Times Change Read Free Page A

of the earth, merged with the wood in the form of a huge fireplace. There was a fire burning in it, crackling and hissing behind a mesh screen. The scent was wonderful. It was a small, cramped room, jammed with furniture, yet it was appealing in its cheeriness and its oddities.
    Jacob could have spent hours in that room alone, examining every inch of it. But he wanted to see the rest. Muttering into his minirecorder, he started up the stairs.
    ***
    Sunny yanked the wheel of the Land Rover and swore. How could she actually have believed she wanted to spend a couple of months in the cabin? Peace and quiet! Who needed it? She ground the gears as the Land Rover chugged up the hill. The idea that a few solitary weeks would give her the opportunity to sort out her life and finally decide what she wanted to do with it was ridiculous.
    She knew what she wanted to do with it. Something big, something spectacular. Disgusted, she blew out a long breath that sent her blond bangs dancing. Just because she hadn’t decided exactly what that something was didn’t matter. She’d know it when she saw it.
    Just as she always knew what it wasn’t when she saw it.
    It wasn’t flying cargo planes—or jumping out of them. It wasn’t ballet, and it wasn’t touring with a rock band. It wasn’t driving a truck, and it wasn’t writing haiku.
    Not everyone, at twenty-three, could be so specific about where his ambitions didn’t lie, Sunny reminded herself as she spun the Land Rover to a halt in front of the cabin. Using the process of elimination, she should be well on her way to fame and success in another ten or twenty years.
    Fingers drumming against the steering wheel, she studied the cabin. It was squat, and just homely enough not to be ugly. An old rocker stood on the porch that skirted the front. It had sat there year after year, summer and winter, for as long as she could remember. There was, she discovered, something comforting in continuity.
    And yet with the comfort came a restlessness for the new, for the untouched and the unseen.
    With a sigh, she sat back, ignoring the cold. What was it that she wanted that wasn’t here, in this place? Or in any place she’d been? Still, when it had come time to question, when it had come time to think, she had come back here, to the cabin.
    She had been born in it, had spent the first few years of her life inside it and running through the surrounding forest. Perhaps that was why she had come back when her life had seemed so pointless. Just to recapture some of that simplicity.
    She loved it, really. Oh, not with the passion her sister, Libby, did. Not with the deep-rooted sentiment of their parents. But fondly, the way children often feel about an old, eccentric aunt.
    Sunny couldn’t imagine living there again, the way Libby and her new husband were. Day after day, night after night, without seeing another soul. Perhaps Sunny’s roots were in the forest, but her heart belonged to the city, with its bright lights and its possibilities.
    Just a vacation, she told herself, pulling off her woolen hat and running impatient fingers through her short hair. She was entitled to one. After all, she’d entered college at the tender age of sixteen. Too bright for her own good, her father had said more than once. After graduating just before her twentieth birthday, she had plunged into endeavor after endeavor, never finding satisfaction.
    She tended to be good at whatever she did. Perhaps that was why she’d taken lessons in everything from tap dancing to tole painting. But being good at something didn’t make it the right something. So she moved on, perennially restless, feeling perennially guilty for leaving things half-done.
    Now it was time to settle down. So she had come here, to think, to decide, to consider. That was all. It wasn’t as if she were hiding—just because she’d lost her last job. No, her last two jobs, she told herself viciously.
    In any case, she had enough money to hold her