Chapter 15 Ace
ACE
The breeze had come from nowhere.
Ace stood at the edge of the gathering with the warmth of it still on his skin and tried to convince himself that he’d imagined what he’d heard inside it.
The campground was full of people and sound and the particular emotional weight of a memorial that had finally, after ten years, arrived at something resembling the truth.
It was entirely possible that an overworked, sleep-deprived mind in an emotionally charged environment could produce exactly the kind of auditory experience he’d just had.
He’d heard it, though.
As clearly as he’d heard it on the island in the cave, in the dark, with the storm pressing at the limestone outside.
Look after them and love them for me.
Ace pressed his jaw together and looked out over the lake. The water was still and bright in the morning light, its surface holding the sky’s reflection with the particular, indifferent beauty of nature on days that were anything but indifferent to the people standing beside it.
He shook his head once. He was losing his mind. That was the only reasonable explanation.
“Are you okay?” Ace whispered to Willa, who was still close beside him.
Willa stepped back slightly and looked up at him. Her eyes were wet, but her expression had settled into something quieter than it had been during the ceremony. “I’m a little better,” she admitted. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m okay,” Ace told her honestly. “This day is always bittersweet. It reminds me how much I miss him.”
“I know,” Willa murmured.
She stepped back just in time as Grace, Andy, and Becky descended on them from the direction of the chairs, all three of them converging at once in the instinctive way of children who needed to be close to their mother after something hard.
The group hug that followed was unplanned and slightly chaotic, and included Ace without anyone making a decision about it, which was exactly how the best ones always happened.
When they untangled, Ace looked at each of them in turn.
“How are you guys doing?” he asked.
“Sad,” Grace answered first. She breathed out slowly. “It’s always a sad day.” Her eyes moved toward the memorial stone and then back. “I feel like each year another part of his memory fades a little.”
“Oh, honey.” Willa reached up and cupped Grace’s face in both hands. “That’s not what’s happening. You’re just learning to carry it differently. Your dad will always live in your heart. That never fades.”
Grace nodded, pressing her lips together.
“I think Dad is going to rest a lot easier now,” Andy said quietly.
He looked at the stone for a moment. “Knowing that Gilbert Fry has been exonerated and that Director Dillinger knows who was really behind everything.” His eyes came back to Ace with a flash of worry underneath them.
“Does the director think they’re still somewhere nearby? Here in Sandpiper Shores?”
“No, bud,” Ace replied, keeping his voice easy and calm. “They’re long gone. The moment they realized the director and your grandmother had figured it out, they left. They’re not going to come back here.”
“Are you sure?” Becky asked, her eyes wide.
“I’m sure,” Ace told her. “They’d be recognized immediately in a town this size. On top of that, they’ve got the FBI and multiple law enforcement agencies actively looking for them. Coming back here would be the worst possible decision they could make.”
Becky absorbed that with a nod, indicating she was filing it away and deciding whether to accept it as sufficient reassurance.
“Why don’t we go and get some of Margo’s caramel pie before it disappears?” Willa suggested, her eyes moving across her three children with the quiet, practical warmth of a mother who understood when what people needed most was something ordinary to do.
“I’m in,” Ace said.
All three kids laughed, and the sound of it moved through the morning air like something that had been waiting for permission to arrive.
They walked together toward the refreshments table, and Ace was aware of it in the way he’d been increasingly aware of things lately, the particular fit of this, the specific rightness of moving through a crowd with these four people and having it feel like the most natural arrangement in the world.
The last of the guilt Ace had been carrying for longer than he’d admitted to anyone moved through him quietly and then settled into something he recognized as peace.
From the corner of his eye, something flickered.
Ace’s heart slammed hard against his ribs before his rational mind could intercept it.
For one fraction of a second, at the very edge of his peripheral vision, he could’ve sworn he saw Shaun standing at the treeline.
Not frightening. Not dramatic. Just standing there the way Shaun had always stood when he was watching something he was pleased about, with that particular, contained satisfaction that had always been his specific version of joy.
Then it was gone.
Ace blinked. He kept walking. He kept his expression exactly where it needed to be.
But now he was convinced that he was absolutely, definitely losing his mind.
“There are my favorite grandchildren,” Dean’s voice carried warmly from behind the refreshments table, where he’d apparently installed himself on the serving side alongside Margo and a handful of her staff.
“We’re your only grandchildren, Gramps,” Grace replied, rolling her eyes with the affectionate exasperation she reserved exclusively for Dean. “I’d like caramel pie with a—”
“Pile of vanilla whipped cream,” Dean finished for her, already reaching for the serving spoon with the ease of someone who had been paying attention for years.
“How did you know?” Grace grinned.
“Because you’ve been ordering the same thing since you were four years old,” Dean replied. He looked at Andy, then at Becky, then at Ace with a raised eyebrow and a knowing expression. “I’m guessing the same goes for you three?”
“Yup,” they chorused.
Margo appeared beside Dean with a plate of caramel pie and ice cream that she held out to Willa without a word.
Willa accepted it with a smile. “Thank you.”
“I made it this morning,” Margo replied simply. “I know it’s your favorite.”
The group expanded naturally as Rad and Tyler arrived, followed by Lucy, Noah, Ginny, Katey, and Zoe.
The teenagers peeled away toward each other with the magnetic efficiency of young people finding their own orbit, and the adults settled at one of the tables set out near the refreshments, plates in hand, the conversation moving through the morning with the easy, careful warmth of people who’d just been through something significant together and were finding their way back to ordinary ground.
“It was a good ceremony,” Lucy said quietly.
“It was,” Margo agreed. “It felt right this year. Different from before.”
“It felt complete,” Willa replied.
They were quiet for a moment, each of them holding that.
Noah leaned forward slightly, his voice dropping to the register that people used in Sandpiper Shores when they wanted to say something without advertising it to anyone passing within earshot. “Are Holt and June any closer to finding them?” His eyes moved to Rad.
Rad shook his head. “Not yet. They thought the Miami lead would pan out. Someone had booked June’s property there for a couple of months, paying cash upfront.
” He picked up his coffee. “But it turned out to be a family whose house is being renovated. They needed somewhere for a few months and found the listing online.”
“Another dead end,” Ginny said.
“Another dead end,” Rad confirmed.
Ace looked at his plate.
He thought about the journal. About the blueprints in the hidden panel.
About all the years of careful, methodical criminal activity that had been sitting inside that house while the rest of Sandpiper Shores moved around it entirely unaware.
Victoria Morrison had been operating in plain sight for most of her adult life, and nobody had seen it because nobody had thought to look.
The most effective hiding places were always the ones that didn’t look like hiding places at all.
Ace’s phone buzzed in his jacket pocket.
He pulled it out and looked at the screen.
Sienna.
The irritation arrived before Ace could stop it, quiet but present, the specific irritation of a man who’d been trying to let something end gradually and was being prevented from doing so by the other party’s refusal to acknowledge the signals.
“Excuse me a moment.” He pushed back from the table.
Ace walked far enough from the table that the conversation wouldn’t carry, stopped near the edge of the treeline, and answered.
“Hello, Sienna,” he said. “I can’t really talk right now.”
“You’ve been avoiding me since you got back from that island,” Sienna replied. Her voice had the particular edge it got when she was building toward something she’d decided in advance. “Are we still going to the concert tomorrow? Because you already put it off a week and it’s the last night.”
Ace pressed his free hand against the back of his neck and looked at the ground. “I can’t make any decisions about the concert right now, Sienna. Give me until the morning.” His jaw went rigid, and his shoulders straightened.
“Fine,” she replied, and the single word carried approximately fourteen different layers of displeasure. “But call me first thing so I can make other plans if you’ve changed your mind again.”
She hung up. No goodbye, just a dead line.
Ace lowered the phone and stood for a moment with his eyes closed, pressing the bridge of his nose between two fingers.