Page 74 of Pro Bono

Paul leaned forward and gave Linda a brief, gentle hug, clearly only to play along, then endured a hug from Mary. Wendy said, “We’ve known Paul for years, and I’m astounded he’ll still put up with us.”

Paul said, “Let me give you a hand with your bags.” Wendy pressed the key fob and the trunk opened. He slipped the strap of Linda’s bag over his shoulder and lifted the other two bags and carried them inside. He carried them up the stairs and set them on the second floor in the hallway. “I’ll let you sort out the bedrooms.” He went back down the stairs as they were climbing up.

A few minutes later when the women came back down, he was standing in the big living room looking out the tall window past the deck at the water. He heard them come into the room and turned around. He said, “The keys are over there on the counter. I’m afraid there are only two sets, but I can get another made and drop it off tomorrow, if you think you’ll need it.”

Linda said, “I won’t need a key. I’m sure they’ll let me in.”

Wendy reached into her purse and pulled out a leather checkbook. She opened it and took out a check that had already been filled out and detached and handed it to him. “And here’s the rent.”

He looked at it and put it into his shirt pocket. “Thank you. Paid in full. I’m going to go now and let you recover from the trip. If you need anything, you have my number.”

“Thanks, Paul,” Wendy and Mary said in unison. He reached the door and went out. The others were drawn in the other direction, toward the big window overlooking the lake.

Linda heard him lock the door from the outside, then heard the garage door roll up, and then a car engine. She heard his car pull out, then drive off down the road.

“What did you think of Paul?” Mary said. Her eyes were gleaming, as though she knew something.

The look struck Linda as presumptuous. “He seems nice.” She said it with less enthusiasm than she might have if she hadn’t been repelled by that look.

“He’s more than nice,” Wendy said. “She and I are both married, and I, for one, will never again get distracted by a man like that. That weakness was what obliterated my first marriage. But you’re single, right?”

“Got me there,” Linda said. “But I’m not looking for a relationship, just a few days outdoors with the girls.”

“Okay,” Mary said. “Who wants to go for a little hike? I feel like stretching my legs after sitting in a car all day.”

Linda’s mood crept up. “That sounds just perfect,” she said. “We’ve got at least five hours of daylight left.”

Wendy said, “I think I’ll just unpack and get a shower for now.”

The walk began on the road, which almost immediately began to lose its stretches of asphalt and was left with a layer of coarse gravel, and then lost even that and became two bare streaks the width of a pair of tires. After a couple hundred yards there was a path that veered off to the left through the trees while the road continued around the lake. Linda said, “Do you know where this goes?”

Mary said, “It’s kind of interesting. I’ll show you.” They turned onto it and very soon it was too narrow for them to walk side by side. It wound a bit to avoid stands of particularly big trees, and it rose as it went on, forcing them to climb an incline that made their walk feel more virtuous to Linda. The air up here was cleaner but thinner, and so it took a bit more effort.

“Does this go to somebody’s house? It seems to be pretty clear of small plants and things.”

“That’s sort of two questions. Yes, it originally led to somebody’s house. We’ll be there in a minute. But I think it is and always was a deer run. Or maybe elk. We’ve seen some on a meadow up there, so they’ve probably been here forever. My theory is that the people who built a house up there probably walked around the lake, saw the path, followed it, and picked a place where they could cut down some tall, straight trees to make a house.”

“When was this?”

“I asked Paul, but he doesn’t know. It would have to be a long time ago, before building codes and things like that. Maybe even in the days when you could go to a wild place and just decide to live there. You’ll see.”

They climbed another hundred yards and reached a space that was mostly flat. “There it is,” Mary said.

They skirted the site. They could see an area about twenty by twenty feet marked out by large stones laid down as a foundation. Linda said, “They must have carried those stones up here from the lake. What do you suppose happened?”

“Paul doesn’t have any real information. He said he’s found old, rusted nails, and they’re round, meaning mass-produced, not the square kind that were made by blacksmiths in the nineteenth century. There’s a streambed over there that leads down to the lake, but I’ve never seen it except when it was dry in midsummer or later. Paul thinks it was probably either a fire—you’ll notice there’s no chimney—or maybe disease. If you got sick up here before there was a road, you’d have a hard time taking care of yourself.”

“I suppose the winters up here are pretty brutal too.”

“We’ve never been up here then, but I’ve heard they are.”

They climbed up the trail for another fifteen minutes before they reached the meadow Mary had mentioned. It was about the size of afootball field, and Linda imagined that the vanished people who had lived in the house had probably seen the large open place covered with weeds and wildflowers with tiny blooms and thought they could farm it. There were no animals visible at the moment, but she could hear a bird call from beyond the first row of trees on the far side.

“I suppose we should start back,” Mary said.

Linda looked at their lengthened shadows and said, “You’re right.”

They walked back the way they’d come. At the top of the trail, just where the meadow ended, they could see the full length of the lake, like a blue shoe print pressed down into the mountains. “That’s a beautiful sight,” Linda said. “Nobody has said what the lake is called. What’s its name?”

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