Ridge Creek Camp.
Closed.
The entrance road beyond it was chained off, weeds growing thick around the posts.
Selena eased off the gas without meaning to.
She remembered that place.
Not the official campsites with numbered posts and fire rings, but the clearing past them, the one people reached by cutting through a deer path and pretending that counted as wilderness.Connor had taken her there once before the divorce, back when money had been thin and pride had been thinner.They had brought a tent that leaked at one corner, two cans of beans, a cheap bottle of wine, and a guitar Connor had borrowed from a cousin.
He had played three songs badly.Same three chords, different speed.Selena had sat beside the fire and pretended the performance wasn’t awful because the concentration on his face made her want to laugh and kiss him at the same time.
“You’re enjoying this,” he had said.
“I’m enduring it.”
“You love it.”
“I love that you think this is music.”
Then he had played louder, grinning through every wrong note.
Selena blinked and looked back at the road.
Connor’s SUV turned left ahead.
The memory faded, but not cleanly.
A few minutes later, the hunting lodge came into view through the trees.
It had a low roof and tired siding.Porch boards worn by the weather and old boots.Police tape crossed the front at an angle, but one end had been torn loose and hung from the porch rail.Connor parked.
Selena pulled in behind him.
The lodge looked larger than the crime scene photographs had made it seem.Places often did.Photos flattened them into evidence.Standing there in the heat, with insects moving in the grass and trees pressing close, the building had presence.
Connor was already looking toward the side wall.
“There’s the broken window,” he said.
Selena followed his line of sight.
One of the side windows had been smashed inward.Jagged glass still clung to the frame.Shards glittered in the dirt below the sill and across the interior floor beyond.
Connor frowned.“That was intact yesterday.”
“Did anyone post a guard overnight?”
“No.Tape and a locked door.We don’t have the manpower to babysit every scene around the clock.”
“I’m not criticizing.”
“I know.”
But she heard the defensiveness beneath it, and maybe the fatigue, too.Harlan County did not have Washington resources.It had deputies, radios, a stretched budget, and a sheriff who had to decide which impossible thing needed attention first.
Connor lifted the fallen tape enough for her to pass.
