That night, after Ethan had gone to bed, Sarah sat up late at the kitchen table with the case file open and Duke asleep at her feet, and she read it all again, more slowly, and she made her own notes in a small notebook she carried in her bag. She wrote down Delgado's number. She wrote down Cole Harper's number. She wrote down the name Halcyon Ridge Development and the name Martin Voss, and she underlined them. She was not a lawyer. She was not a sheriff. She was a nurse, and a daughter, and she was becoming, without quite deciding to, a part of the case — not as a witness, not yet, but as the person who would stand beside her father when the hearing came, and who would not let him stand there alone.
When she finally went to bed, in the spare room that had been hers since she was a girl, Duke followed her, stiffly, and settled beside her bed for a while before padding back to Ethan's room, as if he were checking on both of them, in turn, the way an old dog checks on his people. Sarah lay awake listening to the cabin, to the wind, to the quiet, and she thought about her father, alone on a mountain, refusing to be bullied by paper, and she felt proud of him, and afraid for him, in equal measure, and she knew she would be back, sooner than next month, if she needed to be.
Chapter 21
Linda Mercer did not like the way the autumn was going. That was how she would have put it, if anyone had asked, which no one did, because Linda did not discuss her feelings with the board, or with Voss, or with anyone except, occasionally, herself, in the quiet of her office after a meeting that had not gone quite the way she had planned.
The fines were still accruing. Ethan Walker was still refusing. The board was still voting with her, but the votes were getting thinner. Finch had abstained twice now. Another board member had asked, at the last meeting, whether they should get their own attorney's opinion on jurisdiction before sending more fines — a question Linda had answered smoothly, about the association's attorney already reviewing the matter, which was true in the narrow sense that an attorney had looked at a letter, and untrue in every sense that mattered. Diane Osei's minutes were getting longer, and more precise, and Linda had begun to read them after each meeting with a feeling she did not like to name, which was the feeling of a record being kept by someone who was not on her side.
She called Voss, and Voss, for the first time, sounded impatient.
"Linda," he said, "the county is asking about the second route. I need something I can show them. A signed agreement, or at least a letter of intent. The packet is ready. The measurements are in it. But a packet without an agreement is just a proposal."
"The agreement is coming," Linda said, with more confidence than she felt. "Walker is a stubborn man, but he is one man, and the fines are now substantial. He will talk. Men like that always talk, eventually, when the number gets big enough."
Voss was silent for a moment. "I hope you're right," he said. "Because if he doesn't talk, Phase Three doesn't move, and if Phase Three doesn't move, the association doesn't get the development fees it was counting on, and the board will start asking why."
Linda hung up and sat in her office, looking at the framed groundbreaking photograph, which was still crooked, and she did not straighten it this time. She thought about the board, and about Finch, and about Diane's minutes, and about the fact that a plan that depended on a man signing a paper he did not want to sign was a plan with a single point of failure, and that point was Ethan Walker, sitting on a mountain with a camera above his gate and a case file on his kitchen table.
She thought, briefly, about telling the board the truth: about Phase Three, about Voss, about the $1.4 million, about the fact that the drainage matter was a means to an end. She dismissed the thought almost as soon as she had it. Telling the board would mean admitting that she had led them into a fight over a road they did not control, for a development they had not voted on, on the basis of a survey taken at 2:13 in the morning by men who had entered a locked gate with a code they had filmed a propane driver entering. Telling the board would mean losing control, and control was the thing Linda Mercer valued most. So she did not tell them. She drafted another fine notice instead, and another demand letter, and she sent them, and the paper machine ran on, and the number in Ethan's ledger grew, and Linda told herself that pressure, applied long enough, always worked.
That evening, Deputy Mara Ellison, young and sharp, sat in the sheriff's office with the gate-code audit spread out in front of her, and she wrote a report that would, in time, become part of the case against the patrol firm and against Linda herself. The report was clean and factual: the propane driver had entered the code six days before the intrusion; a Pine Ridge patrol vehicle had been parked down the road; Ray Deluca's photographs included the driver's hand at the keypad; the propane company confirmed only its driver had the code; Sarah Walker and Dr. Alan Beck, Ethan's veterinarian, were cleared, neither having shared it. Ellison did not editorialize. She did not need to. The facts, arranged in order, told their own story, and the story was that the code had not been guessed. It had been stolen, by observation, for a purpose.