Below the embankment, tucked behind the rear concrete-block wall of the storage units where the municipal drainage ditch curved into the timber, sat a structure.
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Arthur’s breath caught in his throat. A cold, nauseating horror gripped his stomach, tighter and more vicious than any grief he had carried for Caroline.
It was not a cabin.
It was a rusted, windowless, green steel industrial **dumpster**—a twelve-yard construction debris roll-off container that had been abandoned by a paving company two years earlier, half-swallowed by mud, dead blackberry vines, and snowdrifts.
Over the open top of the steel container, someone had stretched two blue plastic tarps, their grommets tied with frayed yellow nylon baling twine to the rusty lifting lugs on the sides. The tarps were sagging under the weight of three inches of wet, heavy slush, flapping violently with every gust of wind coming off the highway.
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The mother reached the container, lifted a heavy section of the blue tarp with her left shoulder, and gently hoisted Chloe over the four-foot rusted steel lip into the interior.
