Page 39 of Code Violation

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His coffee had chilled by the time Nero shifted and straightened, then settled back in his chair to stare at the screen. Much of what he’d come across he’d already known. Some facts he hadn’t. Now there was even more to speculate about.

“What?” Forrest asked impatiently. “Did you find something?”

Nero quickly scanned through his notes again.

“First and foremost, I want to know what kind of people would choose to live in the deepest, darkest part of a forest, far away from any humans. No running water. No easy way to communicate if something went wrong. How the hell did they survive for eight years or longer?” He looked over at Forrest. “I’m using eight years only because you say you were around seven when you came to live here.”

Dina Paulsen had even given birth to both children out there, far from any medical help. Another mind-boggling fact.

“I can relate to the need to escape the rat race, but what your parents chose to do was extreme.”

“Yeah, I know. They had to take the sovereign citizen movement to eleven.”

“Did they consider themselves sovereign citizens?”

Sovereign citizens—if they were serious—could be scary, unyielding people. The family involved in the FBI standoff in Oregon ten or so years past were sovereigns.

“I don’t know if it was official, but they sure didn’t believe that laws applied to them. They didn’t pay taxes, they lived where they wanted—this is hearsay, obviously, because no one talked to me about this kind of stuff. Why?”

“I covered a couple of sovereign stories in my career as a journalist. It doesn’t really change much of anything except that, if the group was made up of people who believed in the anti-government survivalist aspect of the movement and those people are still alive, we’ll need to be very careful. I’m not saying all SCs are dangerous, but one of their creeds is to always be prepared. They stock food, guns, and fuel in preparation for the failure of society. Not to be fucked with.”

“From what I remember, it wasn’t a huge compound,” Forrest said thoughtfully. “I think they used the natural area as much as possible, caves and protected places that already existed. Could they have gotten all that stuff up there? My memories are so weird that I really can’t judge.”

“Yes, it’s possible. But okay, we’ll put that idea in our back pockets for now and keep going. I’ve found one more article about your ‘rescue’ but nothing else. Just basic information. Thinking about it, your grandfather must still have had a lot of clout in the region at the time. He was a Cooper, after all—only, what, two generations away from the town’s founder? Still powerful enough to block a lot of publicity about children raised in the woods with wolves.”

“I don’t remember wolves, thank fuck.”

There was no mention of the children’s parents, Witt and Dina, in the piece. The article was written almost as if the Cooper siblings had merely been missing for a few days before being rescued by their worried grandfather. Unfortunately, since it’d been pre-internet and had happened in a relatively isolated small town, the story hadn’t been picked up by other news sources.

Nero growled his frustration at the lack of information and clicked further into the search results.

“Oh, check this out.” Nero pointed at the screen and Forrest came to stand next to him. “The World did a human-interest series on modern pioneers in 1979. Like the ones in the 1800s who traveled by wagon train, lived in log houses, and died of dysentery. Did you ever play that game? No? Moving right along. One of the stories mentions that Witt Cooper handfasted with his beloved, Dina Paulsen, and they planned to homestead, joining a growing movement of people who wanted to go back to the land. So, possibly SCs, but maybe just their own brand of antisocial. I still want to know the names of the rest of the group.”

“Handfasted?” Forrest repeated. “That’s so eighteenth century. What the hell.”

“I think that was the point. Okay, so.” Nero clicked over to another tab. “Back in that era. See there? There were acres of what’s now the Olympic National Forest that existed only nebulously officially. These woods weren’t actually part of the national forest. Not yet anyway. They weren’t protected from timber companies or anyone else—for example, wannabe pioneers. I bet Witt and Dina weren’t the only ones who’d had the idea to live off that land.”

Nero stood up to stretch his legs and spotted the two stacks of diaries sitting on the table. Forrest had set the ones he’d scanned through off to one side.

“Have you learned anything from those?”

“Nothing. No names so far. Could be they had a pact of silence or something. Wouldn’t surprise me.”

Nero’s cellphone vibrated, and he grudgingly tugged it out of his jeans pocket. Mom stared back at him from the screen.

“I should answer this. It’s my mom.”

“Be my guest.” Forrest nodded.

Nero stepped to the patio door and looked outside where Forrest’s dormant lavender fields lay.

“Hi, Mom. How’s it going?” He infused his voice with extra cheer.

“Oh, hi,” she said after a weird pause. “I didn’t expect you to answer.”

He hated talking on the phone, something his mother did not understand, but he refused to apologize for it. Answering phones was not a requirement for modern life—that’s why texting was invented. He shuddered, starting to feel a bit sympathetic toward Witt and Dina for wanting to get away from it all.

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