Page 54 of Forbidden Protector

"Nothing on the porch. Nothing in the yard I can see." I kill the lamp so I'm not lit up in the glass and look out at nothing. Dark yard, dark fence line, the shapes of the horses standing quiet in the corral like nothing's wrong. Gus keeps his nose at the glass another ten seconds, then huffs and drops back down onto the couch cushion like the threat, whatever it was, has already decided not to bother with tonight.

"Coyote, maybe," I say, though I don't believe it and neither does she.

"You don't sound sure."

"I'm not." I put the lamp back on. "Lock the porch door, please."

She does, and I hear the bolt go while I'm still in the hall, and that's one less thing I have to check tonight.

Back in the study, the folders wait where I left them.

Deep into the archive, past midnight now, I find the scan.

Water-damaged at the corner, the kind of document that got boxed wet sometime in its life and dried crooked. A survey request, denied, 1987, Blackwater land, north section. Attached to it, a witness statement nobody ever typed up clean, handwritten, half the ink gone to rust-colored ghost against the page.

I read the surveyor's name twice before it lands.

Caleb Tatum.

The room goes very quiet. Quieter than the study's ever been. Quieter than the night Gideon stood behind that desk and told me to find out who she was before she found out who we are.

I already know who she is. What I'm holding is thirty-nine years older than that.

My hand doesn't move. Neither does the rest of me.

Down the hall, through the wall, I can hear her talking low to the dog, the easy rhythm of a woman who thinks tonight is over.

It isn't.

I sit there with a dead man's name in my hands and no idea yet how deep the ground under this house goes.

For the first time since my truck idled outside an airport terminal, I have absolutely no idea what to do next.

SIXTEEN

HOLT

I wake to the house completely silent and the lamp still on.

For a second I don't know why my neck aches or why I’m at my desk.

Then I see her.

She's standing over the desk like she stopped mid-step and never finished stopping.

My arm had been pinning half the folder down while I slept. The other half has slid loose, the pages close enough to her hand that she didn't have to do anything wrong to see it. Caleb Tatum's name is right there. She picks it up.

"That's mine." My voice comes out low, flat, nothing left soft in it. "Get your hands off it."

"It has my grandfather's name on it."

Not news. I made that connection myself last night, sitting in this same chair. What's news is that she's found the file before I found the nerve to bring it to her.

I don't get up right away.

Some old habit that says a man doesn't come up out of a chair into a fight he hasn't finished sizing up. I have never needed the habit more than I need it right now, looking at Caleb Tatum's handwriting spread open under her hands like evidence at her own trial.

My hand finds the edge of the desk without my telling it to, and I leave it there. A closed fist gives a man somewhere to put what he isn't saying.