CHAPTER SIXTEEN
She'd been thinking about the conversation and not about Cascade Valley. The not-thinking-about-Cascade-Valley had been a gift she'd been giving herself for fifteen hours, and the phone, when it rang, was Cascade Valley arriving to take the gift back.
She picked up.
"Dr. Dunn."
Garrett. Pleasant.
"Mr. Lindqvist."
"I hope I'm not catching you at a bad time."
"It's fine."
"I've been reviewing your field log entries. I want to commend you on the rigor of your documentation. The note from your third day on-site, in particular, the anomalous mineralogical signature, was a good example of careful preliminary work."
"Thank you."
"I want to talk to you about the eventual characterization of that finding."
"Mr. Lindqvist."
"Yes."
"I've already told you I'll continue to characterize the data accurately."
"I appreciate the consistency. I want to emphasize, for the avoidance of doubt about the development potential of the site, that the way that finding gets typed in your final report is going to matter."
She breathed once.
She did not, she registered, feel any rage.
The rage had been yesterday. The shaking hands at Eli's table. Tonight the body had moved past rage into a thing it knew better than rage — the cold flat clarity of a person who had decided.
"I will continue to characterize the data accurately," she said.
"Dr. Dunn. I want you to think very carefully about the position you're taking."
"I have."
"Have you."
"For nineteen years."
The pause was long.
Garrett Lindqvist was, she thought, a man who hadn't, in some span of years, been spoken to in a tone he didn't control.
She wasn't sure he'd ever been spoken to in this particular one.
It wasn't aggressive. It was the tone of a woman whose hands had stopped shaking and were now, in the kitchen of a cabin in Pine Ridge, very steady.
"I hope you'll think very carefully about the position you're taking, Dr. Dunn."
"I have, Mr. Lindqvist. Thank you for the call."
She hung up.
She stood in the kitchen with the phone in her hand and her body humming, and her grandmother's voice in her ears, and the absolute certainty that she was about to lose her career.
The orange cat was sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor.
The doors were shut. The windows were shut. She had not let it in, and there was no way it could have let itself in, and it was sitting on her kitchen floor with its tail around its feet, watching her with the steady yellow attention of something that had decided she needed watching.
"How," she said.
The cat did not explain.
It stayed while she stood there shaking. It stayed the way Mae stayed, the way the cabin stayed, the way the land stayed — present, unhurried, certain. Then it stood, walked to the door, and looked back at her, once, the way a thing looks back when it expects to be followed.
She'd been in the cabin ten minutes when she realized her keys were already in her hand.
She didn't remember picking them up.
She walked out of the cabin. Got in the truck. Started the engine.
She drove.
The drive was fifteen minutes. She did not, when she arrived at the end of it, remember any of it.
She hadn't, before tonight, driven the road that ended at Jackson's cabin.
She'd been to it three times in the eight days since the fire tower, and all three times she'd come from the trailhead, and all three times Jackson had driven and she'd been in his passenger seat.
Tonight she'd come from town. Tonight she'd made every turn without thinking about it.
The road came up the southern flank of the pack land in long curves and ended in a small turnaround in front of a low one-story cabin with a porch and one light on in the kitchen window. Jackson's truck was parked on the gravel. The cabin smelled of cedar smoke from the chimney pipe.
She parked.
She did not get out.
She sat with both hands on the wheel and her body humming and her brain not catching up.
The cabin door opened.
Jackson stepped out onto the porch.
He'd had no way of knowing, while she was on the phone with Garrett, that she was driving. She hadn't called him. She hadn't, for that matter, decided she was driving until she was pulling into his driveway.
He had opened the door anyway.
He stood on the porch in a flannel and jeans and bare feet, his hand on the door frame, looking at her truck the way a man looks at a thing he's been waiting for.
She got out.
She walked to the porch.
She climbed the three steps.
She stopped in front of him.
He didn't say anything.
Neither did she, for a count.
Then she said it.
"They want me to lie about what this land is."
He stepped back from the doorway.
He let her in.
* * *