Chapter 25
Logan
“Hey, boy.” I pat Biscuit’s rump as I pass him in the paddock.
Duke sits dutifully by the open barn door as usual. He lets me scratch his head on the way past.
A messy pile of strawberry-blond hair peeks out over the stable wall.
“Morning,” I call out.
Isla’s head pops up. “Oh. Hey.” She goes back to mucking.
I pause at the open stall. “You turning into me now?”
“Huh?” She frowns.
“You’ve been here before sunrise every day this week.” Granted, the days are getting shorter but still, she’s beating me.
“Oh.” She brushes a loose strand of hair off her face with her forearm. “Yeah. I couldn’t sleep.”
“No shit.” Her puffy, darkly lined eyes gave her away. “What’s keeping you up?”
“Besides my missing best friend?”
“Right.” I feel like an ass. It’s been a month since Holly vanished.
The cops are tight-lipped about the investigation, but people talk.
They’ve seen the K9 units and uniforms—both police and firefighters—searching parks and fields and forests, going door-to-door, looking for any clues or private security camera angles.
According to Sarah, people linger in the cramped aisles at my mother’s market and share gossip about who’s been questioned and who should be questioned.
I’m sure plenty have my name at the top of their suspect lists, but they have yet to dare utter them out loud while standing on Landry land.
“The police are doing everything they can to find her.” Even if Emery isn’t in charge of the investigation, there’s no way she isn’t involved.
Of course, I wouldn’t know that because I haven’t seen or talked to her since Thanksgiving.
Isla stabs her pitchfork into a pile of hay. “Holly wanted me to go out with her. You know, that Friday? But I went to my teammate Ashley’s instead.”
“Yeah.” I rest my arms over the stall door. “And?”
“And … if I’d gone out with Holly instead, none of this would be happening.”
“You don’t know that.” Isla could be missing too. Just the thought sends a wave of nausea through me. I know the kinds of people who do bad things to teenage girls. I’ve lived among them.
“Yeah, I do. We would have gone to that party and then we would have come home. She wouldn’t have been hanging in a dark parking lot for some stupid guy.”
“And you have no idea who she was going to see?”
She shakes her head. “She never said. She probably thought I would tell my mother.”
Which means the guy had to be really wrong for her.
“I wouldn’t have left her there.” Isla’s voice wavers on those last words, and when she passes me to drop the soiled bedding into the wheelbarrow, there are unmistakable tears rolling down her cheeks.
No wonder the kid can’t sleep. She’s drowning in guilt that doesn’t belong anywhere near her shoulders.
Copper hovers at the stable door next to me, snorting impatiently. I reach up to scratch his muzzle, wordlessly telling him to wait. “Holly seems like she does what she wants.” I’m careful not to use the past tense, though the odds of the girl turning up alive shrink with each passing day.
Isla shrugs. “People think she’s trouble, but she’s not.
She’s funny, and thoughtful, and she makes me laugh.
She never talks bad about other people, unless they say something about one of her friends.
She always has your back. She used to come to all my hockey games, when I was playing for Cold River, even though she hates hockey.
” Her nose scrunches. “She just sometimes makes bad decisions.”
Like flirting with a recently released convict more than twice her age in a bar, I don’t add. If I’d been any number of the guys I met in prison, that encounter would have gone very differently. “We all do, right?”
“And she has the worst taste in guys,” she adds as if she read my mind. “But she didn’t deserve whatever happened to her.”
“No, she didn’t.” Both of those things we agree on. “Have you talked to your mom about this?”
She offers a one-shouldered shrug that I’m learning sometimes means no with these kids. “I know she’s doing everything she can. She doesn’t need to be worrying about me.”
And Isla doesn’t deserve to beat herself up about any of it.
“You know, I played the ‘what-if’ game too, after that night I got arrested. What if I didn’t go out with Jay that night?
What if I’d stayed here, with your mom? What if I’d talked Jay out of doing something stupid?
What if I’d stopped Ian when he pulled that gun?
” I’d lie in my cell bed, flexing my fist, imagining my knuckles cracking that asshole’s jaw. “I played that game for years.”
Isla gives up her half-assed effort of pushing hay around. “And?”
“And I promise you, there’s never any winner. You just end up dwelling on things you can’t change and blaming yourself for things you couldn’t control.”
Her inquisitive eyes roam my face. “Do you think you could have stopped it all from happening?”
“I don’t know. That night? Maybe. But there were plenty of other nights for Jay to get caught up.”
“Yeah, my mom said he was like that. Always getting himself into something.”
“He wasn’t all bad.” He’s the one who taught me how to ride a bike and a horse, how to throw a punch and hit a can with a .22 from two hundred feet away. I can’t recall how many summer mornings we spent fishing, just him and me.
“Do you miss him?”
“Yeah. I do.” It’s an odd thing to both miss and hate a person.
Beside me, Copper leans over and nudges my shoulder.
“Okay, buddy. I can take a hint.” Sliding on my work gloves, I guide the horse out to the paddock. The slightest hint of light touches the eastern sky now. Sunrise isn’t too far off. Normally, I’ll find a perch and sit back, waiting for it to appear.
Today, though, I head back inside.
Isla whistles for Biscuit, a comb gripped in her hand, and he comes in an instant, like a well-behaved dog, and sidles up to allow her to groom.
I grab a pitchfork. “How’s school going?”
“It’s hard right now. I can’t concentrate. All anyone does is talk about Holly. They’re constantly asking me to tell them what I know, and they’re making up things about what happened to her. Bad things.”
My stomach clenches as my mind goes straight to the bad things I’ve envisioned. Isla shouldn’t have to hear them tossed around at the cafeteria table like a movie plot. “People can be really shitty.”
“Yeah.” She drags the brush across the horse’s shoulder.
My curiosity gets the better of me. “Are they saying I did it?”
Silence.
Which answers my question all the same.
“I have a tournament this weekend, so I don’t have to go in today. Thank God,” she murmurs a few minutes later, shifting the topic far from Holly.
This is the most we’ve ever talked outside of that night of cards. “Where’s the tournament?”
“It’s here, in Cold River. They have it every year.”
“Do they still have that barn rink?”
She giggles. “Yup. Wooden bleachers and everything.”
“Damn.” I chuckle. “I used to play there.”
She hesitates. “You should come and watch one of my games. I’ll be playing against my old team tonight.”
“Yeah, maybe.” But there’s no conviction in my voice.
“Annie and Holt come to my games sometimes.”
“I’m not surprised.” It was the only time my father seemed interested in anything I enjoyed.
“My mom will be there,” she adds after a beat.
I steal a glance Isla’s way before shifting back to my job. What does she know? There’s no way Emery would have divulged what happened between us to her daughter.
Would she?
“So … what do you do all day, anyway?” There’s judgment in her tone.
I shift the clean bedding around. “Whatever I can to help. Fill water troughs, fix fences, clear brush, cut firewood. I guess we’ll start putting out hay soon for the bison.
” A light dusting of snow fell on Halloween.
It won’t be long before everything’s coated in a blanket of white.
“We had the vet checkup last week. I helped with that.” Herding five hundred animals that don’t like being herded, using treats to bait them and gates and chutes to separate and sort.
It was as daunting a task as my dad warned it would be, but thankfully no one got maimed.
“Harvesting some of the stock is next.” Which means getting them loaded into trailers—something they like even less.
“Do you ever leave?”
“Leave? Like, this property? Yeah, to check in with my parole officer.” I’ve had three meetings with Glen so far. He’s made me piss in a cup every time, but otherwise, he’s not so bad. He was thrilled that I could show him an official pay stub.
“You should get out more.”
“Every time I’ve gone out, something bad happened.
That one night, I almost ended up in a bar fight and then I got questioned about a missing girl.
And that other time, I found a drowning woman in a lake.
So, I think I’m good right where I am.” As promised, Emery looked into it and it turns out, sixty-seven-year-old Carol Roth did survive.
She had some sort of cardiac event that caused her to lose consciousness while paddleboarding.
We must have found her soon after it happened and, as the EMS suggested, the frigid water kept her from suffering permanent damage.
She’s still recovering, based on the message Emery passed along through my mother.
Isla heads into the tack room and returns with riding gear.
“You’re going out now?” I steal a glance out the open barn door. “It’s still pretty dark.”
“I won’t go far. I just …” She throws the saddle blanket over Biscuit’s back. “I need to clear my head.”
“Yeah, but …” I never liked the idea of Emery riding alone, even in broad daylight. There are holes for horses to step in, wolves and coyotes to spook them. “Give me a minute. I’ll come with you.”
I pause a beat to gauge her reaction to that. When she doesn’t argue, I collect my gear and head to the paddock to saddle Copper. “I’ll give you a good grooming after,” I promise as I affix the bridle.
Biscuit trots out of the barn with Isla on his back. She orders Duke to stay put.
“We’re not goin’ too far or too fast, understood? Copper is slow as fuck.” I haul myself into the saddle. What I really need is a horse of my own—one like Storm. “Let’s head up to that ridge over there.” I point toward Jon and Sarah’s log house on the hill.
She follows my direction. “Why? What’s up there?”
“Only the best view on this entire property. You’ve been living here how long, and you don’t know that yet?
” It was one of Emery’s favorite spots. I figured she would have brought her daughter up there by now.
“We should be able to make it just in time for sunrise.” The bite in the air is fierce, though, and all Isla’s got on is a sweatshirt. “Don’t you need a jacket?”
“No, Dad, I’m good,” she mocks, staring at me as Biscuit prances, impatient.
“All right, smart-ass.” I coax Copper into a canter, chuckling.
Isla sidles up next to me on her horse. “I know you didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Holly,” she says quietly.
“Why? Because your mom’s my alibi?”
“No. I mean, that helps. But that’s not why.”
Now I’m curious. “How do you know?”
“I just do.” She shrugs. “Like I know I’m gonna beat you to that ridge.” Biscuit takes off, and Isla’s shriek of girlish laughter trails behind her as they race ahead, her hair flying.