Chapter 28
Twenty-Eight
LAYLA
The Sutter’s Ferry Animal Shelter sat on a side street a few blocks from the waterfront, in a low building with a cheerful mural of dogs and cats on the side wall.
The colors had mellowed from their original brightness into something warmer.
I’d photographed it on my first morning walk.
It had seemed like a good sign then, the kind of place that meant a community cared about something.
The layered noise of animals in close quarters hit us before we were through the door.
At least a dozen dogs barking and howling, cats yowling from somewhere.
After a few seconds, it all settled into a kind of white noise.
The building smelled of industrial cleaner over the distinct warm animal odor you couldn’t fully neutralize no matter how clean you kept the place.
A young woman at the front desk looked up when we came in.
“Hi, is Lauren Holloway here?” Jace asked.
“Sure.” She picked up the phone on the desk. “Can I ask what it’s regarding?”
“Just tell her Jace Hollingsworth stopped by.”
The young woman relayed this, listened, and hung up. “She’ll be right out.”
Koa stood close, ears moving, cataloguing the layers of scent with the focused interest of a dog encountering a profoundly information-rich environment. He wasn’t unsettled. He was just paying attention. I put my hand briefly on his head, and he leaned into the touch.
I was making a concerted effort to keep my focus on the here and now instead of last night. I’d expected to be a lot more rattled today, but Jace had stayed over again, and somehow his presence kept the nightmares—both sleeping and waking—away.
For the moment, that was enough.
A minute later, a woman near our age came through the door, drying her hands on a towel. She moved with the slightly harried air of someone who ran an under-funded operation on determination and caffeine. Her face opened when she saw Jace.
“Jace. God, I haven’t seen you since—Lord, it must be before you joined the Navy.” She shook his hand and then looked at me with polite curiosity.
“This is Layla Murphy, a colleague. Lauren, do you have a few minutes? Somewhere private?”
The curiosity sharpened slightly, but she nodded. “My office. It’s a disaster, but it has a door.”
She had no idea what was coming. I could see it in the ease of her, the ordinary hospitality of someone agreeing to a visit from a familiar name.
The office was small and crowded, with a desk barely visible under paperwork, a corkboard covered in adoption notices and a photo of a litter of kittens, and two mismatched chairs across from the desk.
Koa sat quietly beside my chair, ears flicking at the sounds of barks and whines and the occasional thud of a dog throwing itself against a kennel door with enthusiasm on the other side of the thin walls.
Lauren dropped into her chair and looked at us. “So what’s going on?”
“The new chief of police has been reviewing old cases,” Jace said.
“Things that might have gotten missed under Carson. We’ve been helping him follow up, talking to people who were around, seeing if there’s anything that didn’t make it into the files.
” He paused. “We wanted to ask you about the night of the end of school bonfire. The night Gwen Busby disappeared.”
The ease left her face all at once. Her hands, which had been loose on the desk, pressed flat against it. Tears filled her eyes almost immediately. “Oh,” she said. Just that. “Nobody ever came back.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “That’s why we’re here.”
She pressed her lips together and nodded, pulling herself together with visible effort.
“I gave a statement right after. The officer—I don’t even remember his name—he took it down and said someone would follow up.
” Her jaw tightened. “I kept thinking they would. For years I kept expecting someone would come.”
I privately wondered what information she’d been sitting on all this time and if she believed it was so important, why she hadn’t gone directly to the police herself. But I said none of that.
“Tell us what you remember,” I prompted. “Everything. Even the things that seem small.”
She took a breath. “It was the end of school bonfire, as you know. You were there. I wasn’t really into that kind of thing, but everyone was there that night, or so it seemed, so my friends and I went.
” One thumb began to circle the knuckle of the other as she continued.
“There was already a storm coming—you could feel it. Everyone was trying to fit the whole party in before it hit.”
She trailed off, looking at the corkboard before starting again.
“I remember seeing Gwen that night. She and Willa and Gabi were together, like always. They were down near the water at one point, and I remember thinking they looked like they were having fun.” Her voice had gone quieter.
“And then later—I don’t know, maybe an hour in—this guy came up to me.
Near the dune grass where I was standing with some friends.
I sort of knew who he was, but not well.
He wasn’t really part of the school scene.
I mean, he went to school with us, but he worked a lot, did yard work for the summer families.
He didn’t usually show up at social stuff. ”
I held still, listening, though I instantly wanted to demand who this guy was.
“He asked if I’d do him a favor,” Lauren continued. “Give something to Gwen Busby, make sure she got it. Just a folded piece of paper. A note of some kind. I said sure. It was a party, people passed things to each other, I didn’t think anything of it. He handed it to me and walked off.”
“And you found Gwen,” I said.
“It didn’t take long. She and Willa were still down by the waterline.
I gave it to her, and she opened it right there, in front of me.
” Lauren’s expression shifted into something painful and specific.
“She looked surprised. And then she looked—happy. Like something good had just happened that she wasn’t expecting.
” Her voice softened. “She said thank you and put it in her pocket. That was the last time I ever spoke to her.”
The shelter sounds moved through the wall. A dog barked three times and stopped. Something scraped along the floor on the other side.
“When did you give your statement?” Jace asked.
“That week. Right after everyone found out she was missing. I went to the police myself because I remembered that note, and thought they needed to know about whoever had asked me to give it to her.” She looked at her hands.
“When nobody followed up, I thought about calling so many times. But I didn’t know anything.
I didn’t read the note. What would I even say? ”
“Do you remember the name of the boy who gave it to you?” I asked. She’d said he’d gone to school with them. That made him a boy instead of a man back then.
She was quiet for a moment, circling it the way memory circled things it hadn’t touched in years.
“Shane,” she said finally. “Shane Tatum. He did work for the Hendersons and the Aldridges up on the east side. Others.” She looked up.
“I don’t know if he’s still on the island. I haven’t seen him in years.”
Jace and I exchanged a brief look. Another name to run down.
“Did you see him again that night?” I asked. “After he gave you the note?”
She considered the question. “Once. Before the storm really hit. He was talking to someone I didn’t recognize.
Older—well dressed for a beach party, which is what caught my eye.
He looked like he didn’t belong there.” She shook her head.
“It was dark. I only saw them for a second. That’s honestly all I have. ”
“You said older,” Jace prompted. “Older like college age or full adult?”
Lauren considered. “Not, like, our parents’ age. But maybe not college either? Twenties possibly, but I really didn’t pay that close attention.
Did the note come from Shane? Or from this mystery man? Or from someone else entirely?
The door to the office swung open without warning.
A heavyset man in shelter scrubs backed through it, pulling a large wire transport crate on a dolly, the kind built for big dogs.
Inside, a massive, agitated Rottweiler threw himself against the wire with the focused intensity of an animal that had decided the crate was the problem and he intended to solve it.
He hit the side hard enough to shift the whole thing on the dolly, the crash of metal against metal filling the small space.
The sound cut through me like a blade.
Not the dog. Not the man. The crate.
The specific dimensions of it, the wire grid, the way the animal inside pressed against it with his whole weight.
Something in my nervous system that had nothing to do with rational thought registered the size and the shape and sent me, without my permission, somewhere I hadn’t been in a long time.
My memory supplied the scent of metal and closed space with complete clarity.
The dark of corners where the light didn’t reach.
The sound of a door being unlocked and a monster coming down the stairs.