Part 4
Grant apologized before Mara could decide what she had seen.
He lifted both hands, one still holding the camera, and stepped away from the shed as if he were approaching a skittish animal. “I shouldn’t have been listening,” he said. “That’s on me. But I won’t apologize for wanting to protect the work.”
Caleb did not move. “What work?”
“The kind people like you don’t get funding for anymore,” Grant said. His voice stayed pleasant, but something had hardened under it. “Documentation matters. Public attention matters. You know what happens when people stop caring about a place.”
“I know what happens when people care about money more.”
Mara stepped between them because she could not bear the look on her father’s face. “Enough.”
Caleb’s eyes never left Grant. “Go inside, Mara.”
She hated him for saying it that way, like she was still sixteen, like her feelings were weather he could ignore until they passed. “No.”
Grant lowered the camera. “I’ll pack up in the morning if that’s what you want.”
The reasonable sadness in his voice embarrassed her. She turned on Caleb with all the hurt she had been saving from years of small rooms, hard winters, and being loved by a man who could protect everything except her heart.
“Are you happy now?” she said.
Caleb flinched. Barely. Most people would not have seen it.
Grant did.
He left two days later, but not completely. He rented a cabin down near Larkspur, the nearest town, and still came up for approved field work. He called Mara. He apologized. He told her Caleb had every right to be protective and that he admired him for it. He did not ask her to choose between them, which made her feel she already had.
Caleb grew quieter.
On the morning he died, he was standing at the kitchen counter before sunrise, filling a thermos with coffee. His red field notebook lay open beside him. Mara came down in wool socks and one of his old sweatshirts, still half asleep, and saw him tear a page from the notebook and fold it twice.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Nothing you need yet.”
“Dad.”
He looked at her then, and she saw that same softness from the porch, the one he tried to hide because tenderness made him feel unarmed. “If I’m late tonight, don’t wait dinner.”
“You’re always late.”
“This time, don’t wait.”
She crossed her arms. “You’re being dramatic.”
Caleb capped the thermos. “Maybe.”
The word stayed with her later because he was not a man who used maybe when he knew what he meant.
By sunset, he had not come back.
By eight, Mara had called his radio a dozen times. By nine, she had driven the first five miles of his route until the snow got too deep for the truck. By midnight, sheriff’s deputies and two volunteers from search and rescue were moving along the ridge with headlamps bobbing in the dark.
They found Caleb before dawn at the bottom of a frozen cutbank above Miller Creek.
The deputy said it looked like a fall. The county coroner, who had known Caleb for twenty years and looked sick while saying it, said the blow to the head was consistent with hitting rock. Everyone spoke gently. Everyone wanted the simplest version because the simplest version let them bring his body home and call the mountain cruel instead of looking for a person who had been crueler.
Grant arrived at the station that afternoon.
Mara did not remember calling him. Maybe someone else had. Maybe he had heard through town. He stepped into the kitchen without asking, took one look at her, and came toward her with his arms open.
She let him hold her.
That became another wound later.
For the next week, he was everywhere grief made her helpless. He handled phone calls when her voice failed. He shoveled the station steps. He reminded her to eat. At the funeral, he stood close enough for warmth but not close enough to seem possessive. People in Larkspur said he was a good man to stay.
Mara tried to believe them.
But grief did not make her blind forever.
Three nights after the funeral, she found Caleb’s red notebook under a loose board beneath his workbench. Most of the pages were ordinary field notes written in his cramped hand. Snow depth. Elk movement. A sow with two cubs near the north drainage. Boone seen on trail camera, weight down, right foreleg stiff.
Near the back, the writing changed.
G.W. asked about Blackrock again.
Same boot print near illegal bait site.
Check camera six.
Mara read the lines until the letters blurred. Then she went to the metal file box where Caleb kept old memory cards in envelopes labeled by date and location. Her hands shook so badly she dropped three before she found the one marked CAMERA SIX — NORTH CUTBANK.
The laptop took too long to start.
When the first images appeared, they were what she expected. Snow. A fox. Two elk passing at 3:12 a.m. Then a frame opened from the night before Caleb died.
Grant’s SUV sat on the logging road above Miller Creek.
In the next image, Caleb stood beside it.
In the third, both men had turned toward each other. Caleb’s arm was raised, not in attack, but in warning. Grant’s face was pale in the infrared flash, his mouth open mid-sentence. The next file was corrupted.
Mara stared at the frozen image until she heard a floorboard creak behind her.
Grant stood in the kitchen doorway with two mugs in his hands.
“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked.
Then his eyes shifted to the laptop screen…
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