Part 2
“Nobody had to tell me,” Grant said, and then he named all four disputed dates in order.
He seemed to hear what he had done only after the last one left his mouth. A log loader backed somewhere below the office, its warning signal beeping through the window. Grant turned his mug until the handle pointed exactly toward his right hand.
“Those are the dates in your month-end exception report,” he said.
“I haven’t submitted that report.”
“Then I saw them in dispatch.”
“The source records were deleted under your login.”
His eyes hardened, though his voice stayed mild. “My login is used by three supervisors. If your controls allow that, Evelyn, we have a larger accounting problem than thirty-one tons.”
It was a fair criticism, and that made the threat inside it easier to miss. Evelyn had objected when Grant insisted on a shared administrator password, but she had accepted his answer because refusing would have meant delaying payroll conversion. She had put the risk in a memo, filed the memo, and let the bad practice continue.
“I want the salvage authorization by noon,” she said.
“You’re an accountant, not a forest ranger.”
“I’m the person whose name goes on the financials.”
Grant stood and walked to the window. Below them, the mill yard moved in its practiced winter rhythm: loader, truck, scaler, loader again. “If the bank calls our line, that rhythm stops. You get to balance a clean page. I get to tell one hundred eighty families there’s no Friday check.”
“Then give me the paper that makes the load legal.”
He looked back at her. “Think about the controller job. And Matt’s placement. I can hold both until Friday.”
At her desk, Evelyn found Tess Malloy crying over an open file drawer. Tess was her assistant, a quick bookkeeper who kept crackers in one drawer for her diabetic husband, Eli, and colored pencils in another for the two children she collected from school at three fifteen.
“The four driver packets are gone,” Tess whispered. “Grant took them Friday. He told me not to log the removal.”
“Did you sign them out?”
“He’s the general manager.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
Tess flinched. Evelyn heard her own father in the sharpness and lowered her voice. “Did you?”
“No.” Tess wiped her face with both hands. “He knows Eli’s disability review is next month. North Branch fills out the employment verification for our insurance. He didn’t say he’d do anything. He just asked whether the forms were ready.”
Evelyn closed the drawer. “Go pick up your children at three. From now on, if anybody asks, you never told me this.”
“That doesn’t make me safe.”
“No,” Evelyn said. “It doesn’t.”
She photocopied her handwritten reconciliation, placed one copy in her father’s old canvas cruising bag, and took the other to the sheriff’s substation after lunch. Deputy Owen Pike read it twice. He had a soft, tired face and the habit of rubbing the edge of his badge with his thumb.
“This is company accounting,” he said. “Could be a civil matter.”
“Timber was removed from a closed state tract.”
“You suspect it was.”
“The load records say Blackwater Six.”
“Records you say may have been altered.” He pushed the pages back. “You see the problem.”
“Take the report and give me an incident number.”
Owen glanced toward the closed door although they were alone. “Forestry enforcement handles timber cases. Their office is sixty miles south.”
“Forward it.”
“I can make a note that you came in.”
“With a number.”
He did not reach for a form. Evelyn put the pages back in her folder and stood. Her mistake was not going to him; a reasonable person went first to local law enforcement. Her mistake was telling him the exact tract before she had photographed what remained there.
By four o’clock, a forklift operator who had never spoken to her outside payroll asked whether she meant to shut down the mill. At the grocery store, two women stopped talking when she entered. The cashier set Evelyn’s bread on the counter without looking up.
North Branch’s winter bonus was tied to shipped volume. If an investigation stopped the yard even for a week, families would lose money they had already counted toward oil, medicine, and overdue property taxes. Grant had made sure the town understood whose arithmetic threatened theirs.
That evening Ruth arrived with fish chowder and a loaf wrapped in a dish towel. She let herself in with the spare key Evelyn had never thought to take back.
“People are fools,” she said, taking over Evelyn’s kitchen as if the room belonged to both of them. “Let them talk. They’ll need you at tax time and forget how brave they were.”
“Did you tell Grant about Matt?”
Ruth’s ladle struck the side of the pot. “What?”
“His placement.”
“I might’ve mentioned it. Evie, everybody knows he’s in forestry.”
“Not that the placement fell through.”
Ruth turned from the stove. Hurt arrived on her face before anger, or perhaps she was simply better at putting it there. “So now I’m not allowed to talk about my best friend’s boy?”
Evelyn looked at the flour on Ruth’s sleeve and remembered the week after Tom’s funeral, Ruth sleeping in that same blouse because she had not gone home to change. The question she needed to ask sat between them, blunt and ugly: Did you sign those eleven tickets? She did not ask it.
Instead she ate the chowder and let Ruth tell her about Molly’s new apartment and the landlord who still had not fixed the bathroom fan. By the time Ruth left, Evelyn had decided what paper could not do for her.
At dawn she drove three miles beyond town to Silas Greeley’s cabin. The road ended at a chain stretched between two snow-buried posts.
Silas was seventy-one, retired from state forestry, and unimpressed by emergencies that arrived at his door wearing clean boots. He listened from the porch while Evelyn explained. A hound pressed its nose through the gap beside his knee.
“Blackwater isn’t your tract,” he said.
“It belongs to the state.”
“Then let the state count its trees.”
“They won’t know to count unless somebody shows them.”
“You have a son. I have a warm stove. We should both keep what we’ve got.”
Evelyn tightened the strap of the canvas bag across her shoulder. “My father was Harold Mercer.”
Silas’s gaze shifted to the steel timber mark visible inside the open flap. He was quiet long enough for the hound to sit down.
“In 1966,” he said, “I went through river ice with a saw and a pack. Harold hauled me half a mile before he found a truck road.” He opened the door behind him. “Give me ten minutes.”
They went in on snowshoes beneath a sky the color of old tin. Silas broke trail and never wasted breath on conversation. After four miles he raised one gloved hand, listened, and led Evelyn off the tote road through firs heavy with snow.
The first fresh stump stood within fifty feet of the closed-block sign.
Silas brushed away the sawdust frozen along its edge. The cut was pale and wet with pitch. A blue contractor’s slash crossed the top where the state closure paint should have been untouched.
“Yesterday,” he said. “Maybe the day before. Whoever closed this tract in November didn’t close it for long…”
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