Page 37 of Mazywood

“Dad—whose car is that?” Sharise said.

Tasha gave Johnny a look with the same questions.

“I’m not sure,” Johnny said. “I’ll take a look. You all stay inside.” He put on his hazard lights and jumped out of the idling car, closing his door to cut off Imani’s whine over the delay. This was a private road without a neighbor in sight, so why was somebody parked here?

As he approached the driver’s door, Johnny noticed that the Jeep was coated in a thin layer of snow. Tasha noticed the same time he did, her window whirring down. “That’s been parked there a while,” she called. He heard her unspoken message: It’s nothing to worry about. She sounded as impatient as Imani.

Still, Johnny reached into his pocket for the pen he always carried: It was an arty wood-carved ink pen on one end; the other end a sharp, fortified tip he could use to break glass or take out an eye. He had bought the pen for Tasha and the girls too, insisting that they always had a way to defend themselves. He gripped his with the sharp tip out as he walked past the heat of the RAV’s hood toward the Jeep on the side of the road.

The driver’s-side window was also coated in snow. He knocked on it twice. “Anyone there?” His voice was pleasant, but his message was firm. “This is private property.”

No one answered. Johnny bit down on the pen while he pulled his gloves out of his jacket pocket. He’d been warm in the car, so he’d unzipped his jacket, but now the cold nibbled past his T-shirt where his chest was exposed. He didn’t want to get his hands wet. He hated being cold.

Once his gloves were on and he’d safely transferred his pen back to his right hand, Johnny wiped away the snow and frost from the driver’s-side window.

No one was inside the car. A wire-bound notebook was on the passenger seat, a label he couldn’t quite make out scrawled on the cover. A coffee cup from Joltz with a lid sat waiting in the cup holder, any remnants long frozen by now. Something red dangled just beyond his vision; he shifted his head and noted the San Francisco 49ers key chain dangling on the other side of the wheel. The keys might still be in the ignition.

Johnny checked the door: unlocked. He tugged it open. Snow fell away in clumps.

“Daddy, what are you doing?” Imani called to him.

Johnny peeked in just far enough to confirm that the keys were in the ignition. The faint scent of spicy tobacco smoke made him feel repelled by his intrusion into a stranger’s life. He backed away and closed the Jeep’s door.

Something rustled from the snow and brush on the other side of the Jeep, and Johnny listened a long time for footsteps in the snow. A familiar maw of terror made his blood feel watery. He could be thirteen years old again. He peeked over the Jeep’s hood at a mound of snow near a gap in the lodge’s rail fence. He expected the heap to start moving. Was that where the sound had come from? Sometimes the imagination is a tricky bitch, Uncle Ricky had said.

“Hel-lo?” Imani called, and the awful sensation passed. The day brightened, clouds drifting beyond the sun. Johnny felt silly for imagining his childhood phantoms already.

He grabbed the key ring in his back pocket with his keys to the gate, the front door, and the slope gate. Dick Hollman had organized the keys and made him a new set. His feet sank into three inches of fresh snow as he walked to the driveway gate to unlock it. The snow gave resistance as he pushed the gate open, but with a little exertion, his breath puffing in clouds, he widened it enough to fit the RAV. Three faces watched him from inside the warm car.

“Keys are right there in the ignition, so they plan to come back,” he reported after he returned to the car. “Might be campers on a ski trip.”

“Or hunters,” Imani said, intrigued. A not-so-subtle reminder that she wanted to hunt, an argument waiting to unfold. He wouldn’t have mentioned hunting with his uncle if he’d known Imani would expect lessons too. He hadn’t liked hunting then—and he would hate it now. You gotta take your shot, boy, Uncle Ricky had scolded when he’d failed to shoot a hare.

Johnny didn’t like having a stranger’s vehicle in front of his house in such a remote location, especially strangers who might have rifles. He glanced at Tasha, and she was frowning too. But Imani was right about one thing: Uncle Ricky’s hunting rifle was still in the coat closet. And the box of cartridges was still on the shelf above it. At least he knew how to load and aim it.

“Let’s see if someone drives off in it today,” Johnny said. “If not…” He hated to say the next part. “… I’ll drive back to town and arrange to have it towed. Tomorrow.” Maybe the snow would let up by the morning. But that’s not what the radio was saying, is it?

“If no one claims it, can we keep it?” Sharise asked.

“I don’t think it works that way,” Johnny said. But hell, maybe it did. This was his grandmother’s property—his property now, he reminded himself. He took a last look at the Jeep, unable to make peace with its presence. Maybe mountain folk left their keys in the ignition, but no one else Johnny knew did. Why hadn’t the driver come back?

But fuck it. They were here now.

Johnny drove his family through the gate of Bear Creek Lodge.

Rolling across the driveway of his grandmother’s lodge was the closest sensation Johnny had experienced to folding back time. His firstvisit also had followed heavy snow, and although it wasn’t identical, so much seemed the same. One of the cabins was gone, the other in ruins, but the lodge looked like his memories except for the ancient paint job. Mount Shasta’s peaks appeared above the lodge through the RAV’s windows, twinkling in brighter sunlight, wreathed with thin clouds. Johnny’s breath caught. How did he so easily forget how beautiful this was?

“Do you see that, girls?” Tasha said. “Look at the mountain view!”

Tasha and Imani squealed. For the first time—and one of the last—Johnny was glad he had brought his family to share his memories here. Tasha was right: This was their legacy. Maybe their previous trips to closer mountain resorts had been his way of trying to make up for depriving his children of their rightful inheritance, which had been here all along.

He had paid enough for it. His mother and Uncle Ricky had paid enough.

Don’t forget Mazelle. She paid plenty too.

Bear Creek Lodge might be Mazelle Washington’s greatest creation.

Imani gasped. “Wait—are we rich?” she asked, as if it had never dawned on her.