"She wouldn't have told you. She liked you, Callum, but you're still an Aldrich. She would have kept her insurance policy separate from her messenger."
She's right, and the precision of the assessment makes me want to hear her say my name again in the voice she used last night, the one that had nothing clinical about it.
"Find the copies. I'll stall the permits," I say.
"And then?"
"And then we burn it down."
"Come to the house tonight," she says. "After dark."
"I'll be there."
She hangs up. I pick up the permit, fold it in half, and slide it into my desk drawer. I lock the drawer. I pocket the key. Then I call the county assessor's office.
"Rick Halston's office, this is Denise."
"Denise, this is Callum Aldrich. I need to flag an administrative hold on the access permits filed under the Aldrich Family Trust. All current applications. Effective immediately."
A silence on the other end that stretches long enough for me to hear Denise processing the fact that an Aldrich has just used the wordholdin a sentence about Aldrich business. This has never happened before. The machinery doesn't have a gear for this.
"Mr. Aldrich, I'm not sure I understand. Mr. Halston usually handles the trust applications directly, and he's indicated that these are priority..."
"They're on hold pending an internal administrative review. Indefinitely."
"Indefinitely." She repeats the word the way you'd repeat a diagnosis you weren't expecting.
"That's correct. Thank you, Denise."
I hang up, and the silence of my office settles around me, and I realize that the sound I'm hearing is the sound of a man who has just pulled the first brick out of a wall his family spent over a century building.
The rest of the morning I spend at my desk, doing nothing. I don't work on other cases. I don't return emails. I sit in the quiet of my office with the locked drawer and the pocketed key and the view of the town below, and I wait. Denise will tell Rick. Rick will call Ward. And when Ward finds out, the careful architecture of our relationship, uncle and nephew, mentor and protégé, handler and weapon, will begin its collapse.
I should be afraid of that. I'm not. What I feel is closer to hunger.
My phone buzzes just after noon. A text from Greer.
Found it. The Cather novel on my nightstand. She hollowed out the back pages and glued an envelope inside the cover. There's a name and an address and a key.
I read the text twice. June Holden hid the map to her insurance policy inside a novel about a man who discovers that the things buried underground change everyone who finds them. She doesn't tell me the name or the address, and I don't ask. She's right not to share it. I'm still an Aldrich.
Greer sends a second text:
The bookmark was on page 147. I looked it up. It's the passage where Tom Outland finds the ancient cliff dwellings. Dead people, preserved in a cave, and the professor who wants to keep them hidden.
A third:
My mother was not subtle.
A fourth:
She was brilliant.
I set the phone down and look out the window at the town below, and for the first time since I've lived in this house on this ridge, Wicked Falls looks small. Not the careful miniature my great-great-grandfather designed, not the jewel in the velvet box, not the postcard.
Just a small town in the mountains, built on a lie, with the lie about to surface.
I type:
