In this first book of a trilogy, William Durant and his sister Ella have spent most of their youth living abroad while their father invests in land and builds a railroad empire in the wake of the Civil War. They are provided every opportunity their...
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She raised the maul over her head with both hands. Trying not to sway from the weight of it, Avery brought her arms down over the piece of wood stationed on the stump waiting to be split. The maul missed its mark, again, and buried itself in the stump with a loud thunk.
"Damn it!" She had to figure this out or it would be a miserable summer. The lighting in the cabin was dim at best in the evenings and the small kitchen appliances worked on propane. Cooking over a fire pit out by the lake was much easier and more aesthetic anyway.
She wished she had paid more attention all of those years when her brother split wood at the family's summer camp. It was always so much easier to watch him sweat it out while she whittled away at a twig. Besides, she didn't want splitting wood, like everything else they did, to turn into a competition.
She struggled with the maul, twisting and wrenching it until it came free of the stump so suddenly she stumbled backwards. Lifting it in the air, she brought it down again with angry force and hit the corner of the piece of wood. The log went flying off the stump and left her a few splintered pieces. This wouldn't do; she was going to throw out her back if she wasn't careful.
"What idiot left me with un-split logs?" she said to herself. There was no one else to talk to here.
Avery was red-faced and sweating and still had split no more than three pieces of wood when she saw a small motorboat with a man at the helm maneuvering it up to the dock. Leaning on the maul, she waited to see who was disrupting her solitude. He was about her age, late twenties. He got out of the boat carrying a duffel and waved at her.
"Hi," he shouted. "You ordered some stuff from the store in town?"
She had ordered some supplies from the Raquette Lake store but hadn't known they delivered.
"Yes, I did."
"Well, sorry to startle you," he said as he came up the hill toward her. "My mother asked me to drop these off while I was delivering some things for the College at Camp Huntington."
Avery looked over at his small boat and wondered why he didn't just drive the supplies to Huntington from town. The staff at Huntington would have kept them for her; it was only a mile hike through the woods. And who was his mother?
As if reading her thoughts he said, "I like getting out on the boat when I can, and there are other people on the islands that can always use a delivery of milk or coffee or something."
He had on typical Adirondack attire: jeans, a flannel shirt and baseball cap. He was medium height, dark skinned – she couldn't tell if it was his natural glow or from too much sun – and brown eyes.
He noticed her eyeing him up and down, smiled, and nodded at the pile of wood, her maul, and the splintered pieces at her feet. "Splitting some wood?"
