Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
DANE
The corporate group leaves on Wednesday with sunburns, blisters, and a combined tip that covers my supply costs for the next two months. CrossFit shakes my hand again. Calls me brother again. His buddy already booked a return trip for September.
Noelle stands on my porch watching them drive down the mountain in their rented Suburban, wearing my flannel over her tank top, coffee in both hands.
She ran the north trail with them for three days without complaint.
Organized the camp kitchen so efficiently that even Hatchet looked impressed, which is saying something because that mule doesn't impress easily.
"Good group," she says.
"You handled them well."
"The loud one tried to explain the legal definition of adverse possession to me on day two."
"And?"
"I let him finish. Then I cited the relevant Nevada statute, the controlling Ninth Circuit opinion, and the three exceptions he missed." Her mouth curves. "He was very quiet after that."
Something warm moves through my chest. This woman has calluses on her hands now.
Sun on her shoulders. A tan line from where my flannel sits against her collarbone.
Eight days and she's woven herself into the fabric of this life so completely that I can't remember what my mornings looked like before she was standing on my porch at four fifty-eight.
That scares me more than any corporate group, any bear, any backcountry storm.
Because Mountain Match gave us two weeks.
We're past the halfway mark. And the closer we get to day fourteen, the louder the voice in my head gets.
The one that sounds like a screen door closing behind a woman who drove away from a trailer in rural Nevada when I was eight years old and never came back.
The satellite phone rings at noon.
Noelle's in the guest cabin changing. I'm cleaning the cook kit from the corporate trip when Parker's voice comes through the static.
"Dane. Got a situation."
Tom Parker doesn't call me unless it matters. We're friendly, not friends. He knows I keep to myself. Respects it.
"Go ahead."
"Man came into the general store this morning. Suit, rental car. Showed Margie a photograph, asked if she'd seen the woman in it. Dark hair, tall, thirties. Said he was a private investigator working a missing persons case."
My hand tightens on the phone. "What'd Margie tell him?"
"Margie told him she sees a lot of tourists and couldn't remember. Then she called me." Parker pauses. "The photo, Dane. It looked like your Mountain Match guest."
The cook kit sits in the sink. Water still running. My reflection stares back from the window over the basin, jaw tight, eyes flat.
"You sure?"
"I drove past the general store after Margie called. The rental car was gone. Headed east toward Reno."
"He talk to anyone else?"
"Not that I know of. Whisper Vale's small, though. If he comes back and asks the right person, somebody's gonna remember a new face in town."
The phone feels heavy. "Thanks, Tom."
"Dane." His voice drops. "If your guest is in trouble, the sheriff's office can help. But I need to know what I'm dealing with."
"Let me talk to her first."
Silence. Then: "You've got my number."
The call ends. The water runs. Hatchet brays from the paddock, probably wanting his afternoon grain. Everything looks the same as it did five minutes ago. My cabin, my mountain, my quiet life.
Everything is different.
Noelle comes through the front door twenty minutes later with her hair still damp, wearing the jeans that fit her now and the hiking boots that lost their tags somewhere on the north trail. She stops when she sees my face.
"What happened?"
"Parker called. A man showed up in Whisper Vale with your photograph. Asking if anyone's seen you."
The color drains from her face. Not slowly. All at once, a curtain dropping. She grips the back of the kitchen chair with both hands, knuckles going white.
"When?"
"This morning. He left, headed east. Nobody told him anything."
"Yet." Her voice is flat. Clinical. Attorney mode.
Calculating exits, assessing risk, running through scenarios.
"If he found Whisper Vale, he's already narrowed the search to this region.
Mountain Match is paper only, so he didn't get my location from them.
Which means he's working backward from my last known movements. "
"You bought a bus ticket."
"Cash. But the bus company has cameras." She's pacing now. Three steps to the woodstove, three steps back. "If someone with enough resources pulled footage from every regional bus terminal within a hundred miles of my last known location, they'd eventually find the Whisper Vale stop."
"How many resources?"
"Raymond Schultz has four hundred million dollars in offshore accounts that I can prove. He's hired people to threaten a witness. A private investigator with bus terminal footage is nothing."
My hands are at my sides. Fists. Not because I'm angry at her. Because someone with four hundred million dollars is looking for the woman sleeping in my bed, and the only barrier between her and a man in a suit with bad intentions is a mountain road, a mule, and me.
"You need to call the authorities. FBI. Whoever handles whistleblower protection."
"With what evidence? Everything's on a flash drive in my toiletry bag.
If I go to the FBI, I need a lawyer, I need copies in multiple locations, I need a plan.
Walking into a federal office with a thumb drive and a story about offshore accounts gets me a meeting with a junior agent who puts my file in a stack. "
"Then we figure it out. Together."
She stops pacing. Looks at me with those gray-green eyes that I have memorized in every light, at every time of day, in every mood. The look she's giving me now is one I haven't seen before.
Distance. Deliberate, careful distance.
"Dane. I need to leave."
Three words. Six syllables. Everything in my chest goes cold.
"No."
"If he comes back, he'll ask more questions. Someone will remember the woman who got off the bus with two suitcases. He'll trace me to you. To your business, your clients, your property."
"Let him."
"This isn't a bear you can stare down." Her voice cracks. Just barely, at the edges. "These people sent a man to my apartment at two in the morning. They don't make threats they don't intend to follow through on."
"And you think running keeps you safe? You think getting on another bus, going to another town, starting over alone fixes this?"
"It keeps you safe."
"I don't need you to keep me safe."
"Everyone needs someone to keep them safe, Dane. You just won't admit it."
The cabin is too small. The air is too warm. My hands are shaking both from adrenaline and fear. The old kind that lives in the part of my brain that still remembers watching taillights disappear down a dirt road.
"You were always going to leave." The words come out before I can stop them. Wrong words. Cruel words. True words, from the part of me that spent twenty-eight years building a life nobody could walk away from because it was designed for one person.
Her face goes blank.
"That's not fair."
"None of this is fair. You showed up with a target on your back, moved into my cabin, slept in my bed, told me you loved me, and now you're standing in my kitchen telling me you need to leave."
"To protect you."
"My mother said the same thing." My voice is gravel. "Said she was leaving for my own good. Said it was better for me if she wasn't there. Packed a bag, drove away, never looked back."
"I'm not your mother."
"Then don't do what she did."
Silence. The woodstove ticks. Hatchet is quiet for once. The whole mountain is holding its breath.
Her chin lifts. Eyes wet. Jaw set. "I need to think."
"Noelle."
"I need to think, Dane. In my cabin. Alone." She crosses to the door. Her hand shakes on the handle. "I'm not leaving tonight. But I need you to understand that staying here puts a target on you, too. And if something happened to you because of me, I wouldn't survive it."
The door closes behind her.
Through the kitchen window, I watch her walk across the hundred yards of scrubby grass to the guest cabin. Her shoulders are up again. Drawn tight. The rigid posture she arrived with, the one that eight days of mountain air and physical labor and sleeping in my arms had finally loosened.
Gone.
My hands grip the edge of the sink. The water is still running. My reflection looks like a man who just watched taillights disappear down a dirt road.
Hatchet brays from the paddock.
"Yeah," I tell him. "I know."
But this time, he doesn't sound judgmental. He sounds worried.
That makes two of us.