Page 14 of Travis
Chapter 4
Sera
Garnet Bend, Montana was small in the way that suggested choice rather than failure. A main street with a bar and grill and a coffee shop and storefronts that someone had taken the time to maintain. One traffic light, blinking yellow at this hour. The kind of town that probably looked picturesque in daylight and felt like the edge of the world in the middle of the night.
I drove through it in about five minutes and kept going.
The address was south of town, up a county road that narrowed as the houses thinned and the trees thickened. The GPS told me I’d arrived before I saw anything that looked like a destination. Just mountains in the distance, trees, a dark road, and then a gate.
I pulled up and sat in the car with the engine idling and my headlights cutting across metal that had no business being at the end of a gravel road in rural Montana.
It was heavy. Industrial. No ranch signage, no name on a post. Just the gate, set between two concrete pillars, securitycameras, and a keypad mounted on a steel post at driver’s-window height. An electronic hum came from somewhere behind the pillars. Low, constant, the sound of a system that was always on.
I pressed the button that looked like it might be an intercom. Held it down. Nothing. Tried it again. Nothing.
I picked up my phone from the cupholder and called Travis. Four rings then the same voicemail with no greeting and no name.
I was sitting outside a fortified gate in the middle of the night, trying to get the attention of a man who had not acknowledged my existence in three years.
The keypad wanted a code. I tried the address numbers from the road. A beep, a red light. Wrong. I tried the year. Same beep. Same red light.
I could turn around. Drive back to Garnet Bend and find a motel. Try again in the morning like a reasonable person.
But I’d driven hours to get here. I hadn’t come to be reasonable.
The code would be something personal. Travis was too smart for defaults, but it had to be something his fingers could find by reflex. Something embedded deep.
Something connected to Naomi.
My sister had told me once, in a conversation I wished I could forget, about the name Travis called her. The private one. Not in front of other people, not in front of family. Just between them.
She’d mentioned it casually, the way Naomi mentioned everything about her life. Casually and completely, because it never occurred to her that the details of her happiness might land differently on someone who was quietly drowning in the wake of it.
He calls me Treasure.
I’d smiled and said something appropriate and excused myself and stood in the bathroom of the restaurant where we’d been having lunch and pressed my hands against the counter until my knuckles went white because the man I couldn’t stop thinking about had a name for my sister that sounded like he’d found the only thing in the world worth keeping.
That had been three years ago. The word had lived in me since, a small sharp object I’d swallowed and never passed.
I typed T-R-E-A-S-U-R-E.
The light turned green. The gate swung inward, silent and smooth.
I should have felt triumph. Instead, I sat there with a taste in my mouth like I’d bitten through the inside of my cheek. I’d just used Travis’s love for my dead sister to open a gate.
The driveway curved through trees and delivered me to exactly the kind of house I’d originally pictured. A ranch house. Single story. Peeling paint, sagging porch, dark windows. The driveway continued past the front, and I followed it around to the back, looking for signs of life. There were none. I parked near a utility door and killed the engine.
I walked back around front and knocked. Hard, with the side of my fist. Counted to thirty. Banged again. There was definitely nobody home.
I walked around the house. Tried every window I could reach. Tried the front door. Tried a side door. Everything was locked, and not in the way a ranch house was locked. The paint was flaking off, but the window frames were reinforced. The porch was sagging in places, but the door was heavy and seated in a metal frame.
Interesting paradox.
I stood on the front porch and looked out at the dark trees and the gravel driveway and thought about what I was actually considering. Breaking into someone’s home. Not a hypotheticalsomeone. Travis Hale’s home. A man I hadn’t spoken to in three years, who had never once returned my calls, who might very well call the police when he found me inside.
I grabbed my phone and looked up hotels around the area. The nearest one with availability was two hours away.
I wasn’t leaving until I talked to Travis and hopefully got his help. If that meant sleeping in my car I’d do so. But I didn’t want to do that. I was tired and scared and just wanted to get inside.
