Chapter 4
MAGS
The apartment above The Rolling Pin is small in the way that feels considered rather than inadequate. One main room, a kitchen the size of a good intention, a bathroom with a claw-foot tub that is either charming or a liability depending on how much equipment I need to move through it.
I'd been alarmed by it six times. Always in the middle of the night. Always when the cool June night dropped its last few degrees and the pipes had something to say about it.
Willa arrives at seven-fifteen with sourdough and an agenda.
"I brought bread," she says. "I also have opinions."
"I only need one of those things."
"Lucky for you, they come together." She sets the loaf on the counter and leans against it with her arms crossed, which I am learning is her default position for conversations she already decided to have. "He doesn't do things like that, you know."
I don't ask what she means. That is a mistake. "Move fences?"
"Do things without being asked." She holds my eyes. "Just so you know."
I pull two mugs down, set them next to the coffeemaker, and do not look at her. "We had a professional disagreement about the location of a fence line based on hydrology data and survey error. He corrected the error."
"Sure," Willa says. "Bread?"
I am still thinking about it when Gina shows up at nine with a clinic schedule printout in one hand and the expression of a woman who has also heard about the fence and is choosing not to say so, which is somehow worse than Willa saying so directly.
She drops the printout on the counter without preamble and tears off a piece of sourdough without asking.
"After-hours line's on there. When you get a livestock interaction with the pack, and you will, call me before you call the rancher.
" She chews, considers. "Three of the four on the south corridor will deal with you straight. Fourth is Cutter."
"I've gathered."
"He's already asking questions about the permits.
" She says it the way you'd mention a weather system.
Not alarming, just incoming. "Lead with economic modeling when you talk to him.
Not data. He doesn't trust data he didn't generate himself.
" She picks up her keys. "Luke's the opposite.
He'll fight you on everything and then do exactly what the land requires. "
I think about a fence post twelve inches northwest of a survey marker. "And Cutter knows about the fence?"
Gina looks at me for a beat. "Cutter knows about everything." She heads for the door. "You'll figure out Luke's tell."
"What is it?"
"He gets quiet in a different way." She is already on the stairs. "You'll know it when you see it."
She is gone before I can tell her I already have.
That leaves me alone in the apartment with sourdough and the problem of a man who does things without being asked and then doesn't mention it, which is not a problem I have anticipated when I drove into Copper River almost a week ago and which I am not, currently, thinking about.
Viv Sanders comes through The Rolling Pin an hour later for cinnamon rolls, still in barn boots from the Rocking C.
She stops when she sees me behind the counter where Willa has stationed me as unpaid labor, and her expression does the thing I've noticed at the Rusty Spur, the quick read that lands and settles, like she's already run the calculation and filed the result.
"How many times have they questioned your methodology so far?" she asks.
"Once. First meeting."
"Fast." She accepts the bag from Willa. "It gets better. Mostly."
"Mostly?"
"Cutter never does." A glance at Willa. "Is she coming to girls' dinner?"
"Working on it," Willa says.
Viv looks back at me. "Watch what Luke does, not what he says."
She says it like she is handing me something specific, something she's carried in from Brooklyn and field-tested in this valley and found to be true. She is already turning toward the door.
I stand there with the feeling of a key pressed into my hand before I know what door it opens.
June 8 — 6:47am
The cup is from the Griddle.
I know this because it has the Griddle's logo on the side, a cast-iron skillet above the words Copper River's Best Since 1987, which is either a proud claim or an admission that nothing better has opened since Reagan.
It is sitting on the relocated fence post at six-forty-seven in the morning with the plastic lid still steamed on.
Placed here recently. By someone who knew I'd be here. No note.
I stand with my field notebook open and do not write anything down.
The coffee is still warm. I confirm this by picking it up, because I am a scientist and I deal in verifiable data, and the data is: one medium dark roast, placed with precision on the exact post Luke McAllister moved at four in the morning last week.
The post that is now twelve inches northwest of where the survey marker says it should be, exactly where I told him the drainage runs.
My field log has a four-minute gap between 6:47 and 6:51.
I am going to call that an equipment calibration pause.
Around noon, the south pasture is quiet except for a meadowlark somewhere out in the grass and a stillness in the air that has no business being this humid in early June.
My phone said three hours before rain in the forecast when I left my apartment, and I trust the NOAA radar more than I trust most people.
I'm on the permitted section, collar receiver in one hand, notebook in the other, and I've just confirmed the female has been running the Hendricks draw on a twenty-two-hour cycle.
Consistent, defensible, the kind of clean data that makes a corridor permit hard to argue with in a room full of people who want to.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, below the twenty-two-hour cycle and the humidity reading and the permit mathematics, is the original fence post. The one Luke pulled and put in his truck bed without examining.
The break too clean for weather. I haven't stopped thinking about it since he mentioned it, and I am not going to think about it right now.
I hear the truck before I see it. Not the diesel rattle of a work vehicle running hard, but a controlled idle, unhurried, the sound of someone who moves at their own pace because it has never occurred to them to move at anyone else's.
Luke McAllister parks on the two-track. Gets out. He's carrying something.
He walks toward me across two hundred yards of alfalfa field, cotton work shirt with the sleeves rolled to the forearm, jeans, belt buckle catching the light, the same worn brown hat pushed down against the June glare.
Same expression he had at the gate on Wednesday.
Neutral, attentive, and somehow more unsettling than hostile would be.
He stops three feet away and holds out a paper bag.
"Burrito," he says. "Green chile."
I look at the bag. I look at him. I look at the fence post thirty yards behind us where the coffee cup sat this morning, which I drank because I was not going to waste a perfectly good cup of Griddle dark roast and because leaving it would have been a statement I wasn't ready to make.
"You left the coffee?"
"Yes."
"No note."
"No."
I am standing in a pasture holding a burrito from the Griddle that is still warm, which means he knew exactly when I'd be here, which is something I am going to think about later when I am alone and can do so without an audience of one watching me think about it.
I take the bag. "Why?"
He looks at me for a moment with that steady attention I am learning to recognize as his version of answering. Then: "You've been out here since six-fifty."
I didn't tell him that. "How do you know?"
"I was at the barn."
I open my mouth. Close it. "You watched me stand at the fence post for four minutes and didn't say anything."
Something shifts at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The suggestion of one, unhurried, held in reserve. "Equipment calibration pause," he says.
I am going to find out which one of them it was, Cal or Billy or Jesse at the co-op, and I am going to be very professional about it.
My stomach has apparently decided to weigh in on the situation. I pull the burrito out because it smells extraordinary and I have been in this pasture since before seven and I have strong opinions about green chile. "This is either hostility or flirting, McAllister."
He looks at the mountains. Looks back at me. That suggestion of a smile stays exactly where it is, undeployed, unhurried, maddening.
"It's lunch," he says.
He walks back to the truck and drives away.
I stand there until the dust settles on the two-track, then open my notebook.
Below the collar data, below the twenty-two-hour cycle, below the equipment calibration pause, I write in the careful hand of a scientist who documents everything: 11:42, south fence post, McAllister. Duration: 4 min. No stated purpose.
I stare at it. Then, below, in slightly different pressure: green chile burrito, still warm.
I close the notebook. Take a bite. Pull out my phone and open the collar app to log the morning's data, and that is when I see it. A new access request sitting in my federal permit queue, filed this morning at 7:04am.
Dale Cutter. Requesting formal review of corridor survey methodology.
The burrito is still good. I eat it anyway, and I think about Gina saying he knows about everything, and I think about a fence post with a break too clean for weather. I take out my notebook again and write one more line under no stated purpose.
Begin documentation trail. Today.