3. Camille
CAMILLE
Evander drives the emergency truck like the black ice is a rumor he's decided not to believe. I keep bracing for the back end to break loose on the grade, and it never does, because every small correction he makes happens a half-second before I'd have thought to make it.
"You could ease off," I tell him. "The switch assembly isn't going anywhere. Neither am I, unless we roll into a ravine."
"We're not rolling into anything."
"Confident."
"Experienced. I've driven this stretch in worse than this." He feathers the wheel through a curve without so much as glancing down. "You learn where the road will let you go and where it won't."
"That's not a skill, that's optimism with a steering wheel. You're doing close to forty on a surface rated for maybe twelve."
"Thirty-four. And the road's better than its rating." He shoots me a sideways look. "You always narrate other people's driving, or am I getting special treatment?"
"Only the drivers who worry me."
"Didn't figure anything worried you."
"Bad driving and unsupported conclusions. Short list, but I'm firm on both."
He laughs, a low, surprised sound, like it caught him off guard on its way out. I file it away without meaning to, then remind myself I'm here for a fractured switch, not to catalog how the intimidating local sounds when he stops guarding his face.
The assembly sits where the spur peels off the main line, a squat iron mechanism hooded under a crust of gray snow.
I crouch, sweep the housing clear, and get to work with the cold gnawing through both pairs of gloves.
Evander settles onto his heels across from me, quiet, watching my hands rather than crowding them.
I'll give him that much, most people hover.
"Walk me through it," he says.
"Give me a second to actually see it first."
I lift the protective housing, the panel nobody should ever open outside a scheduled service window, and there, bright, and fine scoring runs along the throw rod, the metal scraped clean where a tool bit down and dragged. Not the dull crumbling edge of fatigue, this is a cut.
"Somebody was in here," I say, keeping my voice flat. "See the shine on that rod? That's fresh tooling. You don't get that from cold or wear. You get it from a person with a pry bar and a reason."
"So I was right."
"You were lucky. There's a difference, and I'm not writing 'lucky' in a federal report.
" I photograph the scoring from three angles, then a fourth with a scale marker beside it.
"This is one component, one. It tells me somebody touched this switch.
It doesn't tell me they touched the coupling, or the signal box, or any of the rest. I don't build a pattern off a single data point. "
"You already believe it's a pattern."
"Believing and proving are two different jobs. I only get paid for one."
He doesn't argue, which I notice, because most people in his position would. Instead he rises and drifts along the rail with his head tilted, reading the snow like it's printed with something only he can make out. I'm still bagging a metal shaving when he goes still at a spot ten yards off.
"Camille, come see this."
I pick my way over. Set into the crust, half-softened but unmistakable, is a line of boot prints heading away from the track toward an old service trail that climbs into the trees.
"Those are recent," I say slowly, doing the arithmetic. "It snowed hard yesterday afternoon. Anything older than about a day should be gone, filled in. These aren't filled in."
"Somebody was here last night. Maybe this morning." His voice drops into a register I haven't heard from him yet, focused and cold. "On a stretch of line that's supposed to be locked down for the season."
"Then let's find out where they went."
He wants to lead. I can see him wanting it, but I'm already moving up the trail, following the prints across a shelf of exposed rock the wind has scoured down to a glaze, and that's my mistake, because glazed rock on a grade doesn't forgive a distracted foot.
My boot skates, and the drop on my right opens up fast, a steep tumble of scree and iced boulders, far enough down that my stomach lurches before the rest does.
As I’m about to fall, a hand closes around my forearm and stops me like I've hit a wall, hauling me back onto solid footing in one clean motion.
When my heart climbs down out of my throat, I register three things at once, and all three are wrong.
He caught me with one hand, he didn't so much as shift his stance to do it, and a grown adult in full winter gear pitching off a ledge should have dragged him at least a step toward the edge, should have made him grunt, brace, something.
Nothing moved him at all. We don’t let go immediately, and I'm close to feel the heat coming off him, absurd in this cold, and close to feel how absolutely still he's holding himself, like he's the one who almost went over.
Then he releases my arm and steps back, quick, putting a clear foot of mountain air between us before I can read whatever just crossed his face.
"Careful," he says. "The rock ices first up here."
"Uh-huh." I plant my boots and study him. "That was a good catch."
"Reflex."
"That was not reflex." I keep my tone conversational, the same tone I use on maintenance supervisors right before they realize I've already read their logs.
"I'm a hundred and forty pounds of dead weight in a heavy coat, and I was going over.
You caught me one-handed and you didn't move your feet. Not an inch."
"Adrenaline."
"Adrenaline gives you a burst. It doesn't let a man your size pluck a falling adult out of the air single-handed and stand there like he's holding a coffee." I don't blink. "So try again."
A flicker behind his eyes disappears before I can put a name to it. "I train," he says. "Search and rescue. Hauling people off mountains is the job. You get strong."
It's a good answer. It's smooth, it's plausible, and it is absolutely not the whole truth, because I've watched strong men before and none of them ever felt like grabbing a fixed post bolted into bedrock.
I let it sit, though. I've learned you don't win an interview by swinging at the first evasion. You mark it, and you wait.
"Fine," I say. "We'll go with training."
We follow the prints another fifty yards until the trail forks and the snow gives up its story, then we turn back to the truck with my memory card full of scored metal and fresh boot tracks on locked-down line.
When I climb into the truck, my head has quietly reclassified itself.
I came here to determine whether an aging railway had decayed past saving.
That's not the question anymore, the question is who's been out here, why nobody's caught them, and how a man who lifts like a hydraulic jack keeps staring at me as though I'm the puzzle he can't solve.