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She’d been with her team in the Port Angeles park headquarters when she received the call from George two hours ago. She’d broken speed records to get here quickly, finding George and inholding landowner Jeb McCutcheon guarding the site. Jae was on his way to document the damage and file a police report. And that would be another form of desecration, photographing remains that never should have been exposed in the first place.
George shook his head. “I recommended you as Roy’s replacement when he retired as park archaeologist. I trusted you to protect our sacred sites. Maybe this time, the looting isn’t your fault. But if it happens again, it will be.”
She nodded. He was right. She couldn’t undo the damage. All she could do was prevent further desecration. “I’ll get cameras out here to monitor the site.”
“Cameras won’t stop looters. They will only record it.”
Again, he was right, but she couldn’t exactly set up camp here as an armed guard, and no way could the park pay for rangers to visit this remote location on a regular basis, let alone twenty-four seven.
“The cameras will be monitored along with other security cameras in the park. If anyone comes out here, we’ll know. When the lodge is open, someone can be here in twenty minutes.”
“Fine when the lodge is open, but what about when it closes? Next week, there won’t be anyone around until the lodge reopens at the end of March.”
“The road is closed to park visitors then. No one will be able to get here to loot during those months.”
Jeb crossed his arms and fixed her with a glare. “We inholding landowners have our own gate and own keys and not everyone is careful. I’m pretty sure the Baldwins are renting their cabin out as an Airbnb even though that’s against the rules. People can get in.”
Jeb had been making that claim for the last few years, but there was no evidence the Baldwin family was violating the easement. But still, he had a point. If someone was determined, they could steal a gate key.
“And,” Jeb added, “if the Navy gets their way, they’ll be tromping all through these woods in January.”
She was about to respond to his earlier point, but the second stopped her short. “What are you talking about?”
“The Navy’s proposal to use the lodge for some trainings when it’s closed in January. I received the notice a week ago.”
“That’s not possible. Whatever you received must be a scam. I’d have heard if the Navy wants to use the lodge.” Any use of the lodge along those lines would have to go through her office. The lodge, outbuildings, and grounds were on the National Register of Historic Places, and many of the inholding cabins were contributing elements to the historic district. Not to mention that the lake and Kaxo Creek were literally surrounded by archaeological sites. This woodland meadow had once been a prehistoric village. George’s ancestors had used this land for thousands of years.
Jeb gave her a scathing look. “You were too busy lip-locking that Navy guy to ask why he was here?”
She took a step back as his words sent a jolt of shock down her spine. “What are you talking about?”
“The guy you picked up in the lodge a few weeks ago. I saw you with him that night and again kissing him goodbye in the parking lot. He was clearly military. My guess is Navy because what did I get a week ago but a letter from the Navy initiating the thirty-day comment period for a proposed action.”
“You aren’t making sense.” She shook her head. Navy? Xavier? He’d said he was in security. If he was military, he’d have said so. Jae wouldn’t let him lie to her face like that. Plus, Jae had vouched for him. Jae’s only warning had been that Xavier didn’t do relationships.
And Jae hadn’t been wrong on that point.
“If the Navy initiated a thirty-day comment period, I think I’d have heard of it.”
Jeb shook his head as if in disgust at her ignorance. Or naïveté. “I don’t know what to say, then, because they did. They intend to use these woods and the lodge for some kind of training ground. This is probably just step one of their plan to seize inholding properties like mine and George’s.”
She rolled her eyes at the familiar tirade. It was no secret that the park wanted the inholding properties, but they weren’t going to use the military—or any other government agency—to seize privately owned land. This was a tune Jeb had been singing for years.
George humored him, but then, as a Native American, he had every reason to distrust the federal government that had done all it could to violate, ignore, deny, or revoke treaty rights agreed to a hundred and sixty years ago.
Jeb was a white man who’d lucked into an inheritance that gave him lakefront property on a beautiful, pristine mountain lake in a temperate rainforest, and he acted as though everything the park did was a threat to his property, when it was the park that maintained the very road that made access to his cabin possible.
She returned to the subject at hand. “I’ll install cameras this week. There isn’t time or money to get solar-powered cameras set up. But I’ve got budget for the cameras themselves. If I have to, I’ll run a cable from the blacksmith shop. I’ll bury it myself.”
It would be days of miserable labor, likely in the rain, but she’d do it. Anything to protect the site.
George nodded. “Fine. And I will winter here again, instead of returning to the reservation.”
Her heart squeezed at the thought of the elder living in his rustic cabin during the coldest, darkest months of the year. “You can’t, George. You promised your family.” He’d spent the last three winters in the woods alone. His family wanted him home this year.
His eyes flattened. “Someone must guard the site. If I’m here and the cameras catch someone looting, you can call me.”
She knew she’d overstepped in telling him he couldn’t stay in his cabin, but what he proposed terrified her. “And send you alone to scare off looters?” Was he insane? Looters could be armed, and George was seventy-two years old. Fit and firm for his age, but still, seventy-two.
