Chapter 25
twenty-five
It was Ghost’s ringtone — two short pulses, nothing else — and Bear was sitting up before the second one, already reaching for it on the nightstand, his thumb finding the screen by feel in the dark.
Greta was finally asleep against his shoulder.
He got up carefully and moved to the doorway before he answered, pulling it mostly shut behind him. “Yeah.”
“Floodwaters are receding on Cole’s land.” Ghost’s voice was flat. No introduction, no preamble. Typical Ghost. “He found something.”
Oh, fuck. This wasn’t going to be good. He braced himself against the doorframe and asked, “What kind of something?”
“Bones. Partial remains. Cole found them this morning when he went out to check the creek line. The water must have uncovered them.”
Bear’s hand tightened on the frame. “Human?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re sure?”
“We’ve all seen human remains before,” Ghost said, deadpan. “We’re sure.”
He made himself breathe. “And why are you calling me about it?”
“The remains are wearing a jacket.” Another pause, measured and careful, which was unusual for Ghost. “Leather. MCR patch on the left shoulder.”
Fuck.
Bear had seen the flyer a hundred times—on the board at Nessie’s, on the telephone poles in town, and the signs at the trailhead, on the community board at the firehouse, where it had been so long it had faded, and curled at the edges.
Greta’s twin at sixteen, standing at the edge of the Bitterroot River with her dyed platinum blond hair wild, wearing a leather jacket and the grin she shared with Greta.
The black and white patch on the jacket’s left shoulder: My Chemical Romance.
It was the kind of thing a sixteen-year-old girl in 2009 would have ironed onto everything she owned.
“Does anyone else know?”
“Cole called me. Naomi’s aware. Nobody else yet.”
“Keep it that way until I get there.”
“Bear.” Ghost said his name the way he said very little — quietly, with the particular weight of a man who had thought it through and decided it needed saying. “She needs to hear this from you.”
He stood in the dark hallway for another second, holding the phone. Then he said, “Yeah,” and ended the call.
The house settled around him. Down the hall, through Logan’s door, the specific low snore that he’d already learned to recognize over six weeks of sharing a roof with his son. From his own room, the almost-silence of Greta’s sleep. He had no idea how to walk back through that door.
He walked back through the door.
She was awake.
He didn’t know when it had happened — whether the phone had done it or the absence of his weight beside her or something in his voice carrying through the door, but she was sitting up in the bed with the quilt pooled at her waist and her hair loose on her shoulders, and she was looking at him with that expression she wore when she’d already read the ground and didn’t like the terrain.
“What happened.”
“Flood cleanup. They found something on Cole’s land.” He kept his voice even. He was trying to buy her thirty more seconds of not knowing, which was stupid and he knew it was stupid, because Greta Dougherty had been tracking patterns in incomplete information for fifteen years. “I need to go out.”
He reached for his jeans.
“Bear.”
He pulled them on. “Let me make a call first, get more information—”
“Look at me.”
He stopped. He turned.
She was watching him from the bed, both hands flat on the quilt, and there was something in her expression that he could only describe as braced.
Not afraid, not fragile — braced, the way she stood at the top of a ridge before a technical descent, reading the slope with everything she had, already committed to going down.
He’d seen that look on her face in Daniel’s shop.
He’d seen it on the bank of the flood ditch with the rope in her hands.
He had never hated it more than right now.
“Is it about Alice?”
He didn’t answer fast enough.
Her face changed. He watched it happen — not collapse, nothing crumpling or breaking, just a specific stillness, like a compass needle swinging to true north and locking. She went very still. Her hands pressed flat against the quilt.
He crossed to the bed and crouched in front of her and made himself say it.
“Bones,” he said, low and careful. “Cole found them on his land when the creek receded. He’s sure they’re human.
” He paused. Let her have the first part before the rest of it.
Her breathing had gone shallow and even, her eyes steady on his face.
“There was a jacket,” he said. “Leather. MCR patch on the left shoulder.”
She looked at him.
The silence lasted four seconds. He counted them.
Then she was off the bed.
She moved fast — not panicked, not stumbling, just absolutely committed to movement the way she always was, as if the only thing she knew how to do with an unbearable thing was aim her body at it. She got her boots from the nightstand floor, sat on the edge of the bed, and started lacing them.
“Greta.” He straightened. “Wait.”
She didn’t answer. The first boot was on. She grabbed the second.
“Let me drive. We’ll go together.” He reached for his shirt, already scanning the room for his boots, his vest, his keys. “Just give me two minutes—”
“I know the way to Cole’s land.” She stood, and her voice was flat and steady, the voice she used when she was containing something too large to let out right now.
The voice she’d used at the flood staging area.
The voice that said she was operational and everything else was filed.
She grabbed the fleece off the post at the foot of the bed.
She didn’t look at him. “I know every road between here and the Bitterroot backcountry. I’ve been on them for fifteen years. ”
He got in front of her.
She looked up at him. Her face was pale, the freckles standing out against the white of her skin, and her eyes were the pale, stark green he’d seen in her once before — at three in the morning when she’d told him she was tired.
She was holding all of it together with both hands and he could see the effort in the set of her jaw, in the way she was breathing, and it was the bravest and most terrible thing he’d ever watched.
He stepped aside.
She was through the door before he’d gotten his shirt on.
He heard her take the stairs at a run — controlled, both feet, not reckless, even now — and then the front door, the latch catching, and then quiet.
He pulled his shirt over his head and sat on the edge of the bed to get his boots on, lacing them fast. His hands were steady. Everything in his body had gone to the particular cold focus he’d learned in uniform and kept ever since: don’t fall apart now, fall apart later, there is a job to do.
He went down the hall and knocked on Logan’s door.
A beat. A shift of weight, the creak of the bed. Then the door opened.
Logan was in the oversized Valor Ridge hoodie he’d been sleeping in, hair pressed sideways, eyes catching the hallway light.
He took one look at Bear’s face and the last of the sleep dropped out of him.
He went very still in the way Bear recognized — Bear had watched him learn to go still over the last six weeks, in the specific situations where Bear himself would have gone rigid and quiet.
The kid was doing it now, shoulders squared under the hoodie, feet set, reading the situation.
“What’s wrong?”
“I need you to stay here with the dogs.” Bear kept his voice low, even. “Both of them. Don’t let King follow me to the truck.”
Logan’s eyes moved past him to the empty hallway, back to Bear. “Where’s Greta?”
“She already left. I need to go after her.”
“Why?” He wasn’t being difficult. The question was the same as all his questions lately — direct, assessing, the kind of question that wanted an actual answer.
“I’ll explain later. Right now I just need to know—” He paused. He looked at his son standing in the doorway in the middle of the night, fifteen years old and already good at going still in hard moments. “Can I trust you?”
Logan looked at him.
Not the look he’d worn the first three weeks — the look that said he was waiting for Bear to give him a reason to leave or lie.
This was different. This was the look he’d started wearing around week four, after the sandbags, after the flood, after he’d watched Bear come back soaked and shaking from the flood ditch and hadn’t said a word about it except to put a plate of Johanna’s leftover chili in front of him when they got back to the ranch.
“Yeah,” Logan said. “You can trust me.”
Something in Bear’s chest went tight and loose at once.
“Good.” He squeezed his son’s shoulder once, brief and certain. “Lock up behind me. Don’t let the dogs out without leashes. If anything feels wrong, call Boone.”
“What’s his number?”
“Posted on the fridge. Green sticky note.”
Logan nodded.
Bear turned.
“Dad.”
He stopped. The word still landed differently every time. He turned back.
Logan was still in the doorway, arms crossed now, the bracelet at his wrist dark in the low light. His face was set, but there was something younger in it than usual — something that was trying to stay still but wasn’t all the way there.
“Is Greta going to be okay?”
Bear looked at his son. He thought about all the ways to answer that. He thought about bones in the mud on a mountain and a leather jacket that had been in the floodwater for god knew how long and a woman who had built her whole life around a person who might have been gone for fifteen years.
“I’m going to make sure of it,” he said.
Logan held his gaze. Then he nodded, once, and stepped back, and pulled the door mostly shut.
Bear went down the stairs two at a time.