Chapter 1
One
Present Day
JACE
The town council meeting room held maybe fifty people on a good day.
Tonight every folding chair was filled before Chelsea Tate brought things to order with the gavel she seemed way too fond of, and the walls filled after that. I’d taken a spot on the left side, with a clear sightline to the main entrance and the council table.
Sawyer found me two minutes in and leaned beside me. “Bigger crowd than I expected.”
I looked out at the room. Mostly locals, happy to have their island back now that the tourist season had ended.
A group of women from the historical society, in their good coats, tittering like a clutch of hens.
Business owners of varying ages. Former classmates from high school, who’d stayed here to start families and build lives.
A couple of faces I didn’t recognize had planted themselves near the front.
Both had recorders out. Mainland press drawn by the story, no doubt.
And it was a story. Police chief executed by a sniper’s bullet. State Bureau of Investigation rolling in by Labor Day for a department audit. The discovery of twenty years of corruption by the man tasked with keeping this island safe.
And the very same man who’d been accused of Gwen Busby’s disappearance and presumed murder now waited to be sworn in as the new Chief of Police. Rios had been exonerated on every level, in the eyes of the law and the public.
It was about damned time.
“Island’s been waiting a long time for something to go right,” I said.
Sawyer didn’t argue.
I followed Sawyer’s gaze to where my sister Willa had snagged a seat next to Bree.
And of course Bree was with Ford. They were in the third row, her shoulder against his, his thumb moving over her knuckles in the absent way of a man still getting used to the fact that she was actually there.
Gabi sat on Ford’s other side with Daniel, her knee going in that quick, nervous rhythm she’d had since she was twelve.
Daniel put his hand on it without breaking whatever he was saying to her, and it slowed.
Behind them, Rios’s sister, Caroline sat with Hoyt, their two oldest kids between them.
Caroline sat ramrod straight, her arms folded and her jaw set.
I recognized that look. She’d worn it every time someone on this island said her brother’s name like it was a curse.
Hoyt stretched an arm along the chairs to reach for her shoulder.
She leaned into his touch the barest fraction, which was as much as she was willing to give right now.
Madden sat in the front row with her spine straight and her hands folded in her lap.
Not at all the woman I’d expected Rios to fall for, given their history.
As Gwen’s cousin, she’d blamed him for the disappearance, trusting in Carson, in the system.
Life had clearly given her hard lessons in both, and she’d owned up to her mistakes when she’d come back to the island this summer.
She’d been the one to pull Rios into the investigation of a missing grad student.
She’d been the one to discover the broader pattern of disappearances in the region stretching back well before Gwen.
She’d been the one to blow it all open. It was no little thanks to her that the island no longer looked at my friend with suspicion.
So if she was his pick, I supported that a hundred percent.
Chelsea called things to order. She was in her mayor’s suit, reading from prepared remarks, moving through the careful, measured language of council confidence and ongoing audit and departmental commitment. The sort of statements appropriate for the press.
Rios stood to the side, waiting in his dress uniform with his standard stoic expression.
He’d been asked to take this job two weeks ago and spent those two weeks deciding whether he’d say yes.
I understood the deliberation. The island had spent almost fifteen years in unfounded certainty that he was responsible for what happened to a teenage girl.
Carson had let that story run because it suited him, because having a convenient suspect meant nobody looked too hard at the actual investigation.
Rios Carrera was the son of a hot-headed father from a poorer family whose lineage on the island didn’t date back more than a hundred years.
He had the wrong last name and wasn’t the kind of man the island was inclined to protect.
And in the wake of the shit show that had been exposed, the town council had come asking him to clean up the mess.
I couldn’t blame him for hesitating over whether that was something he was willing to do.
Chelsea stepped around the council table, and Rios moved to join her.
“Mr. Carrera, please raise your right hand.”
He raised it.
“Do you solemnly swear to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of North Carolina, to faithfully and impartially discharge the duties of Chief of Police of Sutter’s Ferry, to the best of your ability, so help you God?”
“I do.”
She unpinned the badge from the velvet square on the table and reached up to pin it on him.
Something moved across her face while she did it that was less mayoral and more relief at finally setting something to rights.
“Then, by the authority vested in me by the Town Council of Sutter’s Ferry, it is my honor to swear you in as Chief of Police. ”
Ford shot to his feet and started clapping before she’d finished the sentence.
It wasn’t the polite sort of applause, but the real kind that came from somewhere with actual feeling behind it.
It spread through the room in a whoosh until the entire group was on its feet for a man who’d spent almost half his life being treated like the worst thing to happen to this island.
Caroline stopped holding herself together. Hoyt reached behind the kids to squeeze her shoulder.
Rios stood at the front of the room and looked out at all of it, face stoic in the way of someone checking whether something was real before he let himself believe it.
Years of mistreatment had built that reflex.
One afternoon in a town council meeting wouldn’t undo it.
But as he stood there and took it in, I watched something that had been braced for a long time let go, just a little.
When the applause fell off, he stepped to the podium. “I’ll keep this short because I know y’all have better things to do than listen to me talk.”
A faint ripple of laughter traveled through the crowd. He waited for it to die down.
“The audit is still ongoing. I’m not going to stand here and pretend I have the full picture of what I’ve inherited, because I don’t.
What I can tell you is that every case from my predecessor’s tenure will be reviewed.
Every one of them.” He paused. “This island deserves to feel like the people carrying these badges actually mean it. I grew up here. I know what it costs when that isn’t true.
” His jaw tightened. “So hold me to it. That’s it. Thank you.”
Ford got to him first. They grabbed each other the way they had since we were teenagers, one hand locked, the other landing hard on a shoulder, holding on past the point a handshake required.
“About damn time,” Ford said.
“Shut your mouth.”
“I’m just saying—”
“I know what you’re saying. Shut your mouth.”
Gabi got both arms around his middle and squeezed. “Congratulations, big brother.”
Rios rested his chin on top of her head and closed his eyes for a second before he straightened and accepted Daniel’s handshake.
Caroline was next. She’d been holding herself together since she walked in, and she let go of the last of it when he turned to her, and he caught her. As the eldest, she’d held their family together through a lot of tough years, and I couldn’t begin to imagine what this meant to her.
I stayed where I was. There was an order to these things, and I wasn’t next in it.
“He’s not going to know what to do with this,” Sawyer said quietly.
“No.”
“He’ll figure it out.”
“Yeah.” I watched Rios move through the people still waiting—a council member, a woman I didn’t recognize who said something that made him duck his head, a man who had the look of the docks, who shook his hand with both of his. “He’s been figuring out harder things than this his whole life.”
Sawyer and I made our way toward the front of the room where Willa offered her hug of congratulations.
Madden was next. She waited with her arms folded until the others had cleared.
When Rios turned to her, she said something too low to carry across the room, and he said something back with a look for her that spoke volumes about what she’d come to mean.
Her lips curved in the faintest smile before he wrapped her in his arms for a long embrace.
Nothing salacious, just relief and support on both sides.
The room was starting to empty out when Bree asked, “Brewhouse?”
“Obviously,” Ford agreed.
I put my hand out to Rios. He took it and pulled me in, and we held on the way we always had, since elementary school, raising hell on this island together.
“Chief,” I said.
“I will end you.”
“That seems like an abuse of your new authority.”
“I’ve been chief for ten minutes. I’ll figure out the limits later.”
Ford, already steering Bree toward the door: “I told him not to say it.”
“You did not,” I said.
“I thought about it very seriously.”
Rios looked between the two of us, and the corner of his mouth lifted in the barest of smiles, with the full weight of the day and his new charge in it.
He shook his head. “Brewhouse. Before I arrest both of you for something.”