Page 79 of Faultline

"Rhys. Liam. We're back at the cabin. Tosh sent the collapse video to her legal team in Anchorage and the trooper barracks in Palmer. Nancy's got a federal motion protecting the bridge site. Cascade's already put out a statement offering to rebuild. Nobody goes near that wreckage until investigators arrive."

Rhys's voice comes back after a pause. "Understood. I'll brief Harlow and Marc."

The channel falls silent. The stove crackles. Outside, the storm is easing, the wind dropping from a howl to a steady pressure against the cabin walls. The sky through the kitchen window is lighter than it was an hour ago. The clouds are thinning over the ridge.

When the weather breaks, the helicopter will come. The investigators will reach the wreckage. The evidence Cascade tried to bury under a blizzard and a polished press release is already sitting on a secure server in Anchorage and in a trooper's inbox in Palmer.

Cascade cut the only road out of this valley. They timed it for a blizzard, covered it with a press release, and assumed the isolation would do the rest.

They didn't account for me. Or for the people in this town.

The bridge may be gone, but the fight is only beginning.

21

LIAM

Three days after the bridge came down, I'm digging a grave. The shovel bites into frozen subsoil on the rise above the creek where four wooden crosses already stand. The ground resists every stroke, the frost line deeper than it should be this early in the season, and every impact jars up through my wrists and into my shoulders.

The investigators got in by helicopter the morning after the storm broke. They pulled Danny from the creek, documented the wreckage, and released his remains yesterday.

Pete and Sally asked if they could bury Danny here. On Stoddard land. Because Danny loved this mountain. He fished the creek below the cemetery every chance he got and hiked the ridge on his days off. He told Pete once that the view from the Stoddard meadow was the best thing in the valley. I said yes before Pete finished asking.

The birch around the cemetery stand like white columns against the grey morning. My great-grandfather chose this spot for the birch and the drainage that keeps the earth firm. Four crosses. Three generations of Stoddards. Ezra, Catherine, Dale, and my father. The wood my father carved by hand, now weathered to a silver that catches the low light.

Weeks ago, Cascade drove fluorescent survey flags into these graves with a pneumatic gun and GPS coordinates. Turned the dead into data points on an acquisition grid.

Today we're putting Danny in the ground beside them. The first person we can prove Cascade killed outright. Danny, who drove a salt spreader for the borough road crew and should be salting a road right now instead of lying in a box Pete built from lumber Hank donated from the hardware store.

I dig until the hole is deep enough, until the burn in my shoulders and forearms drowns out the other thing living in my body. The cold weight that settled at the base of my spine when the center span dropped. The memory of Danny falling rises up. Danny's hand was almost close enough to touch, but not close enough to save.

Tosh finds me when the grave is finished. She comes up the trail from the cabin carrying two mugs of coffee. The sight of her walking through my family's cemetery in my flannel, her boots leaving prints in the frost beside my grandfather's headstone, hits me low in the gut.

Possessiveness with nothing gentle about it. She belongs here. On my land, in my clothes, walking among my dead like she has a right to. She does.

The certainty of that closes around something deep inside me and doesn't let go.

She hands me a mug and looks at the grave. Reads the depth, the clean edges, the care I took with the corners.

"You squared the corners," she says. "Most people wouldn't bother."

"He's going in Stoddard ground. It gets done right."

"You dug a grave with ninety-degree corners at five in the morning in frozen soil because doing it wrong wasn't an option." She takes a sip of her coffee. "That's either the most Liam Stoddard thing I've ever seen, or you need a different therapist than me."

"You're not my therapist."

"No. Your therapist would've brought you a coat. I brought you coffee." She nods toward the cabin. "Pete and Sally are on the road. Rhys got word across the creek to the town side. The service road fords upstream where the water's shallow enough for trucks. Anyone who can make it up the switchbacks is coming."

I look at the cemetery. The ground I just opened. My father's crosses beside it, carved by his hands, defiled by Cascade's survey crew, still upright.

"Good," I say.

They start arriving before noon. The logging road that climbs the switchbacks from the valley floor to Stoddard land was never meant for the traffic it carries today. By the time the last truck parks in the meadow below the cemetery, the road is rutted deep enough that the spring runoff will carve new channels through the tracks.

Rhys comes first, with Harlow, Marc, and Sela in the department's four-wheel-drive. Harlow scans the tree line and the approaches with the systematic sweep of a former FBI agent cataloging sight lines and exits before she takes her coat off.

Marc carries a duffel that I suspect holds more than a change of clothes, because Marc is former Army CID and men like us don't walk into gatherings without options.