A Death in a Snowstorm by Joel Jurrens

Author:Joel Jurrens [Jurrens, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-07T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Summer hadn’t been joking about the trail being blocked. Every twenty yards or so a pile of brush ran across the creek, forcing a detour up on the bank and around it. With the banks rising sharply into thick cattails, maneuvering a snowmobile around it would have been impossible. They had all they could do working the cargo sled over the obstructions.

About 100 yards into the trip to the cabin, Aaron became aware there weren’t any stumps or other trees and brush along the creek. The obstructions hadn’t occurred naturally. They had been dragged there for the sole purpose of blocking the trail. Wildman Bob had built a moat around his fortress to prevent easy access to the cabin and isolate himself even further from civilization.

After they had been walking for a while, the breeze brought the smell of wood smoke. Aaron knew the cabin must be close. They came to a complicated obstruction that looked like a beaver dam: a pile of rocks, branches and frozen mud, but it was clearly manmade—the branches had saw marks on them. Aaron guessed Bob had dammed the creek to make his water source deeper.

When they had passed the damn by worming their way through the cattails on one side, he could see the cabin. It stood fifty yards up the side of a hill with a southern exposure. The trees had been cleared for a hundred yards in every other direction. The ground beside the cabin had been terraced into flat steps eight feet wide and 30 yards long running to the top of the clearing. They were edged with rocks, and Aaron guessed they were raised beds for a garden.

The cabin reminded Aaron of something from a Boy Scout camp. It was made from peeled logs coated with a shiny substance—maybe varnish or polyurethane. He guessed the logs had been hauled in and not cut in the area. They were too uniform in thickness. Maybe they were made from a kit? The roof was covered in red rolled roofing that looked as if it had been replaced within the last few years. When they were closer, Aaron could see the logs had shrunk as they aged and dried. The spaces between them had been sloppily re-packed with no thought of their appearance. Smears of gray cement ran onto the logs with clearly visible finger streaks where hands had rubbed the cement into the cracks.

There was a tiny building twenty yards from the cabin Aaron took as an outhouse. It was the only building in the clearing besides the cabin, but on the right of it stood a woodpile fully half as tall as the cabin itself. In front of it sat a chopping block. The brush blocking the trail was the refuse of what was left when Wildman Bob had chopped wood, Aaron guessed. He had used it as the material for the walls across the trail and made it as difficult as he could for people to reach the cabin.

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