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and Country . Vanity Fair . The New Yorker . The magazines were her mother’s. Things she flipped through over her first drink of the day and then fanned out on the coffee table. Miranda picked up one, ran her fingers over the cool, slick pages, and let it slip from her hand. These would all stop soon enough because there was no one to renew the subscriptions. Another box held letters, mostly the square envelopes of cards and personal notes. She plucked a few at random and slid her finger under the seals on the thick flaps of expensive paper. A condolence card from someone whose name she didn’t recognize. An invitation to a garden club event. A request for a donation for a new arts center. A solicitation from a cable company. A notice from the school board. A form letter from a doctor’s office notifying her mother that it was time to schedule a mammogram. Miranda wondered why Mazie hadn’t forwarded all this stuff to them. Her mother must have told her not to, that she’d be down to take care of it. Mazie had learned over the years to do as she was told, to not ask twice. She would not have taken initiative on her own. There was also a box of junk mail. Of course, Mazie wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to throw even this stuff away.
    The last box was larger, full of oversize manila envelopes. In the upper left corner, each envelope had a unique combination of three or four last names printed in some conservative typeface above a New York, New York, return address. Miranda’s throat tightened around the question of what those dozen envelopes might portend. Finance. Legal stuff. Business. Her father’s business. Things that needed attending to. The stuff Richard Stone was referring to. Things far beyond her interest or experience. She’d need her mother’s help understanding it all. She was afraid she wouldn’t get it. She knew she wouldn’t get it. Even the earlier version of her mother would probably not have been able to help her. She had managed their domestic and social lives. Miranda’s father managed the rest. As Miranda had heard him say at many cocktail parties as he clapped his wife a little too hard on the back, sloshing her drink, barking out a practiced guffaw, oblivious to her wince: “I make the money. She spends it.”
    It was late afternoon. Long shadows came in the kitchen windows. Miranda’s stomach growled. She was suddenly overpowered with the desire to leave. To flee. This was no longer home. Maybe it never had been. She had planned to stay at least two weeks, to head into the city to see Richard Stone at his offices. Maybe make a few such trips. Maybe even look up an old friend. Instead, she left the magazines and junk behind, put the other two boxes into the backseat of her car, turned the hallway light on, locked the door, and drove back the way she’d come.

    Darkness was descending as she left the highway more than three hours later and headed onto the twisted two-lane road. It was a darkness made of more than just the absence of the sun; it seemed to emanate from the surroundings themselves. The densely branched, heavily needled evergreens, steep slides of charcoal rocks, inky shadows, and tree-clad mountainsides came right down to the edges of the pavement. A vague glow illuminated a closed gas station with rusted pumps. She caught a glimpse of a heathered sign for an attraction that had gone out of business decades ago. A tar-shingled house with dimly lit windows had a thin stream of smoke coming from the chimney, even though it was summer. A spotlight showed a yard filled with junk advertised as antiques. A farmhouse-turned-bar had a few people smoking on the porch, the embers of their cigarettes heating up to red as they inhaled. Miranda knew there was a frame out in front of that place, filled with firewood. She’d seen a man there, bent over a pile of bucked-up logs alongside the building, slowly splitting the wood into manageable sizes. Manageable for tourists. Three dollars a