Chapter 5
Five
JACE
I gave her a few minutes before I turned back.
She’d moved north along the waterline, the dog ranging ahead on its lead.
I let her get enough distance before I fell in behind her.
Not close. The dog had already registered me once, and a hundred pounds of malamute with an established opinion wasn’t something I wanted to test a second time in the dark.
Far enough that she’d see just another shape against the water if she looked back.
She didn’t glance back. She moved with her head up and her attention scanning left and right at intervals too deliberate to be casual.
Not paranoid. Not just the sensible caution of a woman alone at night.
Trained. There was a difference. She’d processed me, filed me, and kept moving, which required a quality of discipline that most people didn’t have and didn’t develop by accident.
The dog did her looking for her. He turned twice, both times toward me, and both times she stopped, followed his gaze down the beach, held for a count, and kept going. She trusted his read, but she verified it herself. That was good training on both ends of the leash.
The village was quiet around us. Off-season meant the restaurants had cut their hours, and the foot traffic that packed these streets from May through September had long since gone back to wherever it came from, leaving the island to the people who actually lived here.
A couple of lit windows. The distant sound of something on a television behind a closed door.
My own footsteps on the packed sand near the waterline, which I kept slow and steady and unthreatening because the last thing I needed was to alarm her and have her turn around and find out she’d had a tail the whole way home.
She turned off the beach at one of the center-most access points and moved through the streets without checking her phone once.
Two blocks inland, a left onto Marsh, and then she stopped at one of the cottages that had probably been turned into a rental, the dog shouldering through ahead of her.
The door closed, and the deadbolt shot home loud enough to carry in the quiet. I noted the sound with some approval.
A light came on in the front window.
I stood on the opposite side of the street and did a full assessment of the building.
Cottage number, window placement, the gap between her building and the next one, the view from the front door to the street.
She had decent cover on the approach, and the deadbolt looked good.
The dog was better. If something came at her in the night, it would announce itself well in advance.
Satisfied she’d made it home safe, I walked back to the Brewhouse.
The party had wound down while I’d wandered the beach.
The parking lot had emptied, the noise inside reduced to the end-of-night register of a room in the process of calling it.
I got in my truck and sat for a minute with the engine off, thinking about a woman who kept her weight on the balls of her feet and her hand near her hip and still managed to seem like someone just out for an evening walk.
Interesting was the word I kept landing on. The tension she’d carried wasn’t the ordinary anxiety of someone in an unfamiliar place. It was practiced. Habitual. The kind that had been built up over time in response to something real.
Not my business, the nature of the something, but fascinating just the same.
I started the truck and drove north.
The coastal road was empty at this hour, the sound visible to the left through the gaps in the dune grass.
Thirteen miles of barrier island. I’d grown up running over every inch.
Even after twelve years away, I drove this road like I’d never left, muscle memory filling in what time had tried to take.
Sutter House sat on its hill with the kitchen lights on, which meant Willa and Sawyer were still up.
I came in through the back. Roy met me at the door with a single deep bark that cut off the moment he registered who it was, and then he was just a bigass black pittie pushing his head against my hand to demand pets before following me into the kitchen like I was the most interesting development of his evening.
Willa sat at the table with her laptop open, a mug of tea at her elbow, her reading glasses on, which meant she’d been there a while. Sawyer leaned against the counter with his arms crossed, his mouth half open like he’d been about to say something to his wife. At the sight of me, he recalibrated.
“There he is. We were starting to wonder.”
“Party wound down.” I pulled out the chair across from Willa and dropped into it. Roy arranged himself across my feet with the serene confidence of a dog who had decided this was his job tonight.
“Uh-huh.” Sawyer opened the fridge and produced a bottle of water, setting it on the table in front of me. “Rios noticed you left.”
“Rios will survive.”
“He will. He was also surrounded by approximately forty people who all wanted to shake his hand, so I don’t think he suffered.” Sawyer leaned back against the counter. “Ford definitely noticed.”
“Ford can mind his business.”
Willa glanced up from the laptop over the top of her glasses with that quiet, level stare. The same one I used to give her growing up, and seeing it aimed back at me was its own kind of strange. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
She held my gaze for a moment before deciding to let it go. “Madden confirmed the Unaccounted rep gets in tomorrow.” She pulled off her glasses and set them on the table.
Ah. The true crime podcast who was sending someone to help with the cold case investigation we’d all had a piece of.
“Do we know who they’re sending?”
“Someone Devon trusts. That’s all Madden said.” She closed the laptop. “She seemed confident.”
“Good enough for me.” I drank some of the beer. “How’s Rios doing? Really.”
Sawyer made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “He held it together well. Madden ran interference when he started to look like he needed an exit, which apparently she’s very good at.”
“They’re good together,” Willa said. Her tone said she’d decided this a while ago and was no longer surprised by it.
“Didn’t call that one,” I admitted.
“Nobody did. I think it surprised them most of all.” She traced the rim of her mug. “He’s going to be all right, Jace. He’s got people around him now. Good ones.”
“I know.”
“And so do you,” she added. Just leaving the truth there as if it were an afterthought.
I knew better.
I drank my water and didn’t answer. Roy shifted his weight across my feet, resettling.
Sawyer’s face morphed into that expression he always wore when he had a thing to say and was deciding whether tonight was the night to say it. He pushed off the counter. “You might consider doing something about the beard before the meeting tomorrow.”
I put a hand to my jaw. Several months of growth, accumulated in a context that had nothing to do with Hatterwick Island and everything to do with a posting I couldn’t discuss and a role that required not looking like myself.
He wasn’t wrong. He was annoying, but he wasn’t wrong.
“What’s wrong with the beard?”
“Nothing’s wrong with it,” Willa said. “It’s just not you.”
“It’s literally my face.”
“You know what she means,” Sawyer said.
“It’s a good beard.”
“It’s a genuinely excellent beard.” Willa stood and picked up her mug. “On a man who’s been undercover. Which you aren’t, anymore. Not here, anyway. Everyone on this island knows who you are. You might as well look like it.”
She wasn’t wrong either. I’d looked in the bathroom mirror that morning and done a small double take, which had been the point when I grew the thing and wasn’t the point now.
“I’ll think about it.”
“Think about it upstairs.” Sawyer straightened. “Some of us would like to go to bed.”
Willa leaned down and kissed the top of my head on her way past. Something she’d never have done five years ago and did now without thinking about it. “Night.”
“Night.”
Sawyer clapped me on the shoulder hard enough to mean something. “She’s right about the beard. She’s also right about the other thing.”
“There is no other thing.”
“Okay.” He didn’t argue it. He never did. That was one of the best qualities about Sawyer Malone. He said the one thing and left it for you. “Night, brother.”
They disappeared upstairs. Roy lifted his head, looked at me with golden-eyed gravity. Evidently deciding I needed his company more than my sister did, he put it back down across my feet.
I sat at the kitchen table, with the sound coming through the windows and the water going warm in my hand, and mulled over all of it.
About Rios in that room full of people who finally meant it.
About Sawyer and Willa in their corner of the Brewhouse with their hands linked and their whole settled, deliberate life arranged around them.
About Ford’s face when Bree said something funny from behind the bar.
About a woman on a beach with a hand at her hip and a dog who didn’t miss anything.
I finished the water and went upstairs to reclaim my face.