Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
KNOX
The knock comes three times. Hard and then nothing.
I'm at the door before Maren's fully out of her chair, gun up, checking the latch out of habit before I remember I'm the one who locked it. Through the gap in the curtain there's no one standing there. Whoever knocked already isn't.
"Knox."
"Stay back." I don't look at her when I say it. She'll hear the difference anyway.
I get the door open and there's no one on the step.
Just the rain coming down steady past the eaves and a small black shape sitting square on the ground in front of the door.
Deliberately placed, not dropped. A flash drive.
Unmarked plastic, dry where it's tucked close against the frame, out of the worst of the weather.
Movement at the tree line pulls my eyes up before my hands can get to the drive.
A figure, already thirty yards out and opening the distance, running the way people run when they've done what they came to do and don't intend to explain it.
Moving like a man who's done this before and knows exactly which way is out.
"Someone's out there," Maren says, at my shoulder now despite what I told her.
"Was," I say. "Not anymore."
He doesn't look back once. Doesn't hesitate at the tree line, doesn't check his footing on ground I know is uneven from experience.
He goes through the gap in the spruce, and then the rain and the trees take him and there's nothing left to shoot at even if I wanted to.
Which I don't, not yet, not with a target I can't identify and a woman standing in an open doorway behind me.
I crouch and pick up the drive. Still warm from whoever delivered it.
"Knox." Maren's voice has gone careful, the way it does when she already knows the answer isn't going to be good. "Who was that?"
"I don't know." I turn the drive over once. No markings, no label, nothing to say who it came from. "But I know who sent him."
"How?"
"Because nobody finds this cabin by accident." I close my hand around the drive. "Jacob."
I look at Maren. She's already looking at the drive like she can see through the plastic to whatever's on it.
"We don't have a laptop out here," she says.
"Actually," I say, glancing toward the pack by the door, toward the rain, toward the tree line that's gone still again like nothing ever moved through it. "We do."
Jacob Mercer looks like a man recording his own ghost.
The laptop is old, a scarred ranch unit I keep charged off the solar panel bolted to the cabin's south wall for exactly this kind of stranding, and it takes four minutes to boot.
Maren sits close enough that her knee presses mine. Neither of us moves to fix that.
I plug in the drive.
One file. No name, just a date stamp three days old. I click it before I let myself think about what three days old means against everything that's happened since.
Jacob fills the frame too close, like he set the camera up fast and didn't check the angle.
Behind him, the equipment barn. I know that wall.
I had a conversation in that barn when I was nineteen years old and the man on the screen now is the same man who handed me a rag afterward and never once asked what happened.
"Knox." His voice comes through tinny and too loud.
Maren reaches over without looking and turns the volume down two notches.
"If you're watching this, something happened to me, or I got too scared to say it to your face, which is its own kind of something happening.
" A short laugh that isn't a laugh. "I've been collecting things.
Records. I should have brought them to you weeks ago and I didn't, because every time I tried, your father had something more urgent.
Charity season. The rodeo. Always something. "
I don't move. I'm aware of not moving the way you're aware of holding your breath underwater.
"There's a group out of Calgary," Jacob says.
"McKenna. They've been working both families for years, longer than any of us knew to look.
It's not the product they want." He leans closer to the camera, and the light catches the grey in his beard, the lines around his eyes that I've looked at my whole life and never once read as fear until right now.
"It's never been about product. I found something in the old records.
Survey stuff, going back decades. I don't fully understand what it means yet, but I know they killed a man over it in 1987, and they'll kill again. "
He stops. Looks off camera, like he heard something. Comes back.
"I don't have time to explain the rest. Just trust that I'm not crazy, and I'm not wrong, and I am so sorry I didn't make you listen sooner."
The video ends.
I sit there with my hand still on the trackpad.
Maren doesn't say anything. She doesn't reach for me. She stays exactly where she is, her knee against mine, and lets the silence be as long as it needs to be.
I watch it again.
The second time I catch the thing I missed.
Jacob's hands, off camera mostly, but visible once when he leans in.
They're shaking. Not from cold. The barn doesn't get cold in August. He filmed this with his hands shaking and sent a man to deliver it to me through a flash flood because he didn't trust a phone line.
I had two chances to hear this from him in person and gave him neither.
I watch it a third time.
"Knox." Maren's voice is quiet enough that the woodstove almost covers it.
I close the laptop. My hand stays flat on the lid a beat too long, like closing it might undo something.
"He came to me," I say. The words come out slower than I mean them to. "Three weeks ago. Before the rodeo. He had the first pieces of this and I told him to sit on it."
"You didn't know what it was."
"I knew it was something." My jaw works.
"I told him Gideon wanted operational quiet through the charity season.
I told my father's foreman that a fundraiser mattered more than whatever he was trying to bring me, and he listened, because that's what Jacob does.
Did." I stop on the word. Make myself say it the right way. "Does. I don't know which one yet."
Maren shifts closer. Her hand finds my knee. Not asking permission, just there, warm and certain the way she's been certain about everything since the beginning of this.
"You didn't ignore him," she says. "You prioritized wrong. That's a different thing."
I want to believe her. For one second I let myself try, let the words sit in my chest and look for somewhere to land.
They don't. I look toward the window, where the clouds are moving east in grey streaks, the wind finally starting to die down outside, and something in my face must give it away because I feel her watching the shift happen.
"Is it?"
"Yes." She doesn't soften it into something easier than it is, which is the only reason I can stand to hear it.
"Ignoring him would mean you didn't care what he had.
You cared. You just cared about the wrong thing more, for one week, because your father trained you to put the ranch first since before you could walk.
" Her thumb moves once against my knee. "That's not nothing, Knox.
But it's not the same as not listening."
"You sound very sure of the distinction."
"I'm a Sullivan. We invented the distinction between caring about the wrong thing and not caring at all. It's most of how my father runs his business."
That gets a sound out of me that isn't quite a laugh, but it's close enough that she notices, her mouth tilting at the corner like she saw the win land and isn't going to make a thing of it.
"I appreciate you trying to make that easier."
"I'm not trying to make it easier." Her eyes hold mine, steady, no give in them at all. "I'm trying to make it accurate. Those aren't the same thing either, and you know it, because you've spent a week telling me the same thing about evidence."
I drop my head. My hand finds my own hair and I press the heel of my palm against my eyes for one second, two, and when I take it away she's still watching me.
She doesn't look away from whatever's on my face.
Doesn't change her expression into something easier to look at.
Just lets me be exactly as wrecked as I am.
"I'm not going to fall apart," I say.
"I didn't ask you to hold it together."
"You also didn't ask me not to."
"No," she says. "I didn't."
I reach for her hand on my knee, turn it over, and hold it instead. She lets me, and we sit there while the fire ticks and Jacob's voice is still somewhere in the air of this cabin even with the laptop closed.
"It's not the product," I say, half to myself. "He said that twice."
"I caught it too."
"What's not the product?"
"I don't know." She's quiet a second. "Old survey records. A man dead in 1987. None of that connects to a missing cattle shipment in any way I can make sense of right now."
I think about the page I burned in the woodstove less than an hour ago.
The Blackwater account number, the Calgary routing code, ash I fed into this same fire with my own hand while she trusted me with the rest of the documents.
I think about the loose page in Jacob's envelope I skimmed past without registering, something about a 1962 survey authorization, sixty years of paperwork that meant nothing to me at the time.
I try to make it fit.
It doesn't fit. Not yet. There's too much else right now, a flash drive that just rewrote what I thought this whole thing was about, my own guilt sitting in my chest like a stone I swallowed whole.
"We don't have enough," I say. "Not yet."
"No." She nods once. "We set it aside."
Outside, the wind keeps dying down, the last of the grey clouds dragging themselves east over the ridge. By the time the light through the windows turns pale and washed out instead of storm-dark, I know we're close to clear.
"It's breaking," I say.
Maren comes to stand beside me at the window. We watch it together, the last of the cloud cover thinning over the mountains, Broken Sky emerging slow and pale through what's left of it.
"Phones," she says.
I check mine. Nothing. The cabin sits low enough in the timber that even on a clear day the signal is unreliable, and this storm hasn't helped.
"There's a rise behind the cabin." I'm already pulling my boots on. "Quarter mile up. Clears the tree line."
"I'm coming."
"Maren—"
"I'm coming with you." She's already reaching for her boots, which means the conversation is over whether I agree with it or not. "Unless you'd like to try ordering me to stay. I'd enjoy watching you attempt it."
"I value my life too much."
"Smartest thing you've said all week."
I put the gun at the small of my back and pull the door open instead of arguing, because I've learned better, and because watching her win is becoming a problem I don't entirely mind having.
The trail behind the cabin is washed out in two places, mud to the ankle, and we go up it fast, her boots finding purchase ahead of me half the time, my hand finding the small of her back on the steeper pitches whether she needs it or not.
She doesn't tell me to stop. By the time we break the tree line we're both breathing hard.
The ridge opens up into clearing sky and the kind of cold, washed light that only comes after a storm finally lets go of a mountain.
My phone buzzes in my pocket before I've even pulled it out.
Then it doesn't stop.
I look down at the screen and watch it fill. Message after message stacking on top of each other faster than I can read them, the little number in the corner climbing past anything I'm prepared for. Holt. Wyatt. My father's office line. A number I don't recognize, twice. Holt again.
I stop counting at twenty-three.
Maren's phone is doing the same thing beside me, her own face going still as she scrolls, her jaw tightening the way it does when she's reading something and deciding how much of it to say out loud.
"Knox." Her voice has changed.
"What?"
She turns the screen toward me.