Chapter 5: The Ranger Cabin (Ella)

I didn’t answer right away.

The truck drove in the rain, wipers sweeping back and forth. I held the bound volume on my knees like a wounded cat.

“Which three?” I asked.

“Pointless to ask now.” Jasper said. “Two are already dead. One just retired last month.”

“What’s the retired one’s name.”

He glanced at me. “You’re more stubborn than I thought.”

“I’m a librarian. I live by the index.”

He didn’t speak. We passed Black Reef’s only traffic light and climbed the mountain road toward the bluff. I’d never taken this road before—up Main Street, around the cemetery, all the way to the edge of the national forest.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You can’t go home.” He said. “They’ve followed you now; they know where you live. They won’t make a move tonight. But tomorrow morning when you open up, your things will be turned inside out.”

“Then where am I going.”

“There’s a little cabin behind the ranger station.” He said. “I sleep there on night patrol. Only one road up. The bluff side drops three hundred feet to the sea. If they want to get to you, they have to come through me first.”

I should have been afraid. Any normal twenty-eight-year-old woman, driven up a mountain on a rainy night by a man she’d just met, to a cabin only he knew about—she should have been afraid.

But I wasn’t.

Not because I trusted him. Because I suddenly realized something: in four years in Black Reef, this was the first time anyone had stood on my side. Even if he stood awkwardly, even if he’d spent the whole time telling me to stop.

The cabin was warmer than I expected. A wood stove, a single bed, a folding table, a hand-drawn map of the bluff trail on the wall. Jasper pulled a bottle of whiskey from behind the stove, poured two fingers, and pushed it at me.

“Take a sip.”

I did. Coughed.

The corner of his mouth moved. Did that count as a smile? I wasn’t sure.

“Now.” He said. “Tell me what you actually found. Start from the beginning.”

I started from where the bound volume had been cut. I told him about the microfilm swapped for September obits, about the girl in the photo named Lena whose name had been inked out, about the still-smoldering Marlboro butt in the back alley.

He listened, fingers tapping slowly on his knee.

When I finished, he stood, walked to the door, bolted it from the inside. Then he did something that skipped a beat in my chest—he took that hand-drawn trail map off the wall and turned it over.

On the back, in pencil, was an older map.

“What is this?” I asked.

He stared at it a long time.

“When I was seventeen.” He said. “I didn’t dare watch what they were burning. But I saw the part they didn’t burn. They buried an iron box, at the spot marked red on this map.”

My breath stopped.

“Where.”

His finger touched a mark at the very edge of the bluff.

“A sea cave. It floods at high tide. They thought no one would ever find it.”