Page 36 of Winter’s Teeth

When the doppler radar faded to the next headline about a local sports event being canceled, Ben voiced, “It looks like we could be stuck here for at least a few days. You said they bring us brunch and dinner?” He rocked in the recliner in the corner of the room, Maple out cold in his lap.

“Yeah, how come?” I replied.

“How are they gonna get here? We definitely can’t get out until a snowplow comes through, and this is a pretty remote road.”

“Oh...” I hadn’t thought of that. “I guess we’ll see. They should be here any minute actually since it’s almost five.”

We waited, watching the news and poking through the bookshelves full of outdoor books and fishing magazines until five rolled around. No cars sounded on the driveway, but footsteps thudded on the porch.

I tracked the footsteps on the wraparound porch, listening as the Winters stalked around the cabin to a back door leading into the kitchenette. They must have lived close by if they could walk over without their vehicles. The Winter family home had to be around here somewhere. Maybe just on the other side of a copse of trees.

When the back door hinges squealed, I tossed formalities to the wind, rushing into the back room wearing nothing but my purple pajama bottoms and my Ecology Club sweatshirt from school.

Corbin yelped, nearly dropping the covered tray bundled in his arms. Rolling his black-lined eyes back, he exhaled a sigh of relief. “You scared me, Rae.”

“Corbin!” I exclaimed, rushing forward to steal the warm tray out of his hands. After depositing it on the counter, I took hold of him by his shoulders, scanning him up and down. A fading, yellowed bruise lingered around his eye, but otherwise, no one would be able to tell he’d been beaten and tied up in the woods the other night.

“Are you okay?”

He forced a smile. “I’m fine. I have to finish setting up dinner, so you go ahead and spend time with your friends. We’ll bring it out when it’s ready.”

“We?”

Two more young men came in the back door carrying trays, and not a single one of them met my eyes. They all had the staple dark hair of the Winter boys, stocky builds, and two-thirds of them wore flannel, but none introduced themselves. They were men behind the curtains, and I was intruding upon the mystery.

Corbin nudged me out with an elbow. “Go on. Dinner will be ready in ten minutes.”

“But did your girlfriend come to get you—” I started to ask.

The door swung shut, and only the sound of crinkling tinfoil and clinking cutlery answered me on the other side.

I trudged back to the stifling heat of the living room awash with the glow of the fire and the muted TV screen. “Riss? Do you still have those aerial maps?”

Riss was all too eager to dig her maps out for show and tell. She flattened them on the coffee table, and we all sat around looking for a nearby house that could be the Winters’. With the fire at my back, sweat beaded along the nape of my neck while dinner was arranged in the adjacent room.

“It’s a weird coincidence,” Riss said as I stared over my shoulder at the young men arranging condiments and cutlery in the dining room through the log-flanked archway between rooms. Trays of steaming brisket, vegetable medleys, and fresh dinner rolls threatened to steal my focus, but I managed to keep an eye on the Winters, committing their faces to memory.

“What’s a coincidence?” Angie asked.

“That the family name is Winter, and R.B. Winter is a famous forester who is largely to credit for the untouched land around here. One of the five parks in the Bald Eagle Forest tract is named for him.”

“Fox insinuated he was related to R. B.,” I offered, pulling my knees to my chest as I traced the forest boundary lines with my eyes on the maps. “He made it sound like the state didn’t own all this land. That his family still maintains ownership.”

Glancing up, I found all three of my friends gaping at me.

“What?”

Riss spluttered, hand gesticulating vaguely in the air until she found her words. “That’s over a hundred-and-ninety thousand acres, Rae. The forest is home to five parks, and R. B. Winter is almost a thousand acres on its own. There’s just no way they have that much land. Or even a portion of it!”

I put up my hands in defense. Or surrender, since there would be no arguing against Riss’s encyclopedic wealth of information. “I’m just telling you what he told me. He said he has permission to snowboard on utility right-of-ways in the middle of the forest because of his last name.”

Riss sat back against the sofa with a huff. “Well, that’s a bit more plausible. That he and his family have special dispensation for things because of their ancestry. Still...” She shrugged, leaving unsaid that there was something unusual about all of this.

“Are we technically on state land?” I asked, dragging one of the maps closer. The state forest lines seemed to overlap slightly with the woods surrounding Winter’s Teeth, and I recalled Arthur mentioning he had “cooperated” with law enforcement, letting them scour the woods as if the family had final say on who was permitted to come and go.

“Dinner is served,” Corbin interrupted from the doorway between living and dining rooms. He averted his gaze just enough to hide his blackened eye in the shadows cast by unevenly spaced lamps about the room. “We’ll be back tomorrow midmorning with brunch. I trust Fox told you everything you needed to know?”

Corbin’s pointed look gleamed with worry. Or was it fear?