Chapter Three
Three
Micah Rhodes had always been an expert in the unspoken, and there was a time when I was one of only a few people who knew that language.
The bacon sizzled in the skillet as the coffee dripped, and I eyed the bowl of apples on the counter. He had gone to more trouble than he’d let on, filling the fridge with several days’ worth of groceries.
We’d never been good at talking about things. This was the way he had always communicated with me. And as much as I used to hate it, as much as it stirred to life a hundred memories I wished I could forget, I couldn’t deny the fact that in some ways, it was just so much easier.
I tapped my phone screen for the tenth time, checking for a notification that he had texted. I wasn’t sure if I was hoping he would or wouldn’t. Through the years, there were times I was sure I never wanted to see him again and others when I’d had to force myself not to get in the car and drive back to Six Rivers. I was eternally pulled between two warring beliefs. I’d lived years alternating between both of them—the idea that leaving things with Micah the way I did was the biggest mistake I’d ever made, and the certainty that it was the only thing I’d done right. For both of us.
I leaned into the counter, watching out the kitchen window, where the lush forest stretched in every direction. The little stone fire pit out back was encircled by two weathered Adirondack chairs that sat in the small clearing of trees. The red-painted shed out back was just beyond it, its roof piled with golden pine needles and a series of rusted yard tools leaning against its side. The whole scene was almost too perfect to look at. Like something that would be sketched onto the pages of a book. But it had never felt that way to me.
My gaze focused beyond the tree line, to where the Walkers’ place sat back in the forest. The drive was still empty, the windows dark, and I let myself hope for a moment that Rhett Walker no longer lived there.
Amelia’s mention of his son Griffin hadn’t exactly been out of nowhere. His death was the biggest thing to happen in this town in the last twenty years, a tragedy that shook Six Rivers to its core. Griffin Walker had been the boy next door long before he was the promising young athlete with a scholarship to Stanford. He and I were the only two kids from our high school who had a way out of this town. But he never made it.
I forced my attention back to the stove, fishing the bacon from the skillet with a fork and setting it onto the plate beside two fried eggs and a piece of buttered toast. Smoke hadn’t moved from his spot at my feet, sniffing the air with a whine buried in his chest. The animal was even bigger than I remembered, his eyes so clear and focused that it was a little unnerving to look at him straight on.
“No, Smoke.” I pointed the fork at his untouched food bowl in the corner. “Your breakfast is right there.”
I tore the toast in half, using it to break open one of the eggs and soak up the yolk.
His front paws shifted just a fraction, his gaze still locked on my plate. When he whined again, I sank down, scratching down his back with both hands. He was an enormous dog, but somehow still lean and slender.
“I think Johnny has been spoiling you.” Smoke leaned into my touch. “Am I right?”
When he didn’t move, I relented, breaking off a small piece of bacon and dropping it into his bowl. He leapt up, crossing the kitchen in a few steps as I took one of the mismatched mugs from the shelf and filled it with coffee.
The bacon was enough to entice him to eat the dog food beneath it, and I picked up my plate, going into the living room. The sofa was still draped with the quilts I’d found in the chest by the fireplace, my pajamas folded and stacked on one of the arms. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to sleep in the bedroom. When we were kids, I’d had the bed in the alcove and Johnny had slept on the couch. But after Dad went to Oregon, I’d taken the bedroom for myself, and when I left it had finally belonged to Johnny. I hadn’t even stepped foot inside; instead, I’d buried myself in the blankets on the sofa and watched the fire until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, Smoke curled on top of my feet.
I followed the hall to where Johnny’s makeshift office was tucked into the corner. The plate of food was still steaming when I set it down between the piles of envelopes, and the springs at the base of the chair screeched as I sat. But I froze when a rush of goosebumps raced up my arms, the quiet cabin coming to life. Almost immediately, the distant sound of fingers tapping on a keyboard drifted through the air. I could hear the drum of what sounded like a pencil’s eraser on the desk. The rustling of papers. The hum of music. But all around me, the house was just a still life. A place frozen in time.
My eyes moved over the desk slowly, my mind trying to sift the sounds from the room. I knew the sensation. It was the same one I had every time the hollow space between me and Johnny bled together. When the feelings flooding his mind pushed into my own. I was usually good at drawing a clear boundary between what was him and what was me, but this was different. It was as if the hours Johnny had spent at this desk still hovered in the cabin like an echo of his existence.
Mentally, I was still waiting, breath held in my chest, for the thread between us to snap. But if anything, it felt stronger than ever. I pinched my eyes closed, pushing the sounds from my mind, and when I opened them again, I focused on the papers stacked in front of me and the patchwork of items pinned to the corkboard. There were notes and reminders overlapped with seemingly random contact sheets and pictures torn from magazines.
The workspace wasn’t neat, but Johnny had had his own kind of chaotic organization that made sense to him. The trick would be decoding it. When I told Quinn Fraser I was coming up to Six Rivers to get Johnny’s documentation for the conservation project, he’d offered to come with me. He’d even insisted that it would be easier to make sense of if he were here, and maybe that was true. But it wasn’t the negatives and field notes I was after. The real reason I’d come to Six Rivers was to understand what exactly was going on here before Johnny died. To find some shred of explanation for the weight of dread I’d felt since that day standing outside the coffee shop. That wasn’t something I could do from San Francisco. And I wasn’t fool enough to believe that’s all Quinn wanted.
I’d first met Quinn Fraser at a black-tie fundraiser for the city’s art council at the San Francisco Public Library. In a way, that was where this chain of events began. Quinn had been seated next to me, and we’d spent the night trading polite small talk and bidding in the silent auction, but as we waited for the valet at the curb hours later, he’d slipped me his card. Flowers arrived at my studio the next morning and meeting up for coffee turned into dinner at Bar Nonnina. That’s when I found out about the project he was heading up at CAS.
Since that night, we’d been walking the tightrope of our not-quite-official relationship, which had been made even more awkward after Johnny’s death. He was Johnny’s boss, but Johnny was my brother, and Quinn hadn’t found a way to be there for me that didn’t feel out of place. We weren’t together, but we weren’t not together, either. And I couldn’t help but feel like it was all tangled up—me, Quinn, the project, Johnny.
I’d been compulsively following the train of thought back and forth since the day Johnny died. If I hadn’t gone to the fundraiser, I wouldn’t have met Quinn. If I had never met Quinn, I’d never have sent him the link to Johnny’s work. If I hadn’t sent the link, Johnny wouldn’t have been hired on, and if he hadn’t been hired on, he wouldn’t have been in the gorge that day.
There were a thousand ways to divide and slice the timeline. Infinite variables and threads to pull. I’d broken the information down in every way I knew how, and each time, it only grew more maddening. If it had been any other day, if the weather hadn’t been clear, if he’d been standing just eight inches to the left. But none of that mattered if it wasn’t an accident. And that’s what I was here to find out.
I took a sip of coffee and got to work, going through the piles on the desk. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but it seemed as good a place as any to start. I flipped through various pieces of mail, sorting them according to their importance. Once I was finished, I turned my attention to the laptop. It was still right where Johnny left it, and the screen came to life, the cursor blinking in the field for the password. I typed in our birthdate, the same password he’d always used for everything.
His email inbox was still pulled up on the screen, but the page took almost a full minute to reload. In the time since I’d lived in Six Rivers, the town had gotten internet connectivity, but it seemed to be almost unusable. I scrolled past the unopened messages from the last three months, a mix of junk mail, automated emails, and actual correspondence that looked like it was related to the research project. But when the first one I clicked took more than a minute to load, I gave up and minimized the browser, bringing the desktop into view. I’d have to wait until I had a better connection.
One of the generic Apple backgrounds was half covered by dozens of random files and folders visible on the desktop. The level of order matched the mess on the desk.
“Seriously, Johnny?” I muttered.
I had to skim the file names twice before I found the one I was looking for— CAS.
Johnny wasn’t a scientist, but he’d completed a training series to become a certified research assistant, and his territory covered Six Rivers National Forest and into the remote stretches that lay north of it. The five research subjects he’d been monitoring over the last two years were documented somewhere in this maze of files and notebooks, and I was hoping that his records might give me some idea of what he was doing in the days that led up to his death.
I clicked the icon and a new window expanded, filled with more folders. Quinn had tried to give me a basic understanding of what he needed to compile, and after a few minutes, I was able to figure out that Johnny had the project sorted in a somewhat intuitive way. Each territory had its own research subject, a northern spotted owl identified by a two-digit number. Each of the five subjects Johnny was assigned to had their own folder, filled with the detailed records he’d been keeping over the last twenty-four months. Most of them still needed to be transcribed; others just needed to be compiled, formatted, and submitted along with the photographic content.
I glanced up to the metal shelf above the corkboard, where a series of filing bins were stacked side by side. I read each of the labels, taking down the one named CAS NEGS/PRINTS. The bin was organized into a series of sections, one for each of the locations that Johnny covered. Within their designated tabs, the negatives were cut and sorted into clear plastic sleeves with a selection of prints Johnny had developed.
I opened the section labeled Subject 44 and pulled one of the prints from the top of the stack. My hand slipped from the edge of the bin as I sat back in the chair, staring into the pair of liquid gold eyes that seemed to be locked on me. The photograph was of an owl huddled on the branch of a redwood tree, its feathers puffed in the falling snow.
One of the reasons Johnny had been chosen for the project was his uncanny ability to get so close to the owls. Like they didn’t realize he wasn’t one of them. This photo was an example of that. The owl’s gaze seemed to pierce right through the lens of the camera, as if it had been looking right at Johnny when he took the photo. There was a focused, soul-stirring look about the bird that Johnny always seemed to be able to capture.
I leaned in, studying the details. The color was so vivid, the flecks of snow so sharp. It wasn’t until I brought the print closer that I could make out the misshapen form tucked beneath the bird. One perfect foot was clasped around the branch, talons shining, but the other was mangled. It was clutched in a tangle of bones under the feathers like it had been crushed and healed in all the wrong places.
The unsettling thought found me again, a nagging sense that I was looking at a picture of my brother. Johnny had always been the troubled one, the one no one understood. But no one knew Johnny. Not really. No one except me and Micah.
I flipped through the other sections of the bin, some of them labeled in more detail than others. Where a handful of negative sheets were identified with each subject’s number, some of them had the number of the location. Others just had an abbreviation of some kind, like Johnny had never really developed a system to go by. That would be fun to figure out, I thought.
The last section seemed to be a kind of catch-all, with random incomplete film sheets, prints, and a few pages of scribbled notes. When I flipped past the glossy surface of a picture of Micah, I stopped, sliding it out from the others. My heart twisted a little in my chest when my vision focused on his face. He was lit in the warm glow of what looked like a fire, his dark blond hair falling into his eyes. In one of the shots, the image was blurred with the movement during the exposure, making him look like a smear of paint.
The corresponding negatives had the date June 2 written on a piece of masking tape, and the entire roll was just variations of the same photo. Micah talking. Micah laughing. Micah’s face turned into the darkness. I’d seen countless rolls of film just like it through the years because it was the kind of thing Johnny did when he was testing out some new piece of equipment. Maybe a lens or a new type of film he wasn’t used to. Whatever was in front of him became his subject.
I reached into my sweater pocket for the roll of film I’d found in Johnny’s jacket, turning it over in my hand. My fingers stilled when I saw a black mark I hadn’t noticed sitting in the dark car the night before. It looked like the squiggle of a Sharpie.
I flipped the canister over, realizing it was a set of letters and numbers. TG 11/10.
My brow creased. It looked like a date—November 10. That was just two days before Johnny died. And TG…was that Trentham Gorge?
Slowly, my eyes dropped to Johnny’s camera bag, still tucked into its place beside the desk legs. I let out a long breath, staring at it.
It was one of the things that hadn’t quite added up. If Johnny was out working in the gorge, he would have had his camera. But when he was found, he didn’t have it. He also hadn’t been wearing his safety gear, and that didn’t track, either. We’d been raised in this forest and taught from a young age how to handle guns. Wearing safety gear was something ingrained in the culture of Six Rivers. Hunting season was knit into the fabric of this place, and there wasn’t a single household that didn’t have a gun collection full of firearms. But of all the unruly details, there was still one thing that unsettled me most. It was where he’d been found. Trentham Gorge. Of all places.
I reached out a tentative hand, letting my fingertips brush the canvas of the camera bag. Instantly, that strange, out-of-body sensation was back. I could feel the weight of the camera in my hands. The pull of the strap against my neck. I could hear the click of the shutter. The slide of the film being pulled from its canister.
I unzipped the bag and let it fall open. Johnny’s lenses, batteries, and flashes were wedged into padded sections. Everything he needed on a shoot had its designated place, a far cry from the chaos of the desk in front of me.
It was evident that the gear had been meticulously cared for, in almost pristine condition despite its extensive use. And that made sense. The camera had been the eye through which Johnny saw the world. A window, where he could watch from a safe distance.
I zipped the bag closed and tucked it back into its place, then turned my attention to the desk drawers. The metal tracks of the large one on the left were stiff, forcing me to jostle it. When it finally slid open, a tall stack of notebooks was stowed inside.
I took them out and set them in my lap, thumbing through the one on top. It looked like Johnny had one dedicated to every subject in the study, with dates and times that labeled each observation. They were Johnny’s field notes.
Smoke whined from down the hall, a high-pitched sound that made me lean forward to see the dog standing at the front door. I ignored him, setting the notebooks aside and reaching back into the drawer for several leather-bound notebooks that didn’t match the others. It took only seconds for me to recognize them.
JG was imprinted at the top corner of the first cover—the initials I shared with Johnny. But these notebooks were mine. The last time I’d seen them was before I’d left Six Rivers for school in San Francisco.
Promise.
That’s what the adviser who’d awarded the scholarship had said about me. That I showed promise.
I never went anywhere without one of my notebooks when I was a teenager, compulsively pulling out my pencils any time I had more than a few minutes to myself. And even when I didn’t. By the time I made it to high school, my drawings had caught several teachers’ attention. When I got to junior year, I was doing something I never dreamed possible—applying to art schools up and down the West Coast. I didn’t really believe it could happen until I got the acceptance letter from Byron School of the Arts. But by then, I had a choice to make. One that felt impossible until the night Griffin Walker died.
I flipped through the pages of sketches, the smell of ink and lead swirling in the air. But my hands froze when I reached one that made my stomach drop.
It was a sketch of Trentham Gorge.
The gorge was deep in the heart of Six Rivers, at the end of a series of cliffside roads that were only drivable in the daylight. More than anything, it was just a steep, forested valley wedged between two small mountains, carved down through the rock over millennia by the twisting ravine at the bottom. But there was a stretch that was deep enough to dive into, and despite warnings from our parents and the people in town, most of the kids we knew hung out there on the weekends.
There was something both wild and protected about the place, created through the natural but unforgiving forces of persistent erosion. Even the meaning of the word gorge itself felt severe—it was French for throat.
My fingers ran over the drawing slowly, my eyes following the jagged lines. I’d sketched out the cliffs with lazy strokes, the ink smearing where the edge of my hand had brushed the paper before it had dried. It was probably the last time I’d drawn the place because after what happened there, I’d wanted to pretend it didn’t exist. We all did. Which is why it never sat well with me that Johnny had chosen it as one of his research locations. And why it was too coincidental that it was the place he died.
Smoke’s whimpering erupted into barking that reverberated between the walls, making me wince. When the sound gave way to howling, I shifted the notebooks to the floor.
“Cut it out, Smoke.”
His shadow flitted across the wooden floor again, and I stood, coming around the corner. He let out another frantic string of yelps, and I realized his attention wasn’t on the front door, like I’d thought. His eyes were pinned on the closed hallway closet.
I walked toward him, throwing a glance toward the living room before I looked between Smoke and the closet door, my gaze tracing its outline before I pulled it open. He instantly quieted, pacing back and forth behind me as it swung wide.
“What?” I looked at him, as if expecting him to answer.
It was just a coat closet, filled with pairs of boots, a few hats, and coats on hangers. The blue and black plaid jacket I’d hung there last night was among them, bullet hole and all. I stood still, listening to see if Smoke had heard something like the scamper of a mouse in the walls, but there was nothing.
He whined again, and I shifted some of the coats to the side, peering into the back. Johnny’s neon-orange safety vest was hung on a hook, and I stiffened, my vision blurring just a little. I reached up, pulling the little string that hung from a bulb fixed to the wall, and the corners of the closet illuminated. The light gleamed on something glossy and black in the back, and I moved the safety vest aside.
It was a gun. A long barrel with a wooden stock and grip was propped in the corner behind the jackets, and my jaw tensed as I let go of the vest and it fell back in place. I didn’t recognize the rifle as one of the ones Dad left behind when he went to Oregon. I’d grown up around guns, but I hadn’t actually seen one in years, and they held a different kind of meaning to me now. There was no erasing that phantom pain that still throbbed in my chest. No way to unknow that a bullet had been the thing that stopped Johnny’s heart.
I closed the door, pressing my back to it before I turned to face Smoke. He was panting, eyes still fixed on the closet with his head dipped low like he was hunting what lay inside.
“Come on.”
I scratched behind his ear and took him by the collar, leading him back down the hallway. He stretched out on the floor when I sat back down at Johnny’s desk. I returned my old notebooks to the drawer and closed it harder than necessary. The desk shook, making the pens in the tin cup rattle, and I rubbed at my temples.
Again, my eyes skipped over the contents of the desk, just as chaotic and cluttered as it had been an hour ago. I didn’t know what I’d expected to find. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. But that whisper at the back of my mind was still there.
My gaze lifted to the corkboard again, scanning the bits of Johnny’s world that hung like a collage over the desk. I reached up, lifting the trimmings of a contact sheet, reading the page beneath it. It was a series of dates scribbled down on an envelope. But when I spotted a piece of ruled paper half hidden at the bottom corner of the board, I lifted the overlapping page to read it.
You changed my life.
The unfamiliar handwriting wasn’t Johnny’s, scrawled in a hurried script on a page that looked like it had been torn from a notebook. The scribbled star that followed the words was almost unfinished, one of the corners barely connected. My fingers slipped from the paper, and it tucked itself back beneath the others. It suddenly sank in that I’d been gone for twenty years. In that time, there was no telling how many people had drifted through Johnny’s life in Six Rivers or had crossed his path through the conservation study. I was more than out of my depth. The truth was, I knew almost nothing about Johnny anymore. Nothing that really mattered.
The air around me suddenly seemed so stagnant and suffocating, that oppressive feeling only growing heavier. As if at any moment, Iwould look over my shoulder and see Johnny standing right behindme.
I’d underestimated what it would be like to be closed up in the cabin with all of his things, the imprint of him touching everything around me. I wasn’t sure how many days of that I could take.
I closed the laptop and slipped it into my bag, getting back to my feet. I was suddenly desperate for the fresh air, eager to escape the skin-tingling sense that my brother was breathing the same air I was.
Smoke followed on my heels as I made my way up the hall, and I couldn’t help but glance back at the closet as I passed, remembering the gun inside. I pulled on my jacket, and as soon as I was through the door, my lungs inflated, fully expanding behind my ribs for the first time since I’d woken. I could finally breathe.
I’d told myself for a long time that the past was the past. That there was no coming back from it. That had been an easy lie to believe when I was hundreds of miles away, but here, in Six Rivers, the past was still living and breathing.