Chapter 7
Whaler wasn’t at home. With a quick look around, Dove determined that he hadn’t been there since they’d looked for him there earlier that morning.
On the way over, she’d called several people she knew that kept in touch with Whaler.
The guy who rented space from him at the marina to sell bait to Whaler’s customers.
Both of the men who still worked for him.
The woman Dove had hired to clean her father’s house twice a month.
And his doctor of forty years. She reached the man just as he was leaving church.
No one had seen or heard from the business owner since Saturday afternoon.
Mitchell was itching to call Kansas in, had been ready to do so for more than an hour, but Dove insisted on checking out one more place.
“He might have stopped for a bite at Roasters,” she said, standing in the middle of her father’s living room as though she couldn’t decide where to put herself.
“One of my mom’s friends works there, and when he’s particularly lonely, he’ll go order some pie and chat with her in between customers.
Not that he’d be eating pie, as drunk as he was… ”
Her voice dropped off, and Mitchell paused on his way to the front door. He looked at her face and felt a rush of the horror he read there, as an almost physical being.
“I never should have left him in that state,” she whispered, eyes wide and almost blank as she stared at him. Her long amber waves fell around her as her shoulders closed in on her petite, shapely frame, and Mitchell was directly in front of her before he’d had the thought to go there.
Taking both of her shoulders in his hands on instinct, he straightened them, bending his head until he could see into her eyes and then raised himself, pulling her gaze up with him. “From what I hear, you’d never leave him at all if you didn’t leave him in that state,” he said clearly. Succinctly.
Staring at him as though through the eyes of a frightened child, she nodded. Nodded again. And he felt her muscles engage beneath his fingers, pulling her together. Upright. Ready to stand on her own.
“Let’s go to Roasters,” he said then, as though nothing had just happened between them. Needing to convince himself that it hadn’t.
He was just out of his comfort zone. Reading far too much into normal, everyday occurrences that were happening in the midst of disruption, coating their time together with uneasiness.
Time that he hoped would be drawing to an end before afternoon hit but held out little hope when no one at Roasters remembered seeing Whaler since Friday.
He’d just pulled out of the parking place on Main Street, not far from the café, and had turned the corner to take them back down toward the marina when he heard Dove gasp and then shout out, “Stop!”
His foot was already pushing hard on the brake by the time she’d finished the command. Shooting forward against his seat restraint, he turned to look over at her.
“That’s my dad’s truck,” she said, her voice breathless-sounding. And hopeful, too.
Mitchell shot forward, turning down the side street he’d been about to pass, and sped toward the truck. Dove was out of the car before he had the vehicle in Park and, leaving his car running in the middle of the road, he followed quickly behind her.
Praying that, if Dove found Whaler slumped over the steering wheel, the older man was still alive.
Her father wasn’t in his truck. Nor was there any sign of when he’d exited the vehicle. Could have been an hour or two, or the day before.
“The engine’s cold so it’s been here more than a few minutes,” Mitchell told her, but she knew he was stretching the time for her benefit.
Something she both appreciated and needed him to not do. Whatever was lying in front of her, it was her job to get through it with as much faith, hope, joy and peace as possible. Not to crumple beneath the weight of it.
“It’s been at least an hour,” she stipulated, more for her benefit than his and headed up to the house in front of which her father had parked.
“You know who lives here?” she asked, as Mitchell showed up beside her.
“Nope.”
“Me, either.” But she couldn’t let the unknown stop her. With Mitchell standing right behind her, his car still running in the street, she knocked.
A few times. Until an older woman called out to her from behind. “He’s a captain, out to sea. Won’t be back for another couple of months.”
She turned to see a seventyish woman, dressed almost stylishly in linen pants and a blouse and jacket—probably just coming home from church Dove realized—standing on the sidewalk between them and her father’s truck. “I live across the street,” The woman said, “and saw you through my front window.”
Dove wanted to smile at the woman. To thank her. And ask questions. But felt the sting of tears too sharply to do anything more than nod.
“Do you know how long this truck’s been parked out front?” Mitchell jumped in, covering her weakness.
“It was here yesterday afternoon when I got home from playing bridge. Hasn’t moved since, that I’ve seen.”
Saturday afternoon. Again. Dove’s heart took a dive so deep she struggled to stay upright and moving forward.
Except that Whaler needed her. She was all he had left, and she was not going to fail him. Or the spirit of her mother who would be there, guiding her, if she’d let it.
If she could access it.
She had to access it. To find her center and be fully present. No matter what it cost.
Even if it meant finding enough good feeling to supersede the bad by turning to a man she hardly knew and had no business leaning on.
He’d been put in her path for a reason. It wasn’t up to her to question why. Not then. Not yet.
And so when she felt Mitchell’s hand at her back, his palm against the strip of bare skin between her crop top and skirt, she landed right there with it. Absorbing his touch. Going with the flow of warmth it gave her. And let him lead her back to his running car.
Mitchell was already on the phone by the time he slid behind his steering wheel.
Heading down the street and around the corner, he stopped just a couple of blocks from the local office of the Alaska Bureau of Investigation.
As far as he knew, his cousin Kansas, a search and rescue state trooper, didn’t have a current case, so probably wasn’t at the office.
But he’d bet Eli was. And he didn’t want to pull his older brother’s attention away from his major crimes duty another time if it wasn’t warranted.
“Hey, cousin, what’s up?” Kansas answered her cell on the second ring, sounding wide awake and ready to go as always.
“I’m not sure. Maybe nothing,” Mitchell said, more in deference to Dove sitting next to him, hearing every word, than his own take on the situation. By his calculation, something was most definitely up. He just wasn’t sure it was within Kansas’s wheelhouse.
“You wouldn’t be calling me on Sunday morning if it was nothing.”
Watching Dove he said, “Whaler St. James hasn’t been seen since yesterday afternoon.
He’s not home, at work or at the bar. No one who works for him has seen him.
And his daughter’s studio was vandalized as well.
Welding’s working on that. There’ve been some less than friendly offers to buy Whaler’s business issued to his daughter as well as Whaler, from a businessman named Brad Fletcher.
Eli has had a team watching him since yesterday.
The most recent text from him came before eight this morning. ”
He paused, sent an apologetic look to Dove, who’d been staring out the front windshield during his entire missive, and said, “We just found Whaler’s truck parked outside the house of a deployed sailor.
Neighbor said it’s been there since yesterday afternoon.
Whaler wasn’t in a great state the last time he was seen yesterday.
I’d even say worse than usual.” His opinion.
But based on facts. He finished with something they both knew, more for Dove’s sake than anything else.
“Local police aren’t going to do anything about this until more time has passed. He could have just wandered off.”
“And, if you mean by he wasn’t in a great state that he was drunk, then he could have fallen while he was wandering and might need help,” Kansas said, stirring up an influx of affection within Mitchell.
His family, their closeness, was a pain in the ass at times, but he loved them all. Would die for any one of them.
Sitting there with Dove, who had no one but a failing father who was missing, Mitchell realized how lucky he was. Feeling grateful for the first time in a long while, rather than just accepting life as it came and giving his best to it.
A good man didn’t just sit with his wealth.
He gave back. And as Kansas told him she’d head out and see what she could find on Whaler, Mitchell hung up the phone and turned to Dove.
“This is going to sound like overkill, but my family and I…we don’t ever take chances when it comes to someone’s safety…
” He paused as she turned and looked into his eyes.
Tried to read what her gaze was telling him. And got nothing but openness.
“Every Colton home has top-notch security,” he said, speaking without carefully choosing his words. And stopped himself as he was about to further expostulate. She didn’t need to know why his family lived as they did. Eli and Kansas in law enforcement were reason enough.
He was going to help Dove. He wasn’t there to bond with her. To tell her he knew about tragedy. About living with those who’d experienced inexplicable loss.
Eli might be the only one of the siblings and cousins who remembered their aunt Caroline, having been five when he and their father had found Will Colton’s seventeen-year-old sister murdered, but every single one of the Coltons lived with the devastating grief that day had wrought.