Chapter 25 #2
The living room was empty. Atlas’s leash was gone from the hook by the door.
She’d taken him. He felt the smallest release of tension at that — she hadn’t gone alone, even in her rush.
He grabbed his keys from the hook beside where hers had been, shrugged into his jacket, and pushed out the front door.
The street was wet and black and still, the maple trees dripping softly onto the pavement.
Her Jeep was gone, the space across the street empty, the dark green front of her bungalow sitting quiet.
The corner streetlight threw its pale cone down over the intersection and lit the standing water in the low point of the road like a mirror.
He got in the truck.
The engine turned over and the headlights swept the front of his house, the porch with the two cedar chairs side by side, the empty street. He put it in reverse and backed out, turned the wheel, and drove.
He knew the road to Cole’s land. He’d been on it twice since the flood started.
He knew approximately how long it would take Greta to get there, and he knew she drove like a person who had been moving through backcountry terrain since she was old enough to hold a wheel, and he would not catch her before she arrived.
He wasn’t trying to stop her from seeing it.
He just needed to be there when she did.
The Bitterroots were invisible in the dark, but he could feel them — the way you always could out here, the mass of them pressing against the sky even when the sky was black and starless. The road ahead of him was slick and empty and the headlights barely reached.
He drove.
The road narrowed to dirt as soon as she turned off the highway, the Jeep’s headlights carving twin paths through the mud and darkness.
Greta gripped the wheel with both hands, pushing the vehicle faster than she should have in these conditions.
Her breath came in short, shallow pulls that burned the back of her throat.
Fifteen years. Fifteen years of searching, of flyers and tip lines and hollow promises, and now a call in the middle of the night—bones in the mud, a jacket with a patch she’d know anywhere.
She took the final turn at a speed that nearly rolled the Jeep, the tires sliding across the rain-slick surface before catching, and then she saw it—the cluster of headlights and flashlights down by the creek, the dark silhouettes standing in a ring.
She slammed the brakes. The Jeep skidded to a stop behind Walker’s truck, the engine still running as she threw herself out of the driver’s seat. Atlas leaped out behind her, hackles raised, ears forward, reading the tension in her body before she’d taken three steps.
The ground was sodden, sucking at her boots with each step.
Ahead, flashlights swung in wide arcs, illuminating the water’s edge where the flood had scoured a fresh, raw cut into the bank.
Greta counted six vehicles—Walker’s truck, Ghost’s black SUV, the beat-up Tacoma Jonah drove, another truck she didn’t recognize, and two Bravlin County Sheriff’s vehicles parked at odd angles, their emergency lights dark.
At the edge of the clearing, Boone leaned against his own truck with a cup of coffee in his hand and a rifle at his feet, his posture alert even in repose.
He straightened when he spotted her, one hand already lifting to wave her back.
“Greta.” Walker appeared from between two trucks, his face grim in the harsh light of the flood lamps. “You shouldn’t be here right now.”
She kept walking. “Where is she?”
“Sheriff’s deputies are processing the scene.” He moved to intercept her, his tall frame blocking her view of the creek. “You need to go home.”
“No.” The word came out harder than she’d intended. “Where’s Evander? He found her?”
“Cole’s down by the water with Jonah. He found the remains when he was checking on flood damage after the water receded.” Walker’s voice had the careful, measured quality he used when talking about hard things. It was the voice of a man about to deliver news that would change everything.
It was fifteen years too late.
She pushed past him. The creek had changed course in the flood, carving a new channel thirty feet from its original bank.
What had been meadow was now a churned mess of mud, broken branches, and debris.
At the water’s edge, three deputies worked in the harsh glow of portable lamps.
One knelt in the mud, camera in hand. Another stood with a clipboard, making notes.
The third bent over something half-buried in the mud.
Greta’s breath caught.
Jonah stepped forward, arms outstretched as if to catch her. “Greta, please—”
She ducked under his arm and ran. Her boots slipped in the mud but she didn’t fall, pushing forward with single-minded focus.
The deputies looked up as she approached.
The one with the clipboard stepped toward her, mouth open to say something, but she was already past him, eyes fixed on the dark shape half-submerged in the mud.
Bones. A jumble of them, weathered and stained, protruding from the earth like broken branches. A femur. Part of a pelvis. A fragment of jawbone. Fifteen years in the ground, uncovered by the flood, and still unmistakably human.
The jacket lay nearby, half-buried but intact, the leather dark with age and water.
Greta’s heart stuttered. The stitching along the sleeve was visible even in the dim light—rough, uneven, done by hands that had been in a hurry.
And there, on the left shoulder, a patch so familiar it made her chest ache: a black and white design, the name of the band running across the bottom.
She dropped to her knees in the mud, her hand already reaching out.
A deputy moved to stop her. “Ma’am, please don’t—”
She ignored him, her fingers closing around the edge of the patch.
The leather was stiff, cold, and slick with mud, but she knew it immediately.
The patch wasn’t straight—it tilted slightly toward the back, where Alice had been in too much of a hurry to get it on before school to check the placement.
And there, visible when she lifted the edge with her thumb, the small, dark scorch mark on the leather underneath—the shape of the iron, pressed down too hard and too long.
“Ironing it,” she whispered. “She was ironing it and left it on too long.”
Her voice sounded strange to her own ears, distant and cracked. The deputy was still talking, his hand on her shoulder now, but she couldn’t make sense of the words.
All she could see was Alice at sixteen, standing in front of the ironing board in the laundry room, her hair damp from the shower, her face flushed as she leaned over the jacket.
“It’s not straight,” she’d said, her voice high with frustration. “Ugh, I’m going to be late.”
Greta had laughed, rolling her eyes at her twin’s drama, and offered to fix it.
“Forget it,” Alice had said, already running for the door. “I’ll do it tonight.”
She never came home.
Greta’s lungs locked up, making it impossible to pull in air.
Her vision blurred, the scene in front of her doubling and then tripling.
The jacket in her hands became two jackets, then three, the patch wavering and indistinct.
Her knees buckled, and she felt herself tilting forward into the mud, her weight suddenly too much for her legs to support.
Strong hands caught her under the arms, stopping her fall.
Not the deputy—someone bigger, someone whose hands were callused and steady, holding her upright when she couldn’t do it herself.
She looked up, expecting Bear, but the face above her was lean and weathered, with a wild beard and dark eyes that held a depth of understanding that made her want to look away.
Evander.
And then Bear was there, running full-out across the open ground, his face set in lines Greta had never seen before—raw fear barely contained under the rigid control she’d watched him maintain for two years.
He pushed past Walker, past Boone, past the deputy still standing with his hand out, and dropped to his knees in the mud beside her.
“Greta. Oh, Christ, Greta.”
She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t do anything but cling to the jacket, her fingers locked around the edge of the patch as if it might disappear if she let go. Bear’s hands—his enormous, careful hands—closed over hers, not pulling, just holding.
“Let me,” he said, his voice dropping to the register she’d only heard a handful of times—in his bedroom, in the dark, when he’d been inside her and everything else had fallen away. “Let me take you home.”
She shook her head. “It’s her.” The words came out ragged, broken.
“The jacket. The patch. I helped her put it on—” She stopped, the sentence unfinished.
Fifteen years. Fifteen years of searching, and now this—a jacket in the mud, bones in the ground, and a scorch mark under a patch she’d watched her twin sew on the night before she disappeared.
Bear’s arms closed around her, one hand coming up to cradle the back of her head.
He was warm—so warm—and solid in a way that made her want to collapse against him and never move again.
His chest rose and fell against her cheek, his heart hammering under her ear.
He said nothing. Just held her, his breath coming in careful, measured pulls as if he was counting them.
She felt him shift, his weight redistributing, and then she was being lifted—effortlessly, as if she weighed nothing—and cradled against his chest. Her face pressed into the hollow of his throat, the familiar scent of him—sweat and pine and the faint trace of the soap he used—filling her nose.
The jacket was still in her hands, clutched against her chest, the patch rough under her fingers.
Bear turned, his stride long and purposeful as he carried her away from the water’s edge.
Behind them, she heard movement—the shift of bodies, the quiet exchange of words she couldn’t make out.
When she managed to lift her head, she saw the Valor Ridge men had closed ranks, forming a wall between her and the scene at the creek—Jonah and Hatch and Walker and Boone and Ghost, standing shoulder to shoulder, their backs to her, facing the deputies and the remains and the long night ahead.
Bear carried her past the trucks, past the deputies’ vehicles, past the place where Atlas waited by her Jeep, his ears forward, watching her with worried eyes.
He didn’t stop until he reached his own truck, parked at the edge of the clearing.
Only then did he ease her down, letting her feet touch the ground while keeping one arm firmly around her waist.
“I’ve got you,” he said, his voice low and steady in her ear. “I’ve got you, Greta.”
She looked up at him, at the face that had become as familiar to her as her own—the dark eyes, the beard, the lines at the corners of his mouth that appeared when he smiled. Right now, those lines were deep with worry, his eyes fixed on hers with an intensity that made her chest ache.
“It’s her,” she breathed. “It’s Alice.”