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Miranda frowned in confusion.

They’d been harvested illegally, Warren explained. People kept track of this sort of thing.

Then there was his contractor. He had done some things he shouldn’t have. Maybe he did them on his own without telling Chick the ramifications, or maybe he did them at his client’s direction. There was no way to know now. But the house was much bigger than had been officially permitted. The septic, well, and driveway were not to code. These things would be serious issues anywhere, but especially in the Adirondack Park. Somehow, all this illegal work had been signed off on by the building inspector. Hard to say whether he was dumb and lazy or had been paid off. Even if he hadn’t noticed the violations, the neighbors had. Two had sued her father. One because the septic was leaching near his property; another because her father had dug out part of the stream to create that swimming hole and thereby disturbed prime fish habitat, and because an outbuilding her father had constructed was never permitted.

Meanwhile, the contractor had gone bankrupt and sued her father for incomplete payment. Chick had claimed shoddy workmanship. There was no way to know what really transpired between them. The contractor had since left the area. The building inspector who had signed off on the illegal work had retired on disability he claimed came from falling while on the job. People had seen him golfing. Not so disabled. The new inspector had been nosing around and didn’t like what he was seeing. The former building inspector had had a large garage built but could not document paying for it. He had made other home improvements as well. The now-bankrupt contractor had done the work but never issued a bill. It was not clear who paid for it.

Warren paused in his story. Sighed. Then explained that there were suspicions Miranda’s father had paid for the work at the inspector’s home and rolled the charges into the work for their log home, in order to get the inspector to ignore the obvious infringements. Then he may have stiffed the contractor, who couldn’t exactly sue for payment of illegal work.

Miranda listened in silence. In shock, Warren feared.

Finally she whispered, “I had no idea.”

“Of course not,” Warren said.

“But it sort of makes sense,” she said. “I mean, I remember some things.”

Warren decided now was not the time to discuss the risky investments Chick Steward had made, many of which had gone sour, or the soon-to-come cutoff of his employer-supplied health insurance.

“What do I do?” Miranda whispered.

“What do we do,” Warren said. “I am here to help you. You will not, cannot, do this alone.”

Had he lived, Warren explained, her father might have been able to extricate himself from the mess, but without him here, it seemed the best strategy was to help her find a way to cut the losses, staunch the bleeding, and try to get a fresh start and a clean slate. An unburdened future, Warren added.

Miranda blinked at him and nodded.

Warren told her what he needed right away was for her to get some paperwork signed by her mother—perhaps by her mother’s doctors, if she was truly incapacitated—so Miranda could get power of attorney. Then he could act on her behalf. Something he assured her he wouldn’t do without consulting her. He promised complete transparency.

“For now,” he said, sighing with relief at the sound of a door opening and closing in the outer office and the footfall of boots on the rug, “go home and get some rest.”

“I feel a bit shaky,” Miranda said.

“I can imagine,” he said, taking her elbow. “I called Dix. He’s here now. He’ll take you home.”

Miranda went home and sat alone in the house her father had built. Flashes of memory exploded around her. Her father complaining about the neighbors to her mother. Her mother begging him to not dig out the river. Her father screaming on the phone. Throwing tools at a pickup truck as it blew gravel out behind its back tires and raced down the drive. Whispered conversations with men who were not friends and who did not come indoors but stayed close to their vehicles in the driveway.

Miranda was fearful. She had no idea how she would sort through all of this. She was afraid of the financial reality that she might be facing. She’d always had an allowance. Her credit card was connected to her father’s accounts. She’d never even balanced her checkbook. She always knew she’d have to face the fiscal facts of her own life someday, but that day had been so easy to keep pushing off. Yet, as sobering as this news was, she felt sure that Warren’s solicitude as she sat in his office was a sign that he was doling out the bad news a bit at a time. She felt sure there was plenty more to come.

Which it did. She learned bit by bit of her father’s financial misdeeds and the mess he left behind. She looked at the numbers Warren showed her—the amounts wasted and lost left her breathless and dizzy. She cried so much over the ensuing six months that she felt desiccated, like something left in the desert. But in between the tears, she made things happen. She did what needed to be done. Guided by Warren, aided by Dix, she rose to the demands life—and death—required of her. Her mother was not going to recover, the log home was not going to be brought up to code, she was not going to inherit enough money to keep them both comfortable for the rest of their lives, as they both had expected.

Barbara Steward was installed in a small assisted-living community. She had often talked of going to a retirement community in the past, on days that she found the management of two large homes overwhelming. She said she’d play bridge, learn to paint watercolors, and never have to cook again. Miranda had seen the “senior living” brochures her mother had once collected, their slick pages filled with photos of vibrant, lightly wrinkled, silver-haired and smiling people biking, painting, listening to a concert, driving a convertible. Bunny hadn’t done any of those things when she was well and would certainly not be doing them in her “retirement.” The only wish of hers that would come true was never having to cook again. Instead, she was fed soft foods in her room by a cast of laconic, leathery women because she refused to eat in the dining rooms with the other residents. One afternoon when Miranda was visiting her dazed, confused, and silent mother in her beige room in the one-story complex up near Plattsburgh, she watched as a brusque woman briskly and efficiently tightened the sheets and comforter of the bed without disturbing their occupant, wiped her mother’s face, brushed her hair, and tidied the food tray, all in a few economical moves. Miranda found herself envying the other woman’s uninflected competence.

Maybe,
Miranda thought,
I could learn to be that good at something. Maybe I could get into some sort of helping profession.
Miranda looked at the woman’s nametag.
T
IFFANY
.
How incongruous,
she thought.

“Thank you, Tiffany,” she said, “for all your help with my mother.”

The other woman murmured something and shrugged.

“Do you mind if I ask how you got into this line of work?” Miranda persevered.

In a few staccato sentences, Tiffany told her she’d gotten training as a health-care aide after her abusive husband burned down their trailer, mistakenly thinking she and their three kids were in it. Miranda brought her fingers to her mouth. Fortunately, Tiffany explained, without emotion, she’d left just that morning and was holed up in a battered women’s shelter with the kids. It was too bad that the dog, two cats, and a parakeet had died in the fire, she added, but thankfully the bastard shot himself in his truck in the driveway while the trailer burned.

“The one thing he did right in his whole life,” Tiffany said as she grabbed a tray and left the room.

Miranda got a real estate agent and put the Connecticut house on the market. It sold quickly, above the asking price, but her father had taken out a large second mortgage on the place and invested the resulting proceeds poorly, so after the taxes and Realtor’s fees, Miranda was left with a sum that seemed to be missing a couple of zeroes at the end of it. Between these funds, the proceeds from a life insurance policy, the much-reduced assets in her father’s once-hefty investment portfolio, and his Social Security due to her mother, Miranda and Warren were able to pay off some back debts, settle a couple of lawsuits, provide her mother adequate care, and put $75,000 into an account for herself. She accurately saw this as a sum that would merely buy her a bit of time to get settled, and then provide a buffer as she found her way into some sort of a modest job and new life. When she tried to imagine what that new life might look like, she could conjure only the image of an empty blackboard, smudged with the recent erasure of whatever guidance might have recently been scribbled there. She told herself, and Warren told her, too, to just focus on the tasks at hand. The rest would sort itself out soon enough.

The log home seemed beyond salvage. The expenses to get it up to code would be too great. It could no longer be lived in, but it likely would not sell with all its encumbrances. There were plenty of other places in the area rich people could buy that were just as pretty and a lot less burdened. Fortunately, since a bank would never have loaned money for a property like that, her father had paid cash. It was debt free. Miranda could just walk away from it. Dix helped her close it up. He drained water lines, sold the mower, tractor, and her father’s lightly used tools. They took a few truckloads of furniture, clothes, books, and other items to Goodwill. Anything of value went into a storage unit while Miranda “sorted herself out.”

When the day came for the final walkthrough, Miranda watched Dix survey the grounds, check doors, locks, and faucets, sweep the garage and barn. She didn’t cry. She had no tears left. She knew Dix was also watching her, careful and gentle with his gaze, and she felt swaddled by the snug pressure of his attention. She reached over and squeezed his arm. His limb felt to her like a young tree with the bark stripped off. She knew he was concerned for her. She didn’t allow herself to take it too personally. She knew he always cared for things that were broken, and she accepted that she fell into this category.

“I’ll be OK,” she said, trying for a smile.

“Where will you live?” he asked.

“I’m renting a little place in town.”

“The Lewises’ house?”

“Yes.”

She had gotten used to Dix knowing things. She had stopped wondering how he knew so much and yet told so little. They stood in the yard in the late-afternoon stillness. A raven croaked from somewhere overhead, a desolate sound that somehow became companionable when another answered. A chipmunk ran under the porch. Miranda noticed that light was low. The days were short. Summer had come and gone without her noticing. The leaves had bloomed with color, faded to brown, and fallen to the ground. Snowflakes blew through the air. She shivered. Dix removed his coat and placed it over her shoulders. She shrugged herself into it gratefully.

“It’s like a graveyard,” Miranda said.

“Yes,” Dix answered. “A peaceful place full of memories.”

“Funny, that’s not how I think of a graveyard. More like a place filled with ghosts.”

Dix nodded slowly.

“I got some good news from Warren,” she said, scuffing a toe in the dirt.

Dix lifted his eyebrows in question.

“Looks like someone may be interested in buying. Warren wouldn’t tell me much. Someone he knows personally. Someone who wants to remain anonymous. He said he thinks whoever it is just wants the land and doesn’t care about living here or the problems with the house. Wants to protect the land. Keep it wild.”

Dix nodded again, a little more slowly this time.

“Must be nice,” Miranda said.

“What must be nice?” Dix asked.

“To be able to do something like that. To be able to be generous. To have that abundance and instead of holding on to it, to share it. Quietly. Without drawing attention.”

“Well, maybe the new owner won’t post the land and you can still visit,” Dix said hopefully.

“No, too many bad memories,” she said. “I have to move on and get my own life started. Time to smash the rearview mirror.” Her mouth twisted a bit. “Besides, they’ll have to post, Warren says. Liability issues. Can’t have someone coming up here, breaking into the house, getting hurt and suing.”