Maisie’s voice was quiet. “How old?”
“That,” Petra admitted, “is what I want to know.”
That night they camped beside the creek. The wind smelled like pine resin and distant rain that wouldn’t come. After Thomas fell asleep curled into Maisie’s blanket like a puppy who refused to admit he was cold, Petra sat by the fire and opened James’s civil engineering survey manual.
It was a book too technical for most men who owned it, but James had never owned it for most men. He’d owned it because he’d always believed the next page might contain the secret to turning wilderness into a life.
Petra read it because James had been conviction and she had been method. He’d wanted silver in the Laramie Range the way some people wanted heaven: as a certainty that excused everything. Petra had been the one who asked how.
Now James was in the ground, taken by typhoid in the third week of July, and Petra had a claim of 160 acres, two children, two horses, a wagon, his tools, and $140 she wore in a belt she hadn’t taken off since he died.
Winter was coming like a debt collector.
She read the chapter on masonry and thermal properties of stone. She read about drainage and freeze-thaw cycles. She read about load distribution the way other widows read Psalms.
Her fire crackled. She pressed her palm to the granite slab behind her, warmed by afternoon sun and the current heat of flame, and her mind returned to the soot twelve feet up.
What kind of structure puts fire that high?
