7. Jessika
SEVEN
JESSIKA
Morgan's trailer sits at the end of an unmaintained county access road about six miles from the ranch, at the edge of a parcel of public land that's been disputed between the county and a private developer for the last decade.
The access road is gated, county padlock, but Grant has a key. I don't ask how.
The trailer is a mid-nineties single-wide, faded white, set up on blocks with a wooden deck my father built for Morgan when he first moved here five years ago.
It looks abandoned. The deck boards have softened in the weather, leaves piled in the corners, but the door is locked and the windows are intact.
The key Grant uses to open the padlock is the same one he uses for the trailer door.
"You have a key," I say.
"Morgan gave me one years ago." A pause. "In case of emergency."
Inside, the trailer smells like closed air and faintly of old coffee and something synthetic I can't immediately place.
The furniture is minimal, a futon, a folding table, two chairs, bookshelves built from planks and cinder blocks.
Books everywhere. Field guides, environmental science texts, notebooks, a few novels.
On the table, a laptop. Closed.
On the small kitchen counter, two prescription bottles.
I cross to them immediately.
Lithium carbonate. 600mg. Filled six weeks ago, the date on the label makes that date roughly a month before his last known contact. The prescription is from a Dr. Anya Chandra, listed as a psychiatrist out of Whitmore County.
I pick up the second bottle. Quetiapine.
"Grant." My voice is quiet. "Did you know Morgan was on psychiatric medication?"
He comes and looks at the bottles. His face does something complicated.
"No," he says.
"Lithium and quetiapine. That's typically a bipolar protocol." I set the bottle down carefully. "These were filled six weeks ago. And they're mostly full."
Grant is quiet.
"If he stopped taking these," I say, "and if he was also using?—"
"He'd be unstable," Grant says. "Really unstable."
"Paranoid. Possibly delusional." I pause. “Or genuinely in danger and presenting in a way that made people question how real that danger was."
We look at each other.
"His laptop," I say.
"It's password-protected. I tried it once before."
"When?"
"About three months ago. When I started worrying in earnest."
"You came out here three months ago."
"I come out here about once a month," he says. Like it's nothing. Like driving to a missing man's empty trailer on the off-chance of something is just a thing he does. "To check."
To check.
I look around the trailer with new eyes. The books arranged carefully. The planks of the bookshelves level and well-built. The folding table clean.
"You've been maintaining it," I say. "Keeping it clean."
"He might come back," Grant says simply.
Something I can't quite name moves through my chest.
I sit down at the table and open the laptop. The password screen comes up. I think for a moment, then try the name of our mother, who died when Morgan was eleven. Then his first dog. Then the name of the creek that runs through the back of the ranch property.
The third one works.
Grant, standing behind me, exhales slowly.
The desktop is organized in a way that surprises me, Morgan was always chaotic in person, but his digital space is methodical. Clearly labeled folders. A folder called COUNTY SURVEY WORK. Inside: dozens of files, spreadsheets, photographs of terrain, water samples, GPS coordinates.
A folder called HARKER ROAD. Dated. The most recent entries from about eight months ago.
"This is it," I say. "This is what he found."
I open the most recent file. It's a written report, incomplete, the kind of thing you write when you're building toward something official but you're not ready to submit. Morgan's voice, even in technical language, I can hear it, methodical, careful, building toward a conclusion.
The report describes elevated levels of trichloroethylene and arsenic in soil samples taken along the eastern edge of county parcel 74-B.
The contamination pattern, Morgan writes, is consistent with long-term industrial solvent disposal.
The pattern of contamination suggests the source is approximately two hundred meters north of the parcel boundary, on privately-owned land adjacent to?—
The sentence is unfinished.
I scroll up and down, looking for a name. For what property borders the contaminated site to the north.
It's not there. Either Morgan didn't complete that section or it was deleted.
"Someone deleted part of this," I say. "There should be a conclusion here. A property identification."
"Who else would have access to this laptop?"
"No one I know of." I pause. "Unless someone else has a key to this trailer."
Grant's jaw tightens. "I'm the only one he gave a key to."
"Okay." I close the laptop. "We need to take this with us."
"Agreed."
I look around the trailer one more time. At the prescription bottles. At Morgan's particular life, contained in this small space. At the evidence of a man who was trying to hold himself together and do something right and got in over his head.
"He's alive," I say. I'm not sure where the certainty comes from. Maybe just the particular stubbornness of love. "He's out there somewhere. And he's scared."
Grant looks at me. "I know."
"How do you know?"
A pause.
"Because if he wasn't alive," Grant says quietly, "I would feel it."
He says it without sentimentality. Like it's just another factual thing. The particular intimacy of someone who has loved a person enough that the knowing goes that deep.
I think about Morgan at twelve, following me around the ranch. At seventeen, getting arrested for the first time, scared under all the bravado. At twenty-five, telling me he'd been clean for eighteen months, the enormous complicated pride on his face.
I reach out and pick up the prescription bottles and put them in my jacket pocket.
"Let's go," I say.