Cody visualized an old potbellied stove in the tack room where he’d done what he could for Max. He’d seen a pile of firewood in one of the stalls out in the barn, and there had been a bunch of kittens playing chase in the hay bales. “Maybe there will be phone service when I reach the barn,” he muttered as he opened the back door of the truck and grabbed his black doctor bag. “If there is, I can let the folks know where I am.”

He pocketed his keys, zipped his coat to his chin, and turned his collar up. Then, bent against the driving north wind blowing snow right in his face, he headed up the lane. He vowed that he would never leave home again without both a ski mask and a stocking hat—even if it was summertime and the thermometer registered over a hundred degrees. At least his cowboy boots gave him protection from the snow.

His nose and ears felt like Popsicles by the time he made it to the barn. He was wearing gloves, but his hands were stiff, and he had trouble sliding the barn door open enough to get inside. Unfortunately, it wasn’t any warmer than the outside.

“But at least it’s dry and out of the wind,” Cody told himself as he removed his cowboy hat and brushed snow from it on the way to the tack room. Bits of snow sifted under the collar of his mustard yellow work coat and down the back of his neck.

The tack room door was already open, and dry wood was stacked neatly in the corner, which, otherwise, was a mess. He threw the stove door open and shoved several sticks of kindling inside, and then stacked three sticks of firewood on top of it. Everything was ready to start a fire, but he didn’t have a lighter or matches, so he went in search of something to light it. He found rusty screws stored in peanut butter jars, several cans of beans, tuna fish, and chicken, a container of cornmeal and one of flour, but no matches.

“Why on earth would Max have food here when he couldn’t even start a fire to heat it?” Cody muttered.

A cast-iron skillet was sitting on top of an old green rounded-top refrigerator, and because he had left his phone in the fridge one time, he even opened the door to see if there were matches in there. Other than a withered apple and two jars of elderberry jelly, the fridge was empty. In the freezer he found a few packages of meat wrapped in white butcher paper—steaks was written on the outside of a couple of them—so he wouldn’t starve. He was disappointed when he turned on a burner and found there was no gas.