I looked at him.
Then we both thought of Grandpa’s notebook.
Don’t trust a man in polished boots on mountain ground.
The man smiled as he approached, hands open, easy as church on Sunday.
“Afternoon,” he called. “Didn’t expect company up here.”
He was in his fifties, broad-shouldered, clean-shaven, with silver hair and the kind of face that seemed friendly until you noticed how little his eyes participated.
“This is private property,” I said.
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”
He stopped at the bottom of the porch. “Name’s Vernon Pike. I own the lumber operation down by Laurel Fork.”
I didn’t offer my hand.
He glanced around. “Walter Hale’s grandsons, aren’t you?”
“How do you know that?” Cody asked.
“Town’s small. News travels.” He smiled again. “Your aunt said you boys might wander up here.”
That hit like a slap.
I kept my voice flat. “What do you want?”
Vernon rocked back on his heels. “Just being neighborly. This land’s been in question for a while. Taxes went unpaid. Boundaries got muddy. I’ve been looking to clear up title issues on some adjoining parcels.”
“Funny timing,” Cody muttered.
Vernon ignored him. “If you boys are in a bind, I’d be willing to help. Cash offer, quick and simple. Save you the trouble of fighting over a piece of mountain nobody can make a living from anyway.”
There it was.
I thought of the hidden cellar. The notebooks. The letter. The way Denise had shut off the porch light before we reached the truck.
“How much?” I asked.
Cody shot me a look, but I kept my eyes on Vernon.
He named a number so low it was almost insulting.
I laughed.
His smile thinned. “It’s generous considering the condition.”
“You don’t even know if we own it,” I said.
“Like I said, title’s muddy.” He glanced past me toward the back of the cabin, and I felt a jolt of alarm so sharp I nearly stepped in front of his line of sight. “These old claims can be messy. Be a shame if the county decided the land was abandoned and unsafe.”
“That a threat?” Cody asked.
Vernon’s expression reset itself into something mild. “Advice.”
He reached into his jacket, pulled out a business card, and set it on the porch rail.
“I’ll give you boys a few days to think. Hard winter coming.”
Then he tipped two fingers in a fake little salute, got back in his truck, and drove away.
We stood in the dust cloud he left behind.
Cody picked up the card and bent it in half until it snapped.
“He knows,” he said.
“Maybe not about the cellar. But he wants this land.”
“Why?”
I looked toward the trees, where the mountain rose dark and quiet around us.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But Grandpa did.”
That night, after we barred the door and banked the stove, I opened the notebooks again.
If Vernon Pike wanted this place that badly, then somewhere in Grandpa Walter’s careful, stubborn handwriting there had to be a reason.
And I intended to find it.
Chapter Three: Grandpa’s Map
There are two kinds of hunger.
The first is simple. Food, heat, sleep, safety. We had lived with that kind for months, the kind that makes your decisions smaller and meaner because all your energy is spent surviving the next hour.
The second kind is harder to name. It’s the hunger to understand why things happen to you. Why your mother dies young. Why your family splinters. Why one person throws you out and another leaves instructions in a hidden cellar years before you need them.
By the third day on the mountain, I was full of that second hunger.
Cody spent the morning patching the porch roof with sheet metal we found stacked behind the smokehouse ruins. I sat at the table under the cabin window, going through Grandpa’s notebooks page by page.
Some were practical. Trapping routes. Weather logs. Planting schedules.
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