A Stolen Season by Steve Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page A

letting it drip off away from the foundation. Thank God the roof was on now, was all I could say this morning. There’s no way we could get up there today and work on it without killing ourselves.
    I went inside the place. It was still just a rough shell at this point. I had been trying to restore it to its full glory, to make it the best cabin in the Upper Peninsula again. This was my father’s masterpiece, after all. When it was burned down…Well, it had become an obsession with me to rebuild it.
    I went inside and took my coat off. About five minutes later, I knew I either had to put the coat back on or build a fire. I wasn’t sure which was more ridiculous, but I figured the fire would make things a little cozier at least. I put some paper and wood in the new stove and lit it. That’s when Vinnie showed up. Vinnie LeBlanc, in his old denim coat with the strip of fur around the collar. His hair was tied in a ponytail today.
    “Why aren’t you using the fireplace?” he said. He was the kind of guy who never said good morning. Or goodbye.
    “I wasn’t sure how long I’d be here.”
    “Is that draft still coming down? You’ve got to fix the flue on this thing.” He bent down and looked up the airway. This fireplace had always been his favorite part of the cabin. The way my old man had saved up all the rocks he had dug up over the years, until he had finally taken on this monumental task of building a two-story fireplace by hand. I couldn’t even imagine how he had done it alone. Hell, for that matter, how he had done any of this alone. Clearing the property, building these cabins, each one better than the last. It must have been therapy for him, after my mother had died. Something to do instead of sitting at the window, staring out at the street.
    “What are you going to start on today?” Vinnie said. “The stairs?”
    “I thought we should get the flooring in first. Then we can do the stairs.”
    He looked up at the beams crossing the room above our heads. “You want to put the second floor in before you even build the stairs to get to them?”
    “That’s what ladders are for. It’ll be easier to do the stairs after we have something to build up to.”
    “You just want to get the floor in so it’ll look almost done. I’m telling you, it’s a bad decision.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “You’re too impulsive. You know that. You don’t do things in the right order.”
    I stood there looking at him. “You’re being a little abrupt this morning,” I said. “Even for you.”
    “Abrupt? Who says ‘abrupt’?”
    “What’s the matter, Vinnie?”
    “Nothing,” he said. He didn’t look me in the eye. “Let’s get some work done. We can do it your way if you really want to.”
    As he bent down to pick up his tool belt, I heard the little grunt he let out. I saw him stand back up a little stiffly.
    “Vinnie, what happened to you?”
    “Nothing. Come on, let’s do it.”
    “Stop,” I said. I went over to him and grabbed him by the shoulders. Up close I could see the bruise on his face, just outside his left eye.
    “Who did this?”
    He looked away. “It’s nothing.”
    “You got clocked pretty good here. Who was it?”
    “Some guys at the casino. We had a little altercation last night.”
    “Some guys? How many?”
    “There were three of them. They were all at one table, getting totally lit up, making a racket. I asked them to turn it down a notch, but they didn’t seem very cooperative.”
    “Three men, you say?”
    “Yeah. One of them looked underage. The other two were real hard cases. I eventually had to ask them to leave, and I tried to escort them outside personally. That’s when things got a little out of hand.”
    “Just out of curiosity, was one of them rather large?”
    He started rubbing the side of his face, where the bruise was. “Yeah, one of them.”
    “Did they happen to leave on a boat?”
    He stopped dead. “Yes, they did. How did you know