Mackenzie
I take the aisle seat two rows from the back, because it puts the door behind me and the whole town in front of me.
Inside a minute I find out I have made exactly one mistake.
The pew behind me is empty.
Over the altar there's real stained work somebody's money paid for in a better year, Christ with his hand up over a valley that is unmistakably this one, the Continental Divide behind him in greens and yellows that do not exist in February.
Everything else is amber glass and knocking radiators and a full church of wet wool steaming in the heat.
Blackwaters hold the left front, four rows deep. Sullivans hold the right, more of them, spilling back toward the county. Between the two blocks runs an aisle nobody has crossed in a hundred and fifty years, except to be buried.
Wyatt Mercer sits front row left, Blackwater side, where his father's chair sat for thirty years. His hands are open on his thighs like he set them down and forgot where.
Knox Blackwater is beside him. And beside Knox, on Blackwater ground, in a church holding every ranch family in three counties, sits an auburn-haired woman whose last name is Sullivan.
She crossed. In front of Rimrock. In front of both fathers.
Half the county keeps not looking at it the way you keep not looking at a fire. I take the heir out of the enemy column and set him somewhere I have no name for. What I put in his place is leverage, because I was raised on this feud and there is no place in me for the simpler answer.
The organ starts, and it is not a good organ, and the whole county stands up in its wedding suits and its feed store coats.
Behind me the floor gives.
One board, then another, a long complaint out of hundred-and-thirty-year-old timber under something well north of two hundred pounds. Whatever it is, it’s walking quietly on top of all that noise, and the hair comes up on my arms.
Then I smell him. Dark, smoky, dangerous, reaching me a full second before he does. My body knows him before my head catches up. Three days. Three days, and some animal in me has learned a man by smell and goes quiet when it finds him.
The pew takes his weight. The whole row moves. Then nothing.
His knees are against the back of my pew. I sit up straighter, which is its own confession, and then I turn around, because I refuse to be a woman who doesn't.
Holt Blackwater has shaved.
Bare to the throat. The jaw I have watched refuse to apologize for two days is smooth, and it takes years off him, and my next breath arrives late.
No hat.
I have never seen him without it. That should not be a thought and it is one anyway. Black suit, no tie, all that black hair, wet-combed back behind the pierced ear, shining under the amber light, one strand already working itself free.
And he is already looking at me.
Not caught at it. Waiting on it, the way you wait on a door you know is going to open. Dark eyes, sooty, long lashes, steady, no apology in them anywhere. He holds it while I take in the bare jaw, the arrow straight hair, and the hoop. He lets me, and he does not blink.
Then his eyes drop to my throat.
Not my mouth. My throat, where the heat is, where it has been climbing since the floor announced him, and he looks at it exactly one second too long and comes back up.
He knows. He has the color of my neck and he is not going to be gracious about it.
I face front.
My fingers curl in my lap. They want that loose strand. They want to put it back behind his ear and find out whether it's as soft as it looks.
I sit in a packed church and inform my own hands that they work for me.
Fifty minutes of service, and I use every one of them.
I count who came. I count who came and sat wrong.
Gideon takes the front left with his wife on one side and his daughter on the other, receiving condolences without moving. A king holding still while the county files past.
A man in a good coat two rows behind him checks his phone twice and doesn't sing a single verse.
A young Sullivan with a golden-retriever face catches me working the room and grins at me outright, at a funeral, and I have to study the ceiling.
Through the fourth window from the front, the snow has gone to nothing much, a few flakes whipping past the glass sideways off a storm already sliding east toward the plains. Out over the tree line, something small holds in the sky and does not move.
Bird, my head says. Birds get shoved around in this wind. That isn't getting shoved.
The priest says Jacob Mercer stood at this rail for his own wedding and both his children's baptisms and never once sat in the back like the rest of you.
The town laughs, all together, one wet sound, and then it stops.
Wyatt puts his face down into his hands for the first and only time today.
Knox reaches over without looking, lays a hand flat between his shoulder blades, and leaves it there.
Behind me, no shift, no cough, no breath I can hear. He came in on a floor that would not shut up about him and has not made a sound since he sat down. I have run interviews in soundproofed rooms with less silence in them than the four feet at my back.
Then, on the last verse, the floor gives. One board. A man's weight coming forward and settling again. Somebody two rows up turns at the noise, which is how I know it was the front of the church he leaned toward and not me.
I don't turn around. I have wanted to for forty minutes and I am not going to give him that.
Outside, the snow has quit and left a couple of scoured inches on everything, drifted deep against the east side of every headstone and blown down to brown grass on the west.
The cemetery sits on the rise east of the church with nothing to break the wind.
Everybody in black crossing ground nobody has crossed yet, hats held on, the older ones taking somebody's elbow, and every set of tracks in the county going up the hill behind us in a place where a man died three days ago for leaving the wrong ones.
The small thing in the sky has moved a quarter mile west and stopped again.
A woman falls in beside me. Auburn, hazel-eyed, boots that have worked.
"Maren Sullivan. My father told you I'd talk to you, so let's not do the part where you wonder."
"Agent Tatum."
"I know." She looks straight ahead. "You made him do arithmetic Tuesday. He hasn't mentioned it, which means he did it twice."
"Is that a complaint?"
"It's a compliment, and it's the only one you'll get from a Sullivan this week." The wind takes her hem and she doesn't grab for it. "Jacob taught half this valley to sit a horse. Me included. Whatever you're doing, do it fast."
"I'd move faster if the sheriff hadn't already decided it was weather."
Thirty feet back and to my right, nothing creaks. I know where he is standing anyway, and I lose the end of my own sentence somewhere between the gate and the gravel.
Maren watches me do it.
"You sat where you could see both sides," she says.
"You didn't sit on either one."
One corner of her mouth goes up and comes straight back down.
"Huh," Maren Sullivan says, and goes back to Knox with his hand on Wyatt Mercer's back.
Kathleen Sullivan catches me at the gate.
She takes my gloved hand in both of hers with a warmth that would fool anybody who hasn't spent three years watching people lie about money.
"Agent Tatum. Bitter day."
"Mrs. Sullivan."
"Kathleen. You'll want a heavier coat. That one's cut for a city, and you're going to be outside a good deal more than you planned on.
" One pat. "Josephine's boy has been arranging himself around you since the second hymn.
Two years he's been home, and I've never seen him stand that close to a living soul.
Have a hot meal tonight, dear. It's a long winter. "
She's gone before my face is in order.
They put Jacob Mercer in the ground at eleven-forty.
The Hutterite women sing something in German that nobody asked them for, four rows of dark headscarves and no accompaniment.
It goes up off this hill in a wind that should take it apart and doesn't. Half the county has its hat over its heart.
The grandmother with the oxygen line has her chin up and her eyes shut.
I am three rows into the faces when the light changes on my left.
Holt stops a half step ahead of me, angled, shoulder open to the northeast. He isn't looking at the grave. He looks up over the tree line one time, fast, checking something he already has the answer to.
I follow it.
Drone. Small and high, small enough that if you weren't hunting it you'd take it for a bird, and I did.
It holds over the northeast corner, slides west a measured distance, holds, slides again. Even spacing, straight lanes, turning at the end and coming back one lane over like a man mowing a field he's being paid to mow.
Nobody flies that for fun.
My phone is already out and coming up when he moves.
No grab, no word. He steps across in front of me and stops with his back to the northeast, putting I’d guess about two hundred and twenty pounds of himself between me and whatever is up there. Then a hand comes up behind me and hovers at the small of my back, and presses nothing, and waits.
It's a question. Move left.
An inch of air, and I can feel every bit of it through wool and lining and a coat cut for a city. My whole spine comes up, and the small of my back forgets there is a case.
His hand doesn't land.
He didn't even touch me. I don't move.
"Tell me what that is."
"No."
"That's no hobbyist."
Nothing.
"Blackwater. It's flying a grid."
He watches the priest's hands. Not the sky, not me. "I know what it's flying."
"Then say it out loud. Say drone."
"You'd write it down."
"That's the job."
"That's the problem."
It runs the lane east to west, holds, turns. I get fifteen seconds of it, two full lanes and the spacing, enough for somebody in Salt Lake to tell me what I'm looking at without asking a Blackwater anything.
Then it comes off the grid.
It leaves the pattern mid-lane, which nothing has done in ten minutes, and it crosses the open ground between us and the tree line, and it stops.
Over me.
Not over the grave. Not over a hillside of people in black wool.
It holds there and drops maybe thirty feet, close enough that I can hear it now under the wind. A small hard sound like a wasp in a jar. It hangs above my head and does absolutely nothing else.
Two seconds. Three.
Nobody around me looks up. They are burying a man.
Then it lifts, slides back to where it left off, and resumes the grid one lane over, patient as a county clerk, finishing what it started.
My arm is still up. I have all of it.
Holt has not moved his eyes off the tree line the entire time, which is when I understand he was never watching the drone. He has been watching the ground it came from.
"That was for me."
"Left," he says. "Now."
And I go, because this time it isn't him moving me.
His shoulder comes over with me. The hand rises again, that inch of air, with nowhere left to put me.
"Do that a third time and I'll put you on the ground."
"You could put me somewhere," he says, and looks at the sky. "Not the ground."
He's close enough now that his breath comes past me in the cold, and I catch myself standing in it. I stay a full second longer than I need to before I step back.
"You shaved," I say.
That gets me the first cut of his eyes since the church. One second, all the way down and back up.
"So did the priest."
"The priest didn't sit behind me."
"No." He looks at the sky again. "He didn't."
Down the slope, near the gate, Sage Blackwater is watching her brother.
Not the grave. Not me. Him.
She's been running him the way I've been running the crowd. She saw the step, saw the hand, and she saw it not land.
Then she catches me catching her, and she smiles, warm and unhurried, a woman who's just been handed something she intends to keep.
They lower Jacob.
The wind takes the priest's last word off the top of the hill and gives it to no one.
The crowd breaks and I go for Wyatt Mercer.
I get four steps before Holt Blackwater turns and speaks to me on purpose for the first time since a motel parking lot.
"You need to leave Montana."
Five words. Nobody asked him for a single one of them.
I look up at that bare jaw with the drone finishing its last lane over his shoulder, and I think: that is a threat, or that is a warning, and the difference between them is the entire case.
"Your family first."