9. Wren
WREN
My supervisor schedules a call for the next morning, and I text the Wilders to let them know I’ll be late. When I pull up to their cabin around nine-thirty, all three of them are waiting outside.
Rhett is by the porch with a mug in his hand and a displeased look on his face.
Boone is loading something into the back of a truck, the muscles in his chest and shoulders stretching his faded T-shirt in a very distracting way.
Cade’s standing near the edge of the treeline, half in shadows beneath the pines.
I park, get out, and put my laptop bag over my shoulder before Rhett can get it for me. “Good morning,” I say brightly.
As Boone answers with a similarly pleasant greeting, Rhett cuts right to the chase. “You talked to your supervisor.”
“I did.”
Cade and Boone both come over, and I’m surrounded by three identical faces wearing varying degrees of curious looks. Rhett looks like he’s ready to subject me to an inquisition.
“Can we go inside?” I gesture to my bag.
Rhett leads me up the steps, through the entryway, and straight over to the dining table. Sunlight streams into the cabin, highlighting how clean all the surfaces are.
As I set my laptop on the table, the brothers arrange themselves around me. Rhett and Boone take seats, but Cade stays near the end of the table, close enough to see the screen but not crowding me.
I open the map overlay and bring up the existing camera locations before I start talking. “My supervisor reviewed everything I sent in.”
“And?” Rhett sounds ready to be unhappy with whatever I’m about to say.
“He agrees the site is suspicious, but he can’t make any definitive conclusions.”
Cade’s eyes narrow, and Boone scoffs. “What the hell does definitive look like?”
“Identifiable criminal conduct.” I turn the laptop toward them.
“Right now, we have a hidden cache, wildlife displacement, and unidentified residue pending lab confirmation. We have camera data that doesn’t match field observations, but we don’t have photographic evidence of anyone using the corridor. ”
Rhett looks at the map. “The cache isn’t enough?”
“Not when we don’t know what’s in it. We don’t even know for certain it’s still being used. Satellite imagery of the remote passes is inconclusive. If there’s illegal activity, it’s happening under cover.”
“If?” Boone asks.
“My agency can’t go on instincts. The trail cams haven’t captured any suspicious human activity. If someone’s using the corridor, they’ve been smart enough to avoid the camera locations.”
After a breath, I say, “Before he can justify a referral to another agency, my supervisor needs visual documentation. He’s not asking me to identify suspects, but I need to fix the data gap by repositioning the cameras, and to do that effectively, I need to identify the movement corridors.”
Rhett nods at that, but I brace myself.
“Camera data and morning field evidence suggest the disturbance is happening after dark, so I’ll be observing at night.”
Rhett leans back in his chair and folds his arms. “No.”
I was expecting objections from the men, but I wasn’t expecting to be shut down. “I’m not asking you to go along,” I say.
Rhett’s brows lift, and he gives a small nod. “Because you’re not going.”
“It’s my job.” I bite back the part where I tell him he has no business telling me what I can or can’t do.
“It’s a stakeout,” Boone says.
“It isn’t. I’ll be scouting camera placement.”
“At night,” Boone says.
“Yes.”
“From a concealed location.”
“Yes.”
“Watching a corridor men are using for unknown criminal activity.”
I pause to take a deep breath because I need them to listen, not just react.
“Right now, the evidence points to some sort of human activity affecting wildlife movement. It might be poachers, illegal outfitters, or maybe dumping. It could be something bigger, but we don’t know, because we don’t have people on camera. ”
Rhett’s jaw flexes.
“My job, a job I’ve done before, is to identify where the trail cams need to go. That’s it. I’m not going to approach anyone. If I see someone, I’m not going to engage.”
Rhett’s mouth is pressed in a line so tight, it looks like it hurts.
“Your supervisor asked you to do this?” Boone asks.
“He asked me to identify movement corridors based on nocturnal activity patterns.”
Cade shakes his head. “Did a lawyer write that for him?”
Rhett plants his hands on the table and leans toward me. “You can go, but you’re not going alone.”
“I don’t need your permission to go.”
As Rhett’s face hardens into granite, Boone reaches out and briefly touches my arm. “What Rhett’s trying to say is that we’ll go along to make sure you’re safe.”
“We’re your guides.” Rhett emphasizes each word like it’s a complete sentence.
“You’re my guides when I’m evaluating terrain and moving through areas where I need local knowledge. If I go out there with you at night, I’m not invisible anymore. I won’t look like a biologist observing a wildlife corridor if I have three Army Rangers covering me.”
I look around at each of them, stopping at Cade. “And, as you said yesterday, if someone’s using the cache site, we don’t want them to get nervous and shut it down before we find out what they’re doing.”
Cade is unreadable as he looks back at me. Rhett’s eyes are boring a hole in the side of my head, but I stay firm.
“Your presence out there at night would compromise the observation.”
“We can stay back,” Boone says.
“No, you can’t.”
His brows lift, but I refuse to back down just because he’s looking at me a certain way.
“If something goes wrong, you’ll act. Maybe you’d be right to act, but it would change everything.
My supervisor approved me to scout camera placement from a concealed position.
He did not approve me bringing armed civilians along.
If this becomes an investigation, your presence creates problems I can’t explain away. ”
Despite my reasoning, the men aren’t done objecting, and even though I absolutely don’t need their approval, I continue to make my case.
I remind them that I’ve worked in grizzly country and rattlesnake habitats, and I know how to stay safe and sit still.
I remind them how much terrain we’ve covered in the past week, and how much I’ve learned about the area.
Eventually, they run out of arguments and shift the conversation into a planning session that involves them imposing a lot of rules about where I go, when I go, how I’ll stay in contact, and how I need to stay put, even when getting closer would mean gathering better data.
I go along with most of it, both because it aligns with plans I already made and because I value their input.
When I indicate where I intend to position myself, Cade adjusts my approach to avoid a slope with loose shale. “You hit that in the dark, you’ll slide and make a lot of noise, or you’ll twist an ankle.”
Good to know, so I adjust the route.
After sitting at their table and forming a plan with an exhausting level of detail, they lead me out into the field for a short hike to verify one of the alternate routes.
All three men are quieter than usual. Rhett moves like there’s a thundercloud following him, Boone’s usual warmth is cooler, and Cade says next to nothing.
In the afternoon, I go back to the motel to take a nap and eat something with more substance than trail mix. Then I shower, braid my hair, check my field kit, and head back to the ridge, where the setting sun turns the cabin’s windows gold.
One of Rhett’s many requirements was that I set out from the cabin, because a truck with a federal plate parked alongside the road would be too visible.
As always, Rhett meets me in the driveway. Boone appears a moment later with a thermos of coffee, and something in my chest wobbles at the sight of it. They’re supporting my work, even while they object to it.
In the few hours since I was last here, Rhett apparently spent the time thinking of every possible way a person can go missing between one tree and the next. He launches into more rules about radio contact, extraction points, and abort conditions.
“What do you do if there’s human activity in the corridor?” he asks.
“I’ll document it from my position. I won’t move closer.”
“Lights sweeping upslope?”
“I’ll withdraw.”
“What if someone moves toward you?”
“Withdraw.”
“Engine noise?”
I shake my head and turn away.
“You’re getting irritated because he’s right to ask,” Boone says.
I turn back to them. “I’m getting irritated because all of you are acting like I wandered in from a gift shop with new boots and a granola bar.”
Rhett ignores this completely. “Your observation window ends at one.”
“I’m planning to stay until two, depending on what I see.”
He grits his teeth and speaks through a clenched jaw. “You want to sit in the dark, alone, and watch for criminals. It’s a long way past what I consider unreasonable.”
He’s irritating me. They all are, but it doesn’t bother me as much as it should. Beneath the irritation is something dangerously close to pleasure, because being looked after this ruthlessly feels better than I want it to.
I’ve spent most of my adult life proving I can handle things, but it turns out being believed and protected at the same time is its own kind of disorienting.
“I understand the plan,” I say.
Rhett holds my gaze for another second before he nods once. Boone walks me toward the treeline, while Cade stays behind, quiet as a shadow. Rhett stays on the porch with his arms folded and a hard expression on his face.