Page 6 of Saved By the Mountain Man Ranger

"The search coordinator in 2004 was a guy named Bill Pratt," she says, not looking up. "Retired Forest Service. Ran the initial ground search for nine days before weather shut him down. His final report says they covered eighty percent of the viable search area."

"They didn't."

Her head lifts. "You've read his report?"

"I worked with Bill for two years before he retired." The coffee is too hot. I drink it anyway, leaning against the counter across from her. "He was good. But eighty percent was generous. The drainage east of Silver Queen is impossible terrain in November. Vertical drops, loose scree, no helicopter access when the ceiling drops below a thousand feet. They covered the trails and the maintained areas. The backcountry swallowed everything else."

She's writing in her notebook. Fast, precise strokes. "You think there's a viable search area that was never covered."

"I think Marcus Farrell went somewhere he shouldn't have, the same way you did yesterday. And the mountain kept him."

Her pen stops. Those dark brown eyes come up to mine with something fierce burning in them. "The mountain didn't keep him. Something happened to him. People don't just vanish."

"Up here they do."

"Not without a reason."

The conviction in her voice pulls something loose in my chest. She believes this. Down to her bones, Eliza Hart believes Marcus Farrell's disappearance has an explanation, and she's going to sit in my kitchen until she finds it.

"You're stubborn," I say.

"I'm thorough."

"Those aren't mutually exclusive."

Her mouth twitches. Almost a smile. "Neither are stoic and annoying, apparently."

I look away before she can see whatever my face is doing. Because my face is doing something. I can feel it. Some unfamiliar rearrangement of muscles that haven't been used in a long time.

The day passes in a strange rhythm. Snow piling against the windows. Wind howling through the trees. Eliza at my kitchen table, working through her files with the focus of a surgeon. Me at my desk by the radio, monitoring weather updates, checking in with Briggs on the sat phone, charting the storm's progression on my topo maps.

We orbit each other in the small space. She gets up for more coffee, brushing past me in the narrow kitchen. Her hip grazes mine. She smells like cocoa butter. The contact lasts half a second, and my whole body responds.

This is a problem.

By noon, she's asking questions. Not tentative ones. Direct, specific, relentless questions about trail conditions, terrain features, water sources, seasonal access patterns. Things only someone who's lived on this mountain for fifteen years would know.

And I answer them. All of them. I don't know why. People ask me things constantly. Hikers wanting directions. Tourists wanting photo spots. Search teams wanting coordinates. I give them the minimum and move on.

Eliza asks, and the answers come out of me fully formed. Detailed. Like she's pulling a cork on something I didn't know was bottled.

"The Farrell family," she says during a late lunch of canned chili I heated on the stove. "You take the call every November."

"I told you that."

"Why you?"

"Because I'm the one who's here."

"There are other rangers."

"Seasonal ones. They rotate out. Mrs. Farrell calls the same number every year. If nobody answers who knows her son's name, she has to start the whole story over again. She shouldn't have to do that."

Eliza sets her spoon down. Looks at me with an expression I can't read.

"What?" I say.

"Nothing." She picks the spoon back up. "You're just not what I expected."