Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
MAREN
I could have Knox out of that holding room in twenty minutes. I have three phone calls that would do it and the political capital to make all three without spending anything I can't replace by Tuesday.
I drive home instead.
The green dress comes off the second I'm through my door.
Jeans, a thin white shirt, a flannel off the hook because it's still seventy but the sky is clear and in an hour it will be fifty degrees and dropping.
Montana doesn't negotiate. I go to the main house because the lights are on and my brothers are still awake and I am not sitting alone in my guesthouse with what I just watched Knox do.
The kitchen smells like coffee and leftover tension. Dawson is at the island with his laptop. Finn has his boots up on the kitchen chair across from him. Tate is leaning against the counter near the window, quiet the way Tate gets quiet when he's already three steps ahead of the conversation.
West is on the barstool at the end of the island, still in a wrinkled shirt from the flight he took out of Seattle this morning, looking like a man who arrived late to a movie and is trying to catch up. He got home six hours ago. Finn called him before the Lodge parking lot had fully cleared.
"There she is," Finn says.
"Don't."
"I'm just saying." He tips his beer toward me.
"The man saw somebody touch your elbow and answered the question of who you belong to in front of two hundred people.
My phone hasn't stopped since we left the Lodge.
By five a.m. the ranchers at the co-op are going to have a full account of it with embellishments. "
"That's already the story," Tate says from the window. "It was the story before Tom got Knox to the cruiser."
I don't answer because I don't have enough to answer with.
Finn's version is what the Lodge saw and what Rimrock will repeat, and I'm not going to spend information I don't fully have yet on a kitchen conversation at eleven-thirty at night.
"Tom walked Knox out voluntarily," I say. "Spent a favor to do it."
Dawson closes the laptop. "How bad?"
"Ted Lowry. Man's been ranching since before I was born, he'll survive it." I pour a mug of coffee, get the cream and sugar and turn around. "Tom walked Knox out without restraints in front of two hundred people. That's not standard."
"Gideon's favor," Tate says. Not a question.
"Has to be." I wrap both hands around the mug. "Knox knew Tom was coming before Tom knew he was coming."
West looks at Finn. "Is this why you texted me a fire emoji at nine-thirty?"
"That and the wrist," Finn says. "But mostly the other thing."
"What other thing?" West asks, and Finn gestures at me like the answer is obvious.
It apparently is to everyone in the room except West, who has been in Seattle for six weeks and is operating on Finn's texts alone.
"Knox ran to her at the rodeo. After the horse went down.
That's been the situation. You're caught up. "
West looks at me, then at Dawson, then back at me. "So that's what's been happening?"
"Nothing is happening," I say.
"He broke a man's wrist," West says. "Tonight."
"I'm aware."
"For you."
"We don't know that."
West opens his mouth again. Dawson gives him the look a second time, sharper than the first. West subsides. But he's smiling into his coffee cup and not trying very hard to hide it.
Finn leans forward with his elbows on the table, wearing the expression he gets when he's about to ask the thing no one else will. "You're going to go get him?"
"Yes."
"Dad's not going to love that."
"Dad's asleep." I look at Finn over my mug. "And it's not his call."
"Maren." Dawson's voice is even. The voice he uses when he's not telling me what to do but needs me to hear him anyway. "Knox extracted something from Ted Lowry tonight. Whatever it was, it ended with a broken wrist in front of half of Rimrock. The sheriff took him in. That is not a small thing."
"No," I agree. "It isn't."
"And you want to walk into county holding at midnight and pull him out?"
"Yes."
A beat of silence. Tate is still looking out the window. West is looking at Dawson. Finn is looking at me with something that isn't quite a smile.
Finn sets his beer down. "He went straight to you after."
I look at him.
"Just an observation," Finn says. He says it without weight, the way Finn delivers the things nobody else will touch.
I don't answer. I finish the coffee and set the mug in the sink.
Tate finally turns from the window. He looks at me the way he always does when he's decided something. Steady and a little sad, like he already knows how this ends. "Be careful which family you're serving when you walk through that door."
I think about something Declan told me when I was seventeen, standing in his office doorway after watching him end a man's career over the phone. Everyone is leverage, sweetheart. Close the door on your way out.
"I'll keep that in mind," I say, and go.
It's cold by the time I pull out of our gate. The moon is up and the prairie is silver and flat on both sides of the highway. By the time I hit Main Street I can feel it coming through the truck window I've left cracked.
The county station sits at the south end of Main, two blocks from the highway, government beige under sodium lights. I pull in at twelve-seventeen. Two cruisers in the lot and one other vehicle, a black Range Rover with Blackwater Ranch plates I don't recognize.
I'm halfway to the door when it opens.
Knox walks out first. Then Tom Aldridge, holding paperwork with the expression of a man who has already been thanked once and doesn't need to be thanked again. Behind them, half a step back and moving like someone who owns exactly how much space she needs, is Sage Blackwater.
I've known Sage my whole life. Rodeos, school hallways, the unique dynamic of growing up in a town where your families are the only two that matter.
She has Knox's coloring without Knox's size, dark hair, grey eyes, and a quality of stillness that has always been completely different from her brother's. His says I will wait as long as necessary. Hers says I already know how this ends.
Seeing her here at midnight, paperwork already handled, tells me everything about which Blackwater moved fastest tonight, and it wasn't the one I came to collect.
She looks at me once, I look back.
"Maren," she says. Perfectly pleasant. Completely opaque.
"Sage."
One beat. She turns to Knox, touches his arm briefly, and walks to the Range Rover without another word. He watches her go with an expression that is fond and slightly exhausted in equal measure. The engine starts. The taillights disappear up Main Street.
Tom hands Knox an envelope, shakes his hand, and goes back inside.
Knox turns to me. He looks the same as he looked in the Lodge before Tom walked him out. Jacket on, not a hair different. Like county holding is something that happens to other men while he waits for it to be over. The only thing that's changed is the way he's looking at me.
"You came," he says.
"Sage beat me to it."
"Sage called. You showed up." He says it like those are different things.
They are different things.
I toss him my keys. "You're driving. I've had coffee but no sleep. I don't want to be responsible for anything else tonight."
He catches them without looking. His eyes are still on my face.
"You made me wait two hours," he says.
"I know."
"On purpose."
"Yes."
His jaw shifts once. Not anger. The decision behind anger, which is quieter and more permanent. "Okay," he says, and walks to my truck.
We're through the edge of town before I ask.
"What did Ted say?"
Knox keeps his eyes on the road. The headlights pull the highway out of the dark ahead of us, the prairie flat on both sides.
"He said she was never supposed to be on that horse."
I let that sit for a full mile.
Not a warning. An attempt.
"He say anything else?" I ask.
"No."
Knox says it clean and flat and I know him well enough now to know that no can mean several different things depending on which muscle in his jaw is doing the work. This one means: that's what I'm giving you tonight.
I hold onto it. Turn back to the window. The flannel is warm against the cold coming off the glass and I pull it tighter and don't push.
He reaches across the seat and puts his hand on my thigh. Doesn't say anything, just leaves it there, the whole rest of the drive home, heavy and certain. His scent fills my truck, again.
He takes us to his place on Blackwater Ranch, a quarter mile past the main gate.
He unlocks the door and doesn't bother with the overhead lights, just the lamp on the entry table.
The house comes up around us in warm, low, gold.
Dark hardwood, stone fireplace cold and dark in July, the western windows showing nothing but stars.
"The footage," I say.
"Yeah." He sets the keys on the counter and moves toward the back of the house. I follow.
His office is smaller than the one in the main building.
Two monitors, a secure router, printed maps pinned to a corkboard with handwritten notes I've learned not to read unless he offers them.
He opens a file on the left screen, the rodeo fairgrounds stable footage, and pulls up the Elks Lodge exterior feed on the right.
"I pulled the fairgrounds footage Sunday night," he says. Flat. No preamble. "I've had it since the rodeo."
I look at him.
"I want you to see it," he says. "Tonight."
I hold that for a moment. He's had this for six days and he's showing it to me now, at one in the morning, after county holding and Sage's phone calls and Ted Lowry's confession.
"Show me," I say.
He pulls the stable footage back to mid-morning last Sunday, the fairgrounds already filling up, trailers in the lot, handlers moving through the stable aisle with leads and feed buckets and the slightly frantic chaos of a rodeo day.