Page 64 of The Fire Line

Navarro was quiet for a moment. “She knew she wasn’t going to be there to check.”

Harris looked toward the stove. “Yeah.”

That had been the part Nell couldn’t leave alone. Not whether Rain would stay at the ranch—of course she would. Nell wanted to know who would notice when her mare was stiff, whether somebody would keep riding her, whether she’d get turned out with horses she liked instead of in whichever pasture happened to have room.

“She made me promise I’d look after her.”

Navarro glanced toward him. “So you are.”

“Only thing I can do.”

Harris looked away. The cabin suddenly felt smaller than it had a minute ago, the air too still, Navarro too close and too willing to understand.

He pushed himself to his feet. “Coffee?”

Navarro watched him for half a second. “Please.”

By eight, they were back on the trail. The old Shaw homestead lay farther north, beyond pasture the family no longer owned. Bright survey stakes stood along the adjoining slope, their plastic ribbons snapping in the wind where cattle had moved when Harris was a boy.

Vacation homes. Twelve approved lots, each advertised with mountain views and private access to a landscape that would become less private with every driveway cut into it.

Navarro filmed the stakes first. He positioned them in the foreground, then widened the frame until the empty slope and distant ridgeline appeared behind them. Afterward he filmed Harris beside the old fence, explaining where the grazing boundary had run before the parcel sold.

Harris watched him work. Navarro changed when he put the camera to his eye. The constant commentary shut down—not completely, because that might have required medical intervention, but enough that everything unnecessary fell away. His movements became economical, his whole attention narrowing toward whatever he had decided mattered.

Harris understood why Nell had liked his films, though he still had not watched them.

The homestead appeared beyond a stand of cottonwoods near noon, rusted roof first, then the collapsed corner of the porch. The barn downhill had lost one door and most of its paint. Grass had swallowed the old road almost completely, leaving only a shallow depression where wagon wheels and truck tires had once followed the same path toward the house.

Navarro lowered the camera. “Is this still yours?”

“Was.”

“How long has it been empty?”

“Since the fifties, maybe.”

Navarro looked from the house to the survey stakes on the ridge behind it. The frame had arranged itself without his help: the original Shaw place rotting below, new construction marked above it. Past and future occupying the same piece of land and neither looking especially permanent.

“Okay if I film you here?”

“All right.”

Harris led the way into the house while Navarro remained near the open doorway, filming past him. Wet wood and mouse droppings had replaced whatever the place once smelled like. Wallpaper hung loose in gray strips. An iron bedframe remained upstairs, rusted nearly through along one rail, and the old kitchen stove had collapsed inward on one side.

In the doorway between the kitchen and front room, pencil marks climbed the frame. Harris had forgotten all about them.

Walter, Della, Thomas.

Then lower, less faded:

Eleanor, Harrison, Evan.

Navarro stopped beside him. “You came here when you were kids?”

“Sometimes.”

“Who measured you?”