Page 10 of Carry on Wayward Son

Koa’s head came up, his ears pricking.

Not the casual alerting of a dog tracking a new smell. His whole body stilled, weight forward, attention fixed down the beach to the north. I followed his gaze, my hand dropping to my hip, fingers resting against the outside of my fleece over the sheath beneath. A twitch of my wrist, and I’d be armed.

A figure moved south along the waterline, unhurried, hands in his pockets. Still a hundred yards off, but closing. Long stride, loose in the hips, the kind of unhurried economy of movement that came from a body that knew what it was capable of. In my experience, that meant someone worth watching.

He’d clocked us. His trajectory didn’t change, but the quality of his attention did, the slight shift of a man who’d registered something ahead and was deciding what to do with that information. He kept coming. Didn’t slow, didn’t speed up, didn’t angle away.

Koa growled. Low and precise, not a warning so much as a statement of position.

The man stopped ten feet away, maybe twelve. He looked at Koa with the equanimity of someone who’d been growled at before and understood it as communication rather than threat.

“Beautiful dog,” he said.

Dark hair. Several months of dark beard. He didn’t look at me the way men sometimes looked at a woman alone on a beach at night. He just stood there, hands still in his pockets, giving Koa all the space the dog had asked for.

“Thanks,” I said.

He tipped his head back and looked up at the sky the way I’d been doing before Koa had pulled my attention north. “Hell of a night for stars.”

My fingers hadn’t moved from my hip. I kept my weight on the balls of my feet and said nothing.

He stood there looking up for a moment longer. Unhurried. Unbothered. Then he looked back at the beach ahead of him and nodded once in my direction. “Have a good night.”

He walked on with that same loose, unhurried stride, south along the waterline. I watched him cross through those amber strips of light until the dark had taken most of him, and there was just the shape of a man getting smaller, and then nothing.

Koa watched him too. When the man was gone, he looked back at me, waiting to see what I’d do.

I didn’t move for a long time. In the dark, the waves whispered, Hush, hush, in an effort to lull me. Somewhere down the beach, the man was still walking, or had turned somewhere, or had arrived wherever he was going. I had no way of knowing, and I made myself stop caring about it the way I made myself stop reading exits in rooms I’d already cleared—deliberately, one breath at a time.

So much of my life had been lived one breath at a time.

He’d stopped when Koa growled. Hadn’t pushed closer, hadn’t tried to make friends with the dog, hadn’t used the dog as a way in, as some men did. He’d given the animal the respect of taking a warning seriously.

I didn’t recognize him. Dark hair, dark beard, the kind of face that would look wholly different in daylight instead of shadow. But I’d been gone a long time, and I shouldn’t expect to recognize anyone. The island had kept moving. So had I.

I stood at the edge of the water until my shoulders came down from around my ears. Until my fingers drifted away from my hip. Until the cold stopped registering as a threat and started feeling like just cold.

Then I called Koa and turned for the lights.

Five

JACE

I gave her a few minutes before I turned back.

She’d moved north along the waterline, the dog ranging ahead on its lead. I let her get enough distance before I fell in behind her. Not close. The dog had already registered me once, and a hundred pounds of malamute with an established opinion wasn’t something I wanted to test a second time in the dark. Far enough that she’d see just another shape against the water if she looked back.

She didn’t glance back. She moved with her head up and her attention scanning left and right at intervals too deliberate to be casual. Not paranoid. Not just the sensible caution of a woman alone at night. Trained. There was a difference. She’d processed me, filed me, and kept moving, which required a quality of discipline that most people didn’t have and didn’t develop by accident.

The dog did her looking for her. He turned twice, both times toward me, and both times she stopped, followed his gaze down the beach, held for a count, and kept going. She trusted his read, but she verified it herself. That was good training on both ends of the leash.

The village was quiet around us. Off-season meant the restaurants had cut their hours, and the foot traffic that packed these streets from May through September had long since gone back to wherever it came from, leaving the island to the people who actually lived here. A couple of lit windows. The distant sound of something on a television behind a closed door. My own footsteps on the packed sand near the waterline, which I kept slow and steady and unthreatening because the last thing I needed was to alarm her and have her turn around and find out she’d had a tail the whole way home.

She turned off the beach at one of the center-most access points and moved through the streets without checking her phone once. Two blocks inland, a left onto Marsh, and then she stopped at one of the cottages that had probably been turned into a rental, the dog shouldering through ahead of her. The door closed, and the deadbolt shot home loud enough to carry in the quiet. I noted the sound with some approval.

A light came on in the front window.

I stood on the opposite side of the street and did a full assessment of the building. Cottage number, window placement, the gap between her building and the next one, the view from the front door to the street. She had decent cover on the approach, and the deadbolt looked good. The dog was better. If something came at her in the night, it would announce itself well in advance.