy of a state courthouse or a city square made no sense in the middle of nowhere. And yet it did.
To the others, Evie Quimby referred to it as a calling lure—an old-fashioned expression, commonly used by trappers. A calling lure draws a beast out of its lair and tempts it into a snare. Usually such lures are scents: barkstone, civet, skunk, blood, and the like. They’re messages carried on the wind; beckonings so potent and pungent and closely related in the animal’s mind to sex and/or prey that they trigger urges the creature cannot resist. That obelisk’s inscription had no smell, but the words spelled out in brass were guaranteed to get inside the head of one man. Its message was simple: We know what you are.
But the truth was when those three women first put up that stone none of them knew the true nature of what they were after or up against.
A month after the stone was put in place, Evie Quimby, her mother Flo, and Lulu Mannheim convened in the vegetable garden behind Flo’s cabin. Misfortune had galvanized the bond between them by then into something that went beyond the categories of daughter, mother, friend. The women were finding out the truth about themselves. How far were they willing to go? How much were they ready to risk, when there was no making things right, just a remote chance of making them a little less wrong? Their troika was a democracy; the particulars of the damage that had been to done to each made them equals. All three were in agreement, but each saw the necessary reckoning in a different light.
Flo told her daughter and Lulu straight out, “All you’re doing by this is asking to get yourselves killed.” She was outvoted.
The garden lay neatly fenced behind a cabin built of logs squared by a double-bladed ax at the end of the Spanish-American War. Silvered by weather and time, it perched precariously halfway up a mountain steeply conifered in fragrant shades of green: spruce, balsam, and pine. Six miles north of the village of Rangeley, New York, pop.: 438, it sat back up in the woods at the end of a rocky dirt switchback with a 30-degree incline at an elevation of over two thousand feet.
The true purpose of their meeting, like that of the stone, was not discussed outside the three. The women told themselves if anyone was watching (a remote but real possibility), or the sheriff stopped by unannounced to see what they were up to (he did so regularly since Evie had come back to Townsend County), it would appear as if they were doing nothing more suspicious at that cabin than conspiring to harvest pumpkins a week early. The women had reason to be both cautious and paranoid.
Evie was the first to arrive. Wearing the uniform of her youth, work-worn Carhartt coveralls and steel-toed boots, she could’ve passed for a local, but she wasn’t . . . not anymore. Getting out of the rental car, walking through the wet grass and puddled mud, she saw more rain in the distance blowing in across the Sister Lakes: Lucille and Constance to the west, and Millicent, the largest and most homely, just to the south. Each was its own shade of blue. A family of half-feral cats, collared by Flo with tiny bells to give the songbirds a chance, tinkled as they slunk out from under the skinning shed to see what Evie was up to.
The Quimby homestead, like the Adirondacks, was wilder and more primitive than simply rural. The stump she used to stand on as a girl to dazzle a pet crow with the shine of a dime was still there, but the tilted meadow was now littered with rusting machine parts, outboard motors beyond repair, and the remains of a ’62 Willys Jeep that had died because there was no one in residence to rebuild its crank case. Buddy Quimby, her father, had been better at taking things apart than figuring out how to make them work again. Puzzling out how the pieces of what was broken fit together had always been Evie’s job. At thirty-four, Evie was no longer the girl that had grown up in that weathered gray cabin, the one who had once told herself she would never come back to Townsend County.
Flo had told her more than once over the years that she was not responsible for what happened to Buddy, but Evie knew that was not entirely true. Pausing to scratch the back of a cat who had lost its tail to a fox, Evie headed up to what was left of the skinning shed and searched among the cobwebs for a pickax and spade. If there had been no hunting accident, if she had never run from the Sister Lakes, the Willys would still be on the road, the outboards repaired, and her father would have been there next to her. It was Buddy who had taught her about calling lures and the setting of traps.
Lulu’s Range Rover spun its wheels up the dirt track to the Quimby cabin. Windows down, stereo on max, the Grateful Dead’s anthem “Box of Rain” echoed up the mountainside. Evie could hear them coming. It was her father’s favorite tune. He’d often croon the lyrics as a warning, just before someone started a fight he would feel obliged to finish. Her mother only played it when she was feeling more hopeless than sad.
Lulu came in fast with Flo riding shotgun. Braking too hard and too late, the Range Rover skidded across the soggy meadow and came to a full stop just before colliding with the remains of the Willys. As Lulu got out the car, Evie reminded her, “The idea is we’re trying to be discreet.”
“Your mother wouldn’t get in the car unless I played the song. I’ve been listening to it on repeat for almost an hour.”
Evie called out, “You coming, Mama?” But Flo just sat in the front seat, staring straight ahead, grimly puffing on one of her nasty cigarillos. She used to hate the smell when Buddy lit up, but now inhaled deeply to remind her of the man that was gone. Flo insisted on listening until the last of his sad song played out.
Lulu, at fifty, was small, girlish, and had a sashay in her step. Except for hair hennaed a shade of cherry red that a twenty-five-year-old would have thought too youthful, she looked like what she was: a very rich woman who exercised too much, believed in Botox, and had more important things on her mind to worry about than the brand-new pair of $1,800 green crocodile loafers she ruined as her feet slopped through the mud.
“I told my lawyer the legal parts of what we’re doing.” Having made a fortune on top of the one she inherited by buying and selling big-city commercial real estate, Lulu had lots of lawyers.
“What’d he say?”
“We’re insane.” Lulu said it with a laugh to let Evie know she hadn’t changed her mind.
Flo was out of the Range Rover now but she still hadn’t said hello. She looked older than seventy-four. Part Mohawk, she was dark-eyed, her face wrinkled as a raisin. Flo had blue jay feathers woven into her bone-white braids that day. Head capped by a red bandanna tied close to her skull, knee-high black boots, ankle-length skirt pulled up and cinched under a man’s belt. To ease the tension, Evie volunteered, “You look like a pirate, Mama.” Evie was blond, blue-eyed, and pale as skim milk. The total lack of physical resemblance between mother and daughter was puzzling to anyone who didn’t know Evie had been adopted by Flo and Buddy on the third day of her life.
Flo ignored the comment and growled, “Let’s get this over with.”