Chapter 2: Eyes in the Trees (Jasper)

I was at the third overlook on the bluff trail when I heard the car.

Black Reef’s roads I could walk blindfolded. Which stretch had potholes, which guardrail had been struck by lightning three years back, which curve got sealed off in spring by wild vines—I remembered all of it. That dark-gray Ford pickup didn’t match any truck I knew. It was too clean. No red mud on the tires, which meant it had come straight down the highway from Portland, hadn’t touched the town’s dirt roads.

It parked in the library’s back alley.

I didn’t move. I stood twenty meters back behind a spruce, rain soaking my jacket through. I watched a man in a dark coat get out, walk to the back door, stand there about ten seconds, then go back to the truck.

He didn’t go in. He was just confirming.

Confirming that the new female librarian was really digging through old newspapers.

I knew that move. At seventeen, behind the town records building by the dumpster, I’d seen the same move—someone standing in the rain listening for a while first, making sure no one was there, before bending to open a box. Before they burned something, they always listened first.

When the pickup drove off, I stood behind the tree a long time.

I should mind my own business. After seventeen, I’d sworn: no more watching, no more listening, no more recognizing. This was my town. I took the Forest Service paycheck, fixed the trails, pulled lost tourists out, carried hot coffee to stranded fishermen in blizzards. I didn’t belong to their secrets, and I didn’t belong to anyone’s conscience.

But I knew the woman in that library’s name was Ella Page.

I’d seen her. Every Tuesday she wheeled the recycling bin to the corner, wrinkled her nose at the rain, then tightened her umbrella. When she moved books she hummed quietly, off-key.

I stepped out from behind the spruce and started down the hill.

I knew what I was going to do. I was going to tell her to stop digging. I was going to use the ugliest words I had, the hardest face, and scare her back to her fiction section.

Because I knew better than anyone in this town: the next time they came, they wouldn’t just stand in the back alley and listen.