Three Days in Town, and the Barista Already Knew My Order novel · Chapter 18 of 24
Chapter 18: Ice
Etienne's POV
The white truck with Massachusetts plates never came back up the hill.
Maura got no more texts, and she stopped turning her phone face down.
That was the whole of what I knew about Kevin by January.
What I knew about the thaw was less.
She had said it in September, and again in October.
I'm not promising you anything past the thaw.
It was the ninth of January, and the lake was frozen to twenty inches, and the thaw was about eleven weeks off.
I had counted.
My uncle and I dragged the hut out onto Crystal Lake on Friday afternoon, on a plywood sled behind his snowmobile, and left it a quarter mile off the public beach by a stand of dead pines.
It was six feet by eight, painted red, with a tin chimney and a wooden bench along one wall and a plank bunk on the other.
A hole in the floor with a lid on it.
I'd fished out of it since I was ten.
I had never taken a woman there.
Maura came out on Saturday in the afternoon dusk, walking across the ice in my old canvas bibs with the legs rolled four times and a hat my grandmother had knitted her.
Her nose was red and she was grinning.
"It's not a house," she said.
"It's a hut."
"It has a door."
"That's what makes it a hut," I said.
I'd got the stove lit before she came.
It was the size of a bread box, a little black iron thing on a sheet of tin, and in ten minutes the air inside was warm enough to take off our hats.
I opened the hole in the floor.
It was a round black eye of water, a foot across, with a skin of new ice that I broke with the gaff.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of Three Days in Town, and the Barista Already Knew My Order are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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