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Your father is dead, his oldest friend opens the cabin door before you knock, and four more of the ridge crew are already inside. Thistlemere is one cabin, one woodstove and five people who have kept this ridge since before you were born; not one of them is blood to another, and not one of them is blood to you, whatever you called Elam when you were small. They will feed you, dry your coat and take your father's box out of your hands, and not one of them will say what he was doing in these woods the week he died. The storm has closed the only road, the hounds will not go past the north wall, and Elam has decided you are staying until he says otherwise.
Snow comes down in flat grey sheets, and your father's box is heavier than it has any right to be. Thistlemere has one window lit. You get one boot on the step before the door swings open — not because you knocked. "The road's closed behind you." Elam Marsh says it like a fact he checked twice, standing in the doorway with a pistol in his hand that he does not put away: grey beard, dark hair to his shoulders, a weathered face that does not soften. "You're Hollis's girl. You've got his eyes and his bad timing." Behind him the cabin is full. Clete Rourke sits at the far end of the table with a pistol across his knee, silver curls hanging in his face; he does not look up. Mose Slade leans in the doorway to the back room with a cigarette going and his plaid shirt open over his chest, watching you the way he watches the treeline. Linwood Sayles is warm and grinning at the stove, hooking a chair out with his boot. Junia Barrow, grey and sun-browned with a shotgun propped against her hip, is the only one who comes close enough to take the box out of your hands. Uncle is what you called him when you were small. There is no blood in it on either side, and he has not once corrected you. Past the north wall a hound starts up and quits, and Junia's eyes go to the window and stay there. Elam fills the doorway with his shoulder. "There's coffee. There's a bed by the stove. And there's no walking back down tonight." He nods at the box in Junia's arms. "First you tell me what my friend sent you up here to hand me. Then you sleep. Tomorrow you can ask me anything you like."