A roadside mile marker sank her already dark mood even deeper. She was only eight miles from the gate that closed the road in winter months. She had ten more slick and twisty miles to go before she would reach Lake Olympus Lodge.

She wished she could have waited at the gate for law enforcement park ranger Jae-jin Son, but according to the dispatcher, Jae was stuck at Mora Campground, dealing with visitors who thought park rules were for other people. She didn’t have time to wait. As it was, she’d be lucky to have thirty minutes of daylight to inspect the site before nightfall and the predicted storm rolled in.

Her belly was cramped tight with fear, an unpleasant accompaniment to her racing heart. Had the site been looted again? Why hadn’t George called her back?

A little more than an hour ago, she’d been at the Forks Ranger Station, planning a spring break archaeology camp for tweens and teens with an interpretation park ranger, when she got a call from headquarters informing her the cameras she’d set up to protect the archaeological site had stopped transmitting.

She’d installed the cameras herself in November, after the site had been looted and tribal elder George Shaw had looked at her with such disappointment. The memory of his words still cut straight to her heart. “I recommended you as Roy’s replacement when he retired as park archaeologist. I trusted you to protect our sacred sites. Maybe this time the looting isn’t your fault, but if it happens again, it will be.”

George took the desecration personally, and she, as the person entrusted to protect all cultural resources within Olympic National Park, had failed him and the tribe. She’d installed the cameras within days. They couldn’t stop looting, but they could alert her department when it happened.

And now the cameras weren’t working.

According to headquarters, the lodge had electricity. This wasn’t a simple power outage. Meaning this could be her worst-case scenario: looters had cut the line before digging up the site.

Her first call had been to George, who had an inholding cabin near the ancestral village. George was one of the few people who wintered near the lodge, and with the forecasted storm, he’d be settled in for the next few days, ready to ride out the wind and rain, the worst of which would hit this evening. But the elder hadn’t answered her call or responded to her messages.

From the moment she couldn’t reach George, her fear had shifted from the archaeological site to George himself. What if he’d seen the looters and confronted them? Looters sometimes turned violent when caught in the act. She couldn’t simply wait by the gate for Jae as the dispatcher had instructed. She had to check on the site and George.