Page 5 of One-Track Pride

I pick my way over. Set into the crust, half-softened but unmistakable, is a line of boot prints heading away from the track toward an old service trail that climbs into the trees.

"Those are recent," I say slowly, doing the arithmetic. "It snowed hard yesterday afternoon. Anything older than about a day should be gone, filled in. These aren't filled in."

"Somebody was here last night. Maybe this morning." His voice drops into a register I haven't heard from him yet, focused and cold. "On a stretch of line that's supposed to be locked down for the season."

"Then let's find out where they went."

He wants to lead. I can see him wanting it, but I'm already moving up the trail, following the prints across a shelf of exposed rock the wind has scoured down to a glaze, and that's my mistake, because glazed rock on a grade doesn't forgive a distracted foot. My boot skates, and the drop on my right opens up fast, a steep tumble of scree and iced boulders, far enough down that my stomach lurches before the rest does.

As I’m about to fall, a hand closes around my forearm and stops me like I've hit a wall, hauling me back onto solid footing in one clean motion. When my heart climbs down out of my throat, I register three things at once, and all three are wrong. He caught me with one hand, he didn't so much as shift his stance to do it, and a grown adult in full winter gear pitching off a ledge should have dragged him at least a step toward the edge, should have made him grunt, brace, something.

Nothing moved him at all. We don’t let go immediately, and I'm close to feel the heat coming off him, absurd in this cold, and close to feel how absolutely still he's holding himself, like he's the one who almost went over. Then he releases my arm and steps back, quick, putting a clear foot of mountain air between us before I can read whatever just crossed his face.

"Careful," he says. "The rock ices first up here."

"Uh-huh." I plant my boots and study him. "That was a good catch."

"Reflex."

"That was not reflex." I keep my tone conversational, the same tone I use on maintenance supervisors right before they realize I've already read their logs. "I'm a hundred and forty pounds of dead weight in a heavy coat, and I was going over. You caught me one-handed and you didn't move your feet. Not an inch."

"Adrenaline."

"Adrenaline gives you a burst. It doesn't let a man your size pluck a falling adult out of the air single-handed and stand there like he's holding a coffee." I don't blink. "So try again."

A flicker behind his eyes disappears before I can put a name to it. "I train," he says. "Search and rescue. Hauling people off mountains is the job. You get strong."

It's a good answer. It's smooth, it's plausible, and it is absolutely not the whole truth, because I've watched strong men before and none of them ever felt like grabbing a fixed post bolted into bedrock. I let it sit, though. I've learned you don't win an interview by swinging at the first evasion. You mark it, and you wait.

"Fine," I say. "We'll go with training."

We follow the prints another fifty yards until the trail forks and the snow gives up its story, then we turn back to the truck with my memory card full of scored metal and fresh boot tracks on locked-down line. When I climb into the truck, my head has quietly reclassified itself. I came here to determine whether an aging railway had decayed past saving. That's not the question anymore, the question is who's been out here, why nobody's caught them, and how a man who lifts like a hydraulic jack keeps staring at me as though I'm the puzzle he can't solve.

4

EVANDER

The storm shuts three roads before noon, so I steer us into the diner near the depot instead of back toward town. It isn't much, vinyl booths gone soft at the seams, a pie case, and a waitress who calls everybody hon and means it. Camille slides into the booth across from me and shrugs out of her jacket, and the warmth spreading through my chest shifts me, and I just tell myself it’s contrast after hours in the cold.

"This isn't a stop for the investigation," she says. "This is you stalling until the plows catch up."

"This is me not putting you in a ditch. There's a difference." I flag the waitress for two coffees. "You can keep working through it. I'll even let you insult my driving between bites."

"Generous." She pulls her map from her bag and smooths it flat over the table, the sabotage sites already marked in her small, precise hand. "Since you're captive anyway, look at this with me. I plotted every failure I've confirmed or half-confirmed. Tell me what you see."

I lean in, she's clustered the marks with colored dots, and a shape sits there plain enough that I don't have to fake noticing it. Almost every one hugs a boundary line, the edge where railway right-of-way meets private ground.

"They're on property lines," I say.

"They're on recently sold property lines." She taps a knuckle against three of them in a row. "These three parcels changed hands in the last eight months, same buyer each time. A company called Northstar Meridian."

The coffee arrives, and I wrap a hand around the mug and drink before I answer, because I know that name and I need a second to decide how much to give her. Northstar's people came sniffing around two winters back, made quiet offers to half the ranchers up the valley, got polite refusals and left cards nobody kept.

"I've heard of them," I say. "They tried buying up land around here a while ago. Development outfit, supposedly. Most folks turned them down."

"Most." She drags her finger along the map until it stops on a large blank shape at the map's western edge, unmarked, unsold. "Everyone except the people holding this. Thousands of acres, straight up the ridge, and it's the one parcel Northstar can't seem to touch. It's held by something called the Shaw Family Trust." She lifts her eyes to mine, and they've gone sharp, the hazel narrowing to a point. "Shaw, as in you."

I set the mug down and keep my face level, the same face I wear when a reporter asks why my rescue teams always beat the county's response time.