The Investigator Set Three Wood Squares Beside A Forged Receipt

I asked the deputy to look at my gate photo.

"I'm taking statements," he said. "I'm not deciding it here."

That was fair. I wanted him to say it again where Silas could hear.

I gave him a copy of the rejection slip and kept the original. Then I called the number on the card he left.

By noon, Rosalie Finch stood in my shed.

She was forty-two, a Black woman with short twists, steady dark eyes, and a green field jacket faded at the cuffs. She worked as a state forestry investigator and had been asked to check the timber side of the complaint.

"May I sit?" she asked.

"That's a stack of walnut blanks."

"Then I can't afford to sit."

I brought her a chair.

She let me tell the story without helping me tell it. When I stopped, she waited. I filled the silence with the part about Silas touching my shoulder.

"Did that feel friendly?" she asked.

"It felt priced."

She wrote that down in quotation marks.

I showed her the three cypress squares in their sleeves.

"Before we open anything, who handled these?"

I told her. She recorded the driver, Silas, and me. She photographed the sleeves and seals, then asked me to sign her inventory.

She didn't touch bare wood with her fingers.

"You think gloves can tell me if it's stolen?" I asked.

"No. They can stop me adding a new story to the old one."

The forged receipt claimed I'd collected the boards Monday morning. My actual rejection was Tuesday afternoon. On Monday, I'd been grading ash at a mill outside Ellijay.

I gave her the owner's name and my time sheet.

"Your phone records might help too," she said. "With your consent, we'll get those properly."

I signed the form.

Then I called Pine Ledger Field Station.

Dr. Ada Bell answered from a room full of fans. She'd taught me how to keep useful samples after a buyer blamed a bad oak shipment on my grade.

"Cypress?" she said. "Send the images through our intake address. Don't sand it all away trying to help."

Rosalie smiled at that.

Ada's team held a research archive from Morrow Brake, a conservation tract near the lower Altamaha. A recorded deed barred timber harvest there. The cypress species wasn't illegal to own. Cutting those particular trees without authority was the problem.

Researchers had mapped living trees and taken narrow growth cores three years earlier. The archive held ring measurements, site photos, and survey numbers.

"A ring match alone won't name a thief," Ada said over the speaker. "It may give you somewhere to look."

"Somewhere is useful," Rosalie said.

She asked for comparison work through a second lab as well. Ada agreed before Rosalie finished asking.

I felt foolish for how much that exchange calmed me. Nobody was promising a miracle. They were making a list.

Outside, a logging truck rattled past the road. I watched until it was gone.

"Does Horne have friends in your office?" I asked.

Rosalie put her pen down.

"I can't promise who he knows. I can give you a case number, a receipt for every sample, and my supervisor's name."

She wrote all three on a card.

When the first review came back two days later, Ada called us together.

"R17-B has a strong growth-pattern match to the Morrow Brake archive. Narrow years, a flood scar, then a run of wide growth. The second lab needs its own look."

"What about the 2011 salvage claim?" I asked.

"The matching tree was alive and standing when we cored it three years ago. If confirmed, that history doesn't fit."

Rosalie asked for the full report, including the limits.

That afternoon, Mercer called. He owed me five hundred sixty dollars for work already done.

"Office says hold payment pending the theft claim."

"Your office or Silas's office?"

He hung up.

I sat down on the walnut blanks. This time nobody warned me about the cost.

Rosalie stayed near the door.

"Have you had anyone from Horne's yard bring you other cypress?"

"A clerk. Late last month. One trial board."

"Man or woman?"

"Woman. She had a red raincoat with one cuff taped."

Rosalie opened a folder slowly. She set a photograph on the bench, away from the samples.

The woman in it had the same tired eyes. Her hair was pulled back with a yellow pencil.

"Her name is June Vale," Rosalie said. "Her daughter reported her missing on April 29."

I stared at the picture.

"That's her. She came here the night before."

Rosalie turned to a clean page.

"Everett, what time that night?"