She had no idea that before midnight, those same ribs would lead them to a secret buried beneath their mountain home for almost thirty years.
Nor could she have imagined that the secret would force her husband to confront the one person he had spent his entire adult life trying to forget.
Outside their cabin, snow fell so heavily that the familiar pine trees had become little more than dark shapes behind a curtain of white. The Appalachian Mountains stretched away in every direction, their ridges disappearing into the gray winter sky. The creek below the property had frozen along its banks, the narrow trail leading toward Blackwood was buried beneath three feet of snow, and even the oldest farmers in the valley agreed that the winter of 1888 was proving unusually cruel.
Inside the cabin, however, the world felt entirely different.
A bright fire burned in the enormous stone hearth. Copper pots hung above the cooking table, dried herbs filled the rafters with their gentle fragrance, and a large iron kettle whispered over the flames.
At the center of that warmth stood Clara.
She was twenty-six years old, with a beautiful round face, soft rosy cheeks, bright blue eyes, and thick chestnut-brown hair gathered into a loose braid. Her generous figure had always attracted unwanted comments from strangers, but inside her home she no longer felt the need to hide herself.
Her sage-green dress rested comfortably against her body, and a clean cream-colored apron was tied around her waist.
She had been standing beside the cooking table for almost an hour, carefully preparing the last substantial piece of beef remaining in their winter stores.
It was an enormous rack of ribs, beautifully marbled and heavy enough that she had needed both hands to lift it from the cold pantry.
Her husband, Samuel, had brought the meat home two months earlier after helping a neighboring farmer repair a collapsed barn.
Samuel Thorne was thirty-five, exceptionally tall, broad-shouldered, and strong enough to carry a full barrel of grain without assistance. His dark wavy hair reached the back of his collar, and his thick beard made his already rugged features appear even more imposing.
He wore a sleeveless brown leather vest lined with sheepskin, heavy trousers, and boots that had been repaired so many times Clara sometimes wondered whether any part of the original leather remained.
Most people in Blackwood were frightened of him.
Clara had never understood why.
Perhaps it was his enormous size. Perhaps it was the old scar running across his left shoulder. Perhaps it was simply that he spoke very little and preferred the silence of the mountains to the noise of town.