4. Evander
EVANDER
The storm shuts three roads before noon, so I steer us into the diner near the depot instead of back toward town.
It isn't much, vinyl booths gone soft at the seams, a pie case, and a waitress who calls everybody hon and means it. Camille slides into the booth across from me and shrugs out of her jacket, and the warmth spreading through my chest shifts me, and I just tell myself it’s contrast after hours in the cold.
"This isn't a stop for the investigation," she says. "This is you stalling until the plows catch up."
"This is me not putting you in a ditch. There's a difference." I flag the waitress for two coffees. "You can keep working through it. I'll even let you insult my driving between bites."
"Generous." She pulls her map from her bag and smooths it flat over the table, the sabotage sites already marked in her small, precise hand. "Since you're captive anyway, look at this with me. I plotted every failure I've confirmed or half-confirmed. Tell me what you see."
I lean in, she's clustered the marks with colored dots, and a shape sits there plain enough that I don't have to fake noticing it. Almost every one hugs a boundary line, the edge where railway right-of-way meets private ground.
"They're on property lines," I say.
"They're on recently sold property lines." She taps a knuckle against three of them in a row. "These three parcels changed hands in the last eight months, same buyer each time. A company called Northstar Meridian."
The coffee arrives, and I wrap a hand around the mug and drink before I answer, because I know that name and I need a second to decide how much to give her.
Northstar's people came sniffing around two winters back, made quiet offers to half the ranchers up the valley, got polite refusals and left cards nobody kept.
"I've heard of them," I say. "They tried buying up land around here a while ago. Development outfit, supposedly. Most folks turned them down."
"Most." She drags her finger along the map until it stops on a large blank shape at the map's western edge, unmarked, unsold.
"Everyone except the people holding this.
Thousands of acres, straight up the ridge, and it's the one parcel Northstar can't seem to touch.
It's held by something called the Shaw Family Trust." She lifts her eyes to mine, and they've gone sharp, the hazel narrowing to a point. "Shaw, as in you."
I set the mug down and keep my face level, the same face I wear when a reporter asks why my rescue teams always beat the county's response time.
"As in my family, yes."
"Why does your family own a mountain nobody can develop?"
"Because we've owned it for four generations, and we don't sell." I keep the answer clean and short. "It's not a mystery, it's just not for sale."
"Everything's for sale to somebody. That's not an accusation, it's economics.
" She sits back, studying me now instead of the map.
"A company is buying a corridor of land, the railway's failing with patterns, and the one piece they can't buy belongs to you, and you didn't think that was worth mentioning when I’ve been investigating it? "
My temper stirs, low and warning, and I take a breath to keep it where it belongs. "I didn't mention it because it isn't relevant to your switch marks and your tool scoring. My family not selling a mountain isn’t relevant."
"Let me decide what's relevant."
"Then decide with the truth I'm giving you, not the version you'd like better.
" It comes out harder than I mean it, and I watch her register the edge in it.
"I am not making that line fail, Camille.
I've buried people this railroad couldn't save.
I want it running more than anyone you'll interview.
Whatever Northstar's doing, I'm on your side of it. "
She holds my stare, testing it like she tests a fracture to see whether it'll hold weight. Then something in her shoulders eases, a fraction.
"Okay," she says.
"Okay?"
"Your anger's wrong for a liar. People covering a scheme get defensive, slippery.
You got protective. Those aren't the same tells, and I've watched enough of both to know the difference.
" She taps the blank parcel once more. "I still think you're not telling me everything about this land, but I believe you're not the one wrecking the railway. Those can both be true."
They can. God help me, they're both true, and she's landed exactly on the seam without knowing what's underneath. I've spent my whole life keeping people from getting this close to the shape of the thing, and she's done it over gas-station coffee in under an hour, just by refusing to look away.
"You're unsettling to sit across from," I tell her. "Anyone ever mention that?"
"Frequently, usually the people with something to hide." She almost smiles. "You want to tell me why guarding this town runs your whole life? Because that part you're not hiding at all, it's written on you."
"It's the job."
"It's more than the job. Nobody drives forty on black ice for a job."
I don't answer that, because the honest reply lives too close to everything I can't say. Instead I signal for the check, and when we step outside the snow has thickened into a slow, blinding curtain, the parking lot gone soft and trackless under it.
Camille pulls her hood up and starts across the lot toward the truck.
Two steps in, her boot skates on a slick patch buried under the fresh powder, and her arms go out.
I'm already there, and catch her by the waist, steady her upright, careful this time, keeping my grip ordinary, my strength leashed down to something a normal man could manage.
She doesn't pull away, neither do I. We're closer than the moment strictly needs, snow settling on her lashes and in the dark hair escaping her hood.
Her hands have come to rest against my forearms, and she's gazing up at me with the sharpness gone soft around the edges, replaced by something unrelated to switch assemblies or property lines.
My lion presses hard against the inside of my ribs, wanting, and for one dangerous second I lean into the pull, my gaze dropping to her mouth.
"You're doing it again," she says quietly. "The thing where you stop yourself."
"I know."
"Why?"
Because I'm lying to you about what I am, because the closer you get, the more likely you are to see it.
Because wanting you is the least careful thing I've done in years.
None of that can be said on a diner sidewalk, so I ease back, my hands sliding from her waist, and I put the cold air between us where it belongs.
"The plows are through," I say, nodding at the road, where a county truck grinds past throwing a wall of slush. "We should go."
She steps back too, and I catch the flash of irritation crossing her face, not at me, exactly, but at the space I just put there.
She's annoyed at how much she wanted me to close it.
I'd feel better about that if I weren't fighting the identical thing, if my whole body weren't cataloging the loss of her weight against my hands.
"Right," she says, brisk again, the shutter coming down. "Wouldn't want to keep the road waiting."
She climbs in the truck without another word, and I stand in the falling snow a beat longer, reminding myself I did the disciplined thing, the necessary thing. My lion calls me a coward in a language that doesn't need words. For once, I can't argue the point.