Broken Ground
Copyright© 2026 by Lumpy
Chapter 3
It took a few minutes of driving around town, which was really all the time it took to cover most of town in total, to find a small L-shaped building with the sign “Pineview Motor Inn” above it. The place looked like it had been built back in the forties and not touched since, but it had a neon sign in the window that said “Vacancy,” which was enough for Taylor. There looked to be about eight units, two on the shorter side of the L with the office anchoring it, and six on the long side, each with a door painted the same faded green.
It had been a long day since he got to the airport in Washington that morning, and the sun was starting to go down as Taylor pulled into the gravel parking lot, stopping in front of the office. Through the window, he could see an elderly woman behind the counter, her gray hair pulled back in a practical bun, reading glasses perched on her nose as she worked on what looked like a crossword puzzle.
A bell chimed when he pushed through the door, causing the woman to look up and set down her pencil.
“Evening. How can I help you?”
“I could use a room for the next few days. Let’s start with three, although I might extend it.”
“Okay,” she said, seeming a little interested in that last part, but also knowing the kind of place this motel was, deciding it was better if she didn’t ask. Instead, she said, “That’ll be two hundred and fifty-nine dollars and twenty cents. Cash or card?”
“Cash.” Taylor pulled two hundreds and a few twenties from his wallet and set them on the counter while he filled out the card.
He used his real name but kept the address section minimal. He hadn’t exactly kept a low profile so far, so hiding his identity now didn’t seem to make much sense.
“You’re not from around here.” It wasn’t a question. The woman counted out his change and handed him a key attached to a plastic diamond with the number four printed on it.
“Just passing through.”
“Room four’s right in the middle there. Ice machine’s next to the office, if you need it.”
Room four smelled of Pine-Sol and stale cigarette smoke. The furnishings were simple. A double bed with a faded floral comforter, a small round table with two chairs, and an old tube television sitting on a dresser. It was clean enough. He dropped his duffel bag on the luggage rack, locked the deadbolt, and drew the heavy polyester curtains shut. The room went dark except for the thin line of light coming through where the curtains met.
He took his laptop from the bag, set it on the small table, and plugged it in. While it booted, he retrieved his sidearm from the locked hard case in his luggage, did a quick check, as was his habit, and set it on the nightstand within easy reach of the bed. He wasn’t exactly expecting trouble, but that didn’t mean trouble wouldn’t come looking for him.
The motel’s Wi-Fi was slow, but it worked. Taylor opened a browser and started with the obvious, searching for whatever paper they might have in Glacier Falls, Minnesota. It didn’t take long to realize a town with a population that wouldn’t fill a city block back east wouldn’t have its own newspaper. The next level up was the Flathead County Chronicle, the paper that covered the entire county, including several equally tiny towns. Its website was a cluttered mess of local ads for farm equipment, diners and syndicated pop-up ads that made it hell to navigate.
Here was the first snag. He actually had no idea what he was looking for. All he knew was that it was weird that they weren’t releasing the body, and everyone involved was acting sketchy about it.
Not exactly something they had a section for.
That meant hours of just reading through random articles until he started getting a pattern for the place. Taylor started with the past week’s news and worked his way back. Most of it was the mundane rhythm of small-town life. A prolonged and bitter dispute over library funding, several stories about the basketball team from one town over that was having a pretty decent season, a pretty bitter dispute over some mining rights on the other side of the county, a Bureau of Land Management inspector who’d apparently been missing for a few weeks, and some articles on seasonal road closures in the area.
Nothing that would connect to Roy, at least not in a way Taylor could see.
He kept digging, pushing further back into the archives. Two months. Four months. Six months. He ignored the birth announcements and wedding notices, the school honor rolls and the classifieds, focusing on police reports, town news, and the one section newspapers never failed to update, the obituaries.
That was where he started to see something interesting. While the county as a whole had a fair number of deaths over the last year or two, they were mostly spread all over.
Not all of them were, however.
About five months ago, Justin Bradley, a rancher on the outskirts of town, had died in a single-car accident late at night when his truck had gone off the road and hit a tree. The death was listed as a suicide, and he was survived by a wife and two children. It was close enough that Dr. Henley would have been the one to do the autopsy.
Then there was Thomas Evans, fifty-seven, who was killed in some kind of hunting accident around the same time. It happened in the hills just outside of town and was also ruled a tragic accident, no charges were filed.
The more he looked, the more the list grew.
Three months ago, there was Sarah Miller, thirty-five, who worked in the local schools and was a hiker. She’d apparently been on a treacherous trail in the same hills where Evans died, where she’d slipped and fallen to her death. Her body was recovered by search teams two days later. Another terrible accident, mourned widely since she was apparently popular with students and colleagues.
After her was Peter Olsen, sixty-two, who ran a small engine repair shop in town and had been found floating in the river after going out fishing, and then three weeks ago, Ryan Hall, fifty-one. There’d been some kind of accidental fire in one of the barns on his farm that he’d tried to put out on his own. By the time the volunteer fire department had responded, the structure was already fully engulfed. They found Jensen’s body inside after they put the blaze out.
Again, after an investigation, Dr. Henley and the sheriff had ruled the death a freak accident.
When he added Roy’s death to the mix, that was six dead people from accidents in as many months. The national average for accidental deaths was somewhere around sixty per one hundred thousand people per year. For a town of eighteen hundred, the statistical expectation would be about one accidental death per year. Maybe two in a bad year.
Six in six months was not a bad year; it was a big red flag.
Just to make sure, he went back and looked through several more months of obituaries, but found accidents were more in the range of one every six months to a year, just like the national averages suggested. Most deaths out here were caused by two things: natural causes and drug overdoses.
Six in six months was not a bad year. It was a statistical impossibility.
These were not the slow declines of old age or the ravages of long-term illness. These were sudden, violent ends. A car crash. A gunshot wound. A long fall. A drowning. A fire. And now Roy, dead from an accident so secret no one could even name it.
The causes were all different, and there was no obvious connection between the dead that he could see, at least on paper. They had a rancher, a hunter, a teacher, a mechanic, a farmer, and a retired army vet. Their ages, sexes, races, and ethnicities all varied.
The only thing they had in common was that they lived in Glacier Falls, their deaths were investigated by the sheriff’s department and ruled accidents, and their post-mortems were done by Dr. Henley.
Whatever was going on, he’d bet a dollar there was something else that connected them all. He could feel it, which meant it was time to do some poking around.
That would have to wait for tomorrow, though. Tonight, he needed to get to this bar Milly mentioned and talk to Roy’s friend, see if he knew what Roy had been up to. It bothered Taylor that Roy hadn’t told his daughter. The last time they’d talked, the two had been very close, and if something that important was going on, he would have told her about it.
The only reason he could think of that he wouldn’t have told her was if he thought it might be dangerous and wanted to keep her safe.
And it looked like he’d been right.
Taylor checked his watch, half past seven. Time to head over to Corky’s and see what Roy’s friend, Harold, might know. He closed his laptop and grabbed his jacket.
The drive across town took all of five minutes. He realized he’d actually passed Corky’s once, just hadn’t registered it as a bar. It was only two blocks from the courthouse, which was only two blocks from the edge of the town proper.
There really just wasn’t that much town.
Although, it wasn’t as completely podunk as it might seem. He noticed two security cameras mounted under the eaves covering the front entrance and parking area.
So it at least had a foot in the twentieth century. Maybe twenty-first if they were Wi-Fi.
Inside, the bar was just a bar. It had that familiar smell of stale beer and cigarettes, which made it stand out from places back east where you couldn’t smoke inside. Dark wood paneling covered the walls, and a dozen mismatched tables filled the space between the entrance and a long bar that ran along the back wall. Maybe twenty people scattered throughout, most probably regulars.
Taylor approached the bartender, a heavy-set woman in her fifties with graying hair pulled back in a ponytail.
“What can I get you?”
“Beer. Whatever you have on tap.” Taylor settled onto a barstool. “I’m looking for Harry Dunn.”
She filled a glass with Budweiser and set it in front of him.
“Harry’s over there,” she said, nodding toward a corner table where a man in his sixties sat alone, staring into a half-empty whiskey glass.
Taylor paid for his beer and walked over. “Mind if I sit?”
Harry looked up. Weathered face, gray stubble, and the kind of tired eyes that came from too many years of hard work. “Depends who’s asking.”