I do not have a joke ready for that one, which might be the most surprising thing that has happened to me since the crash. I just nod, and drink the last of my lukewarm coffee, and let the silence between us stretch out comfortable instead of awkward, filled with nothing but the fire and the fading storm and the strange, quiet certainty that I am safer in this cabin, with this man, than I have felt anywhere in longer than I can remember.
8
Colt
I sit across from her at the small table, the fire settling into a low even burn that pushes back just enough of the cold seeping through the log walls. She looks good in my flannel, better than the shirt has any right to look on anybody, the fabric hanging loose on her shoulders and catching in places that make it hard for me to keep my eyes on my coffee instead of on her. The sleeves are rolled twice at her wrists. The pants are cinched at the waist with a length of paracord I found in the kit, because nothing else in this cabin was ever going to fit her properly, and somehow she still makes the whole ridiculous outfit look like it was tailored for her on purpose.
The color is better in her face today. That soft flush that chased off yesterday's paleness stays put now instead of coming and going with the fear. The shadows under her eyes are lighter too. She is healing in front of me, one hour at a time, and something about watching that happen does a thing to my chest I have stopped trying to talk myself out of.
“You are staring,” she says, not looking up from her mug, a small smile pulling at the corner of her mouth.
“I am allowed to stare. It is my cabin.”
“That is not how staring works, Colt.”
“Out here it is.” I take a sip of my coffee just to have something to do with my hands. “Mountain rules.”
She laughs, quiet and real, and the sound does something warm and low in my chest that I file away next to everything else I am not examining too closely this morning.
I want to ask her more. About the cartoons, about whatever life she is going to walk back into once this storm breaks and the world finds its way back up this mountain. I get as far as opening my mouth when the satellite phone rings sharp on the mantel, cutting clean through the quiet like a shot.
I am up and across the room before the second ring finishes, boots heavy on the floorboards, checking the screen out of old habit even though I already know who it is. Mason. I answer it standing, angled so I can still see Nora at the table without turning my back on the door.
“Mason. What do you have.”
“Got a name for you.” His voice comes through clean over the line, no preamble, which tells me whatever he found woke him up enough to skip the small talk. “Wealthy businessman out of Bozeman went missing sometime yesterday. Wife filed a report a couple hours ago when he did not show for a dinner they had planned. Name is Richard Rogers. Once the roads clear, the county boys will start looking proper, but I figured you would want this before they did.”
I glance at Nora. She has gone still at the table, her fingers wrapped tight enough around her mug that her knuckles have gone pale, like some part of her already knows what I am about to ask her to do. Richard Rogers. The name means nothing to me on its own, but the timing sits too clean against everything else to be coincidence. A man vanishes off the map the same afternoon a woman watches somebody die in the snow twelve miles from where his wife last saw him.
“Could be our victim. You got a photo?”
“Pulling one from his firm's website now. Sending it over.”
The phone buzzes in my hand a few seconds later. I open the image and study it before I show her anything. Clean shaven, dark suit, the kind of smile a man practices in front of a mirror before a shareholder meeting. Nothing about the picture says he belonged face down in the snow on Steel Mountain. There is a ring on his hand in the photo, heavy, expensive, the kind that says old money, or new money trying very hard to look old. I note it and move on. That is a detail for later, once we know more about who this man actually was underneath the suit.
I cross back to the table and hold the phone out, my hand steady even though something in my gut already knows what her answer is going to be. “This the man you saw?”
She takes it careful, her fingers brushing mine for a beat longer than the handoff requires. Her face goes pale as she looks at the screen, the color I have watched come back into her cheeks all morning draining out just as fast. She nods, slow, like her body is confirming it before the rest of her is ready to say the words out loud.
“That's him.” Her voice comes out smaller than it has all morning. “The one on his knees. The one they shot.” She hands the phone back like it burned her. “He has kids. I do not know how I know that, I just, I looked at that photo and thought, that man has kids somewhere waiting for him to come home.”
I do not tell her she is probably right. I do not need to. The grief on her face for a stranger she watched die tells me everything I need to know about the kind of person she is underneath the fear, and it lands somewhere in my chest next to everything else about her I am keeping.
I relay the confirmation to Mason, my voice low and even despite what watching her carry that weight is doing to me. “It matches. Richard Rogers is our victim. I need everything you can pull. Business dealings, enemies, recent trips, anybody he owed money to or anybody who owed him. Somebody drove a truck with mud on the tires a long way to put a bullet in this man, and men like that do not do it for free.”
“On it. I will run him through every database I have access to and a couple I technically do not.” A pause, papers shifting again on his end. “Storm is supposed to hold another day at least. You two are stuck up there a while longer either way.”
“Copy that.” I end the call and set the phone down on the table with a soft click, the sound loud in the quiet that follows.
Nora is still watching me, her eyes wide but holding steady now instead of shaking like they were a minute ago. Tougher than she looks, this cartoonist who wandered into a murder scene looking for a joke and kept running until the mountain nearly killed her trying to save her own life. I sit back down across from her, and my knee finds hers under the table by accident, or maybe not entirely by accident. The small contact sends somethingwarm and immediate through me anyway. She is close. In my cabin. Wearing my clothes, drinking coffee out of my dead grandmother's mug, carrying grief for a stranger like it is her job to carry it. The pull that has been building in me since I lifted her out of that wreck gets harder to ignore with every hour she spends across this table from me. I want to pull her into my lap and hold her until the fear and the grief both settle. I want more than that, if I am honest with myself, but she needs protecting first and everything else can wait until she is safe enough to want it too.
“We will figure this out,” I tell her, keeping my voice calm and sure even though the anger sitting under my ribs is anything but calm. “Richard Rogers was the businessman. Now we know who they killed. The why will come next. Until then, you stay right here, with me.”
She nods and takes another slow sip of her coffee, throat moving smooth when she swallows. My flannel slips a little further off one shoulder, showing the soft line of her collarbone, and I make myself look at the fire instead of her for a second just to get my head back on straight.
I reach over to the shelf behind me and pull down the topo map I keep folded there, the one marked up in my own handwriting with trap lines and deer trails and every wash and ridge on this side of Steel Mountain. I spread it flat on the table between us, smoothing the creases with the side of my hand.
“Show me where you were. As close as you can get it.”
