Chapter Four
Four
Town was busier than the night before, with cars parked along the curb and the doors of the shops propped open. Smoke walked out ahead of me, knowing exactly where we were headed.
The signs that hung over the sidewalk identified the businesses that made up the little town of Six Rivers. The market was tiny, with produce stands out front that were filled with winter squashes, root vegetables, and bundles of fresh greens. It shared a roof with a tackle and bait shop to the right and the post office to its left, where a Cougar Land banner hung in the window.
The town’s residents were fit into the scene perfectly, with their wool and canvas coats and lace-up boots. They were right out of the pages of one of the old Field & Stream magazines Dad used to have piled in the living room.
Two men standing beside one of the light posts on the street reached out to give Smoke a pat on the head as he passed, but their conversation was cut short when they saw me following behind him. Their heads tipped politely, gazes lingering on my face a beat too long, as if they were trying to place me. There was exactly one way into Six Rivers, and it was also the only way out, so seeing a new face in town wasn’t usual unless you’d come for the hunting or fishing, or you’d taken a job at one of the logging outfits. It didn’t take more than a glance at me to guess that I wasn’t here for any of those things. And as soon as word got out that James Golden was back, I’d find more than one set of eyes following me.
I gave the men a polite smile as I passed, following Smoke until he reached the door of the diner. A metal bowl of water was set outside the entrance, and a thin crust of broken ice floated on the surface as he lapped it up. He plopped down, his long legs crowding the width of the sidewalk, forcing a passerby to step over him.
I caught my reflection in the diner’s window, which had been fogged over the night before. It was clear now, and inside, most of the tables were full. Upholstered stools lined the long counter that stretched down one side of the stall-shaped restaurant, and old glass pendants hung from the ceiling. The place had always been alive in a way the rest of Six Rivers wasn’t, buzzing with an energy that made it feel like the beating heart of the sleepy town, if it was possible for it to have one.
I pulled open the door and the bell on the other side jingled, making a few people turn in my direction. That same question was cast in their expressions, but this time there was recognition in some of the lingering gazes. Maybe word had started getting around quicker than I thought.
Many of them were faces I knew, though they were older now and their placement in my own memory was fuzzy, like they couldn’t quite come into focus. The librarian from the middle school, the woman who ran the food pantry, and Harold, the only name I could readily pull from the ether of my mind because he’d worked with my dad as a logger. He sat at the end of the counter on the last stool, fork dangling from his fingertips as he chewed. He was the only one not outright staring at me. But the face behind the counter was easy to recognize.
Sadie Cross greeted me with a smile, but there was still a visible coldness to her that lay just beneath the surface. It had always been that way between us, a natural consequence of the cliché dynamics that often existed between a teenage girl and her boyfriend’s sister.
“James Golden.” Sadie said my name, wiping down the glass dome of a cake stand as she watched me. “You’re maybe the last person I expected to see walk through that door today.”
“Hey, Sadie.” Even her name sounded strange as I spoke it.
She set the lid back down over a perfectly golden pie with a lattice crust missing a single piece. Her dark hair fell long over the shoulders of her blue sweater, covering the embroidered logo on her apron.
She glanced to the window behind me. “Saw Smoke out there, but figured he was with Micah.”
She looked like the same girl I’d known all those years, but there was something just slightly hard-edged in her face now. Her on-again, off-again relationship with my brother had made her a constant in our lives in the years before I left. In some version of events, we’d technically been friends, but it wasn’t until years after I left that I could see that my protectiveness of Johnny had made most of my friendships difficult. I’d never trusted anyone with him. The only exception there’d ever been was Micah.
I looked around me, searching for a spot along the counter to sit. The place was loud, filled with conversation, music, and the noise of the kitchen. Through the long opening in the back wall, I could see a man and another woman working back-to-back over the rising steam of a cooktop.
“I wondered if we’d see you after…” Sadie didn’t finish, gesturing to the only empty stool. “But Micah said you were handling things from San Francisco.”
I took the seat, wedging myself between two brawny men clad in flannel. I couldn’t tell if Sadie was asking for an explanation or just talking in the nervous way people did after someone died.
“Just a few things to deal with up here,” I said. “I’ll only be in town a couple of weeks.”
“Weeks,” Sadie repeated, as if the idea didn’t sit well with her. But the tone of her voice was quickly replaced by the smile returning to her lips. “Well, it’s nice to see you. You look good, James.”
“You too,” I said, thinking that it was true. There was still a distinct look about her that was somehow compounded by the soft wrinkles that framed her eyes and the fullness of her figure.
“What can I get you?” She tucked the rag into the ties of her apron.
“Just a coffee.”
I was glad she was willing to forgo the obligatory catch-up that I’d spent the entire drive to Six Rivers dreading. I didn’t want to talk about life in San Francisco or anything else that had filled the time since I’d left this place. There had been an almost paranoid stirring in me that squelched the safe distance the miles between the city and Six Rivers gave me. I also didn’t want to step too closely to the conversation about the fact that Sadie was still here, working in the diner and living the same life our mothers had, or the fact that I wasn’t at all surprised by it.
She filled a mug from the full, steaming pot of coffee on the hot plate, and I let my eyes wander to the sea of framed photographs that covered almost every square inch of the wall behind her. The ones I’d seen a thousand times were still there—like a scrapbook of the idealized life in Six Rivers. There were pictures of the diner’s regulars, kids at a picnic with balloons, a few people huddled around a fire on the beach. There were also several of hunting groups lined up beside rows of limp-bodied ducks or holding up the horned rack of a stag. Faces of every age looked back at me, some of the images posed and others candid.
Out of habit, my gaze found the one with me in it. It was a photo of a crowd of people standing out on Main Street, smiles wide in a sea of pale blue uniforms and team merch. What I remembered about that day was in splices of sound and light. The soccer team had just won regionals at a tournament in the Bay Area, and those who hadn’t made the trip down to the game had gathered out in front of the diner to listen on the radio. The picture was snapped just after the winning goal was scored. I was fifteen years old, beaming at the camera, and I could see Olivia’s and Micah’s faces in the crowd beside me.
I purposefully didn’t let my eyes fall on the photograph of Griffin Walker that still hung only a few feet away. He was handsome in an all-American kind of way. Perfectly symmetrical and charming. He’d been the town’s golden boy, beloved and revered. That was never more true than after he died.
The small bundle of dried roses that had been tied on the frame after the funeral twenty years ago was still there, the petals now wrinkled and missing their color. There was a time when it wasn’t possible to go anywhere without seeing similar shrines, and that constant reminder had been the last thing to run me out of this town.
Growing up down the road from the Walkers had put Griffin into our orbit at a young age, and when he became the star of the high school’s soccer team, it made him something like a god in this town. That attention had changed him, and not for the better. There wasn’t anyone in Six Rivers who wasn’t shaken by his death, and he was folded into countless memories, some of them all but lost now. But there was one I’d tried and failed to forget. I still remembered the crunch of ice beneath my boots that night. The smell of woodsmoke and melting snow. The way the firelight had gleamed in his open, empty eyes.
I forced my attention to the new photographs that had been added to the wall, finding Johnny’s face among them. Instantly, a sinking feeling pulled in my gut. He was sitting in one of the booths by the window with an arm stretched over the back of the seat. He had a look on his face like someone had just called his name, his head half-turned and eyebrows just slightly raised. The photo couldn’t be more than three, maybe five years old, but the picture of the young version of him I had in my mind was flickering in and out of that image. To me, Johnny would always be the eighteen-year-old kid jumping from the cliffs at Trentham Gorge as I held my breath, watching from below. I don’t know if I ever let that breath go.
I scanned the room around me until I found the booth that was in the photo. It was empty now, but as soon as I turned my head, I had the faintest sense that I could see him from the corner of my eye. I shivered as Johnny’s presence slowly leaked into the muggy atmosphere of the diner. The more it intensified, the more certain I was that I hadn’t imagined it back at the cabin, and it was more than the thread of connection we’d always had. This was stronger—a palpable thing in the air. When a distinct shadow formed in my periphery, I instinctively turned my head back to the booth, where I was convinced Johnny would suddenly appear. But there was nothing.
Sadie set the cup and saucer down in front of me, snapping me back from the avalanche of thoughts tumbling through my mind. I looked up to find her studying my face.
“Can I get you anything else?” she asked.
I set my fingers on the edge of the saucer, still half-distracted by that shadow in my peripheral vision. “No, thanks.”
Sadie moved as if to leave, but she hesitated. “I know there’s not really anything to say, James, but I’m sorry about Johnny.” Her voice was low now. Careful. Like saying my brother’s name out loud was a spell that could wake the dead.
“Thanks,” I managed.
Back in San Francisco, this was the part when the aura of feigned normalcy would typically be broken. The moment when someone heard about the death of my brother and the stilted grief descended between me and the world. But it was so much worse here in Six Rivers, where people had actually known Johnny. And not just the smiling, handsome man in the photo that hung on the wall. This town knew his shadows, too.
A bowl of sugar came down in front of me, followed by a tiny ceramic pitcher of cream, before Sadie’s attention finally turned to a man waiting at the register. I curled my cold hands around the mug, hoping it would calm the trembling I could still feel in my fingers.
“Ben, can you grab another crate of those cups?” Sadie called out to the young man sweeping along the back row of tables as she absently punched the keys of the register. When he didn’t look up, she tugged the rag from her apron again, tossing it at him.
He flinched as it hit his shoulder, pulling an earbud out of his ear as he looked up. “Huh?”
“ Cups. ” She motioned toward the empty shelf, and he answered with a nod before he leaned the broom against the wall. Then he was disappearing through the swinging door at the back.
“Can’t take those things out of his ears for three seconds,” Sadie muttered to the man at the register, half laughing.
She finished ringing him up, listening as he made a comment about the incoming weather, and I glanced around the diner, noting that people were dressed in warmer layers than I was. Hats and coats were hung from the pegs beside the door, and the temperature had already dropped several degrees in the time since I’d arrived. I’d forgotten how quickly the weather turned in winter, how suddenly, almost violently, the forest succumbed to the bone-deep cold. That wouldn’t bode well for the incomplete job I’d done packing. I was pretty sure I’d brought exactly one sweater and was wearing my only jacket.
The swinging door to the back pushed open again, and the young man reappeared with a crate of steaming white porcelain mugs balanced against his hips. He slid them onto the counter and started stacking them.
“This is my son, Ben.” Sadie was talking to me now.
The boy glanced over his shoulder, only half looking at us with a distracted expression that made his face appear blank. He was a handsome kid, with his mother’s blue eyes, but he was at least six inches taller than her. Lanky in a way that reminded me a little of how Johnny looked at that age. But what age was that? This kid looked maybe seventeen or eighteen years old, and that math made me look at him a little more closely. Sadie would have been, what? Nineteen when she had him? Twenty?
That sinking feeling was tugging deep in my stomach again, and I immediately shot a look toward Sadie’s left hand. If she was married, she wasn’t wearing a ring. But the kid could have been from an old relationship, too. I tried to dismiss the possibility that he could be Johnny’s. He and Sadie had been involved for a long time before I left, even if they weren’t exclusive or consistent. When we did talk, Johnny didn’t say much about his personal life, but if he’d had a kid, he would have told me. Wouldn’t he?
A dozen images flashed through my mind like a flip book as I studied Ben’s face. I could see my brother up on the cliffs at the gorge. Moving like a shadow in the darkroom. Standing in the trees with a smear of blood at his brow.
Before that last memory could fully unfold, I shoved it back down.
“Ben, this is James,” Sadie said. “Johnny’s sister.”
The kid’s hands stilled on the mugs, his eyes finally focusing on me. “Oh.” He stood there stiffly, looking from his mom’s face back to mine.
I couldn’t tell if there was something behind that look. Two women down the counter also discreetly leaned forward, catching my gaze, and I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it or if the whole diner quieted just a little.
“Nice to meet you.” I saved the kid from the awkward moment, giving him a smile.
Sadie pushed the drawer of the cash register closed. “He’s a senior over at the high school. Video games for brains but manages to earn a few bucks here when he can be bothered.” Sadie glanced at her watch and looked up at him. “Aren’t you going to be late?”
Ben snapped out of his trance, finally pulling his gaze from me. “Oh, shit. Yeah.”
“I’ll finish that. Get out of here.” Sadie jerked her chin toward the door, holding out a hand.
He untied his apron and balled it up, giving it to her. “Thanks.”
She watched him round the counter and clumsily pull on a jacket. Then he was pushing out onto the street. “No such thing as a day off for some of us.”
“Yeah, Micah told me you bought the place,” I said.
Her eyes found me again, a glimmer of pride in them now. “Almost six years ago, but I’m almost always one employee short during soccer season. You know how it is around here.”
I nodded in response, glancing again to the banner taped inside the post office window across the street.
Cougar Land
The entire town revolved around the team during soccer season. Because of it, the school was flooded with funds, despite its rural location, and businesses even shut down on tournament weekends. The headline of nearly every paper detailed a chronicle of the most recent game, and once the season was over, the town went back to being not much more than a supply stop for hunters and loggers.
I took a sip of the coffee before I pulled my phone from my pocket and unlocked it, opening the Wi-Fi settings.
“Looking for this?” Sadie pointed to a handwritten sign posted beside the coffee machine. It had the network name and password scrawled in marker.
“Yeah, thanks.”
“You’d think in 2024 you’d at least be able to get those things to make a call, but service is still too weak in most places. But we put in one of those internet satellite systems a couple of years ago and business has never been better. Isn’t that right, Harold?” She gave the red-bearded man at the end of the counter a wink before she moved back down to the register.
I typed in the Wi-Fi password and a series of email and app alerts stacked on the screen as soon as it was connected. There was a voicemail from my neighbor in San Francisco about picking up my mail and another from Quinn saying he’d give me another call in the morning to check in. I opened my email next, scrolling through a smattering of unread messages. The only one of consequence was from Rhia, the gallery curator at Red Giant Collective, where three of my pieces were being included in an upcoming show.
I pulled out Johnny’s laptop, just barely finding the space on the counter to open it, and logged in to his bank account. I’d jotted down the list of photos I had to track down, followed by the records I needed to locate for Quinn, which included financial reports Johnny was behind on. The portion of the grant money he had been issued had to be accounted for on a quarterly basis, and Johnny hadn’t submitted anything for the last two. That didn’t surprise me. I couldn’t imagine that admin and red tape were ever something he’d managed to get good at.
I downloaded the statements from the last six months so they could be printed out back at the cabin, and then started on the list I’d made that morning. I hadn’t found any files for Johnny’s field notes, which meant he probably hadn’t started transcribing them. That meant that someone at CAS would have to do it, but not before I had a chance to take a look at the records from the days before Johnny’s death.
I reached into my pocket for the roll of film that had been tucked into his jacket and set it down on the counter, placing my chin in my hand as I stared at it. If the numbers on the tube were a date like I thought, the photos were from two days before Johnny died. The images on the negatives might even be the last photos he’d ever taken.
I unlocked my phone, finding the number Micah had sent me for Olivia Shaw. But my fingers hovered midair, my mind turning with what to say. The last time I’d seen Olivia, I’d lied to her, but that wasn’t why I’d never talked to her again. The reason was because she’d known it.
Hi Olivia, it’s James Golden. Micah told me I could swing by. Is now okay?
I hit send, and only a few seconds later, a reply made the phone vibrate in my hand.
Hey James!! Sure thing. I’ll be here until six. Can’t wait to see you.
I let out a steady breath, relieved, as my eyes lifted over the screen of the laptop, finding Olivia’s face in the framed photographs on the wall. Her dark curly hair was escaping the ponytail it was pulled into, and the lower half of her round face was hidden by a scarf around her neck. But the movement of a shadow on the glass made me tense up again. I was almost sure that I could make out Johnny’s reflection. His dark hair and wide shoulders took shape in the glare of light, but when I turned around again, the booth by the window was still empty.
I closed the laptop and reached into my coat, finding the few bills I had tucked into the pocket.
Sadie waved me off. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Oh.” I glanced to the empty coffee cup. “I appreciate that.”
“You’ll be back. Don’t worry.” She smirked. “A couple of weeks is plenty of time to rack up a bill around here.”
“Thanks.”
She set both hands on the counter, watching me slip the laptop into my bag. Her mouth opened, then closed before she spoke again. “Micah’s taken it really hard, you know—Johnny’s death.”
I was a little thrown by the sudden change in subject, my hands faltering on the zipper of the bag. I looked up at her.
“He’s…he’s not himself, James,” she said. “I’d suggest treading lightly.”
The words sounded like a warning, or a boundary she was making. It felt almost territorial. My smile tightened, and from the look on her face, Sadie noticed the change in the air between us.
I stood. “Thanks again.”
“Sure thing.” She fetched a new rag off the back counter and went back to wiping, but I could feel her gaze on me as I made my way to the door.
The six of us—me, Johnny, Micah, Sadie, Olivia, and Griffin—had been a kind of pack before Griffin died. But after his death, Johnny, Micah, and I became the subject of every conversation in town. After that, we’d formed a tightly closed unit to protect ourselves and one another from those whispers. The result was a separation between the three of us and Olivia and Sadie, and I imagined that when I left, a new line of alliances had formed. What Sadie wasn’t saying was that I hadn’t been in that circle for a long time. And she would close ranks if she had to.