Chapter 2
Two
LAYLA
The ferry horn sounded once, and Cedar Island fell away behind us.
I’d gotten out of the Bronco as soon as we cleared the car deck, needing air more than I needed the illusion of staying put.
As it was off season and a late crossing, the upper deck was mostly empty.
No one was headed to the southern tip of the Outer Banks on a cold November Tuesday if they had a choice about it.
A man in a Carhartt jacket sat near the stern with a coffee and his phone.
A woman with two kids had claimed the row of plastic chairs along the back wall, the younger one already asleep across her lap.
Nobody paying attention to anybody else.
I dug money from my wallet and fed it to the machine in the corner, waiting while it belched questionable coffee into a paper cup.
Then I took Koa outside and found a spot at the rail with a clear sightline to the stairs and the length of the deck both directions, set my back to nothing, and stayed there as the wind did its best to whip my hair out of its braid.
Koa pressed his furry bulk against my left leg and didn’t move.
He’d been like this since the Virginia state line.
Not fully alert, but watchful, as he got when he couldn’t quite locate the source of what he was tracking.
He was tracking me. Whatever emotional state I broadcast, he read it, and what he was reading had his ears back and his body turned into mine.
I dug one hand into his ruff and consciously slowed my breath, relaxing each muscle that had tensed on the ferry’s launch.
The mainland got small. Smaller. Gone entirely.
The Pamlico Sound extended around us, the kind of open water that made the boat feel briefly irrelevant.
I’d grown up on Puget Sound, so I was no stranger to the ocean.
But the Pacific Northwest coast was all rock and fir and mountains dropping straight to the water, the sky always doing something dramatic, the light always at a slant.
This was different. The Carolina coast was low and patient, the land barely distinguishable from the water in the dark, the horizon a suggestion rather than a line.
Even the cold was different. Damp and penetrating where home was sharp and clean.
I told myself it was the wind making me shake as I wrapped both hands around the vending machine coffee, willing the heat into my bones.
I knew fear. I knew horror. I understood the vacuum left behind when someone disappeared, leaving only questions with no answers. I’d built a career out of bringing attention to the missing from one end of the US to the other, putting my skills as an investigative photojournalist to good use.
This case was no different.
And maybe if I kept repeating that, I’d believe it.
The phone in my pocket buzzed. In case it was Devon, I dug it out and checked the screen.
Ashley.
I let the call go to voicemail.
It buzzed again immediately. No sense in putting this off, so I answered. “Hey.”
“Where are you.” Not a question.
“On a case. Why?”
“Because I texted Devon.”
Oh fuck.
“Why?”
“Because you’ve been incommunicado for three days, Layla. I was worried.”
“I’m fine. I was driving. You know how I get. In the zone. Lots of power ballads and duets with Koa.”
Hearing his name, my malamute bobbed his russet head and gave a little “Woo!”
“He says, ‘hi,’ by the way.”
Undeterred, my sister just bulled on. “Layla, tell me it isn’t true. Tell me you didn’t take a case there.”
As I couldn’t tell her that, I said nothing.
The silence stretched long enough that I heard the whisper of fir trees outside her house on Orcas.
That meant she was on the porch, probably with a cup of tea, probably already knowing the answer before she’d dialed.
Because my boss and friend wouldn’t have had any reason to lie to her.
He had no idea of my personal agenda around this case.
“Layla,” she whispered.
The silence got heavier, and Koa turned his face up toward mine, though I kept my eyes on the water. “I’m fine, Ash.”
“You said you were never going back there.” Her voice had dropped into the register she used when she was genuinely frightened for me, rather than simply exasperated.
“I know what I said.” Knew the promises I’d made and who I’d made them to.
But some things were more important.
“They wanted Devon, but he’s tied up following some leads on another case, so he sent me instead. It’s only temporary, to get the ball rolling.” That’s what I’d told myself.
“They? Who’s they?”
“The people who asked for our help.”
Ashley made a noise, and I pictured her pinching the bridge of her nose, fingers squeezing her phone until they turned white. “But a case on this island? He needed an assist there, and you said yes?”
“I did.”
“You—” She stopped herself from leveling a barrage of accusations. That I was being reckless. Foolish. Insane. All possibly true and not actually worth repeating. When she spoke again, the fear had sharpened into something more familiar, more sustainable. “Dad is going to lose his mind.”
Understatement of the century.
I defaulted to the same tactic my siblings and I had all used at one time or another during our teen years.
“He’s not going to find out yet.” The boat shifted slightly, finding its heading, and I adjusted my balance in the instinctive way of someone who’d spent all her life on water.
“I’ll be here a few days. A week at most.” That was the plan.
I was taking an enormous risk coming here, and the quicker I did what I needed to do, the better.
“You agreed—”
“I’m aware of what I agreed to.”
“Then what are you doing on that boat? I can hear a ferry engine.”
My sister had good ears.
A navigation light blinked on the horizon. I watched it, wondering if it held any insight on how to get through this conversation.
“I have to see this through.”
“This is a terrible idea.”
“You might be right.”
“I am right, and you know it.” The edge in her voice softened around something more tired underneath. More resigned. She’d known me long enough to predict how these conversations ended. “Dad is going to lose his mind,” she said again, quieter. Almost to herself.
“Then don’t tell him.” Irrefutable logic, so far as I was concerned.
“I’m not lying to him.”
“I’m not asking you to lie. I’m asking you not to volunteer information he didn’t ask for.” He had no reason to ask for it. He’d called this morning, while I’d been north of Virginia, and I’d said nothing about my plans. I dropped my free hand to Koa’s head. “I need to do this.”
Quiet. The whisper of fir trees again. “A week.”
“A week. Maybe less,” I reiterated.
“You call me every day.”
“I will text you every day,” I amended.
“And you eat. Real food. Don’t do the thing you do half the time on assignment, where you live off of vending machine snacks and bad coffee.”
I eyed the terrible coffee in my hand and smiled a little. “I brought groceries.”
Almost a laugh. “Of course you did.” Her voice came back quieter, “Be careful. You have no idea what you’re walking into.”
“That’s my standard SOP, sis.” But I’d had a hell of a lot of training to make absolutely certain I could handle myself, and Koa was far more than a furry emotional support companion.
Ashley paused for a long time before finally seeming to understand she wouldn’t sway me. “Take care of yourself. Take care of Koa.”
“Always.”
After she hung up, I stood at the rail while the ferry cut through the dark chop of the sound.
Koa pushed his nose against my hand, and I turned it over, giving him something to push against. A hundred pounds of dog, and he still tried to make himself small enough to climb into whatever space I left open.
The protection work, the alerting, the focused intensity.
I’d trained all of it. The thing where he decided his primary job was keeping me from going under, he’d worked out on his own.
I’d told myself for years I wasn’t coming back here.
I’d believed it every time I said it. I’d also known, in the part of myself that didn’t lie, that there was a version of events where I came back anyway.
Where the case, or the years, or the need for the truth would pull me across this water, whether I’d chosen it or not.
Koa lifted his head.
I followed his gaze to the horizon, where a cluster of lights had begun to resolve out of the dark.
Small and amber, spread along a low shoreline.
The island coming at me the way it had always been going to, from the moment I’d opened Devon’s email and seen the details of the case and known, before I’d finished reading, that I was going to say yes.
The lights of Sutter’s Ferry got closer.
I owed it to her. That was the part I couldn’t explain to Ashley, couldn’t explain to anyone, not without explaining everything.
The work I did—the photographs, the cold cases, the faces I kept alive in other people’s memories—all of it had started as the same thing and never stopped being that thing, no matter how many years or how many miles.
It was always about Gwen.
Gwen, who’d died so I could live.