Chapter 39 #2
He told us. It took forty minutes, and it was good.
Independently sourced, cross-referenced against public filings, and had two threads that ran parallel to our own investigation without overlapping it.
His county recorder source had been tracking disbursements from the same MR-7 account we’d found in the annex.
His documentation didn’t have the annex records, didn’t have Evan’s testimony, didn’t have Sean’s cooperation.
But it had six months of careful journalism that had built toward the same architecture from the outside.
“You’ve been doing this alone?” Libby said.
“Mostly,” he said.
“Why Maple Ridge?” Autumn asked. “You seem familiar with it. Are you from here originally?”
“Yes.”
“But you left,” she said. “You’ve been in Portland for…what, five years?”
“Six,” he said.
He didn’t offer more than that. Autumn noted the non-answer with the professional acceptance of someone who had learned when to push and when to wait.
I noted the way Myra’s posture changed very slightly.
It wasn’t dramatic, nothing anyone who wasn’t reading people for a living would catch, but it was the stillness of someone not reacting on purpose.
“The Roberts Fund transfers,” I said, thinking maybe Myra was on to something. “What does your source know about the Roberts family?”
Courtland looked at me. I saw a quick recalibration. He hadn’t expected that question.
“Not much,” he said. “The transfers were flagged as anomalous because the notation doesn’t match the Fund’s standard disbursement coding. Different prefix. The recorder’s source said it looked like something that had been in the system for years and nobody had touched it.” He paused. “Why?”
“Probably nothing,” I said, looking at Myra. “We’ll let you know.”
He accepted that with the equanimity of someone who recognized the shape of a professional deferral and knew better than to push on it.
Myra was looking at the bar.
“We’re not in a position to give you access to our investigation,” Libby said to Courtland.
“What we can do, when this moves to formal charges, which will be soon, is confirm what we can confirm when you ask the right questions.” She held his gaze.
“You’ve been careful for six months. Stay careful for a few more days. ”
“I can do that,” he said.
He stood, picked up the notebook, and looked around the room. At Autumn, Nivea and Andra, Cade and Atlas, at Libby, at me and Finn. Lastly at Myra, who was still facing her laptop and did not turn.
“Thank you,” he said.
Nobody answered.
He left.
The door closed, and the room held a small silence.
“Old friend?” Autumn said to Myra, with the particular tact of someone who knew the answer wasn’t yes and was giving her friend the option of the simplest answer anyway.
“Old something,” Myra said and turned back to her laptop.
The afternoon moved slowly. Cade made food that nobody asked for and everyone ate.
Autumn finished her map and started a second one.
Libby worked the phone in the quiet, efficient way she did everything, and I understood from the calls she was making that she was building a record of the club’s investigation—dates, sources, documentation—the kind of thing that would matter when lawyers started asking questions about the chain of events that had brought the AG to Maple Ridge.
The others did what they did best, each using their skills that came in so handy for the Murder of the Month Club to their fullest.
I sat with it all. Took in the waiting. I’d spent a long time being bad at that. It was one of the things I’d worked on in my own therapy, the particular anxiety of the space between doing and knowing. I was better at it than I used to be. Not good, but better.
Finn came to sit beside me at the window around four o’clock.
Outside, Main Street was doing what it always did on a weekday afternoon.
The hardware store. Two women talking on the sidewalk outside the post office.
The coffee shop with its afternoon sign flipped to the window.
A town that didn’t know yet that three unmarked SUVs were parked in the county complex lot and that by tonight the name on the civic center plaque was going to mean something different.
“Do you think he knows it’s over?” I asked. “Grant. Do you think he knows, right now, that it’s over?”
Finn was quiet for a moment.
“I think he’s known it was possible since before the quarry,” he said. “Whether he’s admitted it to himself…” He paused. “Men like Grant don’t tend to believe the story ends until they’re holding the last page.”
I thought about that. About a man who had spent decades as the person who decided what the story was. Who had decided it about my father, my mother, Eleanor, Evan, everyone in those boxes he’d squirreled away. Who had looked at a town and seen a system he could manage.
What it felt like to hold the last page.
I hoped it was something. I hoped it wasn’t nothing.
The afternoon light through the Hollow Oak windows was low and gold and very clear, the kind that came after storms had moved through and the air had been washed clean.
It fell across the long table where the Murder of the Month Club had sat for three years working cold cases that the town preferred to leave cold, and across the bar where Cade was cleaning glasses with the methodical patience of a man who understood that some things just needed to be waited out, staring across the floor where Rand had stood and laughed and been welcome.
I let myself look at it, too.
Took in the room where we’d built more of the case that was about to change this town.
Whatever came next—tonight, tomorrow, the shape of after—it had started in a library basement, then in a bar full of people who couldn’t let the dead stay buried.
I was glad, for the first time in a long time, that I’d come home.
Finn’s phone rang at 7:44.
He answered it on the second ring, and I watched his face. I took in the stillness of it, the way he listened without moving, and I already knew before he said a word what he’d say.
“Thank you,” he said. And then he added, “Yes. I understand.” He ended the call.
The room had gone quiet. Everyone was watching him.
“Solis,” he said. “They’re moving in twenty minutes.”
Nobody spoke for a moment.
Libby sat back in her chair and let out a long breath. Autumn set her pen down very carefully, like she was afraid of making noise. Cade put both hands flat on the bar and looked at the middle distance with the expression of a man absorbing something he’d been working toward for three years.
I looked at Finn.
He was already looking at me.
There was nothing to say that wasn’t smaller than what the moment was.
So, I didn’t say anything. Neither did he.
He reached across the table and put his hand over mine, and I turned my palm up, and we sat like that while outside on Main Street the town went on not knowing that something was ending.
Soon, it would know.
Tonight, it would know.