Chapter 27: The Cabin

Joost knew where she had gone before I finished the question.

"My father's cabin on Hamlin Lake," he said, pulling on his boots. "He took her there every summer."

"Why would she run to his place?"

"Because it's the only one she was ever told was safe."

Truus met us at the curb on Ottawa Street in her bathrobe, with the little rabbit in both hands.

I took it and put it in my coat.

We drove north through the snow with the heater roaring, and neither of us said a word about the kitchen.

Joost turned off the highway onto a gravel track at the end of a long white road.

An old sedan sat at the bottom of the track with a foot of snow on its roof.

He cut the engine at the mailbox.

"Stay here," I said.

"Femke."

"It's his cabin. Tonight it's hers, and she won't open the door to you."

His jaw worked.

"Twenty minutes," I said. "Then you can come."

"Ten."

"Fifteen."

He gave me the flashlight.

The track to the cabin ran a quarter mile under black pines.

Snow came over the tops of my boots, and my breath showed white in the beam.

There was no light in the cabin, and no smoke from the chimney.

I knocked.

"Sanne. It's Femke. I'm alone."

Nothing.

Then, from the other side of the door, a small, wet cough.

"Go away," Sanne said.

"I have her rabbit."

A long silence.

The chain rattled, and the door opened a hand's width.

Sanne stood in the gap in a man's leather cut over her coat, with her hair stuck to her face.

She looked past me into the dark.

"Did he send you?"

"Joost is at the road. He comes in when I call him, and not before."

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