26. Rhys
RHYS
I go back to Forks alone, because somebody has to, and because of the four of us I'm the one who can move through a town without it reading as a threat.
The job is simple on paper. The dead enforcer's phone has gone quiet for two days now, and a quiet phone is a message of its own, and I want to know what Sutter does with silence.
So I go to read the ground in town the way Knox reads it on the mountain.
Who's been through. What they touched. Whether the careful old woman who sold Ember her last two bottles is still careful and still alive, because the last we saw of Maeve she was bruised and fleeing and telling Ember to go and be kept.
I know it's wrong before I reach the pharmacy. The street's too quiet for midday. The CLOSED sign's been hung crooked, and the lights are off, and there's no note on the door, and a woman who's run a shop alone for thirty years doesn't leave it dark in the middle of a Tuesday without a note.
The back door's unlocked. That's the second wrong thing. Maeve was a woman who locked a locked door twice.
I go in slow, hand near the gun I didn't think I'd need, and the smell hits me before my eyes adjust. Not the smell of the shop, the dried herbs and the antiseptic and the old paper. Under it. The copper-and-meat smell that the body knows before the mind catches up.
I find her in the back room, behind the counter, where she'd have gone if someone made her open the safe.
She's been dead a day, maybe a little more, and she never made Idaho.
They caught her somewhere on the road out and brought her back, because the safe was here and the ledger was here, and Marlowe men don't ask their questions anywhere they can't control the room.
Somebody sat her in her own chair and they were not in a hurry about it.
I've seen enough bodies to read the order things happened in, and the order here tells a story I don't like, a story about questions asked slow and a woman who held out longer than they expected before she gave them what they wanted.
At the end of it her throat's been opened, and I crouch and look at the cut without touching, and the cold goes all the way through me.
I know that cut.
It's the same one Ember showed me, half-joking, in the kitchen the week she came, when she was teaching me why a knife beats a gun up close.
A specific angle. A specific economy. The cut of someone trained the exact way she was trained, by the exact people who trained her.
Marlowe work. Her father's house has a technique and it's on this old woman's throat the way a signature's on a painting.
They didn't send a thug. They sent one of their own. Someone who learned the same blade Ember learned, in the same rooms, and used it on a pharmacist for the crime of selling suppressants to a girl who wouldn't give her name.
I make myself work. Grief later. Reading now.
The place has been wiped. Not ransacked, wiped, which is worse, which is professional.
The register's been gone through but not robbed, the cash still in it, because they weren't here for money.
They were here for what Maeve knew. And on the counter, left out where I'd find it, almost certainly on purpose, is her ledger.
The paper one. The old woman kept her records in a paper book the way old women do, every sale, every date, in a cramped careful hand.
It's open to a page from three weeks back. And there, in the middle of a column of ordinary entries, one line is circled. Circled in pen, hard, twice around, by someone who wanted me or whoever came next to see exactly what they'd found.
Valerie Cole, suppressants, 2 ct.
The alias. The one Rhys gave her, the one that was supposed to be the wall.
Maeve never asked Ember's real name, that was the whole arrangement, that was the mercy of her.
But she wrote down the name she was given, because that's how a ledger works, and the name she was given is sitting circled on this counter in a dead woman's book, which means the Marlowes have it now.
They have the name Ember's been living behind.
They know the wall she's been hiding behind is called Valerie Cole, and they'll run it, and a run name is a thread, and a thread pulls.
I stand in the wiped shop with the dead woman in the chair behind me and the circled name in front of me and I understand that the clock I came to read has already run out.
This isn't a warning of something coming.
This is the thing, arrived, a day ago, while we were laying wire on the mountain and I was telling Knox probably not at once.
I take the ledger page. I do the small things you can do. I close Maeve's eyes, because someone should, because she sold a frightened girl two bottles and never asked her name and they killed her slow for it.
Then I take out my own phone and I look at the photograph I took two days ago, in our kitchen, of the dead enforcer's screen before it went dark. The unanswered text. The saved contact above it.
One word.
Sutter.