Chapter 22
Twenty-Two
LAYLA
Henley picked up on the second ring.
“Finally.” Her voice was slightly distracted and somehow fully present, the two existing simultaneously in a way I’d never quite figured out how to replicate. That meant she was, as usual, doing three things at once. “I was starting to think Hatterwick had swallowed you whole.”
“Hatterwick is fine. I’m fine.” Repetition would make it true.
“You always say that.”
“Most of the time it’s accurate.”
“Uh-huh.” Papers rustled. A chair rolled across a hard floor.
Henley Bell did not sit still while she worked, which was something I’d learned during our first case together and had stopped trying to understand since.
“Give me two seconds, I’m trying to find the—” She dropped into an incoherent mutter, and I could easily picture her digging through evidence or case files.
“Okay. Got it. How’s everything going back east? ”
“It’s moving. Slowly, but it’s moving.” I settled back against the sofa cushions and pulled my knees up.
Koa rearranged himself against my side in perfect position for me to scratch his chest. I understood my role here and began lightly scraping my nails through his fur, eliciting a sigh of profound canine contentment.
“Tell me about the new files first. What came in?”
“Oh, the usual assortment of heartbreak and bureaucratic failure.” The sardonic edge in her voice was the armor we both wore.
Not indifference, the opposite of indifference, but you developed a language for it after a while, or you couldn’t keep going.
“There’s a woman in Oregon whose husband walked out three years ago, and the police told her he had the legal right to do that and stopped looking.
Another case in Georgia that’s been cold for twenty years that the family has been trying to get anyone to look at since the first Clinton administration.
And then—” she paused, and I caught the shift in her voice, the one that meant something had gotten under her skin, “there’s a kid in Texas.
Sixteen, maybe seventeen. Her mom disappeared a few years back.
Single mom working two jobs. She was a bit of a wild child as a teen, which is how she ended up a young single mom to start, but according to reports, parenthood straightened her out.
Local PD closed the case as voluntary departure inside a month. ”
“How old was the mom when she went missing?”
“Thirty-four.”
I was quiet for a moment. “History of drug use?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“That’s not a voluntary departure profile.”
“No, it absolutely is not. The kid has been trying to get someone to listen for two years. She found us through the podcast website.” Another pause. “I can’t stop thinking about her.”
“Put it in the maybe pile.”
“Already done. I’m going to build out the file this week and send it to you when it’s ready.” She settled, having done what she needed to do. “Okay. Your turn. Walk me through your progress.”
So I did. I started at the beginning, giving the outline of what I’d been told about the bonfire, the storm, fifteen-year-old Gwen Busby going into the woods and not coming out.
Willa’s account, the boat, the men who’d thrown a drowning girl into the ocean and assumed that was the end of it.
Fourteen years of nothing, and then the slow unraveling of everything Carson had been doing in the space where an investigation should have been.
The SBI audit. Rios newly sworn in, trying to build something out of the wreckage.
Madden’s years of not letting it go, surfacing into something real.
Something much bigger than the disappearance of one girl.
“God,” Henley said softly when I paused. “This poor family.”
“All of them. The whole island, really. These people have been living with this for all this time, and they haven’t lost the thread once.” I looked out the window at the gray December afternoon. Seriously, how was it already December? “That’s more than I usually see.”
“What does the financial trail look like so far?”
I walked her through what we’d uncovered so far.
When I got to Diane, Henley whistled. “That timing is bad.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Layla.”
“I know. I’m working through it.” I scratched Koa’s chest, and he groaned appreciatively. “It’s the job. You know how it is.”
“I do know how it is. That’s why I’m asking.” She hesitated a beat. “Is there someone there you can talk to when things get heavy? Or are you doing the solo-marathon-run thing again?”
I hesitated a half second too long.
“Oh,” Henley said. That single syllable was loaded. She’d clocked the hesitation and was filing it. “Tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“There is absolutely something to tell. You just did the thing where you pause before you answer a simple question.”
“It’s not simple.”
“Then tell me the complicated version.”
I looked at the ceiling. Koa pushed his nose against my hand, and I let him.
“There’s someone on the team I’ve been working with.
He’s—he knows the island, he knows the people, he’s been useful on the sourcing side.
” I stopped. “He’s also involved with the case.
His sister was nearly killed the same night Gwen disappeared.
He’s been trying to find answers since then. ”
“Okay,” Henley said carefully.
“And it’s—I can’t explain it. He sees things. He notices things about me that I don’t show people, and he doesn’t make a production of it, he just—adjusts. Accounts for it.” I shook my head, not sure where to go from there.
“You don’t usually get tangled up with someone on a case.”
“No.”
“Particularly someone involved with the case.”
“I’m aware.” I pressed my hand over my eyes. “I know how that sounds. It just happened. I wasn’t planning on this.”
“Oooooh.” This time the full weight of the word, all the implications of exactly what had happened, packed into three drawn-out syllables. “Is it going to keep happening while you’re there?”
I thought about the gym and the mats and the shower and the porch and the coffee made exactly right and his hand on my nape outside the police station while I fell apart slightly and then pulled myself back together. “God, yes,” I said. “It’s too good to walk away from.”
A small snicker from the California end of the line. “Good for you,” Henley said. “Genuinely. It’s been a while.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not doing anything. I’m just saying.” Her voice held a warmth now, the teasing softening into something more real. “Be careful, okay? Don’t get in over your head.”
If only you knew, I thought. Instead, I said, “I know what I’m doing.”
“You always think you do.” She said it with the warmth of someone who stayed on the right side of the line between concern and judgment. “Call me when you come up for air?”
“I’ll call you when there’s something worth reporting.”
“There already is,” she said, and I heard the smile.
After we hung up, I sat for a moment with the phone in my hand and let the conversation settle.
Talking to Henley always left me feeling like I’d set something down that I’d been carrying at an awkward angle.
She understood the work in a way most people in my life couldn’t, understood what it cost and why I kept paying the price anyway, and she never made me feel like a tragedy for continuing.
I pulled the files toward me and got back to work.
The paperwork was dense and unremarkable on its surface.
The language of municipal government and corporate filings and property records was designed by bureaucratic instinct to be as boring as possible.
But patterns formed if you stayed with them long enough.
Names appearing in more than one context.
Relationships between entities that weren’t disclosed but could be inferred from timing and geography and the way money moved when people hoped no one was watching.
I made notes and cross-referenced against Madden’s files and let my brain work the way it worked best—methodically, without forcing anything, following threads wherever they led.
Koa snored against my side.
The afternoon light moved across the floor, and I followed it without meaning to, hour by hour, the way you lose track of time when a case has its hooks in you.
My phone buzzed.
Jace.
I picked up. “Hey.”
“Do you have a dress?”
I blinked at the wall. “Is this some kind of weird segue?”
“We’ve got dinner tonight with the owner of the Pelican Point Bistro, who also happens to be connected to the marina. It’s the fanciest place on the island. Hence, dress.”
I thought about the garment bag I’d thrown in at the last minute on a just in case basis. “I’m sure I can come up with something.”
“Good. I’ll pick you up at six.”