Chapter 9
Ruby found him at the lake.
She'd spent the afternoon calling everyone she could think of, working through Fiona's contacts one by one, getting the same answer from each of them.
Haven't seen her. Haven't heard from her.
Try her dad. She'd already tried her dad.
She'd tried the Sheriff's Office. She'd tried Ethan, who sounded worried in a way that made her more worried, because Ethan was the type to pretend everything was fine even when it wasn't, and he wasn't pretending.
The last thing Fiona had told her was the modeling shoot.
Strutz Agency. A photographer named Garrett Finch.
Ruby had found his Instagram in about thirty seconds, a feed full of moody portraits and landscape shots tagged around the High Peaks region, and his most recent story, posted two hours ago, showed a tripod set up beside the lake with the caption "golden hour magic.
" She recognized the shoreline. Everyone who lived here would.
She parked on the access road and walked down toward the water.
The evening light was low and warm, filtering through the pines and laying a copper sheen across the surface.
Garrett was about fifty yards out along the bank, crouched behind a camera on a tripod, shooting a girl who stood ankle-deep in the shallows with her arms out and her head tilted back.
The girl was young. Younger than Ruby. She was wearing a summer dress that clung to her legs where the water had soaked through it, and she was smiling the way people smile when someone is watching them and they want to be watched.
"Garrett Finch," Ruby called out.
He didn't look up. He was adjusting something on the camera, his eye pressed to the viewfinder.
"Garrett."
He straightened and turned. He was mid-thirties, dark hair pushed back, stubble that seemed deliberate. Good-looking in the way that men who work around beautiful women learn to be, the grooming and the posture and the eye contact all calibrated to put young girls at ease.
"Do I know you?" he asked.
"Where's Fiona?"
His expression shifted. Not guilt. Confusion, or a very good imitation of it. "Who?"
"Fiona Spence. She was supposed to come to you for a shoot last night. She never came home. She's not answering her phone. No one has heard from her."
Garrett glanced back at the girl in the shallows, who had lowered her arms and was watching them. He held up a hand to her. "Give me a minute." Then he walked toward Ruby, away from the shoreline, lowering his voice as he got closer.
"Look, I don't know what you're talking about. Fiona didn't show last night. I waited for her and she never turned up. I figured she changed her mind. It happens."
"Bullshit."
"Excuse me?"
"She was excited about that shoot. She talked about it all day. She left to drive to see you and nobody has seen her since. So I'll ask you again. Where is she?"
His face hardened. The easy charm dropped away and what was underneath it was irritation, sharp and immediate, from a man who wasn’t used to being challenged by a girl half his age.
"I told you. She didn't show. I don't know where she is. And if you don't leave, I'm calling the cops."
Ruby held his gaze. Then she glanced past him at the girl standing in the shallows, watching them. The girl who appeared older in the golden light and the wet dress but who Ruby had seen around town, at the grocery store, at the school pickup line last fall. She was sixteen at most.
"Go on," Ruby said. "Call them. I'm sure they'd love to know about your underage photoshoots."
She looked at the girl again, long enough to make the point, then back at Garrett. His face had gone still. Not angry anymore. Something colder.
Ruby turned and walked back up the bank toward her car. Her hands were shaking but she kept them at her sides and didn't look back. She got in, closed the door, started the engine, and sat there for a minute watching the lake through the windshield.
Fiona had never made it to the shoot.
Which meant she'd disappeared somewhere between the gas station and Elizabethtown, on a stretch of road that ran through twenty miles of nothing.
Noah paced back and forth, contemplating whether to make the call.
He'd met with a former pit boss from Ashford Royale Casino earlier that day, a meeting O'Connell had set up.
The man refused to be a witness but was willing to answer questions, and what he described painted a clear picture of the laundering operation running through the casino.
The one area he wouldn't touch was whether it involved the Sinaloa Cartel.
O'Connell had suggested Noah just come straight out with it and ask Natalie directly.
He'd considered it multiple times but they had a good thing going. Or maybe he was just deceiving himself.
“Screw it.”
Noah dialed Natalie's number and leaned against the kitchen counter. She picked up on the third ring.
"Hey,” she said in a chipper voice.
"You busy?"
"Just got home. What's up?"
He rubbed the back of his neck. "You and I are close, right?"
"I'd like to think so. Why?"
"You remember me saying that for this to work there can't be secrets."
"Right."
"I need to know something. About your father."
The warmth left her voice. "Noah, I said that was off limits."
"I know you did but I need to know. Is he laundering money for the Sinaloa Cartel?"
A long pause. He could hear her breathing change. "You just can't stop, can you?"
"Why can't you just tell me?"
"Because I don't know."
"Can you find out?"
"Noah, let me get this right. You want me to spy on my father?"
"No. I..."
"That's exactly what you're asking me to do."
"Look, I have reason to believe the cartel provides Luther with massive amounts of dirty cash generated from drug and human trafficking, including smuggling operations across the Canadian border. If he isn't involved, fine. Then there's nothing to hide."
"I'm not doing this. Not again."
"So there are secrets."
"Noah."
"I'm sorry, Nat. I just don't trust him."
"Him or me?"
He closed his eyes. "Look, maybe we should just call it a day. You know, you and I."
Silence on the other end. "Is that what you really want?"
"I think we need to stop lying to ourselves. This isn't going to work."
"If that's what you want."
A pause. "Yeah. That's what I want."
The line went dead. Noah set the phone on the counter and stood there for a long time, looking at nothing.
Noah had the file spread across Gretchen's kitchen table when she came in from the other room.
He wasn't looking at the sketch. He'd moved past it to the witness statements underneath, the ones that had gone nowhere five years ago.
It was just sitting there, face up, half buried under a stack of interview transcripts.
Mia and Ethan were in the living room with the television on low. Gretchen had made dinner for all of them. Noah had brought the file because he couldn't stop looking at it, and because Gretchen's kitchen table was bigger than his.
She set a mug of coffee beside him and glanced down. Then she stopped.
"Huh." She tilted her head. "Didn't know you were a fan of Seraphine Maddox."
Noah looked up. "Who?"
"The artist." Gretchen pulled the sketch out from under the transcripts and held it closer.
"SM. See?" She tapped the bottom corner where two small letters sat in the charcoal, so faint Noah had assumed they were part of the shading.
"She signs everything that way. Same style too.
That heavy charcoal, the way she builds the darks in layers.
" She set it back down. "She works out of a little studio gallery in Saranac Lake.
Does these moody Adirondack landscapes. They're actually pretty good. "
Noah stared at the drawing like he was seeing it for the first time. "This was in a case file from five years ago."
Gretchen shrugged. "Well, she's young. Twenty, twenty-one maybe?
So she would have been a teenager when she drew that.
" She sipped her coffee. "I've seen her stuff at a few shows.
She's got a real eye for the backcountry.
Bogs, old rail lines, that kind of thing.
Dark stuff though. Not exactly what tourists hang over the fireplace. "
"You know her?"
"Not really. Seen her around. Quiet girl. Keeps to herself mostly." Gretchen looked at the sketch again. "Why is her work in a case file?"
Noah didn't answer right away. He pulled the sketch back toward him and studied those two letters in the corner. SM. He'd gone over this page a dozen times and never once thought it was signed.
"I have no idea," he said. "Where's the studio?"
"Main Street, right across from Hotel Saranac. Can't miss it. Her name's on the sign." Gretchen rinsed her mug. "Tell her I said hi."
The drive from High Peaks to Saranac Lake took twenty minutes. Noah spent most of it telling himself this was nothing. An artist's initials on a five-year-old sketch. A name he'd never heard before today. It didn't mean anything. People drew bridges all the time.
He found Main Street without trouble. Hotel Saranac sat near the corner like it always had, its old brick face lit amber under the streetlights.
The studio was across the road, a narrow storefront wedged between a gift shop and a real estate office.
A hand-painted sign above the entrance read Seraphine Maddox, Fine Art & Gallery in letters that could have been done by the same hand that made the sketch in his jacket pocket.
The place was closed. Lights off. A small cardboard sign in the window said By Appointment Only with a phone number beneath it. Noah tried the handle anyway. Locked.
He stepped back onto the sidewalk and looked up. There were windows on the second floor, an apartment, maybe. Dark. No movement behind the glass, no light leaking around curtains. Wherever Seraphine Maddox was tonight, she wasn't here.
A couple walked past him on the sidewalk, the woman glancing at him the way people glance at a man standing alone outside a closed shop at dusk. He ignored her and moved to the front window.
The glass was cold when he cupped his hand against it. Inside, the gallery was small, maybe four hundred square feet. He could make out paintings lining the walls in mismatched frames, an easel near the back with a cloth draped over it, jars of brushes on a wooden table, a stool.
His eyes moved across the paintings. Dark landscapes, most of them.
Heavy greens and blacks. Adirondack terrain rendered in a style that made the wilderness look less like scenery and more like something watching you back.
Bogs, ridgelines, rivers choked with fallen timber.
She had a thing for the places people didn't go.
Then he saw it.
On the far wall, larger than the rest, maybe three feet wide, a painting that stopped his breath in his chest. A wooden bridge over black water.
Not a photograph. Not exactly the same. But unmistakable.
The same warped planks. The same dead-flat horizon bleeding into nothing.
The same suffocating stillness that had come off the charcoal every time he'd studied it.
But this was more. This was the full picture.
Beneath the bridge, two dark channels of water curved toward each other and merged, a Y-shape, like a fork pressed into the earth.
To the left, a single tree stood taller than everything around it, bare-limbed and golden against the muted greens, its trunk leaning slightly as though the ground beneath it had shifted.
Beyond, a straight elevated line, too straight to be natural, cut through the flat bog and disappeared into the distance like a scar that had never healed.
And on the right side of the horizon, low and tilted, a mountain profile that anyone who'd lived in the High Peaks region for more than a year would recognize without thinking.
Whiteface.
Noah's hand dropped from the glass. He stood there on the sidewalk for a long moment, his breath fogging the window, his reflection staring back at him over the painting like a ghost superimposed on the landscape.
He reached inside his jacket and pulled out the sketch.
He held it up to the glass, next to the painting, and the air went out of him.
The sketch was a fragment. A tight crop of the lower center, just the bridge and the water and the darkness beneath it.
Everything that made the location identifiable had been cut away.
No fork in the channels. No tree. No railroad bed.
No mountain. Just a bridge over black water that could have been anywhere.
But the painting told the whole story.
He knew that place. He'd hiked it. Years ago, maybe, on a day he barely remembered, but the geography was in his bones the way all the local geography was.
Two Bridge Brook converged under a trail bridge.
A dead-straight path on a raised bed that used to carry trains.
Tamaracks standing like sentinels in a thousand acres of open bog.
Whiteface watching from the east like it watched over everything.
It was Bloomingdale Bog.
Noah lowered the sketch. His hands weren't shaking but his chest was.
He took out his phone, held it up to the glass, and photographed the painting.
Then he photographed the sketch beside it.
Then he stood there looking at both images side by side on the screen, the painting and the fragment, the answer and the question that had gone unanswered for five years.
He didn't try the handle again. He didn't call the number on the sign. He folded the charcoal back into the file, put the file inside his jacket, and walked back to his truck.
He sat behind the wheel for a while. The engine was off.
Main Street was quiet. Across the road, Hotel Saranac's lights made the wet pavement glow like something burning underneath.
He looked at the photo on his phone one more time.
The Y-shaped water. The leaning tamarack. The railroad bed. Whiteface.
Noah put the truck in gear and drove home.
He wouldn’t sleep well that night.