On her seventh morning, he entered while Evelyn was shaping biscuits.
“You stayed.”
“You sound disappointed.”
“I lost ten dollars.”
Evelyn stared.
“You bet against me?”
“Business is business.”
She threw flour at him.
Dawson blinked through the white cloud.
Silence fell across the dining room.
Then he started laughing.
The ranch hands nearly overturned the tables.
By the second week, Evelyn knew every man’s appetite.
Boone liked coffee black.
Red hated onions.
Pike ate enough biscuits for three ordinary men.
Jack preferred his steak nearly burned.
And Dawson, though he would never admit it, loved cinnamon cake.
For the first time since her mother’s death, Evelyn occasionally forgot to be sad.
Then strange things began happening.
A sack of flour disappeared.
Her kitchen window opened during the night.
A drawer she always kept locked stood open one morning.
Nothing was missing.
Except her mother’s recipe book had been moved.
Evelyn knew because she always left it facing north.
That morning it faced south.
She told Jack.
His expression became serious.
“Lock your door.”
“I already do.”
“Then put a chair beneath the handle.”
“Do you know something?”
“No.”
“You’re lying.”
His eyes met hers.
“For your own good, Evelyn, sometimes asking fewer questions is wise.”
She stared at him.
“My father used to say people only give that advice when they’re terrified of the answers.”
Jack went still.
Then he smiled again.
“Your father sounds like an interesting man.”
“You knew him?”
“No.”
The answer came too quickly.
Evelyn knew it.
And Jack knew she knew it.
That evening she opened her mother’s recipe book.
Most pages contained ordinary recipes written in faded ink.
Cornbread.
Rabbit stew.
Blackberry preserves.
Cinnamon cake.
But now Evelyn noticed something peculiar.
Numbers appeared in several margins.
Three.
Twelve.
Nine.
Twenty-one.
Measurements, she had always assumed.
Yet beside a biscuit recipe her mother had written:
Third stone. North wall. When the ridge turns white.
Evelyn stared.
That wasn’t a recipe note.
She turned another page.
Beside beef stew:
Never trust the hollow man.
A chill crawled along her neck.
She had read the book hundreds of times.
How had she never noticed?
Then she remembered.
Her mother’s eyesight had worsened near the end of her life.
She had added notes in dark ink.
These were pale.
Older.
Written before Evelyn had been born.
She examined another page.
Under the place where bread rises.
Evelyn looked toward the pantry.
There was only one place bread regularly rose.
The wooden kneading table.
She waited until midnight.
Then moved it.
Beneath one leg, almost invisible under years of grime, was a small iron ring set into the floor.
Evelyn’s heart began pounding.
She pulled.
A square section of floor lifted.
Beneath it was darkness.
And a narrow staircase.
“You planning to climb down there alone?”
