Chapter 18 Ace
ACE
The drive to Gainesville took forty minutes.
Ace had driven it before, knew the highway well enough to do it without thinking, which was fortunate because thinking was something he was struggling to do in any organized way with Sienna in the passenger seat, talking at a pace and volume that suggested she’d been saving the conversation up for some time.
She was in a good mood.
That was the first thing that struck him as he drove, and it struck him because it was inconsistent with the situation a person in her position ought to be in.
Sienna’s mother was missing and under active investigation.
The family home had been searched by a forensic team.
The town was talking. By any reasonable measure, Sienna should have been stressed, subdued, and at least performing some version of daughterly concern.
Instead, she’d come to the door of the pool house looking like someone heading out for the best evening of the month, and had spent the first twenty minutes of the drive telling him about the band’s last album with the enthusiastic focus of someone who had absolutely nothing more pressing on their mind.
Ace drove and listened, trying to ask all the right questions at the right intervals. Then, when he lapsed into silence, Ace thought about the questions Holt and June had given him in the briefing room that morning.
Keep it casual, June had told him. She’ll close down the moment she feels interrogated. Let her talk. People who are hiding something talk more than people who aren’t, because talking gives them control of what’s being heard.
Ace had thought about that on the drive over. He was still thinking about it.
“You’ve gone quiet,” Sienna observed, somewhere around the thirty-minute mark.
“Just enjoying the drive,” Ace replied.
Sienna looked at him for a moment with the particular, appraising expression she wore when she was deciding whether something was worth pursuing. Then she went back to talking about the band.
The venue was a converted tobacco warehouse on the outskirts of Gainesville, transformed into one of the region’s better live music spaces.
The exposed brick walls and the high industrial ceiling gave the sound somewhere to travel, and the crowd that had filled it for the evening carried the compressed energy of people who’d been looking forward to this and intended to make full use of it.
Ace stood just inside the entrance with Sienna and looked around the space, doing what he always did in unfamiliar venues: locating the exits, identifying the sight lines, and getting a sense of the crowd’s density before he went any further.
Sienna’s two friends were already there when they arrived, positioned near the front of the general-admission floor, with drinks in hand.
Ace shook hands, was introduced, said the right things, and, within approximately three minutes, registered that this was a couple who were considerably more interested in being observed at an event than in the event itself.
Sienna seemed entirely comfortable with both of them.
Ace accepted a drink from the bar and settled in beside the group, letting the support act wash over him while thinking about nothing in particular, watching everything carefully.
It was twenty minutes before he saw her.
Willa was about thirty feet away, standing with Margo on her left and Harvey on her right.
She was laughing at something Harvey had just said with the full, unguarded quality of her real laugh.
Willa was in a dark green dress he hadn’t seen before, her hair down.
Harvey leaned in to say something close to her ear over the music, and Willa tilted her head toward him in the easy way of people who were comfortable with each other.
Ace looked away. He looked at Sienna, who was talking to one of her friends about something that required a lot of hand gestures.
He noted that Sienna’s sleeves were pulled down over her hands in the habit he’d been watching for weeks, even here, even in a warm and crowded venue where a long-sleeved shirt was a strange choice.
He looked back at Willa. A spurt of jealousy hit him at how close she and Harvey were standing. It was like they were on a double date with Margo and Rad. Ace had to look away again before he rushed over there and did something incredibly stupid.
The main act came on and the room lifted with it, that particular surge of collective energy that a crowd produced when what they’d been waiting for finally arrived.
Ace let himself be present in it for a while, keeping his expression easy, his body language open, and his attention carefully split between the three people he was supposed to be monitoring and the green dress thirty feet away that he was supposed to be ignoring.
He was not ignoring it as successfully as he would have liked.
Sienna moved closer to him as the music got louder, which was natural and expected and entirely in keeping with the evening she’d clearly planned. Ace let it happen and kept his eyes on the stage.
Ace watched Sienna’s face in the moment of unguarded amusement that followed.
She was performing tonight. That was the word that kept coming back to him.
Not performing in the obvious way of someone putting on a show, but in the subtler way of someone who had decided what this evening was going to be and was executing that decision with considerable skill.
Ace had been around enough people who were hiding things to know the specific, faintly elevated quality of ease that came with active concealment. The slightly brighter engagement. The carefully managed reactions. The moments when the face did something a fraction of a second after it should have.
Sienna had all of it tonight.
He filed it away and watched the stage.
Then Willa moved toward the refreshments area.
Ace watched her go. Harvey stayed with Margo, laughing at something Rad had just said. Ace waited a reasonable interval and excused himself from Sienna’s group with a gesture toward the bar.
The refreshments area was set back from the main floor behind a low partition, and Willa was standing at the end of the bar waiting for her order when Ace arrived beside her.
She looked at him.
“Hello, Ace,” Willa greeted him with a tight smile. “I guess this is no coincidence running into you at the bar?”
“Hello, Willa,” Ace greeted her back. “Actually, I was going to point out that I’m surprised to see you here at the concert I asked you to go to, and you turned me down.”
Willa turned to look at him properly.
“No, I said I couldn’t go to the opening concert last week,” Willa corrected him. “But this week Harvey got tickets and asked me to go, so here I am. You know this is one of my favorite Florida bands.”
“You’re here with Harvey,” Ace said.
“Harvey, Margo, and Rad,” Willa corrected and glanced back to the seats where he’d come from. “I see you’re with a crowd too.”
Ace looked at her, and everything he wanted to say boiled up inside of him, but then he remembered why he was here with Sienna and the promise he’d made to Holt and June, plus the uncomfortable wire stuck to him beneath his shirt.
“Oh, there comes the bartender,” Willa pointed out and turned her back to him, indicating that the conversation was over.
“Enjoy the show,” Ace said through gritted teeth and left her there. His fists curled into balls at his sides.
Ace breathed a few relaxing breaths as he went back to his seat.
His eye caught Willa as she returned to the group and handed out the drinks.
Something in his stomach knotted when he watched Harvey’s arm come up around Willa’s shoulders, and the way Willa didn’t step away, she leaned slightly into the embrace.
Ace looked away as Sienna leaned over and asked, “Where are the drinks?”
“The bar was way too crowded,” Ace lied. “I’ll go back later.”
“Good idea,” Sienna said as she and her friends stood for the next song so they could dance to the beat.
Ace’s head kept swiveling back to Willa’s group, who appeared to be having a considerably better evening than the one he was currently having.
His irritation was specific. Ace was entirely aware of its source, and he had no right to it whatsoever, which made it worse, not better.
He pulled his attention back to the group he was with as the other two people in their group went to the bar.
Sienna watched them go.
Ace turned toward her, knowing now would be a good time to get some of the rehearsed questions out.
“Are you enjoying the concert?” Ace asked.
Sienna looked up at him with a flirty expression. “I’d be enjoying it considerably more if you paid me attention the same way my friend’s boyfriend does to her.” She gave him a sultry smile and shifted closer.
Ace smiled without committing to anything and let the comment go. “How are you holding up with everything going on with your mother?” he pushed on with his questions.
Sienna’s expression changed.
It was less than a second. The kind of involuntary shift that happened before conscious management could intercept it. What moved across her face in that fraction of time was not the grief or worry or complicated distress of a daughter in a genuinely difficult situation.
It was something considerably colder.
“To be completely honest,” Sienna said, her voice dropping, “I don’t particularly care what happens to that woman.” She held his eyes for a moment. “Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned.” Her expression returned to its usual composed surface. “I just want everything in that safe back.”
Ace kept his face neutral. “Everything in the safe was yours?”
Sienna paused. Something moved behind her eyes. “Yes,” she said. Then she stopped. “Well.” A beat. “Not everything. I don’t want her to sell my stuff.” She looked toward the stage, then changed the subject. “I really hope they play my favorite song in the next set?”
Ace let her redirect. He waited two songs.