The scent of damp earth and pine followed Alistair up the winding path from the creek bed, a fragrance he had come to associate with a peculiar kind of peace. In his hand, tucked into the inner pocket of his coat, the folded notes felt like a talisman against the world he’d left behind.
The name—Jedediah Pope, Notary Public, Philadelphia—was more than just a clue; it was the keystone. With it, the entire corrupt structure of the Appalachian Coal & Timber Company would crumble.
For the first time in weeks, Alistair felt the familiar, invigorating hum of a story coming together. But this was different.
It wasn’t the cold satisfaction of an exposé, the clinical pleasure of laying a fraud bare. This was a righteous fire, a conviction that burned with the heat of his growing affection for Sera and his grudging respect for the people of Whisper Creek.
He and Sera had met again the night before, their heads bent close over the papers in the flickering lamplight of her cabin. The air had been thick with shared purpose, a dangerous and intoxicating intimacy that left him feeling both powerful and profoundly vulnerable.
He rounded a bend where the path widened near a lonely cluster of hemlocks, their branches forming a dense, dark canopy that swallowed the last of the evening light. A figure stepped out from the shadows, blocking his way. It was not a casual meeting; the man had been waiting.
Silas Blackwood.
Alistair’s hand instinctively went to his coat, pressing the notes against his chest. His heart, which had been beating with a steady, hopeful rhythm, now hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird.
“Getting to be a familiar face around here, Finch,” Blackwood said. His voice was unnervingly calm, a low rumble that didn’t quite fit the menace coiled in his stance.
He held a small whittling knife, not as a weapon, but as a tool of idle intimidation, shaving long, clean curls from a piece of scrap wood. The blade flashed in the gloaming.
“I’m just enjoying the mountain air, Blackwood,” Alistair replied, forcing a level tone.
“It’s a commodity your employers seem keen on acquiring.”
A thin, humorless smile touched Blackwood’s lips. He took a slow step forward, and another.
“My employers are businessmen. They see potential. You, on the other hand… you see a story. But you’re digging in the wrong place. The real story isn’t in the dirt here. It’s back in the city you came from.”
Alistair’s blood ran cold. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t you?” Blackwood flicked a curl of wood from his knife.
“A man asks a lot of questions at the county records office. Pokes his nose into deeds and filings. Makes a fellow wonder. So the fellow makes a few inquiries of his own.”
He paused, letting the silence stretch, thick and suffocating.
“A little telegram to our head office works wonders. They’ve got long memories in Philadelphia. Long arms, too. They remembered a nosy clerk named Jedediah Pope. A man with a fondness for bourbon and a bad habit of signing documents he shouldn’t.”
Every word was a hammer blow, dismantling Alistair’s carefully constructed investigation piece by piece.
The confidence he’d felt moments ago curdled into a thick, nauseating dread. Blackwood knew. He knew everything.
“You came here to write a piece of fluff about some backwoods faith healer,” Blackwood continued, his voice dropping, becoming more personal, more venomous.
“A nice little distraction. But you couldn’t leave it alone. You had to play the hero.”
He closed the remaining distance between them, and the scent of sweat and stale tobacco overwhelmed the clean smell of the pines. The whittling knife stopped its lazy work.
“Here’s the thing about this place, Finch. It’s quiet. Things happen, and nobody hears them. A man could slip on a rocky trail in the dark. A hunter could mistake a city fellow for a deer. Accidents.”
His eyes, dark and flat, flickered past Alistair, looking down the path toward the distant, warm lights of the village. Toward Sera’s cabin.
“But I’m not talking about you,” Blackwood purred, his voice a gravelly whisper.
“You’re just a nuisance. Her, on the other hand… she’s the heart of this place. A pretty woman like that, living all alone. Tending to her garden, walking these woods by herself to gather her little weeds and roots. It would be a terrible shame if something were to happen to her. A terrible, tragic accident.”
The threat was not shouted; it was delivered with the precision of a surgeon’s cut. It bypassed Alistair’s intellect, his journalistic bravado, and plunged directly into the deepest, most terrified part of his soul.
An image flashed in his mind, stark and horrific: Sera, her gentle face marred by violence, her compassionate hands still. It was the face of his sister, Lily, in her final moments—the same unbearable sense of helplessness washing over him.
“You touch her,” Alistair choked out, his voice raw, “and I swear to God—”
“You’ll do nothing,” Blackwood interrupted, his face inches from Alistair’s.
“Because if you do, she pays the price. You are going to pack your bags. You’re going to get on the first train out of this valley tomorrow morning. And you are going to forget you ever heard the name Whisper Creek. Your story is dead. Do you understand me?”
Alistair could only stare, his mind a maelstrom of rage and terror. He had come here with such arrogance, so certain of his own intellectual superiority.
He had intended to dismantle Sera’s world with his words, and now this brute was threatening to dismantle her life with his hands. And it was all Alistair’s fault.
As if to punctuate his point, a commotion erupted from the direction of the town. Shouts echoed up the mountainside, sharp and panicked. Alistair’s head snapped toward the sound.
Down below, lanterns were moving erratically. Two men in official-looking coats—county deputies, Alistair realized with a jolt—were dragging a man from his cabin.
It was Thomas Miller, the farmer whose barn had been burned, a man with a wife and three small children, a man who had spoken up defiantly at the last community gathering. He was struggling, protesting his innocence, while his wife’s desperate sobs cut through the night air.
“What’s happening?” Alistair breathed.
Blackwood stepped back, a look of profound satisfaction on his face. He gestured down toward the scene with his knife.
“Proof. A demonstration of my employer’s reach. Seems Mr. Miller has been running an illegal still. Very naughty of him. He’ll be spending a long time in a county jail far from here. His land will, of course, be forfeit to pay his fines. See how easy it is? A word in the right ear. A little money in the right pocket. The law is a useful tool when you know how to hold it.”
He slid the knife back into his pocket.
“That’s a community leader. Think how much less noise it would make if it were just a lonely woman, found in the woods.”
The finality of it crushed Alistair. It wasn’t just brute force; it was a corrupt, insidious system that he could not fight.
His evidence, his precious notes, were meaningless. Publishing the story would be a death sentence for Sera.
His investigation hadn’t armed the community; it had only painted a target on the back of the person he had, against all reason, come to love.
Blackwood turned to leave, then paused.
“Tomorrow morning, Finch. Don’t make me come looking for you.”
He disappeared back into the hemlock shadows as silently as he had appeared, leaving Alistair alone on the path. The cool night air felt heavy, impossible to breathe.
The sounds from the village—the woman’s weeping, the angry, helpless shouts of the men—faded into a dull roar in his ears.
He stumbled to the side of the path and leaned against the rough bark of a tree, his legs trembling. The weight of his failure was a physical thing, pressing down on his shoulders, stealing the air from his lungs.
He had walked into this valley a cynical, arrogant man on a mission to expose what he believed was a lie. He had uncovered a far greater evil, a genuine conspiracy of greed and cruelty, and in his attempt to fight it, he had only made things infinitely worse.
He had pointed Blackwood’s calculating malice directly at Sera.
His grand crusade for justice had been nothing more than the posturing of a fool. He was not their savior.
He was their curse. The papers in his pocket, once a source of pride, now felt like scraps of poison.
He was utterly, hopelessly defeated. And tomorrow, he would have to leave, carrying the sickening knowledge that his presence had brought nothing but danger to the one person who had managed to heal a part of him he thought was long dead.