Chapter 7 - The Road to North Mountain
The sound of Greta’s horn screaming through the telephone receiver didn't fade; it lived behind my eyes, pulsing with every beat of my heart as Sarah Cho drove her government-issue Ford Taurus through the southern outskirts of Spokane.
The sleet had stopped, replaced by a low, ceiling of dirty yellow clouds that smelled of snow coming down off the Selkirk Range.
“I’ve contacted the Washington State Patrol and the Idaho State Police,” Cho said, her knuckles white on the steering wheel as she took the Interstate 90 on-ramp at fifty-five miles an hour. “The Idaho troopers are dispatching two units from the Coeur d'Alene barracks toward the Blackwood reservoir. But that road—the old timber bypass—is outside their normal patrol grid. It could take them forty minutes to locate her car.”
“Forty minutes is too late,” I said, staring at the gray ribbon of concrete disappearing beneath our wipers. “Clint’s truck has an eight-ton winch and a custom steel bumper he welded himself out of half-inch plate. If he pushed Greta off the switchback at Mile Marker 6, she went down sixty feet into the creek drainage.”
I gripped the blue-backed legal folder on my lap. Inside was the certified scan of my father’s 2018 codicil, stamped with the digital seal of First National Bank and signed by Arthur Pendergast.
It was my weapon. But paper doesn't stop four tons of four-wheel-drive Dodge Ram coming through the mist.
My phone rang again.
It was Neil Harmon.
I hit the speaker button immediately. “Harmon! Where are you?”
“I’m in my personal truck,” the deputy’s voice crackled through the dashboard speakers, rough with exhaustion and static. “Marcus Callahan took my cruiser and my county badge at four this morning. I’m running on a twelve-gauge shotgun and an old six-channel scanner. Piper, tell me you’re still in Spokane.”
“I’m twenty miles from the state line with a state caseworker,” I said. “Clint just ran Aunt Greta off the reservoir road. She was on the phone with me when it happened.”
A long, profane curse rattled from Harmon’s end of the line.
“I’m five miles from the reservoir now,” Harmon said, the sound of his old Chevy’s engine roaring under a hard load. “Greta’s Buick is down in the alder thicket below the third switchback. I can see the ruts where Clint’s duals pushed her through the guard cable. The car is on its roof in two feet of runoff.”
“Is she alive?” I screamed.
“I don't know yet! I’m getting out of the truck to slide down the bank now,” Harmon breathed, the phone rustling against his canvas jacket. “Clint’s not here. His tracks lead up the mountain toward the logging camp. Piper, he’s got five hundred gallons of off-road diesel in the skidder tank up there. If he lights that cabin, the whole ridge will go up, and Tony and Bria are inside.”
“We’re thirty minutes out,” Cho spoke into the speaker, her voice dropping into that calm, terrifying clarity that high-level administrators get when they realize people are about to die. “Deputy Harmon, this is Sarah Cho with the Washington State DCYF. I have an emergency felony revocation warrant for Clinton Callahan issued by the Spokane County Superior Court thirty minutes ago. You are authorized under interstate mutual aid to execute that warrant with lethal force if there is an imminent threat to human life.”
A dry, bitter bark came from Harmon. “Lady, I don't need a Washington warrant to shoot Clint Callahan if he’s trying to burn his own daughter alive. Just get here with the medical kit. The ambulance out of Blackwood won't come up this mountain without Marcus Callahan’s permission, and Marcus is currently sitting in the diner in town eating pancakes and pretending his radio is broken.”
The line clicked off.
We crossed the state line five minutes later.
The welcome sign—*WELCOME TO IDAHO: FAMOUS POTATOES*—was pitted with old birdshot and smeared with road salt. The four-lane highway narrowed down to two lanes of cracked asphalt, winding through the narrow canyons where the pine trees grew so close to the shoulder they blocked the daylight, leaving the road in a permanent, cold green twilight.
Blackwood County didn't look like America in the twenty-first century; it looked like a private kingdom carved out of timber fifty years ago and forgotten by the rest of the world. Every third truck that passed us was a mud-splattered logging rig with the Callahan triangle logo stenciled on the door. Every small frame house on the river had an old skidder or an engine block rusting in the yard beneath a blue plastic tarp.
This was the empire my father had built with a chainsaw and twenty-four hired men.
This was the kingdom Clint was willing to kill his own family to keep.
We took the cutoff at Mile Marker 14, leaving the state highway for the washboard gravel of the reservoir road. The Taurus rattled violently, its city tires throwing up a hail of wet stones against the floorboards as the road began its brutal, switchback climb up the face of North Mountain.
At the third switchback, Harmon’s blue Chevy pickup was parked crookedly across the gravel, its hazard lights flashing in the mist.
Cho slammed on the brakes, the Taurus sliding six feet in the slush before stopping against Harmon’s rear bumper.
I threw my door open and ran to the edge of the shoulder.
The guard cable—three strands of rusty wire rope on cedar posts—was snapped clean through, the splinters of the posts scattered across the mud like matchsticks. Sixty feet below, half-submerged in the swollen, brown waters of the creek, was Aunt Greta’s 1998 Buick LeSabre, its white roof crushed flat against the door frames.
Neil Harmon was at the bottom of the ravine, waist-deep in the freezing water, using an iron pry-bar to wrench the driver’s door away from the silt.
“Harmon!” I yelled, sliding down the wet clay bank on my heels, the briars tearing at the green hospital scrubs until my calves were bleeding.
Harmon looked up, his face covered in gray mud and creek silt, his campaign hat gone, his gray hair plastered to his forehead.
“She’s breathing!” he shouted over the roar of the water. “Her leg is pinned under the steering column, and she’s got a bad head cut, but she’s conscious! Piper, stay back! The car’s shifting on the gravel bar!”
Sarah Cho came down the bank behind me with the first-aid kit from the Taurus trunk, her tailored slacks soaked to the knees, her leather shoes ruined, but her movements steady and fast.
“I’m an EMT certified volunteer,” Cho said, dropping into the creek beside Harmon without a second of hesitation. “Let me get the c-collar on her before you pry that frame. If her cervical spine is cracked, moving that door will sever it.”
Harmon looked at the petite Asian caseworker in her ruined wool blazer, then stepped back two inches to let her reach through the broken window.
Inside the crushed cabin of the Buick, Aunt Greta’s face was visible through the silt. Her silver hair was soaked red, her eyes half-shut, her wrinkled lips moving with a dry, clicking sound.
“Piper...” she croaked, her hand reaching through the twisted window frame, her fingers catching the hem of my borrowed sweatshirt.
“I’m here, Aunt Greta,” I sobbed, dropping to my knees in the freezing mud beside the car. “I’m here. We’re getting you out.”
“The... the strongbox...” Greta whispered, her breath rattling with fluid in her chest. “In the trunk... Piper... I went to the house while Lucille was in Spokane... I got it...”
Harmon and I both looked toward the rear of the submerged vehicle.
The Buick’s trunk had popped open during the tumble down the rocks. Lodged between the spare tire and a rusted wheel-jack was a heavy, olive-drab steel ammunition box—the one Dad had kept on his lap in the wheelchair five years ago.
The brass padlock was still through the hasp.
“Get it,” Harmon grunted, leaning into the creek to reach the box. His fingers caught the canvas handle, and he hauled the thirty-pound container out of the water, setting it down on the gravel bar with a dull, metallic *clonk*.
“The key,” I said, digging the tarnished brass key from my pocket.
My fingers were so numb with freezing water and terror that I couldn't align the notches on the first try. On the second try, the key slid into the brass cylinder.
It turned with a sharp, heavy *snap*.
The lid of the ammo box opened on dry rubber gaskets.
Inside, wrapped in three layers of oiled butcher paper, were two microcassette tapes, a stack of handwritten ledger sheets from 1994, and an eight-by-ten manila envelope marked in my father’s pencil: *‘THE HANLEY SETTLEMENT & CLINTON’S RECORD.’*
I tore the envelope open.
A dozen photographs spilled out onto the wet lid of the ammo box.
They were not from last year. They were dated September 12, 1994.
In the photographs was a twenty-year-old girl with dark hair and wide, terrified eyes—Brenda Hanley’s older sister, Mary, who had disappeared from Blackwood County thirty years ago, the girl the town had always whispered had run off to California with a trucker.
In the photographs, Mary was sitting in the same chair Rowan had sat in yesterday—the mahogany armchair at the head of the table on Old Creek Road.
Her face was unrecognizable. Her jaw was wired shut with dental steel, both her eyes swollen black, and standing behind her, his hand resting on the back of the chair with that same, arrogant tilt of the chin, was our father, Ed Callahan.
And taped to the back of the photograph was a handwritten confession signed by Lucille Callahan:
*‘I, Lucille Callahan, acknowledge that on September 10, 1994, my son Clinton did cause the injuries to Mary Hanley following an altercation regarding the boundary timber on Section 14. In consideration of the sum of twenty-five thousand dollars paid from the joint timber account, Mary Hanley agrees to vacate the state and make no formal complaint to the sheriff. Ed Callahan witnessed this agreement.’*
Harmon looked at the photograph. His breath hissed through his teeth like steam from a cracked boiler.
“Mary Hanley didn't go to California,” Harmon whispered, his hand shaking as he touched the paper. “She died in a trailer park in Reno six years later of an overdose. The family always thought Clint killed her soul before she ever left this valley.”
From up the mountain, three miles above us through the timber, came a sound that rolled down the canyon like summer thunder.
*Boom.*
A dull, concussive thump that shook the hemlock needles from the branches over our heads.
May you like
Then, rising above the dark green canopy of the cedar forest near the crest of North Mountain, a thick, greasy plume of black diesel smoke began to claw its way toward the yellow sky.
Clint had lit the skidder.
