Page 137 of In the Dark of the Past

“I know what Fund-adjacent means,” she said.

She took the laptop back. I watched her save the photograph to a folder I hadn’t seen before, label it, and close the window. Whatever the Roberts family had buried with them in 1994, it would have to wait a little longer. But not forever.

The knock came at two-fifteen. Three measured raps. It was the knock of someone who knew the door wasn’t technically open to the public but had calculated that the group inside would answer it anyway and had prepared something to say when they did.

Cade checked the door camera on his phone and said, “It’s Courtland Holt.”

Silence fell, and I watched as Myra set her water glass down.

“I’ll get it,” she said.

She said it the way people said things they’d already decided before the question arose. No deliberation, no shift in expression, just standing and walking to the door. Autumn looked up, Cade looked at his phone, I looked at the door with everybody else. I didn’t understand the tension that had threaded itself through the room. Who was Courtland Holt?

The man who walked in was around Myra’s age, maybe two years older. He wore a good jacket over a rumpled shirt, had a messenger bag over his shoulder, and carried a notebook in one hand. He had the kind of face that read as trustworthy in a way that would be useful in his work and that he probably knew was useful.

His eyes went to Myra first. He didn’t scan the room, just zeroed in on Myra.

Interesting.

“Jennings,” he said.

“Holt,” she said.

The economy of it, the usage of surnames, the flat affect, the absence of any version of “it’s been a while” or “you look good” or any of the other things people said when they were trying to manage the temperature of a reunion told me everything I needed to know about the temperature of whatever this was.

“Portland Ledger,” he said to the room. “I’ve been covering the Benevolence Fund from the outside for a while now. I heard about what’s going down and have documentation on the shell structure going back to 2015, a source inside the county recorder’s office who flagged the Roberts Fund transfers, and this morning’s public filing from Grant’s office, which—” He stopped. Recalibrated. “I know you’re not obligated to talk to me. But I’m asking anyway.”

“You drove from Portland this morning?” Libby asked.

“Two nights ago, actually.” He glanced at her, then back to the room. “I went to the station yesterday to talk to Sheriff Callahan, but he wasn’t there. I was going to track you down elsewhere—” Another stop, this one different from the first. It wasn’t tactical, it was something else. “But I wanted to be sure the AG was actually engaged before I approached any of you. I didn’t want to blow anything.”

That was a particular kind of professional discipline. The kind that came from having blown something before.

“Do you want to sit down?” I asked, not sure if it was the right thing to say. I glanced at Myra and saw she was still standing rigidly. She didn’t look at me when I said it, just went back to the bar and her laptop.

Courtland sat and put his notebook on the table face-down—the gesture of someone offering not to take notes, meaning he understood that the thing he needed right now was trust and that trust was not the same as a source agreement.

“What do you have on the shell structure?” Autumn asked, already uncapping her pen.

He told us. It took forty minutes, and it was good. Independently sourced, cross-referenced against public filings, and had two threads that ran parallel to our own investigation without overlapping it. His county recorder source had been tracking disbursements from the same MR-7 account we’d found in the annex. His documentation didn’t have the annex records, didn’t have Evan’s testimony, didn’t have Sean’s cooperation. But it had six months of careful journalism that had built toward the same architecture from the outside.

“You’ve been doing this alone?” Libby said.

“Mostly,” he said.

“Why Maple Ridge?” Autumn asked. “You seem familiar with it. Are you from here originally?”

“Yes.”

“But you left,” she said. “You’ve been in Portland for…what, five years?”

“Six,” he said.

He didn’t offer more than that. Autumn noted the non-answer with the professional acceptance of someone who had learned when to push and when to wait. I noted the way Myra’s posture changed very slightly. It wasn’t dramatic, nothing anyone who wasn’t reading people for a living would catch, but it was the stillness of someone not reacting on purpose.

“The Roberts Fund transfers,” I said, thinking maybe Myra was on to something. “What does your source know about the Roberts family?”

Courtland looked at me. I saw a quick recalibration. He hadn’t expected that question.