Chapter 10 June
JUNE
Two days after the rescue, Sandpiper Shores was trying to put itself back together.
The storm had left the kind of mess that took time, muscle, and patience to address.
Harbor Street had lost three awnings and a section of decorative fencing outside the ice cream parlor.
Two of the older trees along the waterfront had come down in the night, taking a stretch of the sidewalk with them.
The beach was littered with debris the sea had thrown up and then walked away from, as if it had simply lost interest. Cleanup crews had been out since sunrise, and the sound of chainsaws and generators had replaced the usual morning quiet of the town.
June sat across from Holt in his office at the police station with her notepad open and a coffee going cold at her elbow. She looked at the picture of the boards they had built together over the past few weeks, which were locked up at the Sandpiper Inn.
June had been looking at them for the better part of an hour.
Nothing had moved.
That was the honest truth of where they were, and June had spent enough years in courtrooms to know the difference between a case that was building quietly toward something and a case that had simply stalled.
The fires, the accidents, the attacks, the stolen safe, all of it sat on those boards exactly where it had been sitting before the storm hit.
The storm had not helpfully rearranged anything into a cleaner picture while they were occupied elsewhere.
“I keep looking at it expecting something to shift,” June admitted, setting her pen down.
Holt looked up from the report on his desk. “And?”
“And nothing shifts,” June replied. “We have pieces that should fit together, and they still won’t.”
Holt leaned back in his chair and looked at the boards himself.
Tom was at a conference in Gainesville until the following morning, and without him in the building, the station took on a different quality.
It was quieter and more contained. Rad was out on a call.
There was no one else in the immediate vicinity, and June had noticed that both she and Holt seemed to breathe a little more freely when the space belonged only to them.
“How are Willa and the kids?” Holt asked, moving the subject away from the one they’d been staring at for a little too long.
June smiled despite herself. She couldn’t help it.
The smile arrived before she’d given it permission, which was what happened every time she thought about that Coast Guard helicopter landing in Sandpiper Shores two days ago and seeing Willa climbing out and walking toward her across the dock with Grace and Andy on either side of her.
“Willa is sore,” June told him. “Her shoulders and arms took the worst of it from the water, and the rope work on the ledge. She’s not admitting that, of course, but Carmen looked her over and confirmed it.
” She paused. “Andy has barely left her side since they got home. He keeps finding reasons to be in whatever room she’s in. ”
“He’s fifteen,” Holt said simply. “He almost lost her.”
“He did,” June agreed. “And he’s handling it the way Willa handles things, which is to say, he’s pretending he’s fine and then hovering within arm’s reach of her at all times.”
Holt smiled at that. It was a small smile, the kind that said he recognized the pattern because he had seen it before in someone else.
“Grace is different,” June continued. “Grace went quiet. She’s been helping around the house, cooking, keeping Andy occupied, and making sure Becky isn’t feeling left out of what happened since she wasn’t there.
She processes by doing.” June looked at her hands for a moment.
“She’s so much like Willa, it frightens me sometimes. ”
“That’s not a bad thing,” Holt said.
“No,” June agreed quietly. “It’s really not.”
She picked up her coffee, remembered it was cold, and put it back down.
The memory of standing at that Coast Guard station window with her hand in Holt’s, watching the storm press against the glass and not knowing, was still close enough to the surface to reach without much effort.
She had replayed the moment Dean’s helicopter appeared over the tree line on the island in the footage Lieutenant Reyes had shown them afterward more times than she would admit to anyone.
“How is Tyler?” June asked.
“He’s good,” Holt said, “He told me the island was the most interesting thing that had ever happened to him and then asked if we could go camping there again sometime.” He shook his head slowly. “What can I say? I guess we’re all like that at fourteen years old.”
“They’re resilient at that age,” June told him.
“Terrifyingly so,” Holt agreed and breathed out.
June looked back at the picture of the boards.
She gave herself a moment to feel the gratitude, let it sit properly in her chest the way it deserved to, and then set it aside. There were people still in danger, a case that wasn’t moving, and a town that deserved better than what was currently sitting underneath its surface.
“Do you know that Judy’s back in surgery?” Holt asked, his tone shifting as he looked back down at the report in front of him.
“I know,” June replied. “Lucy called me this morning.”
“The neurosurgeon confirmed it’s a secondary bleed,” Holt said, setting the report down.
“The original injury was more severe than the initial scans showed. The impact to the back of Judy’s head was significant.
” He looked at June. “Lucy said they won’t know more until she’s out of surgery and stable. ”
June looked at the pictures of the boards. Judy Vernon’s name sat in the victims column exactly where it had been for a few days, and now the thread attached to it felt thinner than ever.
“And there is still no word about Lacey regaining her memory,” June bit her lip. She was more worried about her friend than she was about her remembering.
“No, and I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing,” Holt replied.
“Lucy says the memory may never fully come back because the brain does what it needs to do to protect itself.” He tapped his pen on the desk.
“The question is what is it protecting Lacey from?” He shook his head slowly.
“I worry that she’s in danger and she doesn’t even know it because she can’t remember it. ”
“I know,” June agreed. “Whoever attacked her could be anyone close to us.”
“I know,” Holt said.
“And that’s two of our best potential witnesses gone,” June said. “Lacey can’t remember, and Judy is back in surgery.”
“Yes,” Holt said flatly. “Which also leaves us exactly where we’ve been stuck for days, running in circles.” He sighed and leaned his elbows on the desk. “This is not a big town. You’d think it would be a lot easier to catch a criminal or solve a mystery.”
“Or not,” June pointed out. “It could make hiding in plain sight a lot easier, too. Especially if it’s someone no one would ever suspect.”
“True!” Holt nodded.
June picked up her pen and tapped it lightly against the notepad. “What about the safe?”
“Nothing,” Holt replied, and his jaw tightened as it always did when he was forced to report a dead end.
“Whoever took it knew exactly what they were doing. No usable prints on the wall cavity or the door that we can tie to anyone outside the household. No witnesses. No camera coverage on that side of the Morrison property.” He looked at her steadily. “It’s as if it simply ceased to exist.”
June looked back at the pictures of the boards.
Something had been nagging at her since before the storm.
Not a specific thought. More like the feeling of a word sitting on the tip of your tongue that refused to come forward, no matter how hard you reached for it.
She’d learned over years of legal practice to trust that particular feeling.
It meant something was there. It was simply waiting for the right moment to show itself.
It had been a few weeks now, and June was still waiting for the shoe to drop.
“What about Nigel Frost?” June asked. “Have you gotten hold of him yet?”
“Still nothing,” Holt said. “His phone is still dead. The department he was supposed to transfer to confirmed he’s deferred his start date, but won’t give me more than that.
” He reached for his own coffee. “Either he doesn’t want to be found, or someone has made it very clear to him that being found is not in his best interests. ”
“Or both,” June said.
“Or both,” Holt agreed, his expression turning grim.
June looked at Victoria Morrison’s name on the board.
It had been sitting there long enough now to have taken on a kind of weight simply from the looking.
All the threads from the fires and the accidents and the evidence destruction led back toward her orbit in ways that were suggestive rather than conclusive.
But suggestive was not what you could take into a courtroom. They needed something concrete.
June was about to say so when a knock at the office door pulled both their heads up.
“Come in,” Holt called.
The door opened.
Sienna Morrison stepped inside.
June’s first impression was that Sienna looked nothing like herself.
The polished, composed exterior that had always been the girl’s most reliable armor was entirely gone.
Her hair was pulled back in a scruffy bun that looked like she’d slept with it in.
Her face was pale, devoid of makeup, and drawn in the way of someone who had not slept properly in several days.
Sienna was wearing a soft gray sweater, the sleeves long and pulled down over her hands so that only her fingertips were visible.
Her fingers worked the fabric edge in a slow, unconscious movement as she stood in the doorway.
Sienna looked at Holt, then at June, and her eyes filled immediately.
“I need to talk to you,” Sienna said. “Both of you.”
Holt was already on his feet. “Come in and sit down, Sienna.”