Chapter 10 - The Visitor on the Ridge
I didn't show the letter to Eliza. Not immediately.
Her blood pressure had been edging up during her thirty-two-week checkup, and Doc Hallowell had warned me that stress was the enemy right now. "Keep her calm, Nolan," he had told me, tapping a stethoscope against his thigh. "She’s carried too much trauma this year. The baby needs stillness."
So I buried Evelyn's letter in the lockbox bolted under the passenger seat of my truck, but I didn't ignore it.
I called Evan Pierce from the payphone behind the feed mill. The attorney listened in silence as I read him Evelyn's venomous words.
"Savannah’s running her mouth in the women's facility," Evan said, his voice flat with disgust. "She’s rooming with low-level traffickers in Billings. But Nolan, this part about the debt... that might not be Evelyn’s usual bluster. When the state police raided Savannah’s apartment, they found ledger entries tied to a private lending network out of Spokane. Predatory loan sharks who launder through used-car lots and strip-mall cash advances. If Savannah borrowed against her future inheritance and promised them collateral tied to the family estate—which you liquidated—they might feel robbed."
"Let them come," I growled into the receiver. "I’ll bury them beside the creek."
"Don't talk like that," Evan snapped. "You're a father now, Nolan. You aren't in the mountains of Kunar anymore. If someone approaches you, you call the county sheriff. Do not take the bait. Evelyn wants you to violate parole conditions by threatening her or showing up at the prison."
"She threatened my unborn child, Evan."
"And that makes it a felony," Evan countered. "I’m filing an emergency injunction and a restraining order violation this afternoon. The warden will put Evelyn in administrative segregation for witness tampering. That letter will add three years to her sentence. Just stay on your land and hold your wife."
I hung up, but the knot between my shoulder blades didn't loosen.
That evening, the temperature plunged. Autumn in the high country doesn't arrive politely; it strikes like a dropped axe. We ate venison stew by the cast-iron stove, the wind whistling through the cedar eaves. Eliza smiled, her eyes soft as she watched me assemble a hand-carved rocking chair, but every twenty minutes, her eyes drifted toward the dark window facing the western tree line.
"You're listening for something, Nolan," she said quietly, setting her spoon down.
I kept my hand on the rasp, smoothing the armrest. "Just the wind. Sounds like we might get an early freeze."
She stood up slowly, supporting her lower back, and walked over to where I was kneeling. She placed two fingers under my chin, lifting my face until our eyes locked. There was no deceiving her; she knew the topography of my mind better than I did.
"The post office," she whispered. "You came home white as a sheet, and you checked the perimeter fence twice before dark. What did she do?"
I closed my eyes, breathing in the scent of chamomile and cedar on her skin. I couldn't lie to her. Secrecy was the very poison my family had used to strangle us.
"Evelyn sent a letter," I admitted, my voice dropping low. "She’s trying to rattle us. Saying Savannah owed money to people who aren't bound by court expungements."
Eliza didn't cry. She didn't panic. The broken girl who had huddled on our kitchen floor with her head shaved and her ribs cracked was truly gone. In her place was a mother whose jaw set into hard marble.
"Does she know where we are?"
"Not down to the acre," I said. "She knows the county. But Evan is putting her in solitary. The law is holding them, Eliza."
"The law doesn't patrol the ridge at midnight," she whispered.
She was right.
Two hours later, after Eliza had finally drifted into an uneasy sleep, I took my night-vision monocular and stepped out onto the porch. The moon was a sliver of bone behind scudding gray clouds. I lifted the optic to my eye, panning across the timberline four hundred yards up the slope.
Green phosphorescence washed over the trees, sharpening the pine needles and granite outcroppings.
And then, my breath caught.
May you like
Near the old logging trail that crested the ridge, a silhouette moved. It wasn't the lumbering gate of an elk or the low creep of a black bear. It was a man, standing upright, holding binoculars directed straight down at the glowing light of our bedroom window.
***
