Page 3 of Forbidden Protector

I take out the folder instead. Jacob Mercer's folder, the foreman's folder, the door that five months of somebody's patience finally cracked open just wide enough to let one accountant through.

Beside it I set the other thing. The thing with no case number because it was never a case: a field notebook, my father's, the cardboard cover gone soft as cloth from thirty-five years of a man's hands.

I don't need to open it. I copied the one page that matters into my own hand years ago, the way you learn a prayer you don't believe.

Blackwater knows. Meeting refused. They'll bury this like they buried '41.

My grandfather wrote that in the last week of his life, then went up the mountain to survey a section line for a family that didn't want it surveyed.

The mountain killed him.

Exposure, the county said, a careless old man caught out in weather, ruled and filed and buried in pine.

In the box in the garage is one page of a coroner's supplement naming the last man known to have spoken to Caleb Tatum before he walked up into the snow.

The name was Blackwater.

Outside, thirty miles north up a county road I haven't driven yet, a black truck is turning in under a gate with the family's name on it, ten miles past the Sullivan land, onto Blackwater ground running back into the foothills toward the peaks.

I think about the man driving it, the scar, the mirror, the throat above the collar.

I think, with the clean cold certainty of a woman who has already decided:

I am going to take this family apart.

They have already assigned me the one who takes things apart for a living.

I turn off the light.

TWO

HOLT

I'm in the study before he sends for me. I usually am.

There's a place along the north wall, between the gun cabinet and the window over the drive, where a man can stand and not be in the room until he decides to be.

My father built the house. I found the seam in it anyway.

"Holt." He doesn't look up from the desk. "Sit."

I don't. I come off the wall and stand where he can see me. He lets it go, which is not the same as not noticing.

Knox is already in the leather chair, one boot on his knee, turning his phone face-down on the arm like it's nothing to him. It isn't nothing.

My mother sits in the window light with her hands folded, saying the thing she says best.

Jacob stands by the cold fireplace in his work coat, hat in his hands. Thirty years in and the man still won't sit in Gideon's study uninvited. He looks tired. I log it and don't open it.

"The Fed," Gideon says.

"She's at the Riverview." Four words. My whole report.

"I know where she is. I want to know what she is."

He sets the pen down and squares it to the desk edge, the way he squares everything. "Six months since the task-force chatter crossed our desk. Six months I've had people hardening books that were already clean, spending money to look like a family with money to hide." A pause, built for it. "And they send us one accountant."

"Maybe they're economizing," Knox says.