Bear’s hand tightened on the frame. “Human?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re sure?”
“We’ve all seen human remains before,” Ghost said, deadpan. “We’re sure.”
He made himself breathe. “And why are you calling me about it?”
“The remains are wearing a jacket.” Another pause, measured and careful, which was unusual for Ghost. “Leather. MCR patch on the left shoulder.”
Fuck.
Bear had seen the flyer a hundred times—on the board at Nessie’s, on the telephone poles in town, and the signs at the trailhead, on the community board at the firehouse, where it had been so long it had faded, and curled at the edges. Greta’s twin at sixteen, standing at the edge of the Bitterroot River with her dyed platinum blond hair wild, wearing a leather jacket and the grin she shared with Greta. The black and white patch on the jacket’s left shoulder: My Chemical Romance. It was the kind of thing a sixteen-year-old girl in 2009 would have ironed onto everything she owned.
“Does anyone else know?”
“Cole called me. Naomi’s aware. Nobody else yet.”
“Keep it that way until I get there.”
“Bear.” Ghost said his name the way he said very little — quietly, with the particular weight of a man who had thought it through and decided it needed saying. “She needs to hear this from you.”
He stood in the dark hallway for another second, holding the phone. Then he said, “Yeah,” and ended the call.
The house settled around him. Down the hall, through Logan’s door, the specific low snore that he’d already learned to recognize over six weeks of sharing a roof with his son. From his own room, the almost-silence of Greta’s sleep. He had no idea how to walk back through that door.
He walked back through the door.
She was awake.
He didn’t know when it had happened — whether the phone had done it or the absence of his weight beside her or something in his voice carrying through the door, but she was sitting up in the bed with the quilt pooled at her waist and her hair loose on her shoulders, and she was looking at him with that expression she wore when she’d already read the ground and didn’t like the terrain.
“What happened.”
“Flood cleanup. They found something on Cole’s land.” He kept his voice even. He was trying to buy her thirty more seconds of not knowing, which was stupid and he knew it was stupid, because Greta Dougherty had been tracking patterns in incomplete information for fifteen years. “I need to go out.”
He reached for his jeans.
“Bear.”
He pulled them on. “Let me make a call first, get more information?—”
“Look at me.”
He stopped. He turned.
She was watching him from the bed, both hands flat on the quilt, and there was something in her expression that he could only describe as braced. Not afraid, not fragile — braced, the way she stood at the top of a ridge before a technical descent, reading the slope with everything she had, already committed to going down. He’d seen that look on her face in Daniel’s shop. He’d seen it on the bank of the flood ditch with the rope in her hands.
He had never hated it more than right now.
“Is it about Alice?”
He didn’t answer fast enough.
Her face changed. He watched it happen — not collapse, nothing crumpling or breaking, just a specific stillness, like a compass needle swinging to true north and locking. She went very still. Her hands pressed flat against the quilt.
He crossed to the bed and crouched in front of her and made himself say it.
