Page 27 of Faultline

We come back to the cabin by mid-morning. The sun has cleared the ridge and the frost has burned off the porch railing. My boots are caked with mud and duff from the hillside, and the muscles in my legs carry the deep ache of terrain that doesn't forgive a casual stride.

Inside, I spread my files across the table while Liam makes fresh coffee and neither of us acknowledges that this is already a routine. My laptop opens. His coffeepot heats. We've done this twice and it already has a rhythm neither of us built on purpose.

I pull up the timeline I've been building since Della Pruitt's phone went dead. The corporate filings for Cascade Mineral Partners. The separate filings for Cascade Resource Group. The relocation records I've assembled from Jeanine, from the lodge manager up the highway, from Della's landlord. I add what we found this morning: the hide site, the boot prints with their tactical treads, the energy bar wrappers, the field-stripped cigarettes.

The pattern arranges itself with the clarity of a case brief I've been writing in my head for weeks. Cascade Resource Group clears the people off the property. Cascade Mineral Partners acquires the land. Two operations running in parallel, separated by enough corporate structure to keep them out of the same filing, connected by enough shared infrastructure that someone who knows where to look can see the seams.

I've been looking at the seams since my first client went quiet. What I haven't had until this morning is the other half of the picture.

Liam sets a mug beside my laptop. Full this time. I drink it.

"I need to check in with my client list," I say. "The recruiter who contacted Jeanine used a different subsidiary name but the same phone prefix. If they're rotating their approach, they might be accelerating their timeline. I need to know who's been contacted since the last round of calls and who's gone quiet."

"Use the landline if the cell signal drops."

I reach for my phone and scroll through the contact list I keep separate from everything else, the one with the names and numbers of women who trusted me with the worst things that ever happened to them.

The list is organized by risk level. Della Pruitt is at the top, marked in red because she's been unreachable for weeks and the gap between silence and crisis is measured in hours, not days.

I try Della's number first. Disconnected. The same disconnected tone I've been hearing since she vanished into whatever Cascade built for her on the other end of a relocation package.

I try the next name on the list. Nina Ballard. Voicemail. I leave a message and move on.

The third name picks up on the second ring. She's fine. Steady. Hasn't been contacted by anyone.

The fourth name doesn't answer. The fifth picks up and sounds shaky. A woman came to her door last week with a business card and an offer. She said no. The woman came back a few days later with more money.

I write down every detail. The name on the card. The subsidiary. The dollar amount.

When I hang up, my hands are steady, but the stillness is the kind I learned to maintain when everything underneath it is moving fast and none of it is good.

Liam is watching me from the kitchen counter. He doesn't ask. He waits.

"The fifth call," I say. "She's been contacted twice. Different visits, escalating offer. She turned them down both times, but she's scared, Liam. She's a DV survivor living alone, and a woman with money and a smile keeps showing up at her door telling her how much easier life would be somewhere else."

The muscle in his jaw flexes. His hands rest flat on the counter, held still with the deliberate control he uses when he's deciding what to do with the anger that lives underneath everything else he shows the world.

"How many more calls do you need to make?" he asks.

"All of them."

The light falls across the table where my files are spread beside his maps. Two investigations, one operation. Cascade is buying the mountain and clearing the people off it. The woman at the fifth number on my list is a data point in someone's acquisition timeline the same way the Stoddard family graves were data points on a survey grid.

The difference between my work and Liam's is that his evidence is in the ground. Mine walks and breathes and answers the phone when it rings, until the day it doesn't. I pick up the phone and dial the next number.

9

LIAM

The morning after Tosh worked through every name on her client list, she starts again. Different calls this time. Landlords and employers. Emergency contacts listed in files that are starting to feel less like paperwork and more like evidence.

I sharpen the splitting maul on the bench grinder in the mudroom. I stack the firewood I split yesterday against the west wall of the cabin, bark side up so the rain runs off. Work that keeps me in earshot without sitting across the table watching her like someone with nothing better to do.

Her voice changes with each call. The first two carry the calm precision of a woman who has done this enough times that the questions come out polished, the silences measured. She writes the answers down on a yellow legal pad in handwriting too small for me to read from the mudroom doorway.

The third call is different. She dials a number, and the conversation that follows is short, clipped, mostly Tosh asking questions in the controlled voice she uses when she's writing faster than the person on the other end can talk. She fills half a page of the legal pad before she hangs up and underlines something twice.

"Nina's landlord," she says, without looking up. She's already dialing the next number. "Unit's been cleared out. Lease terminated. The landlord received a letter on corporate stationery requesting early termination. The forwarding address on the paperwork is a P.O. box in Anchorage. No suite number, no street address. Just a box."