Page 54 of Into the Fire

“For Dutch’s place?”

“He left one there during fire season.”

I went back to the truck and took my shotgun out from behind the seat. Dante watched me load it and didn’t comment.

I pushed the cabin door open and went in first, with Dante one step behind. It took thirty seconds to check for anyone left behind—the main room, the bedroom, and the lean-to where Dutch kept his tools. Nobody. I stood the shotgun by the door.

The room looked exactly the way we’d left it.

The mail was still stacked on the shelf where the headlamp had been. The maps lay folded on the side table. Nothing was pulled out and dumped. Nothing was obviously missing.

It would have been easy to decide I’d forgotten to lock the door.

I stood in the middle of Dutch’s cabin and felt the opposite of settled. I was confident I’d locked the door. Nothing missing meant whoever came to the cabin hadn’t come to take anything. They’d come to look at something.

Dante started for the side table, and I caught his sleeve.

“Phone first.”

I pulled up the photos from our last visit, and we compared the pictures with the real thing side by side.

“Boone.” Dante pointed at the screen. We’d closed the drawer of the side table. Now it stood open an inch.

The contents were the same: furnace manual, receipts, the seed catalog, and the hardware-store envelope. But in my picture, the envelope sat under the catalog, one corner showing. Now it sat on top of it, square in the middle, the flap tucked in the wrong direction.

“He put it back nicely,” Dante said. “Cleaner than Dutch kept it.”

That was the pattern once we knew to look for it. Dutch’s papers had been gone through and tidied up by somebody neater than Dutch. The notebooks were on their shelf, but the two board-bound ones had swapped places, and the spiral one we’d left with its wire facing out now faced in. On the corkboard, the crew shot with young Nash and the cargo box hung half an inch lower on its pin, the old hole showing above the new one.

Dante drifted around the room while I worked, not touching, hands in his back pockets. “If you’re a thief,” he said, “the binoculars on the nail are worth something. The saw in the lean-to.” He turned and looked at the room. “A cabin at the end of a bad road, empty for five years, and someone entered and left all of it. What does that make him?”

“Not a thief.”

“A reader,” Dante said.

“Papers,” I said. “He came to look at the papers.”

“Worth calling the sheriff?” Dante asked.

“And tell him somebody used a key and read Dutch’s papers?”

The maps were folded in their stack on the side table. From the doorway, they looked untouched. Then I got close.

On the first trip, the Carson Ridge map had sat on top of the stack, refolded wrong. We’d opened it, read it, and put it back the way Dutch had it, wrong fold and all, because the way he left it mattered.

It sat on top of the stack, now folded clean. Cover out, creases nested.

“He fixed it,” I said.

Dante joined me.

“The fold. Dutch had it inside out. We put it back inside out. Somebody refolded it right.” I looked at the neat rectangle, USGS green, the name band showing along the edge. “Same as the envelope. He’s tidy. He put everything back the way it should go instead of the way it was.”

Dante studied it. “How sure?”

“I’ve got the photograph from last time. Dead sure.”

I opened it over the table. Everything was there. The shaded Yates burn. BAD underlined twice on the road. The initials at the creek crossing. The pencil line down the North Fork, holding its elevation too long, crossing where the walking was worst. Nothing erased. Nothing cut away. No new mark anywhere I could find. I looked twice.