Page 12 of Carry on Wayward Son

I put a hand to my jaw. Several months of growth, accumulated in a context that had nothing to do with Hatterwick Island and everything to do with a posting I couldn’t discuss and a role that required not looking like myself.

He wasn’t wrong. He was annoying, but he wasn’t wrong.

“What’s wrong with the beard?”

“Nothing’s wrong with it,” Willa said. “It’s just not you.”

“It’s literally my face.”

“You know what she means,” Sawyer said.

“It’s a good beard.”

“It’s a genuinely excellent beard.” Willa stood and picked up her mug. “On a man who’s been undercover. Which you aren’t, anymore. Not here, anyway. Everyone on this island knows who you are. You might as well look like it.”

She wasn’t wrong either. I’d looked in the bathroom mirror that morning and done a small double take, which had been the point when I grew the thing and wasn’t the point now.

“I’ll think about it.”

“Think about it upstairs.” Sawyer straightened. “Some of us would like to go to bed.”

Willa leaned down and kissed the top of my head on her way past. Something she’d never have done five years ago and did now without thinking about it. “Night.”

“Night.”

Sawyer clapped me on the shoulder hard enough to mean something. “She’s right about the beard. She’s also right about the other thing.”

“There is no other thing.”

“Okay.” He didn’t argue it. He never did. That was one of the best qualities about Sawyer Malone. He said the one thing and left it for you. “Night, brother.”

They disappeared upstairs. Roy lifted his head, looked at me with golden-eyed gravity. Evidently deciding I needed his company more than my sister did, he put it back down across my feet.

I sat at the kitchen table, with the sound coming through the windows and the water going warm in my hand, and mulled over all of it. About Rios in that room full of people who finally meant it. About Sawyer and Willa in their corner of the Brewhouse with their hands linked and their whole settled, deliberate life arranged around them. About Ford’s face when Bree said something funny from behind the bar.

About a woman on a beach with a hand at her hip and a dog who didn’t miss anything.

I finished the water and went upstairs to reclaim my face.

Six

LAYLA

The morning came in gray and cold, the kind of light that didn’t so much arrive as seep, which I saw because I habitually woke before dawn, no matter what time zone I was in. At the cottage’s little kitchen table, I worked my way through a cup of the mediocre drip coffee the Airbnb had provided, already thinking through what I needed from the meeting and how to run it. I always went in knowing as little as possible about the specifics of the new case and let the people closest to it tell the story from the beginning in their own words. What they actually had and what they believed they had were almost never the same thing, and the gap between them was usually where the real work started.

Without fail, bias always played a role in why these cases grew cold to start. Investigators who had a pet theory and jumped on evidence that supported it, while neglecting or discarding anything that didn’t. Add to that a precedent for biased questioning of witnesses, who were unreliable to start, and suddenly there were false trails or convictions in cases that should never have gone to trial.

Things had improved some. Law enforcement was slowly adapting to a more rigorous standard, and the tech around evidence processing was far better than it used to be. My own father was meticulous about detail when investigating his own cases. Or had been before he retired from the FBI a few years ago. He’d seen that I knew better, and I’d wager I’d had more thorough training in actual investigative techniques than a lot of other reporters in the field.

I didn’t take that lightly.

It was my job to avoid bias and comb through the facts with fresh eyes to see what the evidence actually said, not to attempt to make it fit a preconceived narrative. That was admittedly harder to do in this particular case, given my insider knowledge. All the more reason that I say nothing until I had a clear idea of what they knew. For my own safety, I couldn’t risk a slip that indicated I wasn’t an impartial third party.

I fed Koa, layered up, braided my hair back in something looser than I had last night, and grabbed the smaller camera bag again.

“Come on, pal. Let’s go explore.”

Front Street was quiet but not dormant. Someone had been through recently with Christmas lights. White strands strung along the storefronts and cedar garland wound around the lampposts, the red ribbon at the ties working loose in the wind off the water. A sandwich board outside one of the shops advertised a Christmas market on the first weekend of December. Several storefronts were dark, with reduced hours posted on the doors. The ones with lights on were the ones that served the people who lived here year-round.