The insurance company called me at eight the next morning, a polite young man named Mr. Dolan, who wanted to know why my signature was on a policy change dated in August. I had not signed anything in August. I told him so, quietly, and I could hear him typing on the other end. He said that the form had been filed electronically, with a scan of my signature, and that the beneficiary on the new rider was Rick Haldane. I thanked him, put down the phone, and sat very still in the guest room of my daughter, with my hands in my lap.
I am seventy three years old. Bill and I bought the cabin on Lakeshore Drive in 1986, with money we saved over eleven years of teaching school, and for thirty eight summers it was where every good thing in my life took place. Bill died there, on the porch, with a sunset in his eyes. Now it was a black skeleton of timbers on the edge of the water. I had been trying all night to believe that it was a wiring fault. The fire marshal had told me kindly that it was not.
Fire Marshal Donnelly came to the guest room at ten with a cardboard box under his arm. He was a heavy, gentle man with a gray mustache, and he put the box on the bed the way a man sets down a sleeping child. “Mrs. Fairweather,” he said, “I told you last night that the policy was not the only thing we found. I want to show you the rest.” He lifted the lid. Inside, wrapped in a clean kitchen towel, was a metal fireproof lockbox about the size of a bread loaf, black with soot but intact.
“It was under the floor of the crawl space,” he said, “right next to where the gasoline had been poured. Whoever set the fire wanted the whole place gone. But this box was bolted to a joist, and the heat never reached it.” He handed me a key on a ribbon. I recognized the ribbon. It was from the gift shop at the lake. Bill had tied it to the key of the shed in 1990. I turned it in the lock with a hand that I could barely control, and the lid creaked up on its old hinges.
What a man hides under the floor for his wife is never really hidden. It is only waiting for the day she needs it most.
On top lay an envelope with my name. Inside was a letter in the sloping hand of my husband, dated the spring before he died. Dear Joan, it began. If you are reading this, the cabin is gone, or I am, or both. I have been worried about Rick for years. I think he is in trouble and too proud to say. I am putting the deed to the lake lot in the name of our granddaughter Emily, where nobody can take it. I have also put in the enclosed what I could save. Keep it for yourself. Do not let anyone talk you out of it.
Under the letter lay a deed, recorded and stamped, giving the entire lakefront lot to Emily Haldane, my eight year old granddaughter, in trust. Below it was a bank envelope with sixty three thousand dollars in cash, in neat bundles, and a small brown notebook in which Bill had written the history of every board and nail in the cabin. I held the notebook against my chest. The marshal looked politely at the window. When I could speak, I asked him what happened to Rick.
He said that Rick had been picked up at the airport in Minneapolis at dawn, with a one way ticket to Las Vegas and a duffel of cash from the party gifts. A debt of eighty thousand dollars to a bookmaker had been hanging over him for a year. He had taken out the smoke detectors, filled the crawl space with gasoline, and set the fire at three in the morning, believing the cabin would be empty and his mother in law would be safely asleep at the party house in town. He had not meant to hurt a soul. He had meant to collect.
I thought of the birthday party. Rick, fifty years old, in a paper crown, blowing out candles while my daughter Dana laughed. He had hugged me hard and said, I love you, Joan, and I had thought it the warmest hug in a decade. Now I knew it was goodbye. I closed my eyes and sat quietly. Then I told the marshal that I did not want to see Rick that day, but that someday I would, and that I wanted a lawyer to ask the judge for mercy, not on his behalf, but on behalf of my daughter and her child.
Dana arrived at noon, red eyed and shaking. She knelt on the floor beside me and put her head in my lap. She said she had known nothing, nothing, and that the thought of what might have happened to me made her ill. I stroked her hair as I had when she was small. I told her the cabin was only wood. What was truly lost was the trust in her marriage, and that would take a long time to rebuild, if it ever could. But we would face it together, and the lake would still be there.
Rick pled guilty in November. The judge sentenced him to six years, with a chance at early release for good behavior and treatment. Dana visits him on Sundays, with Emily. I go twice a month. We talk about baseball, mostly, and the weather. On my third visit he cried and said, I do not deserve the sight of your face. I told him that a face is a gift you may keep as long as you earn it. He nodded and wrote that down on a napkin.
In the spring, the neighbors came with hammers. Forty people, some of whom I had not seen since the funeral of Bill, stood on the black foundation with lumber and coffee. We built a smaller cabin, one room and a porch, on the same stones. The notebook of Bill was our blueprint. On the day we hung the door, Emily climbed onto the porch rail and carved her name into the beam above the entrance with a butter knife. It says, Emily, owner. She gave me the knife afterward, and I keep it in my apron pocket.