Buttons and Bones Read Online Free

person who needs to discover he misses you.”
    “Oh, I don’t think I can get away right now . . .” Betsy sighed. She was trying to save money by working extra hours in the shop, thereby cutting back on her part-timers’ hours. Employee pay was her biggest expense.
    Jill, who had pulled a skein of 645, dark gray, and another of 924, dark blue-green, came over to the checkout desk to lean forward, her light blue eyes shining. “Think about it,” she murmured. “Pine trees so tall their tops seem to tangle in the clouds, air cool and clean and a little sharp in the nose. Sky blue water in the lake, a deer half-seen in the woods, an eagle circling a clearing on still wings. A fire in the stove on a cool evening, a cup of cocoa, and pair of loons making that yearning, lonesome yodel down on the lake.”
    Against her will, Betsy’s interest stirred. “You have loons?”
    “Right down on our shore.” She put the floss on the pattern, which was of a pair of adult loons, black-and-white-striped water birds. A fuzzy gray infant rode on one adult’s back. “Like this, except it’s August and the babies are grown now.”
    Betsy had never seen a loon in person, and had heard their eerie cries only in recordings. They had pointed beaks and heavy bones, she knew. They were very strange birds, the state bird of Minnesota.
    She looked up into Jill’s kind, concerned face and said, “When?”
    “How about this weekend? Come for four days. Lars is taking Monday and Tuesday off because he’s working all of Labor Day weekend. It’ll be the first time we’ve brought the children up.”
    “Oh, I don’t think—”
    Godwin appeared from out of nowhere. “No, don’t think. Just go. Consider this—what do you military folk call it? Emergency leave. Take emergency leave.”
    She looked at his face, also kind and concerned.
    “All right,” she said. She looked at Jill. “Yes, I’ll come. Thank you.”

Three

    THERE are two kinds of travel, goes an old saying: first class, and with children. The Larson children were well behaved, for nearly four and almost two—but they were lively little ones, and for them the three-hour drive to Thunder Lake was interminable. Lars stopped twice on the way up to turn them out of the SUV and let them run around. That worked for little Erik after the second time, when he fell asleep in his car seat. But Emma Beth, buckled into her car seat, couldn’t find a DVD she liked, so she sang, loudly and off-key, the same three verses of “Old MacDonald,” and asked after every other verse if they were there yet.
    Jill and Lars discussed what they had done to the old cabin. It had been six weeks since they had taken possession. They had gone up on weekends to do some emergency repairs to make the place suitable for human habitation—which meant they had driven out the spiders, squirrels, mice, and mama raccoon that had taken up residence. They had unplugged the chimneys and propped up the miniature front porch. Lars had found and plugged a leak on the roof. There was no electricity pending an inspection of the wiring by a professional, and the only source of water was a hand pump outside the cabin.
    Betsy, no fan of roughing it, was prepared to put up with a certain amount of primitive living for the sake of getting really far away—cell phones didn’t work on that side of the lake, and the Larsons didn’t plan to install a landline, at least not right away.
    But thoughts of a fugitive spider or two nesting in her hair overnight and no hot shower in the morning were discouraging.
    At last they turned off the highway onto a secondary road lined with immense pine trees set here and there with aspen. They turned off that onto a gravel road even more closely set with huge pines, and off that onto a dirt road, and off that onto a lane that was two barely visible tire tracks. It led up a steep little rise and into a small clearing—and on the far edge of the clearing stood a little log