Chapter 13 #2
Naomi Pryce walks in with her jaw set and her messenger bag heavier than usual.
Her hair is pulled back, and the way she moves through the room is systematic, mapping threats before she maps furniture.
She spots me at the bar, clocks Keaton on the wrong side of it, and her eyebrows lift a fraction of an inch.
She crosses the room in four strides, pulls out the stool between Keaton and me, and sits.
"Rick Halston's office," she says, by way of greeting. "Two men in suits that cost more than his annual salary, sitting in his waiting room when I arrived for my appointment."
She sets her bag on the hook under the bar.
"They introduced themselves as representatives of the Aldrich Family Trust. They suggested, with the professional courtesy of people who have been trained to threaten without technically threatening, that my investigation into the mining claims was causing unnecessary disruption to the community and that perhaps my resources would be better allocated elsewhere. "
"Let me guess," I say. "They brought a pamphlet about the scenic beauty of literally anywhere else."
The corner of Naomi's mouth twitches. The closest she comes to a smile when she's working. "They brought a letter on letterhead so expensive I could feel the thread count."
"What did you say?"
"I told them my resources are allocated by the State Historic Preservation Office, not by the Aldrich Family Trust, and that if they'd like to file a formal objection to the investigation, they're welcome to do so in writing, through the proper channels, where it will be reviewed and, in all likelihood, denied. "
She signals Keaton, who is already reaching for a glass. He pours her something amber without asking, and she takes it without looking at what it is.
"Then I sat down in Rick Halston's office and completed my meeting. Rick looked like a man who has been asked to hold two live wires at once and is trying to figure out which one to drop."
"They leaned on you," I say.
"They tried. The distinction matters." Naomi takes a drink and sets the glass down. "This was cruder than what I usually see. Direct. They were in a hurry."
"Because Callum filed the challenge," I say. "Against his own clause. He's fighting it publicly."
Naomi looks at me with the particular steadiness she reserves for things she knows I will not want to hear. "I need to tell you something, and I need you to hear it without taking it personally."
"That's never a good opening."
"My priority is the six. The six Chinese laborers buried in that mine in 1893. They are the reason my office authorized this investigation. They are the historical record I am here to recover and identify and name."
She holds my gaze. "Eleanor matters. Your mother matters.
I understand that. I understand you are grieving and investigating and those two things are tangled up in each other in ways that make it hard to separate them.
I am here because six men were killed and buried and erased from the historical record, and if I have to choose between prosecuting a living case and recovering a historical one, I will choose the historical one. Every time."
The anger arrives before I can intercept it, hot and specific, because Eleanor has waited too. Eleanor has been in that mountain for twenty years, and the idea that the dead have a hierarchy, that grief runs on a numbered ticket system, lands in my chest like a fist.
I hold it. I breathe through it. Naomi is not wrong. She is not cruel. She is telling me the shape of the box she operates in, and the box is real, and the fact that Eleanor doesn't fit inside it is my problem, not hers.
"I'm not asking you to choose," I say.
"Not yet. But you will, or someone will, and when that happens, I want you to know where I stand. I stand with the dead. All of them. In order of who has waited longest."
Keaton refills my glass without being asked. He is behind the bar again, back where he belongs, but the crossing has been made. He stepped out from behind the walnut and sat down as a person, and the room will not forget it even if the room pretends to.
He looks at Naomi. She catches the look and holds it for a beat longer than the moment requires. Then she turns back to her glass, and he reaches for the next one on the shelf, and the exchange is over so quickly that a person who wasn't paying attention would miss it entirely.
"Keaton heard something," I tell Naomi. "About my mother. Before she died."
I give her the facts the way I'd file a story: source, location, date range, exact language. Ward Aldrich and an unidentified man in the hotel lobby. The Holden problem. Permanent resolution. A month before my mother died.
When I finish, Naomi sits very still for a long moment. Then she pulls a notebook from her bag, clicks a pen, and writes something down in handwriting so precise it could be typeset.
"You understand what this means," she says. It is not a question.
"My mother was murdered."
The word hits the air and comes back to me changed, heavier, realer than when it was just a shape I carried in my head. My hands are flat on the bar top. Keaton's posture, I realize, from minutes ago. The posture of a person putting something down.
My mother did not die. My mother was removed, the way the six were removed, the way Eleanor was removed, the way the inspector and the journalist and the grad student were removed from the record by the same family that carved its name into the stone above the door I walked through tonight.