Chapter 28
TWENTY-EIGHT
MAREN
A table has never once, in my entire life, sat a Sullivan and a Blackwater at the same time.
Not at the rodeo. Not at a fundraiser, a wedding, a funeral. Both families have spent huge amounts of energy perfecting the art of sharing a room without ever sharing a table, staying in their corners like the space between us is a wall neither side built but everyone maintains anyway.
Gideon is at the head of the Blackwater dining room table, Josephine at his left. Declan at the opposite head, Kathleen beside him, Dawson at my shoulder like he's been stationed there.
Knox stands. Doesn't sit until I do. Then he takes the chair beside mine. Not across from me, not down the table where a Blackwater heir is supposed to sit when Sullivans are in the room. Beside me. I feel every eye at that table look and say nothing.
"We're here," Declan says, "because my daughter was framed for a crime that never happened, using a company neither of us have heard of before." He looks at Gideon. "I'd like to hear how that's possible without someone inside one of our own operations."
"We're getting there," Gideon says.
"We're already there." I open my folder before anyone can decide the pace of this meeting for me.
"The document naming me was built from a campaign office template.
Missoula. Political correspondence software, not corporate.
Header spacing off by half a point. I traced the metadata myself.
" I slide three pages down the table. One to Declan, one to Gideon, one staying in front of me because I don't hand over my last copy to anyone.
"Whoever built it had access to files that haven't been touched since I worked that office at twenty-two.
That's not McKenna parachuting a stranger into Rimrock.
That's someone who's been watching me for eight years. "
Silence while both men read. Kathleen doesn't move. Josephine's hands stay folded on the table, still as carved wood.
"There's more," I say, and I don't look at Knox when I say it, which is its own kind of message.
"A dead Blackwater ranch hand's credentials have been used three times in the last year.
Once at the rodeo stable. Once at your equipment yard.
Once at the county records office, the same week two McKenna filings vanished off a database I was actively reading.
" I slide the last page down. "Corbin Reyes has been dead three years.
Someone's been wearing him like a coat."
Gideon's jaw doesn't move. That's how I know it landed.
"Who?" he asks.
"We don't know yet." I keep my voice level, the way my father taught me. "But it's someone with standing access to both operations. Long enough to know which dead names would still open doors."
Under the table, Knox's boot presses against mine. Grounding. Neither of us looks down.
Gideon's eyes flick down. One second, maybe less, but I catch it, and so does Knox, whose jaw sets in a way that has nothing to do with McKenna. Gideon doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to. The order to end things is a week old and neither of them has taken it back.
Knox sets his own folder down next to mine.
I count the pages without meaning to. Four sheets. I photographed six from the ravine notebook alone, and that's before the stable footage stills, before the Lodge tree line frame, before the account number he told me he didn't recognize. Four pages sitting there like they're the whole story.
I don't say anything.
I file it, next to everything else I'm not ready to spend. A Sullivan doesn't play a card in a room this loud with secrets. I'll ask him later. Tonight, maybe. Or I'll wait until I know exactly what he's still protecting before I give him the chance to explain it away.
"The airstrip," Knox says, and his voice has the flat, operational register he uses when he's decided a room needs facts instead of feelings.
"Confirmed McKenna staging point. Local coordinator out of Great Falls.
A handler flew in from Calgary two days before Maren was taken.
" He looks at his father. "Two days. Which means someone told them where she'd be before she decided to go. "
The table goes quiet in a different way than before.
"Someone at the search command post," Dawson says. He's already there, same place I got to on the drive back last night.
"That's the working theory," I say.
Declan's eyes move to Gideon. "That's your search. Your coordinator. Your radios."
"I'm aware of what it is." Gideon's voice doesn't change, doesn't rise, and that's worse than if it had.
"Wyatt was on those comms. Jacob's son. A boy I've known since he was six years old, running comms for a search his own father may be the reason we needed.
" A beat. "I don't need you to point a finger, Declan.
I've already counted every name that had access to that post, and I don't like a single one of them. "
I feel Knox go rigid beside me under the table, one hand flat on his own thigh. I put mine over it before either patriarch decides this is the hour to relitigate generations of grievance. His fingers turn under mine and hold on.
"Jacob Mercer," I say.
The room shifts. I feel it happen, the small collective flinch of two families who would very much rather spend this meeting discussing evidence packages and dead men's credentials than the actual living man who might already be one himself.
"What about him?" Gideon says.
"He's been missing five days." I look down the table, at both patriarchs, at the empty chair nobody thought to leave for him even symbolically.
"He warned Knox before any of us knew there was anything to warn about.
He sent a man to walk through a flood carrying a flash drive because he didn't trust a phone line.
He is the reason we know McKenna's name at all, and he has been gone five days, and this is the first time anyone in this room has said his name out loud this morning. "
Nobody answers right away.
"Search and rescue downgraded to recovery yesterday," Gideon says finally, flat, like a man reading a line item off a ledger, and I hate him a little for the register he chooses. "I'm aware."
"Are you searching?" I ask.
Knox answers before his father can decide whether the question deserves one.
"I have three men on it right now. Since dawn today.
While we're sitting at this table." He doesn't look at Gideon when he says it.
He looks straight down the table at Declan, at me, at the room, like he wants every person here to understand exactly where his resources are going while the rest of us argue about metadata.
"Private search. Timber roads north of the corridor.
It doesn't stop because we're having a meeting. "
His hand finds mine again under the table. He didn't let me be the only one in this room who remembered a man is still out there.
"Good," Declan says, and it's the closest thing to approval I've ever heard him give a Blackwater. He turns back to Gideon. "Then let's talk about how a company operating on both our doorsteps for years managed to stay invisible to every contact either of us has cultivated across two counties."
Gideon doesn't answer.
Josephine does.
"Because they were patient," she says.
Everyone turns.
She hasn't spoken since we sat down. Her voice comes out low and even. Her hands stay folded on the table. Her spine stays straight.
"McKenna isn't new to this corridor," she says. "I heard the name years ago. Before your three children were born." Her eyes go to Gideon, and something passes between them that isn't quite permission and isn't quite apology either.
"There was a survey team through here in the sixties.
Old business, buried business, tied to land nobody was supposed to still care about.
My mother's generation on the reservation knew pieces of it.
I knew pieces of it." A pause, her jaw setting the way Knox's does right before he says something he's already decided to regret.
"I buried what I knew when the shipment first went missing.
Not because I thought I was wrong. Because I was afraid of what happens to this family if I was right. "
"What survey team?" Declan asks.
"That's not tonight's conversation." Her voice doesn't rise.
It doesn't have to. Years of holding a room the way her husband holds one, just in a different key.
"Tonight's conversation is McKenna, and the shipment, and this woman's name being cleared.
" Her eyes find mine when she says it. This woman, warmer than the words should allow.
I understand exactly what she's claiming without saying it outright.
Gideon's mouth tightens at woman, at the warmth in it, at whatever he hears underneath his own wife's endorsement of a woman his son has no business choosing.
He doesn't correct Josephine either. He just pockets it, the way I pocket everything, and I understand exactly where that grievance is going to land.
"Josephine." Gideon again, quieter now, the patience of a man circling something he's decided matters more than the meeting's agenda. "What else are you hiding?"
She looks at him.
The silence stretches long enough that I hear magpies squawking outside in a cottonwood, long enough that I watch Gideon's hand find the edge of the table and go still there, long enough that I understand nobody in this room, not even her own husband, knows the full shape of what Josephine Blackwater has been carrying since before any of us were born.
Knox's hand tightens around mine under the table, and I look at the four thin pages still sitting in front of him, the ones I know aren't everything he has.
I hold things close too. I always have. But I let myself believe he was the one person I didn't have to do that with.
I was wrong.
And I'm not waiting until tonight to find out what else he's holding.