Part 3
“Nine,” Mara said. “Three kills I saw. Six I certified from Wade’s notes without going to the sites.”
At the number nine, Evie stopped moving. Whatever answer she had braced for, it had not been one her mother could count.
“How many did you get paid extra for?”
“All nine.”
Evie pushed away from the table and walked to the sink. She opened the faucet, then shut it without using the water.
“Don’t tell me he made you,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were. Maybe not right away, but you’d get there—the bills, the cottage, my tuition. You’d keep naming things until it sounded like you had no choice.”
Mara lowered herself into the chair. Her ankle throbbed inside the boot, a steady pulse that worsened when she was tired. “I told myself the bears were already dead. That refusing one form wouldn’t bring them back and would only put somebody else in my chair.”
“Did that help?”
“For a while.”
Evie folded her arms over her chest. “I’ll sit with you when you call Ruiz. But if you blame Wade for your signatures, I’m leaving.”
She left the chair opposite Mara in place. She had not walked out, and Mara found that harder to bear than a slammed door.
Mara went to her bedroom and returned with a green metal cashbox. The key had been on her ring for years, worn smooth between the keys to Wade’s gates. Inside were nine pocket notebooks, their covers swollen from rain and sweat.
“I wrote down every set I serviced and every animal I saw,” she said. “Not because I planned to turn him in. I kept thinking there’d be a day when I couldn’t remember which version Wade put on paper.”
Evie did not touch them. “Is my study in there?”
Mara looked up as Evie opened a map on her laptop.
“Wade asked for my weekly movement maps,” Evie said. “He told me he wanted the guides to avoid denning females and keep clients out of the camera grid. The false complaints started shifting after I gave him access.”
Colored circles marked the recent ranges of six bears. Four overlapped sites in Mara’s notebooks.
“I handed him the routes,” Evie said. “I made it easy.”
“You didn’t know.”
“Neither did you, the first time.”
Mara had been ready to say that Evie had not known and she had. But her daughter was looking at the map as if good intentions could not move the colored circles back where they belonged. Mara closed the cashbox.
“There’s a place you need to see,” Mara said.
They took the company utility vehicle assigned to Mara’s cottage because she could not walk the distance. Wade had not asked for it back, and her employee code still opened the lease gates. Evie drove past the Juniper block and turned onto an overgrown skid road Mara had not traveled in two years.
The afternoon had warmed into the low fifties. Gnats hung over standing water, and the smell of sour peat came through the open sides of the vehicle. At a lightning-scarred tupelo, Mara told Evie to stop.
They moved slowly into a shallow ravine. Mara used the cane; Evie carried the cashbox in both hands. Beneath leaf mold and storm-fallen branches, lengths of dark cable lay half swallowed by roots. One loop still held the narrow bones of a fox’s foreleg. Farther down, a chain had grown into the side of a cypress until bark covered all but three links.
Mara touched a strip of faded orange tape tied above it. Her knot.
“We called this the old line,” she said. “When hides were damaged, Wade told us to leave the rest for scavengers. When he started selling parts, we left less.”
Evie stood over a low mound where antler, rib, and vertebra showed through the leaves. Mara had seen thousands of her daughter’s field sheets, each animal reduced to clean columns of sex, weight, location, and date. Evie stared at what had been left out until she pressed a sleeve over her nose.
“Did you bring me because you think seeing this will make me understand you?” she asked.
“No. I brought you because the notebooks aren’t enough by themselves, and because I know where everything is.”
Mara took out her phone. One bar of service flickered at the top of the screen. Evie had already given her the number for Officer Lena Ruiz, a state wildlife officer who had reviewed permits for the bear study and once spent an hour helping their crew free a deer tangled in old fencing.
Mara called before she could arrange another reason to wait. Ruiz listened without interrupting. She asked what had been moved, who owned the notebooks, and whether Mara believed anyone was in immediate danger.
Mara answered plainly. When Ruiz said Mara’s own conduct would be part of the investigation, Evie watched her mother rather than the phone.
“I understand,” Mara said.
Ruiz told them to leave the site undisturbed, photograph only what was visible, and meet her at the district wildlife office with the original notebooks. She would begin the steps needed to secure the location and company records. She also told them not to confront Wade.
Back at the utility vehicle, Evie placed the cashbox on the passenger-side floorboard beside Mara’s boot.
“Ruiz will see your initials on nearly every page,” she said. “If anything goes missing, I’ll tell her what was there.”
“Nothing is going missing.” Evie held her gaze a moment, then started the engine.
On the way to the district wildlife office, Mara’s phone rang through the vehicle speakers. Wade’s name filled the dashboard screen.
She let it ring twice before answering.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Out.”
“I can see that. You used Gate Four.”
Mara glanced at Evie. The electronic gate logged every employee code.
“Come to the handling yard,” Wade said. “Bring Evie. She knows the field identification, and you know the removal paperwork.”
The call ended.
Evie reached for the phone. “Ruiz said not to confront him.”
“We’re not going alone.” Mara called the officer, relayed Wade’s words, and gave the handling-yard location. Ruiz said she and a county deputy were on their way from the far side of Stanton, at least twenty-five minutes out. Her instruction was clear: wait at the public road.
Mara agreed. At the junction, the lodge gate stood open. Beyond it, Wade’s pickup sat beside the handling shed. The narrow steel trailer he had acquired years ago was backed into a timber-walled lane inside the yard, its rear gate facing a wide service gate into the woods.
The company had no current authorization to set it. Its rear end rocked hard enough to shake the sweet-gum saplings beside the fence.
Evie braked on the public shoulder, facing the open gate. Mara heard the deep boom of a body striking metal. Then a black forepaw appeared beneath the trailer’s rear gate. Two outer toes bent inward against the dirt…
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