2. Holland
Chapter two
Holland
The base appeared on the left, exactly where the map placed the compound. I pushed harder on the accelerator.
There wasn’t much to see: a low prefab building with a green metal roof, chain-link fencing, a flagpole bearing two limp flags. Through the trees, I caught a corner of the gravel yard. Then the road bent, hiding the compound.
For four months, I had rehearsed this drive.
In my head, the base had acquired institutional menace: fluorescent corridors, locked doors, enough architecture to carry the burden I was bringing to the compound.
In reality, the base was a Forest Service compound four miles outside a town of nine hundred people.
Smaller than my high school. The flagpole had ten feet of bare aluminum beneath the flags.
I kept driving.
First the cabin. Unpack. Call Halliday.
A sound plan, if you ignored how someone who’d already made her choice had disguised the decision as logistics.
The road descended into the valley. Larches burned gold on the slopes, while the cottonwoods along the creek had already gone bare. Above the timberline, the peaks held their first proper snow. I watched the hard white boundary where winter began.
Two hours of Missoula lay behind me. A man’s name waited in the fourth box. For nine hundred feet, the road ran alongside his workplace before curving away.
The base dwindled in the rear-view mirror.
My rental stood three miles beyond town on a dirt spur: an A-frame clad in new vinyl, one of four cabins tucked behind lodgepole pines. The listing photographs had omitted the highway. I parked. Through the windscreen, I studied the next three months while the engine cooled.
A semi passed as I climbed out. The blast knocked a yelp from me. The cabin windows rattled. I grabbed the Subaru’s roof as if the vehicle might bolt too.
Once the truck had gone, I remained beside the car, annoyed at my own nerves. There had been no witnesses, which made the embarrassment worse.
I carried in four banker’s boxes, their corners softened by a day in the damp car. Court transcripts. Eleven months of FOIA correspondence. The Wyatt Torres incident report. Each lid released the same odour of wet cardboard mixed with old toner.
The fourth box was heavier. My arms knew why before I allowed myself to acknowledge the folder inside.
The manila folder contained a name-change petition filed in Lewis & Clark County in June 2013. I had come to call the document simply the folder. I lowered the box beneath the window, then looked at the stack against the white drywall.
There. The work had entered the room.
I set up the table.
Laptop first. I opened the computer before locating the bathroom, following the order I had used in four rented rooms over five years. Work before toothbrush. My left hand had polished two grey patches into the keyboard. The Scrivener file waited in the dock, but I left the file closed.
Beside the laptop went a Moleskine, followed by a twelve-pack of Pilot G-2 07s. The cabin smelled of sap mixed with fresh vinyl. I took out a pen, clicking the button once. In any new room, that click established jurisdiction.
The code came last.
The page had travelled in the outer pocket of my crossbody bag, folded around the thumbtack I’d removed from the corkboard above my desk in Missoula. The tack always came with me. A new tack would have worked better, but ritual has no interest in efficiency.
Three rules:
Don’t lie.
Don’t sleep with sources.
Don’t write what you can’t defend.
I fixed the page above the table. The page hung straight.
Four rooms had come before this one. I knew what made the fifth different. That difference was why the code needed to hang above my table. A promise made when keeping the promise costs nothing is office décor.
I pushed the tack deeper with my thumbnail, then went looking for the coffee maker.
While the machine dripped, I unpacked the bathroom.
Toothbrush on the counter. Hairbrush beside the toothbrush.
Lavender lotion for the grime of the road.
From my toiletry bag, I took a small amber prescription bottle, placing the bottle on the shelf beside the floss.
I made a point of handling the prescription casually, then noticed how much effort appearing casual required.
The tap ran cold long enough to numb my fingers before the water warmed.
Coffee in hand, I returned to the table. I brought up Halliday’s number. Before calling, I checked my bank balance. I stared until the figure resumed being arithmetic.
The balance sat where I expected: enough, just, with the next advance instalment due to turn just into fine. No crisis. I had walked out of a building that paid me well, leaving my name on the publication’s masthead because poverty with integrity had seemed preferable to comfort without integrity.
I had performed that calculation before. I would perform the same calculation again.
Halliday answered on the second ring. “Holland Vane. Tell me you’ve found somewhere with heat.”
“I’ve found a propane furnace that runs on spite.” I uncapped the pen. “I’m in Copper Creek. Cabin secured, boxes inside. I’ve been operational for twenty minutes.”
“Good.”
A faint scrape came through the phone. Over fourteen months of Tuesday calls, I had identified the scrape as the sound of him removing his glasses.
“Walk me through where you are,” he said.
“The story or the geography?”
“Story first.”
“The September piece outperformed projections. A few thousand shares, which passes for viral in my world. There’s also a producer in Denver asking to option material I won’t be optioning.
” I rolled the pen between my fingers. “Until now, the work was private. The piece made the work public. Everyone received notice. People tend to hire lawyers after reading about themselves.”
“That’s why I called.” His pace changed, each word receiving separate inspection. He used that cadence when he thought I might react badly. “The civil timeline has compressed. We modelled eighteen months to a referral. Current estimate is six. Less, possibly, if the archive opens.”
Cold crept across my hands.
Under my collarbone, the old ProPublica engine started. My cardiologist had supplied the surge with a clinical name, then supplied me with a daily pill. Once, that surge would have driven me straight through whatever stood in front of me.
Six months. I had built the entire approach around having time.
I put the pen down before Halliday heard me fidget with the barrel. “Define ‘if the archive opens.’”
“The encrypted material is the fulcrum now.” Papers shifted at his end.
“The sealed witness is ready to move as soon as we can read the files. Without those files, we have a strong civil case. We also have a publishable story. With access to those files, we have grounds for a criminal referral—a different story altogether.”
“So the witness is waiting for a password.”
“The witness is positioned. The password gives us leverage.”
“Nobody has the password.”
“Nobody we can name over the phone.”
I wrote key in the margin, then boxed the word. On the second pass, the pen cut a groove into the paper.
I left the obvious question unasked. I knew more about the answer than I had told Halliday. I wasn’t prepared to learn how much more while he listened.
“When do you expect initial source contact?” he asked.
“This week.”
“Thursday this week, or the sort of week that means eventually?”
“The sort that means I intend to do the approach properly.” Behind me, the furnace started with a metallic clunk. Forced air rushed through the vent under the table. “He isn’t a defendant, Ray. I’m not ambushing him in a car park.”
“Six months leaves little room for delicacy.”
“A compressed timeline doesn’t make him hostile either. If I mishandle the approach, he disappears. Then you lose the archive, along with the witness who can explain why the files matter.”
Halliday stayed silent.
“One question,” I said. My bank balance remained open on the screen. “If the timeline accelerates, does the money accelerate too?”
“The advance moves with the manuscript.” His glasses clicked against the phone. “Don’t file thin just to meet a date.”
“I won’t.”
“You’ll keep me current.”
“I’ll keep you current. I have Sunday’s newsletter to write, so I’m tied to this table for the next two days anyway.”
The call had begun to close. I hurried the closing, an old reflex learned from my mother: leave first, even if only from a telephone conversation.
“I’ll let you go.”
“Holland.”
“Yes?”
“The September piece mattered. You did good work.”
Praise I hadn’t earned could get past defences that handled criticism easily.
“Thanks.”
After he hung up, the furnace seemed much louder.
Everything I had told him was true. That was the craft. Give the truth in sufficient detail, stopping one inch before the account becomes whole.
Halliday knew about the name-change petition. He did not know I had driven two hours to live in the same valley as the man named in the document: the disowned son who left his father’s house the year Wyatt Torres died, then changed his name that June.
I turned my phone face-down.
Ray would have approved the trip. He would have said, That’s your lane, Holland. You’re the journalist. His permission would have been immediate, reasonable, yet useless. I hadn’t asked because I wanted the choice to be mine before anyone blessed the decision.
That explanation would never survive beneath my byline.
The encrypted archive had reduced my timetable to six months, perhaps less.
I had planned to spend weeks becoming an unremarkable presence at the Pine Needle before speaking his name to him.
That would have been slow work. Such work acknowledged that I was about to enter a stranger’s life carrying questions capable of setting his past alight.
Now I had a sprint.
I caught myself inventing his face.
A man who had left, renamed himself, then gone north. My mind tried to supply features for the blank: a brow, a mouth, the posture of someone who expected old trouble to arrive from the south.
I stopped. Both palms came down on the table.
The evidence consisted of four items: a petition, a redacted personnel record, a service history, a hire date.
That asymmetry made me feel ill.
Above the table, the code waited.
Don’t write what you can’t defend.
I could defend every decision I had made. I could footnote each choice. Yet the combined decisions had placed me in a cold cabin four miles from a man who had spent twelve years believing no one was looking for him. Somewhere between the individual acts, their total, the arithmetic failed.
I opened a blank document for the newsletter.
Three thousand subscribers expected their Sunday piece. I poured more coffee, then began explaining the plan to myself as if pitching a sceptical editor. Keep the hands occupied. Keep the reporting clean. Thursday could wait until Thursday.
The cursor blinked on an empty page.
After several minutes, I went to the fourth box. I removed the folder. The corners had worn soft. The folder retained a little warmth from the car. I laid the document beside the laptop, opening the petition.
Then I read the new name aloud.
I wanted to know how the name behaved in a human voice.
Beyond the window, the October gold drained from the trees. The folder remained open while I wrote out the days of the week in my notebook.
Beside Thursday, I added:
Pine Needle, 6:00 a.m.
The second zero came out narrower than the first.