Chapter 9
nine
On Rainey’s second day at the cabin, restlessness set in. It wasn’t helped by the rain that had been on the roof for an hour. In any other situation, she found that kind of white noise soothing.
But not now.
She’d tried to read one of the well-worn adventure novels Evander had. Tried to work on a song and messed with her broken guitar. Tried to pace it off, tried to ignore the twinge in her left side every time she reached too far.
None of it distracted her from the fact he left when the rain started with strict orders to stay inside, and he hadn’t returned.
Fuck waiting.
She pulled on her boots. Grabbed the wool blanket from the foot of the cot and wrapped it around her shoulders. The movement sent a twinge through her left side, sharp enough to make her hiss, but it settled as she crossed to the window and wiped the fog from the glass.
Outside, the clearing had turned to mud. Sheets of rain swept across the yard, driven by a wind. The lean-to where Sable stood was barely visible, a dark smudge at the edge of the clearing, and the horse had pressed herself against the back wall, tail to the weather, head low.
Evander crouched near the base of the cabin, his hood up, water streaming off his jacket. He was digging something—a trench—his shovel biting into the earth with a steady rhythm that seemed almost meditative under the chaos of the storm.
Tilly stood nearby, head low, her black coat plastered to her body. She looked miserable.
Rainey pulled the door open and stepped onto the porch. The wind hit her immediately, cold and wet, carrying the smell of saturated earth and pine resin and something sharper underneath—ozone, maybe, or the creek that had swollen somewhere below.
“Tell me you’re not going to stay out here all day,” she called over the rain.
Evander didn’t stop working. His shovel came up, went down, mug flying into a pile beside the trench. “Get inside, Rainey.”
Yeah, right.
She pulled the blanket tighter and leaned against the porch rail, her forearms crossed on the wet wood. The rain soaked through the sleeves of her borrowed shirt in seconds. “What are the trenches for?”
“Water’s coming off the ridge faster than the ground can take it.” He paused, wiped his face with the back of his glove. “The slope funnels everything straight at the foundation. If the trenches can’t channel it around the cabin, we’ll wake up ankle-deep.”
She watched him work. The rhythm of it—shovel, lift, throw—had the same patience she’d seen him use on Sable. No wasted motion. No frustration. Just a man doing what needed doing, a little at a time, until the problem stopped being a problem.
Tilly trotted over to the porch and shook herself violently, spattering Rainey’s legs with cold water. Then she sat at the top of the steps, pressed against Rainey’s knee, and stared out at the rain.
“I think your dog’s had enough,” she called.
“She’ll survive.”
“But will she enjoy it?”
That earned her a pause.
Evander looked at Tilly, then at the sky, then at Rainey. His face was unreadable under the hood, but she caught the faintest shake of his head before he drove the shovel into the ground and walked toward the porch. Water ran off him in rivulets.
“Fine,” he said. “Five minutes. Then I’m back out.”
They went inside. Evander stripped off his jacket and hung it over the back of a chair, where it began immediately to drip onto the floor.
Tilly found a spot near the stove and collapsed with a sigh that sounded almost human.
Rainey added wood to the fire, coaxing the coals back to life, and made coffee while Evander scraped mud from his boots.
“How bad is it?” she asked. “The rain.”
He took the mug she offered. Drank. His fingers left damp prints on the metal. “Depends on how long it holds. This drainage system was built for normal storms. A heavy downpour like this, it’ll keep up for a day, maybe two. If it goes past thirty-six hours, expecting the ground to hold gets dicey.”
“Dicey how?”
He set the mug down and looked at her. His eyes were dark, serious, but not afraid.
“The creek below can jump its banks fast. I’ve seen it happen.
The water comes up over the culvert, spills into the low ground, and suddenly the soil’s too heavy to sit still.
Trees go down. The road washes out in half a dozen places. ”
She thought about that. The track they’d driven in on, already rutted and narrow, now being eaten away by moving water. The isolation of this place, which had felt like safety for the past days, suddenly felt like a trap. If the road washed out, they weren’t going anywhere.
“Could it reach the cabin?”
“Not up here. We’re on high ground.” He paused. “But it’ll slow everything down. The fire road on the north ridge will be mud. The creek crossing on the southern route will be running too high to ford. And there’s a risk of mudslides.”
“Mudslides?”
“We should be safe here. We have mostly rock above us.”
That wasn’t reassuring. “So what do we do?”
“We stay put until it passes.”
“How long?”
He shrugged. “Montana mountains in the summer. Could be a few hours. Could be three days. Hell, the temp could drop, and it could turn to snow.”
Three days.
Three more days of this—the four walls, the woodstove, the growing tension between them that she’d been trying very hard not to name. Three more days of watching him sleep on the floor, of waking to coffee, of fighting the urge to touch him just to see what would happen.
She sat down at the table. The map was still spread across it, held down at the corners by a tin of coffee, a box of shells, and a smooth river stone Evander used as a paperweight.
“So what do we do if the Sons find us while we’re stuck here?”
He considered the question for what felt like a long time. The only sound was the rain, constant and heavy, and the occasional pop of sap from the wood stove.
“Same thing we do if they find us anywhere.” He leaned against the counter, arms crossed, his gaze steady on hers. “We survive.”
He said “survive” like it was simple, like he’d been doing it so long he’d forgotten there was any other option.
Like he’d forgotten there was more to life than surviving it.
“Has it ever been this bad?” she asked. “The rain. The flooding.”
“Last spring.”
He didn’t offer more, but she was getting used to his tells now and pieced it together. “Is that why you don’t live next to Valor Ridge anymore?”
His gaze snapped to her.
“You said you had a cabin there you lived in for eight years,” she reminded.
He picked up his mug, drank the last of his coffee, and set it in the basin with a clink. “Yeah.”
She waited. The rain filled the silence, but she waited through it, and after a long moment he spoke again.
“We had a late thaw, a warm spring, and then a week of solid rain. The snowpack came off the high country all at once. Creeks jumped their banks. Rivers flooded. Half the county got hit, but the worst damage was in the low canyons.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice had gone flat, the way it did when he was talking about something he didn’t want to feel.
“I was living at the old cabin. The one near Valor Ridge.”
“And it flooded,” she finished when he stopped.
“The creek was a couple hundred feet away. With normal spring runoff, it never came within fifty feet of the cabin. This spring it came over its banks and ate the ground out from under the cabin’s southwest corner. Took half the foundation with it.”
She tried to picture it. The cabin she sat in now was solid, dry, well-built. The thought of water tearing at the ground beneath it, undermining the very thing that kept it upright, made her stomach clench.
“Could you see it happening?” she asked. “Was there warning?”
“Some. The water came up fast, but I had time to move most of my gear to high ground.” He paused. “Tilly and I watched it go under.”
The flatness of the words betrayed him. Eight years of work, of solitude, of a life built by hand, and he’d stood in the rain and watched it disappear under floodwaters.
“Where did you go?”
He gave a narrow-eyed look, and she realized what a dumb question that was. There was only one place he could’ve gone.
“Valor Ridge,” she answered herself. “Bet Sable loved that.”
A faint smile touched his lips. “She wasn’t thrilled.”
“The cabin wasn’t salvageable?”
“I could’ve rebuilt.”
“But…?” she prompted.
God, she needed a crowbar for this conversation.
He turned to the window, where the rain had slowed to a steady, drumming rhythm, and she watched his profile against the gray light. His jaw, his shoulders, all of him was tight, even at rest, like he was always braced for something.
She knew exactly how that felt. She’d lived most of her life braced for the bad, too.
“But I didn’t want to,” he said at last. “The water exposed something. When the ground washed away, it opened up a cut along the bank. Bones. Old ones.”
Rainey’s mouth went dry. “Human?”
“A murder victim.”
She stared at him. The rain hammered the roof. The coffee sat forgotten in her mug.
“Hank Goodwin,” Evander said, and his lip curled around the name. “He came out personally. Him and his deputies, looking at me like I’d dug a grave in my own backyard.”
“Who were the bones?”
“In his mind? Alice Dougherty.”
The name meant nothing to Rainey, but she could tell it meant something to him. “Did you know her?”
“No. She went missing when she was a teenager. Fifteen years ago. Taken off the highway, presumed dead for over a decade. Her twin sister, Greta, spent all that time looking for her. Everyone thought she was chasing ghosts.” He paused, and a muscle in his jaw jumped.
“When the bones turned up on my property, Goodwin decided I was responsible for those ghosts.”
“Because you were the easiest person to blame.”
“Because I’m the ex-con who lives alone in the woods and doesn’t socialize. And I was once a resident of Valor Ridge. In his mind, that’s practically a confession.”