Page 36 of Faultline

"You skipped the third floorboard," she says, pouring coffee.

"It creaks."

"I know it creaks. I've memorized your entire stealth protocol. Very impressive for a man your size." She wraps both hands around the mug and turns to face me. Her hair is tangled; her eyes sharp with the awareness of a woman recalibrating after a night that rearranged her defenses. "What's the tree line telling you this morning?"

"Quiet."

"You say that like it's bad news."

"Quiet when you're expecting noise is bad news."

She takes the chair that's been hers since she arrived, and I hand her the legal pad she left beside the coffeepot last night. The pen is wedged in the spiral binding. Her files are stacked on the table's edge. Beside them, the copy of the plat map from Evelyn's office, my father's topographic sheet, and the notebook where his timber data now shares margins with LLC registrations and shell company names.

"I want to walk the corridor today," I tell her. "The full length. Access road to ridgeline."

"You've walked it before."

"But now I want to see how the parcels connect on the ground, not on paper."

She blows across the top of her coffee. "What are you looking for that the map didn't show you?"

"The reason."

Her eyes come up over the rim. Steady. Waiting.

"The corridor doesn't make sense for timber," I say. "I've been running the numbers. The standing inventory on those three parcels is decent white spruce, some birch, a few scattered cottonwood in the drainage. Good timber, but it's not exceptional. My grandfather logged better stands on the north slope fifty years ago. Cascade isn't spending this kind of money for board feet."

"What about mineral rights?"

"Surface rights transfer with the sale. Mineral rights depend on the deed. The transfer documents at Evelyn's office included full mineral conveyance on all three parcels. The sellers gave up everything, surface and subsurface." I pull my mug off the drying rack and lean against the sink. "But nobody's mined this section. Not in a hundred and twenty years. My grandfather knew every prospector who worked these ridgelines, and none of them ever found anything worth filing a claim on. The terrain's wrong for oil at this elevation, and there's no gold that three generations of Stoddards and their neighbors ever turned up."

"So it's not timber. It's not gold. It's not oil." She sets the mug down and pulls the topographic map toward her. "What's left?"

"That's the question I can't answer from the kitchen."

"Hence the walk," she says.

She nods and traces the corridor on the map, her finger following the same line she traced the first time I showed her the parcels. The Harmon acreage at the bottom, highway access. The Duggan lot through the drainage. The Kessel property up the ridge. Her fingernail taps the blank space in the middle.

"Your land."

"My land."

Her finger stays on the map. My eyes stay on the place where the flannel opens at her throat, the bruise darker now in the kitchen light than it was in the bedroom. She doesn't know it's visible. I'm not going to tell her. Let the mirror handle that.

The investigation is the only thing keeping me on this side of the table.

"Take Rhys with you," she says.

"I'll call him."

"I'll keep pulling the Whitfield-Crane filings. There are older records in the state database I haven't accessed yet. Corporate registrations going back years. If Cascade's been building this position for longer than we think, the paper trail might go deeper."

"How deep?"

"Deep enough to matter." She opens her laptop. "Go walk your mountain. I'll dig."

I call Rhys from the landline. He answers on the third ring, and the conversation is short. He'll meet me at the bottom of the access road in an hour.