Cold Heart by Chandler McGrew Read Free Book Online Page B

message from her. The gallery owner wanted the piece on the next mail plane and that would be coming in around five o'clock. But occasionally Rich was early.
    She walked around the table, studying the stained-glass window.
    It wasn't perfect.
    But they never were.
    She could almost see something good in the piece.
    Something magical.
    If she removed this piece of glass and replaced that one. If she reshaped that corner. If she made the work less a depiction of fish and more a study of light and shade…
    She pulled her hand away.
    She glanced at the crate in the corner and made up her mind. Time to pack it up.
    You can't hold on to your babies forever.
    By the time she had the window safely stored in the wooden crate it was almost lunchtime and her stomach was starting to grumble. She pulled a can of milk down from theshelf over the woodstove and poured a bowl of granola. She opened a can of butter—one of those odd, long-shelf-life foodstuffs that bush villagers accepted as standard fare— smeared a generous helping on the biscuits left over from last night's dinner, and carried the meal over to the table, pulling up a three-legged stool.
    Her cabin was comfortable, with one large living area downstairs and an open sleeping loft above, without being too big for her to take care of. When she moved in, it had three large fixed windows and she had spent much of her first summer creating and installing three more stained-glass ones. The window in the loft opened to allow cross ventilation between it and the front and rear doors. The doors themselves were massive affairs with black, hand-wrought iron hinges and locks and hand-carved spruce planks with X-braced interiors.
    She glanced around the cabin and thought of Houston.
    Has it really been four years already?
    McRay was home to her now. It seemed as though she had stepped out of Zeke's plane that day and found not a strange, unfamiliar land, but a refuge.
    Outside, the jays were screaming their heads off again.

12:00
    D AWN G LORIANUS STARED AT their wet clothing, laid out on grass still brown from winter. The clearing on this side of their cabin was covered with a patchwork lawn. Her mother insisted that the washing smelled better if it dried that way rather than on a line.
    Snow circled the spruce trees around the cabin where the bases of the big conifers were shaded from the sun. The temperature was barely in the fifties. But it was warm enough for Dawn's mother, Terry, to decide that it was time for spring cleaning. Every item of winter gear, every blanket, every pair of long johns, every sock was washed clean by hand in the big galvanized tub that doubled as their bath.
    Terry knelt over the frothy water, sliding a sheet up and down the washboard, her shoulders heaving. Dawn glanced at the handkerchief in her own right hand. Terry had finished washing it but Dawn didn't know where to put it yet. And she was more concerned with her mother's anger. When Terry got in one her moods, there was no sense talking to her. Dawn knew that she had incited Terry's wrath even if Dawn didn't think it was her fault.
    Dawn hated McRay.
    In McRay, people lived like animals. They did dumb things like washing their clothes in a tub. Stupid things, likeputting them on the lawn to dry. Even though the temperature would drop to freezing the second the sun dipped over the mountains. Even though the clothes would all be frozen solid in the morning, anyway. In McRay you got your schooling through the mail. And if you ever had any notion of meeting a boy, you could just forget it.
    Dawn didn't know much about how her counterparts lived, Outside. But she was pretty sure from her voluminous reading that they met people of the opposite sex, had things called dates, and did other wonderful things that she was still two long years away from getting to experience.
    As soon as she turned eighteen, on that very day, McRay, Alaska, would be history.
    But all Dawn had said, this time, was that she was old