Chapter 3: The Truth Has Roots
What Has Been Buried Always Finds the Light
Lucas told Nadia that evening.
Not everything.
Not yet.
He told her that his grandfather had come and that they had talked and that what they had talked about was the story that connected their families and that the story was longer and darker and more specific than either of them had imagined.
She sat across from him at the corner table that had become their table. She watched his face while he spoke, and she did not interrupt because she had learned that Lucas said the most important things in the middle of what sounded like ordinary sentences, and interrupting him meant missing where the weight was.
He said the families had been separated deliberately.
She said what do you mean deliberately.
He said he meant that what happened between their families twenty years ago was not a misunderstanding.
He said it was not a falling out or a dispute or the organic damage that families sometimes did to each other through ordinary human failing.
He said it was constructed.
He said someone built it from the outside and placed it between the families and stood back and watched it work.
She was very still.
He said his grandfather was ready to tell her grandfather directly.
He said the two old men needed to be in the same room for the first time in twenty years.
He said that was the beginning of the undoing of what had been done.
She looked at the table.
She looked at him.
She said who built it.
He said a family named Harmon.
The name arrived in the space between them and sat there.
Nadia looked at it.
She said she knew that name.
He said he thought she might.
She said Claire Harmon had married into her family.
She said a cousin on her grandfather’s side, not close family, but family enough that the name was present at the edges of occasions.
She said she had met Claire twice.
She said she was a quiet woman.
She said quietly in the way of someone who had decided that quiet was safer than any alternative.
Lucas said yes.
Nadia said what did she do.
He said that was part of the story her grandfather and his grandfather needed to tell together.
He said there were things his grandfather knew and things her grandfather knew, and neither of them had the full picture because the man who had built the lie had been careful to give each family only enough to damage them without enough to understand why.
She sat for a long time.
The dining hall moved around them with its ordinary Thursday energy, other people’s conversations, the scrape of chairs, the particular noise of a place where people ate and talked and did not think about twenty-year-old wounds because they did not know they existed.
She said call your grandfather.
He called William.
William said he was ready.
She called Daniel.
Daniel answered on the second ring.
She said grandfather there is someone who needs to speak with you.
She said his name was William Voss.
The phone was quiet long enough that she thought she had lost him.
Then Daniel Hargrove said, in the voice of a man who had not used certain muscles in a very long time, that he was here.
He said to put him on.
They drove William to the hotel first.
Then they drove to a restaurant on the east side of Tucson that was quiet on Thursday evenings and had a back room that could be reserved and where the lighting was low enough to have the kind of conversation that needed to be had without the feeling of being observed.
They sat at a round table.
Lucas and Nadia on one side.
William Voss’s face on a laptop screen propped on a book because he was seventy-nine and had flown to Arizona and needed to eat and rest and could not manage the restaurant as well.
Nadia’s phone was propped beside the laptop with Daniel Hargrove’s voice coming through the speaker.
Two old men.
A screen and a phone.
Forty years since they had last been in the same room and twenty since they had spoken, and the technology was reducing the distance to something manageable, but not erasing what the distance had cost.
William spoke first.
He said Daniel.
The word came out differently from any other word.
Like something that had been waiting at the back of a throat for a very long time and had finally been permitted to leave.
Daniel said William.
The same quality.
The same waiting in it.
They were quiet for a moment.
The restaurant moved around them, and Lucas and Nadia sat very still and let the two old men have the moment because the moment belonged entirely to them.
Then William said he had something to tell him.
Daniel said he was listening.
And William Voss told Daniel Hargrove the story of Robert Harmon.
All of it.
From the beginning.
He told it the way he had told it to Lucas in the car, in order, with nothing left out, the full weight of it given the full space it required.
Daniel listened without speaking.
When William finished, there was a silence that lasted long enough that Lucas looked at the phone to make sure the call had not dropped.
It had not dropped.
Daniel was there.
He was simply sitting with what he had been given.
Then he said, very quietly, that he had known.
William said what did you mean you had known.
Daniel said not all of it.
He said not the full shape of it.
He said, but for years, there had been something that did not sit right.
He said that in the weeks after James and Sarah were found, he had wanted to come to William.
He said three times he had started driving to the Voss property and three times he had turned back.
He said the weapons had been found.
He said the men were in custody.
He said the rumours were everywhere.
He said it was easier to believe the thing that gave the grief a direction than to believe the thing that left it nowhere to go.
He said he was sorry.
He said it simply and directly, without the packaging that apologies sometimes arrived in when people were trying to make the apology easier to receive.
He said William, I am sorry.
I should have come.
I should have called.
I should have stood at your door in the worst of it and said that, whatever we were told, I did not believe that you had done this.
I should have said it; I did not. That silence was the second crime committed against both of us, and I will carry it for the rest of whatever I have left.
William was quiet.
The laptop screen showed him sitting in his hotel room with his hands on the table and his eyes clear in the way they had always been clear.
He said Daniel.
He said we were both deceived.
He said the man who deceived us understood that grief needed somewhere to go.
He said he gave it a direction.
He said we followed the direction because the alternative was worse.
He said that was not a weakness.
He said it was just being human in the face of something inhuman.
He said the crime was Robert Harmon’s.
He said we spent twenty years punishing each other for a crime that was his.
He said he thought they had both served enough of that sentence.
Daniel was quiet for a moment.
Then he said yes.
He said he thought they had.
They talked for three hours.
What came out of those three hours was not the full story yet.
The full story required more than a round table in a Tucson restaurant, two old men on a screen, and a phone.
The full story required both families to be together in one place.
It required the kind of conversation that had physical weight and needed physical presence to hold it.
But what those three hours produced was the beginning of a map.
A map of what Robert Harmon had done.
What Claire had known and when she had known it.
What evidence might still exist if they looked for it?
Who else might have seen something in that October in Montana that they had not known mattered?
William said his lawyer in California had certain documents from the time.
He said he had never shown them to anyone because he had not understood what they meant and had not trusted his own reading of them, given what he believed at the time.
He said he thought those documents, in the context of what he now understood, might mean something different.
Daniel said there was a man, old now, who had worked on the Crawford ranch adjacent to the Harmon property in Montana.
He said he had said something once, years ago, at a valley gathering, something that Daniel had not understood at the time and had not known to hold onto.
He said he thought he could find him.
He said men like that, men who had carried something they did not know what to do with for twenty years, were often waiting for someone to come and ask the right question.
Lucas and Nadia sat at the table and listened to the map being drawn.
They were not outside of it.
They were not observers.
They were the reason it was being drawn now rather than never.
They understood this.
It was a weight, and it was also, in the particular way of weights that you chose to carry, not entirely unwelcome.
When the call ended and the laptop was closed, Nadia sat with her elbows on the table and her hands over her face for a moment.
Lucas let her.
Then she lowered her hands and looked at him.
She said that her grandmother Rose and his uncle James.
He said yes.
She said they were killed.
He said yes.
She said by a man who wanted what their families had.
He said yes.
She said, and the families believed it was each other.
He said yes.
She said for twenty years.
He said yes.
She looked at the table.
She looked at him.
She said we have to make this right.
He said yes.
She said all of it.
He said we will.
She said how do we start.
He said we start with the documents his grandfather had in California.
He said we start with the man his grandfather knew in Montana.
He said we start with the truth and we follow it wherever it goes.
She said alright.
He said there was one more thing.
She said what?
He said Claire Harmon was connected to her family.
He said Claire’s daughter was part of their world.
He said they did not know yet how much Claire’s daughter knew or what she was willing to do with what she knew.
He said until they had more of the story, they should be careful about who they told and what they said.
She said careful how.
He said just careful.
She looked at him.
She said alright.
They drove William back to his hotel.
He walked to the door, and then he turned.
He looked at Nadia for a long moment.
He had not looked at her directly until now.
He looked at her with the eyes he had always had, clear and watching, and he said her name.
She looked at him.
He said she looked like her grandmother.
He said it simply.
Without drama.
The way a true thing was said when the saying of it was both painful and necessary.
She said she had heard that before.
From her grandfather.
He said that was because it was true.
He said Rose Voss had been the best of all of them.
He said he was glad her granddaughter was in the world.
He went inside.
Lucas and Nadia drove back to the university in the warm Arizona night.
They did not speak much.
Some things needed to move through a person before they could be spoken about.
She held his hand across the centre console.
He drove.
The desert was dark and enormous around them.
They should have had more time.
That was the thing that Lucas thought about later, in the places where he had time to think, in the spaces between one terrible thing and the next.
They should have had more time to be careful.
To be methodical.
To find the documents and the old man from the Crawford ranch and build the case the way it needed to be built, slowly and from the ground up, before anyone knew they were building it.
They should have had more time.
They did not have more time.
Because Claire Harmon’s daughter had been at the restaurant.
Not at their table.
Not close enough to hear.
But she had been there, at a table on the other side of the room, and she had seen William Voss’s face on the laptop screen, she had seen Nadia, she had seen Lucas, and she had understood enough of what she was looking at to know that it was the thing her mother had lived in fear of for twenty years.
The thing Robert Harmon had told them would never happen.
The thing he had built the entire structure of his plan to prevent.
The two families are talking to each other.
The map is being drawn.
She left the restaurant, and she called the one person she had been told to call if this day ever came.
She did not call her mother.
Her mother was fragile in the way of people who had been carrying something terrible for a long time and had survived it by not looking at it directly.
She called the man her grandfather had established as the family’s insurance policy in situations that required action.
The man was not Robert Harmon.
Robert Harmon was eighty-three years old and lived in a house in California, and had not been capable of the kind of action he had taken in Montana for some years.
The man was someone Robert had identified and cultivated and paid, and kept available for exactly this contingency.
His name was not important.
What was important was that within two hours of the call, he knew where Lucas and Nadia lived, where William Voss was staying, and what the situation required.
What the situation required, he understood from the briefing he had been given years ago and updated intermittently since, was that the two young people be separated from the old man.
And that the old man be made to understand that the documents he held in California were not safe to produce.
He did not move that night.
He was a patient man in the tradition of the family that employed him.
He moved the next morning.
Lucas had a habit that would later seem like instinct and was probably just the quality of attention his grandfather had raised him with.
He noticed things that were slightly wrong before he understood why they were wrong.
It had made him a good student.
On the morning after the restaurant, he noticed two things.
The first was a car parked on the street outside the dormitory building that had been there when he went to sleep and was still there, same position, same angle, when he came out at seven in the morning, which was not in itself alarming because people left cars in streets overnight but which sat in the back of his mind as something to note.
The second was that when he went to William’s hotel to have breakfast with his grandfather, the hotel receptionist was slightly too careful in telling him that Mr. Voss had stepped out and she was not sure when he would be back.
Slightly too careful in the way of someone who had been spoken to by someone else recently about what to say.
He thanked her and walked out of the hotel and called his grandfather.
William answered immediately.
He was at a diner two blocks from the hotel.
He said he had woken early, felt watched, and had left through the side entrance.
He said he was sorry to sound like an old man with a paranoid imagination.
Lucas said he did not sound like that at all.
He said stay at the diner.
He said do not go back to the hotel yet.
He called Nadia.
She was at the library.
He said go to the side entrance and wait for me.
She heard something in his voice.
She said what happened.
He said he was not sure yet.
He said just the side entrance.
She said alright.
He picked up William from the diner.
He picked up Nadia from the side entrance.
He drove them to a coffee place on the other side of the city that none of them had been to before.
They sat at a table in the back.
He told them what he had noticed.
William listened with the expression of someone who was not surprised.
He said that he had been afraid something like this might happen.
He said that the Harmon family had not maintained its position for twenty years without knowing when the position was threatened.
Nadia said how they would have known.
Lucas said the restaurant.
He said he did not know who had seen them.
He said, but the restaurant was where the conversation had happened, and the conversation had been the thing that changed things, and the timing was not coincidental.
Nadia was quiet.
Then she said Claire’s daughter had been there.
Both men looked at her.
She said she had seen her at a table on the far side of the room.
She said she had not thought anything of it at the time.
She said she had not realised she should have.
Lucas looked at his grandfather.
William said the documents in California were the most important thing.
He said if they could get to the documents and get them to the right people before the Harmon family could suppress them, then the case would build itself.
He said without the documents, they had two old men’s memories and a story that no one with the power to act on it had any reason to believe.
Lucas said we need to go to California.
William said yes.
Nadia said what about the semester.
Lucas said there were two weeks left.
He said it was not the semester he was worried about.
Nadia said she was not worried about the semester either.
She said she was thinking about what happened when they got to California.
She said who in California would listen.
William said he had a lawyer he trusted.
He said he had the documents.
He said he had been carrying them for twenty years without knowing what they meant; now he knew what they meant, and the lawyer was a good one and would understand what to do with them.
Nadia said alright.
She said then we go to California.
They left that afternoon.
Not all of them together.
William took a flight because he was seventy-nine, the drive was too long, because a direct flight left Tucson at two in the afternoon, and he could be in California before dark.
Lucas and Nadia drove.
They took Lucas’s car and the main highway, and they told no one where they were going except Daniel Hargrove, whom Nadia called from the road, speaking carefully and briefly, telling him only that they were going to California and that his grandfather’s lawyer and some documents were involved and that she would call him again when they were there.
Daniel said he was getting in his car.
She said he did not need to come.
He said she did not understand.
He said he had been sitting with a wound for twenty years, and the wound had just been told it was not what it thought it was, and that the person who had inflicted it was still in the world and still working.
He said he was getting in his car.
She said alright.
She said California.
He said he knew the way.
The drive was long and the desert gave way to the mountains and the mountains gave way to something flatter and more golden and eventually the Pacific came into view on the horizon like a rumour that turned out to be true and they drove into California in the early dark with the ocean smell coming in through the cracked windows and the weight of what they were doing sitting quietly in the car between them.
Nadia said are you afraid.
Lucas said a little.
She said to me,o.
He said what specifically?
She thought about it.
She said of arriving somewhere with the truth and having no one believe it.
She said of being the grandchildren of old men with old wounds and having people look at us and see not the truth but the family history.
She said she was afraid that what Robert Harmon had done twenty years ago was built well enough to last another twenty.
Lucas drove.
He thought about what she had said.
He said his grandfather’s lawyer was a good one.
She said good lawyers did not guarantee belief.
He said no.
He said, but good lawyers knew how to make belief available.
He said they knew how to present a thing so that not believing it required more effort than believing it.
He said that was what they needed.
Not for people to trust them immediately.
For people to find the truth, the easier thing to accept is the alternative.
She was quiet for a moment.
Then she said that it was actually very good.
He said his grandfather was a wise man.
She said he had learned from him.
He said he tried.
She leaned her head against the window.
The California night moved past outside.
She said Lucas.
He said yes.
She said whatever happens when we get there.
He said yes.
She said I am glad we are doing it together.
He drove for a moment without speaking.
Then he reached across and took her hand the way she had taken his at the restaurant in Tucson.
He held it.
He kept driving.
The lawyer’s name was Franklin Reyes.
He had been William Voss’s attorney for fifteen years; he was sixty-one years old, and he had the particular quality of a man who had spent decades being the person that other people came to with their worst situations and had developed, as a result, an almost complete immunity to surprise.
William had called him from Tucson.
Franklin had listened to the summary without interrupting.
When William finished, Franklin had said that he needed to see the documents and that he needed to speak with both old men together and that he needed to hear everything from the beginning before he could tell William what was possible.
He said possible was not the same as easy.
He said easy was not something he was promising.
He said, but the truth was not as complicated as the people who tried to hide it liked to believe.
He said he had been undoing complicated constructions for thirty years.
He said give him the documents and the story, and he would tell them what they had.
They met in Franklin’s office on a Saturday morning.
William.
Daniel Hargrove, who had driven from Montana through the night and arrived in California red-eyed and entirely present in the way of a man who had been waiting for this morning without knowing it was this specific morning he had been waiting for.
Lucas and Nadia.
Franklin Reyes was behind his desk with a yellow legal pad and the expression of someone who had decided to reserve all judgment until the whole thing was in front of him.
They told the story.
Both old men.
From the beginning.
The fence and the friendship and three generations of what had been built, and Robert Harmon watching from the edge of it for decades with his patient, particular hunger.
James and Sarah.
October in Montana.
The weapons and the rumours and the arrest and the release and the families being turned against each other with the precision of a man who understood exactly which levers to press.
William produced the documents.
Fourteen pages that he had kept in a locked box for twenty years, documents that had come to him in the chaos of the investigation, paperwork from the sheriff’s office that he had not understood and had held onto out of the instinct of a man who had learned to hold onto things he did not yet understand.
Franklin went through them slowly.
His expression did not change.
His pen moved.
He made notes on the yellow pad.
He went through them a second time.
Then he put them down and looked at William.
He said where did these come from.
William said the sheriff’s office.
He said they had arrived in the mail two weeks after the investigation had concluded.
He said he did not know who had sent them.
Franklin said did he have the envelope.
William said he had kept everything.
Franklin said he needed the envelope.
William said he had it in the box.
Franklin said the postmark on that envelope was going to tell them something.
He said the documents themselves were going to tell them something.
He said one of the documents was a vehicle registration.
He said a vehicle registered to a company that he was going to need to trace.
He said if the company traced back to where he thought it traced back, to the Harmon family or any entity connected to it, then they had the beginning of something that could be verified independently of memory or testimony.
He said something that could be verified independently of memory or testimony was something he could work with.
He said he needed time.
He said a week, perhaps two.
He said he needed to make calls, pull records, and verify the chain before he could say what they had.
He said in the meantime, he was going to strongly advise all of them to be careful about their movements and their communications.
He said the Harmon family had shown, twenty years ago, a willingness to take extreme action when they felt their position was threatened.
He said he had no reason to believe that willingness had diminished.
He looked at Lucas and Nadia.
He said, especially the two of you.
He said you are the thing that brought this forward.
He said the people who want this buried know that.
He said to be careful in a way that is specific and not general.
He said not to be careful in the abstract.
Careful in the sense of knowing where you are going before you go there, and telling someone who is not going with you.
He said carefully, in the sense of not being predictable.
He said carefully, in the sense of not making it easy for someone who was looking for an opportunity to find one.
Lucas said he understood.
Nadia said she understood.
Franklin said good.
He said he would be in touch.
He said in the meantime, he was going to make one call today, before the weekend was out, that he was confident about.
He said he knew the right person in the right department who would understand what he was presenting and would have the authority to begin moving on it.
He said he was not promising anything.
He said he was saying that the machine, once started, took time, and he was going to start it today.
Daniel Hargrove looked at Franklin across the desk.
He said that it was twenty years overdue.
Franklin said yes.
He said he was sorry for that.
He said the best he could do was not let it go further.
Daniel said that was enough.
He said that was more than enough.
They stayed in California for four days.
Those four days were not the four days any of them had expected.
They were not the days of a case beginning to build and a truth beginning to surface and two families beginning to heal the 20-year wound between them.
They were the days of discovering that the truth, even when it had the support of a good lawyer and fourteen documents and the testimony of two old men, was considerably harder to move through the world than anyone who had not tried to move it had understood.
Franklin’s contact at the relevant department listened carefully and said he would look into it.
He called back two days later and said the matter was complicated by the fact that the original investigation had been closed for twenty years, and the jurisdiction was Montana, and the primary individuals named were very old and, in the case of Robert Harmon, possibly not competent to face proceedings.
He said none of this was impossible.
He said it was slow.
He said slow was not the same as never.
He said he needed more than the documents.
He said he needed testimony, and he needed it from someone who had direct knowledge of what Robert Harmon had done, rather than inferential knowledge derived from documents that were twenty years old and had been in private hands.
Franklin said he understood.
He said he was working on it.
He said they needed the man from the Crawford ranch.
He said the man Daniel had mentioned, who had been there and had said something and had been carrying it.
Daniel said he was going to find him.
He said he was going to Montana.
He said he was going in his car the same way he had come.
William said he would go with him.
There was a moment of quiet.
Two old men looking at each other across twenty years of not looking at each other.
Then William said he had not been back to Montana since December of that year.
He said he did not know if he was ready.
Daniel said neither did he.
He said, but readiness was a thing you discovered by going rather than a thing you arrived at by waiting.
William said that sounded like something his grandfather Edward would have said.
Daniel said it sounded like something his grandfather, Samuel, would have said.
They looked at each other.
Something passed between them.
Not quite a smile.
Not forgiveness exactly, because forgiveness was too small a word for what twenty years of a wound and the understanding of its true cause required.
Something larger and quieter and more permanent than either of those things.
A closing.
Of a distance that should never have existed.
By two old men who had been on the wrong sides of a lie for twenty years and were now on the same side again.
Daniel said let us go to Montana.
William said yes.
He said let us go home.
Lucas and Nadia did not go to Montana.
They had not finished their semester.
They had two weeks of university remaining and examinations, and the practical reality that their lives, however much the past three weeks had complicated them, had structures that needed attending to.
They drove back to Arizona.
Franklin had told them to be careful.
They were careful.
They took the route they did not usually take.
They stayed in a motel halfway rather than driving straight through.
They checked in under Lucas’s middle name, which was Theodore, a name he had never used and which appeared on his ID but never anywhere else.
They were careful.
They were not careful enough.
Because the man the Harmon family had sent was better at his job than either of them had understood.
He had not followed them to California.
He had not needed to.
He had simply waited for them to come back to Arizona because Arizona was where they lived, and living somewhere made you predictable in ways that no amount of caution could eliminate.
He was outside the campus on the Wednesday of the week they returned.
He was not there to hurt them.
He was there to be seen.
To communicate, without words, that he knew where they were.
That the awareness went both ways.
That the care they had been providing was not careful enough.
Nadia saw him first.
She was coming out of the library at four in the afternoon, and she saw a man leaning against a car on the street opposite, who was looking at the entrance of the library with the particular quality of someone who was not waiting for a person but for a moment.
She had grown up on a ranch.
She had spent twenty-two years reading things that required reading.
She knew the difference between a man who was waiting and a man who was positioned.
She went back into the library.
She called Lucas.
He came in through the side entrance.
She described the man.
Lucas went to the window.
He looked.
He said he recognised the car.
He said it was the car that had been parked outside the dormitory.
He said it was the same car he had seen in Tucson.
He said it had followed them back.
Or it had not needed to follow them back.
He said either way, it was a message.
Nadia said what kind of message.
He said the kind that said they had not been forgotten.
She said what do we do.
He said he needed to think.
She said alright.
They sat in the library for an hour while Lucas thought, and Nadia sat beside him and let him think and watched the clock and the window in equal measure.
He called Franklin.
Franklin listened.
He said that the presence of the man was almost certainly intended to frighten them rather than harm them.
He said the Harmon family was intelligent enough to understand that physical action against two university students in a city would create exactly the kind of attention that worked against them.
He said he was almost certainly not certain.
He said he would make some calls.
He said in the meantime, he suggested they finish the semester and be visible in the way that public places made you visible, and avoid situations that were isolated.
He said the public was safer than private right now.
He said he needed two more weeks on the documents and the records, and the contact at the department was moving, slowly but moving.
He said two more weeks.
Lucas said alright.
He said two more weeks.
He looked at Nadia.
She was looking at the window.
Her jaw was set in the way it was when she had made a decision and was not going to be moved from it.
He said what are you thinking.
She said she was thinking that they had done nothing wrong.
She said they had found the truth, they were trying to do the right thing with it, and there was a man outside the library whose job was to make them afraid of that.
She said she was not going to be afraid of that.
He said that was not what afraid meant in this context.
She said What does it mean.
He said it meant aware.
He said afraid and aware were not the same thing.
He said he was afraid of paralysis.
He said awareness was what let you act correctly in the situation you were actually in, rather than the one you wanted to be in.
She looked at him.
She said alright.
She said, aware.
He said yes.
She said she could be aware.
He said he knew.
They finished the semester.
Two weeks.
They moved through them with the particular combination of ordinary and alert that was the hardest combination to maintain, attending class and submitting assignments and eating at the corner table and walking across the campus in the evenings as though the world were simply itself.
They graduated from their second year at the University of Arizona on a Friday in May, in the warm desert morning, with their families watching from the stands, and the future officially further along than it had been.
Nadia’s grandfather had driven down from Montana for the graduation.
Daniel Hargrove sat in the stands in the Arizona morning and watched his granddaughter cross the stage and receive what she had earned, and something in his face, in the place where the south had always lived, was different.
Not gone.
But different.
Lighter.
As though the carrying had been redistributed.
As though, for the first time in twenty years, it was not only his.
William had not come.
He was in Montana.
He had sent a message through Lucas.
The message said congratulations to you both.
It said that what they had started was not finished, but it was further than it had been.
It said the man from the Crawford ranch had been found.
He was old, very old, and he was not well.
But he remembered.
He remembered everything.
He said he had been waiting for someone to ask.
They planned to go home for the summer.
Lucas to California.
Nadia to Montana.
To decompress and rest and let Franklin do what Franklin was doing and trust that the machine, once started, moved in the right direction, even when it moved slowly.
They planned this.
The plan lasted three days into the summer break.
On the third day, Franklin called.
His voice was different.
Not alarmed.
Controlled in the way of a man who was choosing his words because the words mattered.
He said the vehicle registration had traced.
He said it traced to a shell company.
He said the shell company was traced to an entity connected to the Harmon family business.
He said that was the independent verification that the department contact had been waiting for.
He said the contact had opened a formal inquiry.
He said the inquiry was not public yet and would not be public for some time.
He said this was good news.
He said this was also dangerous news.
He said that the opening of the inquiry meant that certain people were going to become aware that the machine had started and that certain people were going to act on that awareness.
He said he wanted Lucas and Nadia to be somewhere he knew about.
He said something that was not predictable.
He said somewhere they could stay for a few weeks while the inquiry moved forward and the situation stabilised.
Lucas said what did that mean in practice.
Franklin said it meant going somewhere that was not California, not Arizona, and not Montana.
Somewhere quiet.
Somewhere, they could be reached by him, but not easily found by anyone else.
Lucas looked at Nadia.
She was watching him.
He said he knew somewhere.
He said his grandfather had a contact.
A man who had done business with the Voss family in better years and who lived across the border.
He said his grandfather had mentioned him once.
He said as someone who could be trusted absolutely.
He said the contact was in Mexico.
Nadia was quiet.
He said it was not running away.
She said I know.
He said it was buying time.
She said I know.
He said it was keeping them available and safe while the right people did what they were now doing and needed enough time to do it properly.
She said how long.
He said Franklin thought for six weeks.
She said six weeks.
She looked at the window.
She looked at the life outside the window.
The California street and the afternoon and the ordinary machinery of a world that was continuing regardless.
She said alright.
She said six weeks.
She said then we come back and we finish it.
He said yes.
She said together.
He said together.
She said then let us go.
They crossed the border on a Tuesday.
A warm crossing.
The Mexico of popular imagination was not the Mexico they drove into.
The Mexico they drove into was the Mexico of the interior, an hour south of the border, a town that sat in a valley between two ranges of hills where the air was clean and the evenings were long and the people who lived there had been living there for long enough that a couple of quiet Americans renting a small house on the edge of the town was neither remarkable nor worth discussing.
The house belonged to the contact.
His name was Miguel, he was sixty-five, and he had the particular quality of a man who had kept other people’s confidences for so long that confidence itself was simply the climate he lived in, unremarkable and permanent.
He showed them the house.
He said it was not grand.
It was not.
It was small and clean and had a table on the back porch that faced east and caught the morning light, and a kitchen that had everything needed and nothing superfluous.
Nadia said it was perfect.
Miguel said if they needed anything, he was in the house at the end of the road.
He said he would not come unless asked.
He said if anyone came looking for them, he would come regardless.
He said that was the arrangement.
He said William Voss had helped him once when helping was the last thing anyone else had been willing to do, and that kind of debt did not expire with the years.
He went to his house at the end of the road.
They unpacked the car.
They put the essentials in the kitchen, the books on the table, and the things that needed to be lived with in the places that suited them, and by the time the sun was going down behind the western hills, the small house felt less like a temporary situation and more like a place.
Nadia sat on the back porch and looked at the hills turning gold in the last light.
Lucas brought two cups of tea.
He sat beside her.
She took her cup.
She said that for something that was not running away, it felt remarkably peaceful.
He said that was possibly the point.
She said they would have to tell their families where they were.
He said they would have to tell Franklin.
She said, and their grandfathers.
He said yes.
She said not the location specifically.
He said not specifically.
She said enough for them to be found if they needed to be found.
He said yes.
She said alright.
She drank her tea.
The Mexican evening moved in around them, warm and unhurried and entirely unaware of the people it was sheltering and what they were sheltering from.
She said six weeks.
He said yes.
She said a lot could happen in six weeks.
He said yes.
She said a lot had already happened.
He said yes.
He said, and most of it was going in the right direction.
She looked at him.
She said do you believe that.
He said yes.
He said because the truth was in the right hands now.
He said because Franklin was good at his job, the inquiry was open, and the man from the Crawford ranch had waited twenty years to be asked and was ready to be heard.
He said that because their grandfathers were in Montana together for the first time in twenty years, and that alone was something that should not have been possible and was.
He said because the thing that Robert Harmon had most wanted to prevent, the two families talking to each other and finding each other and choosing each other, had already happened.
He said it had already happened in a second-year agricultural economics classroom in Arizona when two people from the wrong sides of a twenty-year wound had sat down next to each other, and one of them had said that the other was not taking notes.
It had already happened.
Everything else was the world catching up to what was already true.
She looked at the hills.
She was quiet for a moment.
Then she said she was glad she had sat down next to him.
He said he was glad she had sat down next to him.
She said, even knowing everything they knew now.
He said, especially knowing everything they knew now.
She took his hand.
He held it.
The Mexican evening settled around them, the hills went dark, the first stars appeared in the sky above the valley, and they sat on the back porch of a small house in the interior of Mexico and let the quiet be what it was.
Complete.
And for now, enough.
End of Chapter three.
Chapter 4 is the final act.
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The cartel.
The border.
The tragedy that changes everything, and what two families do with the love that was taken from them…