Chapter 10
“I see the tracks on the ledge, you little bastard!” Caleb’s voice was wild with exhaustion and rage. “There’s eighty feet of air behind that rock! Step out or I put three slugs through the pine!”
I didn't answer.
I reached into the box, uncoiled the rubber headset, and pressed the single earbud into my left ear.
I flipped the toggle marked **PARLOR** to the live position.
The white noise of the blizzard vanished from my head.
Through the earbud, the audio came through with shocking, intimate clarity—so close, so dry and warm, that for half a second I thought I was standing on the rag rug in Faith’s front room.
I could hear the slow, rhythmic ticking of the walnut grandfather clock beside the mudroom door.
I could hear the dry crackle of hemlock logs burning in the open hearth.
And then I heard the heavy, iron-shod heel of Silas Redfern’s boot scraping across the red oak floorboards.
*Scrape. Thump. Scrape.*
He was pacing between the front window and the sideboard, five feet from wherever the microphone was buried inside the mantelpiece.
*“He’s at the spoke, Silas,”* Lyle’s voice crackled from a small base-station transponder inside the parlor—Lyle was still down at the timber bridge, radioing in from the road. *“Caleb’s at the base of the quartz now. He’s got the boy pinned against the drop.”*
*“Tell him to take his time,”* Silas said. His voice was right on top of the mic, low, thick with tobacco phlegm. *“Put the rifle through his thigh first. I want the surveyor’s book intact. Don’t let him drop the bag into the creek.”*
A chair scraped against the wood.
A heavy, wet cough sounded from the floor near the hearth.
*“You won’t get the book, Silas,”* Faith spoke. Her voice was faint, ragged, but every syllable was cut from cold granite. *“The boy’s smarter than your whole council. He knows what Thomas wrote down.”*
*“The boy is a stray,”* Silas replied, his boots coming to a stop directly in front of her. *“A nameless pup from the county poorhouse you brought into this valley to mock Donald’s memory. You thought because you gave him an iron compass and a chain he’d make something of himself? He’s dying in a snowdrift forty chains from where his real daddy took his last drink.”*
A soft, metallic click echoed through the line—the sound of an iron fire poker being lifted from its stand.
*“You’re an old woman, Faith,”* Silas said softly. *“The clan’s carried your widows’ share for eleven winters. But you got greedy. You let that DEP dog Vance stay in your hayloft while he was poking around the culverts. You thought you could trade my timber lines to the state for a federal pension?”*
*“David Vance was my sister’s boy,”* Faith whispered. The rage in her voice was so dense it caused the microphone diaphragm to distort. *“And you put him in a fifty-gallon drum of slaked lime behind the third skid trail. You and Caleb and that half-wit Lyle.”*
*“We put him where the family put every dog that bit the hand,”* Silas said. *“And you watched us do it. You kept your mouth shut and took the beef and the firewood every November.”*
*“I kept my mouth shut until I had the line,”* she said.
A pause fell over the parlor. Outside the utility box, the wind shrieked against the quartz pillar, but in my ear, the silence between them was heavier than the storm.
*“What line?”* Silas’s voice shifted, the calm slipping, replaced by a sudden, jagged edge of suspicion.
I heard the sound of paper being kicked across the floor—the yellow pages Silas had torn from her surveyor’s transit.
*“You think I kept Donald’s books to measure timber?”* Faith let out a short, dry laugh that ended in a cough. *“Donald didn't survey hemlocks, Silas. He was the head blasting engineer for the Bluefield Coal and Iron Company for thirty years. He laid the charges for the state highway tunnel through the south gap. He knew how much dynamite it took to drop a limestone shelf into the creek.”*
The radio in Silas’s coat began to squelch. Caleb’s voice broke through the parlor audio, shouting over the storm at the overlook:
*“Silas! I’m at the base of the Dead Man’s Spoke! The boy’s behind the quartz! I’m moving in with the Winchester!”*
Silas didn't answer Caleb.
Through the earbud, I heard the heavy rustle of wool as Silas lunged forward, his massive hand closing around Faith’s collar, dragging her up from the floor.
*“What did you give him, Faith?”* Silas’s voice was a violent, suffocating hiss against the mantelpiece. *“The box at the bridge... the emergency relay at the spillway... Why did you file the security chain on the front door?”*
Faith didn't scream. She didn't struggle.
*“I filed the chain so it would bind when Caleb kicked it,”* she said, her voice dead, level, and entirely devoid of fear. *“I needed sixty seconds to drop the transponder into the haversack. And I gave the boy the code.”*
*“The code to what?”* Silas roared, the fire poker striking the iron grate with a deafening ring. *“The township books are in the safe! What did you slip into his glove?”*
A boot crunched into the snow five yards from my rock.
I turned my head.
Through the whiteout, Caleb emerged like a ghost—shoulders hunched against the gale, his headlamp beam pinning me against the quartz pillar, the black barrel of his Winchester raised to his eye.
“Don't move a finger, Jesse!” Caleb screamed over the wind, his finger whitening against the trigger. “Drop the iron pin or I blow your knee out through your trousers!”
I didn't drop the pin.
In my left ear, through the live feed from the parlor three miles down the mountain, Silas Redfern’s voice boomed through the speaker, demanding his final answer:
*“You threw the bastard out to die in the frost, Faith! You locked him into sixty miles of whiteout with no truck and no coat! So why did you slip him the master gate override?”*
Over the static, Faith’s voice rang out without a tremor, clear and cold as well-water:
*“Because in five seconds, Silas, you aren't the hunter.”*
She paused, and across the open frequency, I could hear her draw her final, steady breath.
*“You're the bait.”*
*BEEP.*
A high-pitched, piercing electronic arming tone screamed through the earbud—a three-pulse warble that rose in frequency until it locked into a continuous, vibrating whine.
Inside the steel DEP box, right beside the audio jack, a small red toggle switch flipped open on an electromagnetic solenoid, exposing a recessed brass contact point.
A contact point cut from a single link of security chain.
The cut on the link wasn't a defect.
It was a key.
The filed brass link in my pocket was the bridge shunt for the emergency avalanche charges Donald Redfern had set into the limestone cliff seventy years ago to protect the valley from spring mudslides—a series of deep dynamite boreholes running the entire length of the ridge above the homestead.
One touch of that link to the open terminal in the box, and forty thousand tons of frozen limestone shale would break from the crest, roaring down the mountain to bury Caleb, the flume, and the gorge.
And straight into the north wall of the Redfern house.
I looked down at the brass link sitting in my frozen palm.
Caleb’s Winchester was leveled straight at my skull, his boot stepping onto the petrified pine log that crossed the chasm, his finger tightening on the steel trigger.
And in my ear, the arming tone reached its crescendo, waiting for the contact that would save my life—or drop Faith into her grave.
