XVII
My headlights swept over the estate, snagging on the raw plywood nailed over the front door. Only Ford would have found a hammer and a box of nails before the sun was even up.
I killed the engine, hands pinned to the wheel by their own weight. Outside, mountain dusk pooled in the corners of the yard, dark and stagnant.
I cut through the side yard, weeds catching on my jeans. The back porch screen door gave a traitorous squeak as I eased it open, then fell back into silence.
The basement door waited to the left.
I stopped.
To anyone else, it was only wood and hinges. To me, it was a boundary.
Behind it waited the narrow stairs and the hum of a lab carved into the earth—Harvey’s secrets buried in the house’s bones. I didn’t reach for the handle. I didn’t have to. I could already feel the phantom rejection of the sensors. My pulse too fast. My palm too small.
I can get you inside . . .
Heaton’s promise scraped at the back of my mind, sharp as glass.
I exhaled through my nose and turned away.
In the kitchen, a hammer lay on the counter beside a box of bent nails, wood shavings scattered like pale confetti.
Ford’s work.
Patching.
Trying to hold the place together, one board at a time.
Beyond the kitchen, a heavy slant of amber sun illuminated the living room.
It stretched across the couch where Ford lay sprawled on a makeshift pallet, one arm over his chest, the other trailing toward the floor.
His features, usually sharp with sarcasm, had softened into something unguarded.
For the first time since the break-in, the exhaustion beneath his eyes had smoothed into a borrowed calm.
He had fought to keep this place standing. To keep me standing.
And only now had he collapsed into its shelter.
Guilt hit hard.
I could wake him. I could tell him that a guy at school had offered me a way into the lab. That the lock keeping me from the truth wasn’t as unbreakable as we thought.
But what did I actually know about Heaton Dashwood?
Or the danger crawling around Harvey’s work?
Ford’s chest rose and fell in a slow, steady rhythm. He looked like a man who had finally earned a moment of peace, and I wasn’t about to steal it from him.
Whatever storm I was carrying, he deserved to sleep through it.
So, I slipped past him into the dark.
The stairs creaked under my weight. At the landing, my body turned toward my room on instinct, seeking sleep—or at least the illusion of it.
Then I stopped.
A few feet away, Harvey’s private study stood cracked open.
I could still feel the memory of it: the careful order of his world torn apart. I pushed the door wider, spilling light into the stillness.
The sight hollowed me.
Papers lay in drifts across the rug, his tidy stacks shredded and trampled. Someone had ripped the old map of the Wasatch Range from the wall, and boot prints had ground the mountains into gray smears.
This wasn’t just a search.
It was a violation.
The rug crunched beneath my boots where shards of glass still clung to the fibers. I crouched, hands moving on instinct to gather the papers.
It wasn’t enough to collect the pieces.
I needed order.
Harvey’s filing system had always been a labyrinth of half-coded symbols and cross-referenced scribbles, but I didn’t care. I stacked articles by town and smoothed creased maps, pressing wayward clippings beneath fallen books.
One piece at a time, the wreckage bent back into shape.
A paper cut split the edge of my palm, the sting sharp and grounding.
For the first time all day, my hands weren’t shaking.
They were working.
That was when I spotted it.
A folder lay half-buried under the desk. I pulled it free, heart stuttering as the bent tab met the light.
WINTER QUARTERS
My pulse raced.
I flipped it open, but the metal prongs were empty, bent backward as if someone had yanked the contents out in a fever.
Only a single scrap of yellowed legal paper remained, tucked so low in the back pocket it had been overlooked.
A hand-drawn map of the access roads.
The only surviving route to the town.
I sank back onto my heels, the near-empty file settling into my lap.
Someone had come here for this.
And they had missed the directions.
I tucked the folder under my arm. The paper cut on my hand burned as I flexed my fingers, a thin red line against the gray ink and dust.
Downstairs, the kitchen was a paused disaster, frozen mid-repair.
A stale sleeve of crackers. The last of the raspberry preserves. I spread the jam, the knife scraping the bottom of the jar while the crackers splintered under my grip. Then I filled the dented kettle and set it on the burner.
Tea.
Not coffee.
My nerves were already frayed enough.
The kettle hissed, steam threading upward with the faint bloom of peppermint. I pulled a mug from the shelf and traced the rim with my thumb, letting the cool ceramic steady me.
Behind me, the floor creaked.
Ford stirred on his pallet, lashes fluttering as the scent of mint reached him. He pushed up on one elbow, hair sticking out in uneven tufts.
“You’re back,” he rasped.
He shuffled into the kitchen, socked feet dragging over tile, and reached past me for a second mug—one with a chipped rim and a tea stain that wouldn’t scrub out.
“I still can’t believe you actually went in today,” he said. “After last night?”
I wrapped my hands around my mug, letting the heat bite into my palms.
“If I skip the second week, people start asking questions I can’t answer. My dad wanted me to keep things normal.”
My eyes flicked to the raw plywood over the front door.
“So much for that.”
Ford leaned against the counter, arms crossed. His gaze dropped to the folder under my arm.
“Normal people don’t wake up to shattered doors and missing parents, Maddie. They don’t just go to Trig.”
“If he were here,” I said, the words heavy in my mouth, “he’d tell me to go.”
“If he were here,” Ford said softly, “the door wouldn’t be in pieces.”
His attention sharpened on the folder.
“Did you find something?”
I hesitated, then slid it onto the table and smoothed the bent tab with my thumb.
“I went into the study. I wanted to see what they might’ve been after.”
I flipped it open, the empty metal prongs catching the light.
“They gutted it,” I said, sliding the scrap of paper toward him. “This was all that was left.”
His finger traced Harvey’s penciled shorthand.
“Winter Quarters?” His brow furrowed. “That’s deep in the range.”
He stopped at a sharp bend in the road.
“This cuts off after a few miles. You’d have to hike the rest.”
He looked up.
“Didn’t your dad say this place was off-limits?”
“He said it wasn’t safe.”
Ford’s eyes searched mine.
“This isn’t exactly a solo hike, Maddie.”
“I know,” I said too quickly. “It wouldn’t be smart.”
Ford didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t press.
He nudged his mug aside and leaned in, shadows deep under his eyes.
“Did your dad ever do this before?” he asked. “Just . . . stay gone longer than he meant to?”
“He was always gone, Ford.”
I swallowed against the sudden dryness in my throat.
“But there was this one time I thought he wasn’t coming back.”
He waited.
“I was eight. He left me with an older woman named Viv in Helper. She ran a bed-and-breakfast that smelled of cinnamon and mothballs. She made me tea and read me murder mysteries before bed.”
A weak smile touched my mouth.
“I think she thought they were comforting.”
Ford went still. “And you didn’t know where he went?”
“Field work. He always said that.”
The words tasted thinner now—a lie I’d outgrown.
“He was gone for three months. Back then, I believed him. But now . . . ”
I shook my head, heat pricking behind my eyes.
“Now it just feels like another locked door I don’t have the key for.”
Ford wrapped both hands around his mug, steam ghosting between us.
“And how long did he say he’d be gone this time?”
“He said a few days.”
My voice cracked.
“Then that call came through. Broken. Full of static. He sounded scared, Ford. That’s never happened before.”
The pressure built behind my eyes.
I squeezed them shut, trying to dam the flood, but the weight of it all—no sleep, no food, no answers—rose too fast.
Then warmth settled over my hand.
I flinched.
Ford’s palm covered mine, rough and calloused, his thumb brushing once over the thin paper cut on my skin.
“Maddie,” he said, voice gone soft. “It’s Harvey. You know how he gets. A new site, a new mystery, and the rest of the world just . . . drops away.”
His grip steadied.
“I’m sure it’s another detour.”
My eyes fixed on our hands.
His steady.
Mine trembling.
The frantic thing in my chest slowed just enough for me to take one real breath.
“Yeah,” I said.
The word scraped on the way out.
I squeezed his hand once, then pulled back, retreating to the safer territory of my lap. My fingers found the folder again, the bent plastic tab biting into my thumb.
Ford leaned in, forearms braced on the table.
“Promise me you won’t go out there alone, Maddie.”
“I promise.”
The word came out rusted.
I wanted to mean it.
Part of me did.
But as his attention lingered, searching for a truth I couldn’t give him, my brain was already mapping the canyons.
The folder in my lap felt hotter than the tea cooling between us.
For the first time, I wasn’t afraid of whatever waited out there.
I was afraid of how badly I wanted to find it.
The rest of the week crawled, the days bleeding together like chalk in the rain.
Julian reappeared on Tuesday. He slid into his seat at lunch as if nothing had happened, muttering something about a doctor’s appointment when Nico elbowed him for details.
No one pushed.
The lie hung between us, unclaimed.
But the way Julian’s eyes skittered past mine—never landing, never settling—told me everything I needed to know.
I was a crime scene he wanted to forget.
Heaton lingered at the edges of my world, a shadow at the end of every hallway.
He didn’t chase.
Didn’t push.
He simply waited.
And every time my fingers brushed the gutted folder in my bag, his voice slid back into my thoughts like a pulse I couldn’t shake.
I can get you through the door, but you’ll owe me.
By Thursday night, the charade was over.
I wasn’t cleaning Harvey’s study anymore.
I was hunting.
The room became mine—not a restoration, but a takeover. I stopped returning papers to drawers and started building outward. Maps climbed the walls, webbed with string and red circles that bloomed like bloodstains wherever locations repeated.
At first, the research was familiar.
Salt fractures.
Iron disruption.
EMF spikes.
The ghost stuff I had grown up with.
For a few pages, I could almost breathe again, pretending my dad was exactly who he said he was.
Then the language soured.
Summoning.
Emergency pull.
High casualty risk.
Never attempt without containment.
I saw our last name, circled in red ink so thick it had bled through the next three pages.
OCTOBER.
My vision tunneled.
He wasn’t just studying ghosts.
He was studying us.
Beneath the name, the notes were clipped and impersonal.
Summoning is not command.
It is invitation.
Lower on the page—written smaller, lighter, like he hadn’t wanted it found—
The danger is in who answers.
Night after night, the research crawled with me into bed.
I dreamed of a house with shifting walls and doors that wouldn’t latch, but the real nightmare was worse: I was a passenger in my skin, screaming behind my closed mouth while someone else—something else—steered my body into the dark.
I woke shaking.
Every time.
By the week’s end, the only answer I had sat cold and suffocating in my chest.
I couldn’t wait for Heaton’s timing.
Or Ford’s caution.
That night, I packed.
A sleeve of stale crackers, bottled water, heavy flashlight—and a map of a place I shouldn’t go.
Each item found its place in my canvas backpack, the worn straps settling against my shoulders.
Before dawn, while the house still slept, I moved through the dark. The floorboards groaned beneath me, a familiar warning I ignored.
Ford lay curled on the couch, the blanket twisted around his legs. He didn’t stir as I crossed the living room. He murmured something into his pillow and turned away.
The note waited on the kitchen table, my handwriting small and neat.
In town with Penny. Don’t wait up.
For a moment, I thought about waking him. About telling him everything—the folder, the map, the pull I couldn’t explain.
But the quiet felt too fragile to break.
So, I didn’t.
I pulled on my boots and eased the back latch open. The screen door complained, the creak slicing through the stillness.
Outside, fog had settled over the yard, a gossamer shroud clinging low to the ground. Beyond it, the trees sharpened into black points.
I slung my bag over one shoulder and stepped off the porch.
At the car, my fingers trembled on the keys. The engine coughed once before catching, and I flinched, heart hammering as I looked back at the house.
No lights stirred.
I shifted into gear.
My headlights cut through the fog in twin spears as I passed the treeline, Mapleton slipping away behind me like a dream I had already half-forgotten.
I didn’t turn around.
If I had, I wasn’t sure I would have kept going.
The house.
The warmth.
Ford asleep on my couch.
Each one tugged at me like gravity, soft and relentless, begging me to stay.
I broke orbit and pressed the gas, steering deeper into the throat of the mountains.