Read Online Dead Level by Sarah Graves - Free Book Online

in the old house really were psychological, not supernatural.
    Or maybe my loner nature was just poking its head up and taking itself out for a little airing, as it had done a few other times over the years. For whatever reason, though, a long silence sounded like heaven to me. While I was here, I didn’t even plan to turn on the radio.
    Meanwhile, the fresh pile of boards at the edge of the truck turnaround reminded me of something I did mean to do: that deck.
    “Come on, let’s get the supplies inside,” I told Ellie.
    For the next half hour, we worked steadily, transferring the tools, the coolers, the dry goods, and my clothes and toiletries into the cottage, a sixty-by-eighty-foot post-and-beam building with a sharply peaked roof, shingled outside and pine-paneled inside.
    The main floor was one big room with a woodstove situated dead center in it, an open galley kitchen with a gas stove and propane refrigerator, and a living area with bright braided rugs, big overstuffed chairs, and a round wooden table plus a pair of daybeds for lying around on, reading and relaxing.
    Not that much of that went on at the cabin, though, since a fewfeet downhill was the lake. A long wooden dock ran out into it, and when we weren’t working on the camp—a surprising amount of labor went into just keeping the place in running order—we were swimming, fishing, floating in inner tubes, or just messing around in boats.
    “Oof.” Ellie set the last canvas bags of supplies on the kitchen counter. “It’s like you’re staying for a month.”
    I put the gasoline-powered chain saw down. Most of the deck work that remained could be built with a handsaw, a hammer and nails, and a battery-driven drill equipped with wickedly long bits that looked like parts of a spearfishing kit, for drilling the holes the carriage bolts went into, to attach the steps and railings.
    But I did still have to cut the posts for the railings that would run alongside the steps, and I had no intention of trying to do that by hand. The posts would be made of six-by-six-inch pressure-treated lumber, and pressure-treating doesn’t just force anti-rot chemicals in; it also makes the wood a lot harder. So I’d bought myself a new sixteen-inch gas-powered Stihl: big enough for the job, light enough for me to handle well, and best of all, an easy starter.
    “I mean—” Ellie pulled things at random out of the food satchel. “Pistachios? And a garlic press?”
    “Well, I don’t want to be eating entirely out of cans while I’m here.” Crouching by the chimney, I opened its square, cast-iron cleanout hatch and angled a small hand mirror up into it.
    Deviled ham on toast would be fun once or twice. But after that I meant to enjoy foods no one else in my family tolerated: a brussels sprouts quiche one night, for instance, rice with black beans another. Having to go back down that bumpy dirt road for a spice or condiment was not in my game plan, either.
    “A nutmeg scraper,” Ellie said, marveling.
    Tipping the mirror one way, then the other, I tried to look up the massive stone chimney the woodstove was piped into. But as I did, something fell down the chimney, landing on the ledge at the bottom of the hatch with a sooty thud.
    “Uh-oh.” It was a dead bird.
    Ellie knelt beside me to see, and I felt her recoil just the tiniest bit before she repressed a shudder, because of course she was not superstitious and neither was I, and never mind the odd, Victor-ish events that had gone on at my house that morning.
    But anyone with half a brain knows dead birds are bad luck. I mean, have you ever looked at a dead bird—some poor floppy, limp-necked thing that’s smacked into a plate-glass window and bounced off, and now has two little cartoon x’s where its eyes used to be—have you ever looked closely at one of those and thought, Oh, great, this means I’m in for some good luck ?
    I lifted the thing from the cleanout hatch with a garden spade from the toolshed,