Greer is across the valley in June's house with her mother's journals spread on the dining room table, her half-sister's photograph on her phone, the bruises I put on her hips, and the instruction I gave her: choose the investigation. She chose it.
She's doing what I told her to do, on her own terms, with that jaw set and that mouth that makes demands of men who've never been demanded of, and she's going to pull every secret out of this valley whether I'm beside her or buried under it.
I don't have the key. I'm going to open it anyway.
I put the car in gear and drive down the ridge, toward the valley floor, toward the glass house I can no longer call home.
13
GREER
The stool at the end of the bar has a clean napkin folded into a precise triangle. I don't register whose seat it is until I'm already sitting, my jacket over the back, my bag on the hook underneath. The recognition comes a beat late, the way recognition does when your body makes a decision your mind hasn't authorized. Callum's stool, Callum's sightline down the length of the room.
From here, I can see every entrance, the front door, the lobby archway, the service corridor behind the bar. The vantage point of a man who needs to know who's coming before they arrive. I lean back and the stool holds me the way it holds him, solid, high-backed, and the thought of his body in this same position, his hands on this same bar top, puts heat in places I should not be thinking about in the middle of an investigation.
The Aldrich Hotel bar in the early evening runs on the principle of absorption. Dark walnut paneling swallows conversation. Heavy drapes muffle the windows. The carpet eats footsteps whole. Two guests occupy a corner booth, speaking in the low, calibrated tones of people who belong here, and the bartender stands at the far end polishing a glass with theunhurried competence of a man who has made an art of being present without being noticed.
Keaton has worked the Aldrich bar long enough to know every regular's drink, every regular's business, every regular's pressure point. I watched him at my mother's memorial, pouring and registering faces and saying nothing. I watched him the night Callum bought me dinner in this room, setting bourbon in front of Callum before he ordered.
He tracks the room the way a camera tracks a hallway, steady and comprehensive and seemingly detached. He is not detached. I am starting to understand that Keaton's blankness is the most deliberately maintained thing in this building.
He sees me take the stool and his hands pause on the glass for half a second. The pause says everything his face does not. Then he sets the glass down, reaches for a tumbler, pours two fingers of the single malt I ordered the first time I sat in this room, and slides it across the bar without a word.
"Thank you," I say.
He nods and goes back to the glass.
I didn't come here for the scotch. I came here because Callum told me to choose the investigation, and the investigation has led me to the family's own house.
And if I'm being honest with myself, which I am trying to be, I came here because this stool still holds the faint warmth of a man who walked out of my bedroom and told me to choose the thing that would take me away from him, and sitting where he sits is the closest I can get to him right now without calling.
The scotch burns going down, clean and simple. I set the glass on the bar and wait. Waiting is what my mother did for thirty years in a house above a mine, and whether she meant to teach me or not, I learned.
Keaton finishes with the glass and sets it on the shelf with the others. Then he does something I have never seen him do. Hecomes around the bar, not past the hinged counter to the dining room but all the way around to the customer side, and pulls out the stool two seats down from mine and sits.
The two guests in the corner booth don't look up, but the room recalibrates. The man who has spent years dissolving into the walnut is sitting on the wrong side of it, and every surface in the room registers the displacement.
"I heard a conversation," Keaton says. His voice is lower than I expected, rougher at the edges, as though he doesn't use it often enough to keep it smooth. "About a month before your mother died. In the lobby, late. Ward Aldrich and a man I didn't recognize. Denver clothes, Denver shoes, briefcase that cost more than my car. They didn't see me. People don't, when I'm working. That's the job."
He is looking at the bar top, not at me. His hands are flat on the walnut, long fingers spread, pressing down as though testing whether the surface will hold what he's about to set on it.
"Go on," I say.
"Ward called your mother 'the Holden problem.' He said it the way you'd say 'the drainage issue' or 'the permit delay.' Administrative. Like she was an item on an agenda."
The scotch sits heavy in my stomach. I don't pick up the glass.
"The other man asked how Ward wanted it handled. Ward said he wanted a permanent resolution. Those words, in that order.Permanent resolution."
"The stranger asked about timeline. Ward said before the end of the quarter. Like a fiscal deadline." Keaton's jaw works. His eyes stay on the bar top. "Your mother was dead before the quarter closed."
I am very still. The split second between the car hitting the guardrail and the understanding that you are in a wreck. I havebeen assembling this case for weeks. The ledger, the clause, the seven instead of six. I did not have this.
Permanent resolution,about my mother, a month before she died.
"The man," I say. My voice is steady. It has no right to be, but the crime beat taught me to keep the shaking in my hands and out of my throat. "What did he look like? Could you identify him?"
"Fifties. Grey at the temples. Expensive haircut, the kind you get in a city. He carried the briefcase in his left hand. I'd know his voice if I heard it again, but I never saw his face straight on. He stood with his back to the bar."
