Buried Truths (Wicked Falls)

Chapter 1

GREER

The house looks worse than I remember.

That's the first thought I have pulling up the gravel drive, which tells me something unflattering about my priorities.

My mother is three days dead, and I'm critiquing her landscaping.

The juniper hedges have gone feral, crawling across the front path like they've been trying to escape.

The porch railing lists to the left. One of the second-floor shutters hangs at an angle that looks almost intentional, like the house itself is squinting at me, trying to figure out if I'm worth recognizing.

I kill the engine and sit in the rental car for a long minute, letting the silence of the San Juan Mountains settle over me like a physical weight.

Denver is seven hours and an entire world behind me.

Up here, at nine thousand feet, the sky is so blue it looks manufactured, and the aspens along the ridge have already started to turn, gold bleeding into the green like a wound that won't stop spreading.

October in the mountains. My mother's favorite time of year, which she mentioned in every single one of the letters I stopped opening years ago.

The aspens were blazing, but the peaks above them carried the first sugaring of white, and the radio had mentioned snow in the forecast for the passes by the end of the week.

October in the San Juans is a closing window.

Another few weeks and the roads over the high passes would shut for the season, and Wicked Falls would become what it always became in winter: a sealed box, beautiful and unreachable, with one road in and the mountain deciding when you got to use it.

The guilt arrives on schedule. Right on time, like always.

I grab my bag from the passenger seat and force myself out of the car.

The air hits me first: thin, dry, sharp with pine resin and the mineral tang of cold rock.

My lungs ache with it. Years in low-altitude cities have softened me, and my body registers the elevation like a mild betrayal.

Everything up here demands more effort. More breath.

More blood. My mother used to say that's why the mountains keep people honest, that the altitude strips away whatever you're trying to hide behind.

My mother said a lot of things. Most of them in a tone that made you feel like you were being gently corrected by a woman who'd already forgiven you for being wrong.

The front door sticks. It always stuck, even when I was a kid, even before the frame warped and the foundation shifted and the whole house started its slow surrender to gravity and weather.

I put my shoulder into it and the door gives with a groan that sounds almost human, and then the smell hits me: dust, old wood, dried lavender, and underneath all of it, the faint sweetness of decay.

The potpourri my mother kept in bowls on every flat surface has gone to rot.

Inside, the house is dim. The curtains are drawn, heavy velvet things in a shade of green so dark it's almost black, and the late-afternoon light that manages to filter through turns everything amber and underwater.

The furniture is the same. The worn Persian rug in the entryway, the oak staircase with the banister I used to slide down, the grandfather clock in the hall that stopped working when I was young and that my mother never fixed because she said she liked a clock that had the dignity to stop on its own terms.

God. She was insufferable. She was wonderful.

I set my bag down at the foot of the stairs and walk through the ground floor like I'm casing the place, which in a way I am.

The kitchen: an ancient gas stove, copper pots hanging from a rack my father installed before he left, a window over the sink that frames the mountains like a painting no one asked for.

The living room: bookshelves floor to ceiling, a stone fireplace big enough to stand in, two armchairs angled toward each other in a way that suggests my mother still had conversations with someone who sat in the second one.

The dining room: a long table, six chairs, a chandelier made of antler and iron that I used to think was beautiful and now recognize as vaguely menacing.

Every room smells like her. Lavender and old paper and the specific, undefinable scent of a woman who lived alone for a long time and had made peace with it.

The lawyer called me four days ago. A man named Aldrich, Callum Aldrich, very polite, very precise, who informed me that my mother had passed in her sleep, that she'd named me sole beneficiary, and that there were "matters related to the estate" that required my presence in Wicked Falls.

He'd said it like he was handling the words with tongs.

I'd booked a flight to Denver before the call ended, rented a car at the airport, and drove west into the mountains without stopping, because if I stopped I'd think about it, and if I thought about it I'd feel it, and if I felt it I'd have to reckon with the fact that I haven't spoken to my mother in three years and now I never will again.

So I didn't stop.

Except once, at the gas station on the edge of town, because the rental was running on fumes and denial only gets you so far on a quarter tank.

The woman behind the counter was in her sixties, weathered and watchful, with reading glasses on a chain around her neck and a paperback facedown on the register.

She looked up when I walked in, and her eyes did the thing that small-town eyes do: scanned, cataloged, placed.

"Pump three," I said, handing over my card.

She looked at the card. Looked at me. "Holden," she said, and the word came out careful, like she was testing whether it was safe to say out loud. "You're June's girl."

"I am."

Something moved across her face, too fast to read. Sympathy, maybe. Or warning. "I'm sorry about your mother. She was a good woman." A pause, and then, quieter: "She deserved better than this town."

She handed my card back without another word and went back to her paperback. I stood there for a moment in the fluorescent light of the gas station, turning her words over in my head, unsure what to do with the weight of them.

The town itself is exactly as I remember, which is the problem.

Wicked Falls doesn't change. It calcifies.

The name comes from the waterfall at the head of the valley, a narrow chute of white water that drops two hundred feet down a granite face into the pool that feeds the river.

The miners called it Wicked Falls because the mist made the rocks slick and the current at the base pulled under anything that got too close.

Three men drowned there in the first year of the silver rush, according to the historical marker at the trailhead, and the town that grew up around the mines took the name like a badge.

My mother always said the town earned it in ways that had nothing to do with water.

The Main Street storefronts have the same tasteful paint colors, the same window boxes trailing the same seasonal flowers.

The craft brewery on the corner has a new name but the same smug chalkboard menu.

The Aldrich Hotel still anchors the far end of the street like a cathedral to old money, its stone facade and copper roof green with age, its lobby visible through floor-to-ceiling windows, all leather and dark wood and lighting designed to make rich people feel richer.

The Aldriches built this town. That's the story, anyway.

They came during the silver boom, dug the mines, built the smelters, laid the roads.

When the silver ran out, they pivoted to real estate, tourism, development.

The resort on the north ridge is theirs.

The ski area is theirs. Half the commercial property on Main Street is theirs, leased back to the boutique owners and restaurateurs who pretend they're independent small businesses and not tenants in someone else's kingdom.

My mother hated the Aldriches. Quietly, consistently, with the steady dedication of a woman tending a grudge garden. She never explained why, and when I was old enough to ask, she changed the subject with a skill that I only recognized as deflection years later.

She just didn't sell. That was her rebellion: small, stubborn, absolute.

The Aldriches wanted our land. They'd wanted it since before I was born, according to the property tax records I found in a shoebox under her bed when I was a teenager, snooping the way teenagers do when their mothers keep too many doors closed.

Offers every few years, each one larger than the last, each one declined in her slanting handwriting on formal letterhead she had printed for exactly this purpose.

My mother's refusals were legendary in town. Brief, polite, final.

The property sits on fourteen acres at the western edge of Wicked Falls, backed up against National Forest land and the old Aldrich mining claims. The house itself is nothing special, a Victorian-era miner's cottage that's been added onto and repaired and added onto again until it sprawls like something organic, more grown than built.

Three bedrooms, two baths, a root cellar I was terrified of as a child and am not particularly excited about as an adult.

The land is the thing. Fourteen acres of mountain meadow and old-growth spruce, with a creek running through the lower pasture and the remnants of a mining road cutting across the northeast corner toward the old Aldrich shafts.