Their DNA connected the brothers to names long unknown and long discarded even by them. Thomas and Michael Burgess.
They were Australian. They knew different skies, it was true, though it had been a long time since they’d operated beneath the ones under which they were born.
Thomas was Jack, the elder brother, a figure in the Sydney crime world until he traveled to America at the turn of the twenty-first century to kill a man and liked the place enough to stay once the man was dead. His brother, who had washed out of the Australian army for dishonorable conduct, joined him, first in Boston, then New York, then Chicago. They wore many names during those years but settled on Blackwell for reasons unknown. Jack and Patrick were names they’d given each other in childhood while passing through various foster homes after their father was murdered. He was shot through the windshield of his car with a semiautomatic rifle when Jack was nine and Patrick six. They’d watched it happen from the steps of their front porch.
Their sister had joined them in the country ten years earlier. She’d tried-unsuccessfully-to become a U.S. marshal, a position they saw great value in her having, given their line of work. They’d had a contact in the U.S. Marshals, a man named Temple, but now he was gone and they needed a replacement for him. It didn’t work out, but she moved into the world of executive protection as a private consultant, a job that took her to some interesting places and once to Montana to be taught survival by Ethan Serbin while she silently protected a witness who later disappeared, a rumored high-dollar hit.
In Chicago, the brothers had met a police sergeant named Ian O’Neil, who also needed some witnesses to disappear. Ian O’Neil was currently on the board as an unsolved homicide victim himself.
The Burgess brothers died on the slopes below Republic Peak as the Blackwell brothers, Jack and Patrick, and the task of connecting their DNA with the crime scenes of unsolved homicides began slowly and then bore steady fruit, starting that summer and going on into the autumn and the winter and the year beyond.
The Ritz was not finished yet, though it could have been. Ethan and Allison lived in the bunkhouse while they completed the main house. Originally, Ethan feared that it would be home to nothing but horrifying memories, and he wondered if they should go somewhere else entirely. Allison talked him out of that.
Their bodies had healed by summer’s end, and in the fall, as the tourists left and the first snows teased the slopes and padlocks were placed on the doors of the fire towers, they worked together, measuring and cutting boards and driving framing nails. There were new aches and new weaknesses for both of them, and the work was harder now than it had been but, on some days, maybe a little sweeter too. They got as far as they could before winter shut them down, and then in spring they resumed, and by then they understood better what they hadn’t been able to give voice to at first. The house had to be rebuilt, and they had to do it, because to do so was to heal, and it was either that or run. The two of them were rebuilding everything. Doctor visits were constant-burn specialists and plastic surgeons for Allison; physical therapists for Ethan-and even in their words, their touches, it was not a matter of reclaiming but rebuilding. Things were broken now, but not irreparable. And so they went about repairing, and the house became a part of it, and then it became the central part of it as the doctor visits fell away and the words between them came easier and with less weight and the touches were familiar and not desperate again.
It was, Ethan realized, what he’d never understood about survival in all these years of studying it and teaching it.
Survival didn’t end when you were found. The arrival of the search-and-rescue teams wasn’t a conclusion. Rescue, rejoice, rebuild.
He’d never known the last step.
It was summer again and the sun was hot and Ethan was shirtless as he worked laying shingles on the roof, Allison sanding drywall tape along the ceiling below him, on the day when Jace Wilson arrived with his parents.
The boy was taller, in that startling way that children between certain years could achieve. Voice huskier. He looked good, but he looked guarded, and Ethan knew why. It was the rebuilding season for him too.
His father was named Chuck. His mother, Abby, worked for a bank in Chicago, where last year she’d been approached by a professional bodyguard, a woman with kind blue eyes who’d said she’d heard about Abby’s son’s situation from her police contacts and thought she could help with the problem. Jace’s parents had divorced when he was young, but this summer day, they all made the trip together, and whatever tensions there might have been were well below the surface, where they belonged. They all had a good afternoon and a good quiet evening and after the sun went down behind the mountain, and Jace went to sleep in the bunkhouse, the adults had glasses of red wine on the porch of the unfinished house and there Allison asked Jace’s parents if they wanted to know what had come of the identification of the corpses of those who had pursued their son so relentlessly. And so they listened and learned of the exploits of the Burgess brothers and their sister. As far as Ethan could tell, the only questions that had been answered were which men had been paid how many dollars to kill which other men. But it mattered to Jace’s parents, it was part of their rebuilding season, and so Ethan listened as Allison told what she could of the story, even though Ethan knew, and was certain that she knew, that they had all parted ways with the story on Republic Peak on a hot June day when the western wind breathed fire across the mountains.
The next morning they rode back to the place where Jace and Allison had survived the fire. They borrowed extra horses from a friend, but Allison rode Tango. The burned riding the burned. She told Ethan that she was curious to see if the horse would remember the spot. Ethan didn’t ask her how she would know, but he believed that she would.
They rode out just after sunrise to the ravaged slopes below Republic Peak, and all around them was the grim gray of the burnout. Ethan was worried about the visual effect, was trying to come up with a way to balance the sorrow, when Jace said, “Her grass is already coming back.”
He was right. In the land of burned timber, there was a circle of green, an acre of grass. It had fallen victim to the flames faster than the trees, but it had come back faster too. Jace looked at it for a long time, and then his mother asked, gently, if this was where he wanted to put the cross. It was the first time anyone had mentioned it, though he had been carrying it with him the whole ride.
“Nobody died here,” he said. “She was higher than that.”
And so they went higher, up past the withered and blackened remains of trees, over a ridge of rock, and onto a short plateau. They dismounted there and Ethan knew that the boy had studied the maps that had been released during the inquiry into the fire, because he knew exactly where she had fallen. Ethan was sure of it too because he’d made a trip here himself in the fall, a long slow walk, and then he had sat alone among the black rocks and spoke aloud when he thanked Hannah Faber for his wife.
That was just before the first snow.
Now Jace Wilson cleared a spot in the earth and took a hammer and began to pound the cross into the ground. It was rough soil and he had some trouble, but when his father and Ethan offered to help, he said that he would do it himself. In time he did, but then he decided it wasn’t straight enough, and they waited in silence until he got it aligned in a way that pleased him. He ran his hands along the surface of the wood and then turned back and looked down the slope and said, “She made a good run at it. She made a really good run.”