Chapter 19
Nineteen
JACE
Layla was quiet on the drive back to town, looking out at the sound through the passenger window. I’d unsettled her with that kiss. Or maybe it was the case. Or some combination of both. I wasn’t sure, and asking wouldn’t help, so I stayed silent.
As soon as I pulled into the driveway, she reached for the door handle. “Give me a few minutes to change.”
“Take your time.”
Since she disappeared into the bathroom like her ass was on fire, I took that for the lack of invitation it was and resigned myself to wandering the small kitchen.
I heard the shower start and stood in front of the sink, listening to the rattle of pipes, considering the twelve or so inches of drywall and lumber between me and a naked Layla.
I deliberately turned to the fridge, staring unseeing at the contents.
She needed space, not my overeager dick, so I found some butter and eggs and made myself useful.
Koa supervised from beside the kitchen table in a way that told me he, too, expected eggs.
Wanting to stay on his good side, I added a couple more to the pan.
Twelve minutes later, she emerged, her wet hair braided, dressed in jeans and a sweater, camera bag in hand. I found myself missing the wild, loose mass of that hair. My fingers itched, and my cock twitched at the mental image of it trailing over her body and breasts as she rode me.
Big boy brain, Hollingsworth.
Clearing my throat, I handed her a plate. When she only looked at it as if she’d forgotten breakfast was a thing that happened, I felt compelled to explain, “I figured you should eat after that run.”
Her brows drew together—in bafflement or suspicion, I wasn’t sure. “Thanks?”
I gave Koa his portion, which earned yet another brow raise from Layla as she leaned against the counter.
She dug in without sitting down, eating with the singular focus of someone used to refueling rather than eating.
As that was SOP for me as well, I followed suit.
We were out the door five minutes later, her furry shadow in tow.
The ferry terminal sat squat and low at the edge of the dock, the same weathered clapboard it had always been—snack bar to one side, a rack of fishing charter and ghost walk brochures by the door, the ticket desk in the lobby.
People who lived on Hatterwick walked through that lobby hundreds or thousands of times, usually on the way to somewhere else, the ferry company being so much a part of the background of growing up here that you stopped actually seeing it.
I’d been here even more because of my grandparents.
Because Granddaddy wanted to make sure I understood my legacy on the island.
It was Willa’s legacy now, but I didn’t begrudge her a damned thing.
As I’d told Layla, she was the best of us.
Beyond the lobby, a hallway ran toward the back of the building, past the breakroom and the small HR office, to where the administrative offices were tucked away from the public-facing side of things.
Willa had called ahead. Diane Crowell was expecting us.
She met us in a small conference room off the main corridor.
Mid-sixties, tidy, with a careful, composed expression, she offered coffee, which we both accepted.
Koa settled beside Layla’s chair without being asked, his chin on her foot, and Diane glanced at him once with curiosity and the respect of someone who understood working dogs.
She settled her hands flat on the table in front of her as if to brace herself for whatever was coming.
As Willa hadn’t told her what we wanted to speak to her about, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that reaction.
Layla settled her notebook on her lap. “We appreciate you making time for us, Mrs. Crowell. I understand you worked at the marina for a number of years before you came to the ferry company.”
“Yes, that’s right.” Confusion flickered over her face.
“We were hoping you could tell us a little about that time, and specifically about why you left.”
Diane nodded slowly. “The new owners. After the Busbys sold, things changed considerably. Different priorities, different way of conducting business.” She paused, choosing her words.
“I’d been at that marina for seventeen years.
Started when Miles and Gwen were still children.
I knew that family. I cared about that family.
And when the new people came in and started treating it like just another property to turn a profit on…
” She shook her head. “It wasn’t the place I’d spent all those years building.
I didn’t want to be part of whatever they were making it into. ”
“Did Miles say anything to you before the sale was finalized?” Layla asked.
The careful expression shifted. Something underneath it moved.
“He came to find me about a month before it closed. Said things hadn’t been entirely right with the business for a while.
He didn’t go into specifics, but said I’d be better off finding something new.
That he’d help.” She looked down at her hands.
“He called your grandfather himself. Put in a good word. Set me up here.” A pause.
“That was Miles. Even when everything was falling apart around him, he was still thinking about the people around him.”
“He thought a lot of you,” I said. I knew no such thing, but this was about greasing the wheels.
“I’d like to think so.” She looked at me directly.
“I’ve worked for a lot of people over the years.
Miles Busby was difficult in ways I don’t need to get into.
But he had a core of decency that didn’t go away no matter how hard things got.
” She stopped herself. Started again. “I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand what came out about what he did to that Galef man.
The man I knew, the boy I watched grow up—I can’t fully put those two things together, even now. ”
“People do things under desperation that they couldn’t have predicted,” Layla said. “Especially when they’re trying to protect someone.”
Diane looked at her. Something in the directness of it seemed to settle her.
“That’s true. And Miles was never right after Gwen disappeared.
Anyone who knew him knew that. Whatever else he was—whatever mistakes he made—that girl was the whole world to him.
When she went missing, it was like watching someone lose the thing that made them who they were.
Slowly, over years.” She pressed her lips together briefly.
“I keep thinking, if she’d come home—if any of it had been different—maybe he’d have been all right.
Maybe none of the rest of it would have happened. ”
The room was quiet for a moment as we all sat with the weight of a lot of maybe.
“What do you remember about the marina in the period around when Gwen disappeared?” Layla said. “What was it like to try to work there during that time?”
Diane exhaled slowly. “It was a disaster, honestly, and I say that with all the compassion in the world. The family fell apart completely. Miles was barely present. His parents were drowning, both of them. Things just stopped getting done. Communication broke down. It was like the whole place shifted to autopilot while the people running it had their lives collapse underneath them.” She paused.
“I did what I was able. Kept the books as best I could. But bookkeeping doesn’t work when the information coming in isn’t reliable. ”
Beside me, Layla’s pen had gone still on her notepad.
“What kind of unreliable?” she asked.
“Discrepancies. Fuel numbers that didn’t match what was actually in the tanks.
I’d reconcile the figures, and the numbers just didn’t add up.
Slips logged as occupied when they were sitting empty.
Sometimes the reverse. Boats in slips with nothing in the records to account for them.
” She looked at the table. “I told myself it was the grief. Bless their hearts, nobody’s brain was on the business.
I cleaned up what I could, made corrections where I was able, chalked the rest up to extraordinary circumstances.
” She paused. “I’ve thought about those numbers a great deal since everything came out.
I wonder now if I should have pushed harder. ”
Layla hadn’t moved. Not a shift, not a fidget. That kind of stillness that had weight behind it. Beneath the table, Koa shifted with a small grumble, reacting to her lack of reaction.
“Were the fuel discrepancies consistent?” she asked. “Always in the same direction?”
“Over, mostly. Revenues coming in higher than the actual logged traffic would account for.” Diane looked at Layla steadily, and I watched her arriving at something, slowly, the way you arrived at conclusions you’d been circling for years. “I thought it was sloppy record keeping.”
“It may have been something else,” Layla said quietly. She didn’t push further. Just let it sit there between them.
Diane looked at the table for a moment. Then she looked up at me. “I always liked that family,” she said. “The whole Busby family. Even at their worst, they were real people. They loved each other. It just went so wrong.”
A knock at the door. A younger man leaned in, apologetic, papers in hand. “Diane, sorry to interrupt. The quarterly variance report is throwing an error, and Kevin can’t figure out what’s wrong with it.”
“Column F,” she said without looking up. “Tell him to check the formula in column F.”
He nodded and pulled the door shut behind him.
Layla closed her notepad. “You’ve been extremely generous with your time, and more helpful than you know.”
Diane looked at us both. “I’ve thought about all of this more times than I can count, since everything came out about Miles and Carson and all the rest of it.
If I’d noticed something sooner, if I’d asked more questions about those numbers, maybe something would have been different.
” She stopped. “I know that’s probably not realistic. ”
“You couldn’t have known what you were looking at,” Layla said. “And you looked out for the people you could look out for. That matters.”
Something in Diane’s face eased. Not completely, but some.
“If we have more questions, we’ll be in touch,” I said. “Thank you, Diane.”
We walked back out through the corridor, past the breakroom, through the lobby with its brochure rack and ticket desk, out into the cold air of the parking lot. The ferry horn bellowed somewhere out on Pamlico Sound—that low, sustained note that had underscored every day of my childhood.
Layla walked beside me without speaking for a moment, looking at the water, and I let her think.
“Fuel revenues running high,” I said finally. “Slips occupied with no record of what was in them.”
“Money coming in off the books and being run through as legitimate marina revenue.” She kept her eyes on the sound.
“And vessels coming and going without a paper trail. They were using that marina as an operational hub—not just laundering money through it, running actual traffic through it. Boats that had no business being there, logged as nothing.” She paused.
“Which means it was already happening before Miles refused them. He may have had no idea what his family’s business had been turned into.
And when they finally came to him and asked him to participate directly, and he said no—that’s when it became personal. ”
“And when the Busbys sold—”
“Whoever bought it got a fully operational setup. Established routes, established cover, staff who saw the discrepancies as just grief-related sloppiness.” She turned away from the water toward the truck. “Which means quite likely all of it is still ongoing.”
“So the sale is the thread. Who bought it, how the purchase was financed, whether the money trail connects to anything we already have.”
“Public records?” she asked.
“Public records,” I agreed, and slid into the truck.