Remembering the Haven

The last customer of the day had been a man with a Triumph who wanted to know if his clutch cable could wait until Monday, and Jesse had told him it could, though she'd heard the fray in it the second he walked it through the bay doors. She wiped her hands on a shop rag that had long since stopped doing anything but moving the grease around and looked at the clock above the parts counter. Quarter past six. Outside, the light had gone the color of a bruise healing, that thin gold-violet that only lasted a few minutes before the mountains ate it.

"You're staring at that clock like it owes you money," Ray said, from somewhere under the lift where he was wrestling a stuck brake caliper off a dirt bike that had clearly lived a hard life.

"Just tired," Jesse said, and that was true enough, though it wasn't the whole of it. Her temples had been throbbing on and off since lunch, a dull pressure behind the eyes that two aspirin and a long drink of water hadn't touched. She'd had headaches before. Everybody who leaned over an engine all day for a living got them. This one had a different shape to it, though, something that sat lower in her skull and pulsed in time with her pulse instead of just aching.

Pete came through from the back with an armload of oil filters for the shelf, his watch cap pushed back off his forehead, grinning the way he always grinned at the end of a shift, like the day had been a gift instead of eleven hours of busted knuckles. "You heading up the hill?" he asked. "Cassie texted the group chat. Something with rosemary. Pork, I think. Ray, you want in on that, or you got somewhere to be?"

"I got a recliner and a ballgame," Ray said, sliding out from under the lift, swiping a forearm across his brow. "Tell her I said thank you kindly and I'll take a plate tomorrow if there's any left, which there won't be, because Austin's got a hollow leg."

Jesse laughed, short and low, and the sound of it in her own chest felt good, felt like something solid to hold onto against the pressure building behind her eyes. She racked the last of her tools, pulled the bay door down with the long practiced yank that always stuck a little at the bottom, and checked the lock twice out of habit. Ray stood in the lot a moment longer with his hands in his coverall pockets, watching her swing a leg over the bike.

"You take the highway tonight," he said. It wasn't quite an order, not from Ray, who didn't give orders to anybody, but there was something in the flatness of it that made Jesse look up.

"I'll be fine," she said. "Ridge road's faster this time of day anyway, no trucks on it."

"Ridge road's got no shoulder and no guardrail for about four miles of it," Ray said. "And it's gonna be dark before you're halfway up."

"I've ridden it a thousand times, Ray." She said it gently, because she knew the worry under the words for what it was, the same worry he'd carried since she was seventeen and first wrapped her hands around a throttle in this same lot. "Head's just loud today. I want the wind instead of the straightaway."

Ray studied her for a second longer, then shrugged the way he always did when he'd said his piece and knew better than to say it twice. "Go on, then," he said. "Tell Cassie I said hey."

Pete waved from the doorway, one hand lifted, the garage light behind him throwing his shadow long across the gravel, and Jesse kicked the engine over and let the old familiar growl settle into her chest where the headache lived, and for a few seconds it was almost enough to quiet it.

The ridge road climbed out of the valley in long lazy switchbacks before it narrowed and started to twist in earnest, pine crowding close on both sides, the asphalt gone dark and slick-looking under a mist that hadn't quite decided to become rain. Jesse leaned into the curves the way she always did, weight shifting low, the bike answering her like it always had, like an extension of her own spine. The headache had sharpened somewhere around the second switchback into something with edges, something that made the tree line flicker at the periphery of her vision in a way she didn't like.

She told herself it would pass. It always had before.

At Hilltop Haven, the kitchen smelled like rosemary and browned butter, and Cassandra Evans stood at the stove in a flour-dusted cotton dress with her braid come half loose from the heat, basting a pork loin that had been resting under foil for the last ten minutes while she finished the greens. Selene Dubois sat at the kitchen island with a folder of estate documents spread in front of her, reading glasses pushed up into her dark hair, and across from her Tracey had a laptop open and a mug of tea gone cold at her elbow.

"The county wants the easement survey redone," Selene said, tapping a sheet of paper with one silver-ringed finger. "Which is absurd, since Wayne's own crew did the last one eighteen months ago, but apparently somebody new in the clerk's office doesn't trust a signature that isn't dated this fiscal year."

"Wayne will handle it," Tracey said, not looking up from the screen. "He always does."

"Wayne handles everything," Cassie said, from the stove, "which is why we should invite him to dinner more often instead of just sending him home with a pie every time he does us a favor."

"Noted," Selene said, with the faint amused curl at the corner of her mouth that meant she agreed and had no intention of doing anything about it tonight. She glanced at the clock on the wall above the pantry door. "Where is our girl? I thought she closed at six."

"She did," Tracey said. "Ray texted Austin, said she left on time. Ridge road, apparently, not the highway."

Cassie's hands stilled over the pan for a half second, then kept moving. "She takes the ridge when her head's bothering her," she said. "Says the wind helps."

Nobody answered that right away. Outside, the last of the light had gone from violet to nothing at all, and the kitchen windows had turned to dark mirrors that threw the room back at itself, Cassie at the stove, Selene with her glasses in her hair, Tracey's face lit pale from below by the laptop screen.

The mudroom door opened and closed, and boots thumped against the mat. Austin came through first, leaning on his cane out of habit more than need these days, Morgan a step behind him with a coil of rope over one shoulder that she'd clearly been using out at the fence line.

"Bike's not up," Austin said, before anyone asked. "I was out checking the gate latch, would've heard her coming a mile off. Nothing."

Morgan set the rope down on the bench by the door, her face already gone carefully still in the way it did when she was working a problem instead of feeling it. "What time did she leave the shop?"

"Six," Tracey said, and she was already doing the math in her head, Jesse had done it, Jesse had told her once how long the ridge took on a good night, twenty-five minutes if you didn't dawdle at the overlook. "She should have been here by six-thirty, six forty at the outside if she stopped to look at the valley."

Selene had gone very still at the island, her pen motionless above the easement papers. "It's nearly seven."

Tracey pulled out her phone and called, and it rang twice and went to the flat recorded voice that meant voicemail, no ring-out, no pickup. She called again. Same result. "Straight to voicemail," she said, and her voice had lost its measured clinical edge entirely now, gone thin and fast. "That doesn't happen unless the phone's off or the battery's dead or—"

"Or it's broken," Morgan said, quietly, which was the thing none of them wanted to be the one to say first.

Cassie had already turned the stove off without seeming to decide to, the pork forgotten under its foil, her hands pressed flat against the counter's edge. "Something's wrong," she said. "I know her. She doesn't go dark like this."

Selene was up and moving before Cassie finished the sentence, pulling the landline off its cradle on the wall by the pantry, her voice shifting into the brisk, commanding register she used when something needed doing and she intended to be the one who did it. "I'm calling the highway dispatch line, see if there's been any report of trouble on the ridge road tonight. Tracey, work out her fuel range, tell me how far she could have gotten on what was in that tank when she left the shop."

"She filled up Tuesday," Tracey said, already moving toward the hall closet where the good flashlights lived, her mind running the numbers even as her hands shook faintly reaching for the door. "She's got range. It's not that. Something happened."

Morgan was already pulling the high-powered spot lanterns down from the shelf above the coat hooks, checking each one's charge with a thumb on the switch, quick and businesslike, the same motion Jesse imagined she must have used a hundred times checking gear before it mattered. "Austin, get the truck. Four-wheel, not the sedan, the shoulders up there are soft this time of year."

"Already on it," Austin said, and was out the mudroom door again, his cane tapping fast and uneven against the boards, the truck's engine turning over a moment later with a cough and then a steady roar.

Cassie grabbed her coat off the hook with hands that weren't quite steady, and Tracey caught her wrist for half a second, not to stop her, just to feel her there, solid, present, before they both went out the same door into the mist.

"I'll stay on the phone," Selene called after them, already dialing, her voice pitched to carry over the sound of the truck idling in the drive. "Find her. Whatever it takes, find her."

The spot lanterns threw long white cones out across the wet gravel as Morgan and Cassie climbed into the truck bed and cab, and Austin pulled out onto the drive with his jaw set, headlights cutting up into the mist toward the dark shape of the ridge road rising against a sky gone completely black, no moon, no stars, nothing but the road and the trees and the terrible, swallowing quiet where an engine note should have been.