Page 13 of Carry on Wayward Son

As I’d noted last night, Sutter’s Ferry was more developed than I’d expected. I spotted gift shops full of the t-shirts and branded knick-knacks tourists always loved for souvenirs. Other windows showed companies offering tours and water-based excursions like parasailing and fishing trips. At the far end a couple of blocks from the marina, I spotted a building of clean, modern lines, with a classy hint redolent of old wooden sailing vessels. Pelican Point Bistro sprawled across the sign in a fancy font. The core of the village seemed intact, though. The working waterfront at the south end with its scents of diesel and cold salt water. Home Port with its sign unlit at this hour, the kind of bar that opened for lunch and closed when it felt like it. Closer to the center of town, I found the hardware store and thrift shop. For a moment, I stopped in front of a massive, two-story building with clapboard siding and awning windows closed against the chill. A sign proudly announced OBX Brewhouse, with a smaller note touting wins at what I could only assume were beer brewing competitions.

Koa catalogued everything, nose down, working the sidewalk with focused attention.

I found the bakery by smell, on a side street off Front, the sign reading Panadería de la Isla above a door propped open despite the cold to let the warmth and the scent of cinnamon and yeast out into the morning. A line of waiting patrons trailed out, and that was the best kind of advertising. Stomach growling, I joined it, and that was when I saw her.

The poster was on the community board just inside the door, between a flyer for the Christmas market and a notice about the library’s holiday hours. Newer paper than the others I’d passed on the way here. This one recently replaced, the colors still saturated, the edges still flat.

I’d seen the age-progression renderings online before I came. I’d been careful not to go too deep into the case before the meeting, not wanting to build a picture that would bias what the family told me. But seeing the Missing poster in person was different from a screen. It always was.

She’d been fifteen in the last photographs taken of her. Round-faced, bright-eyed, with the unfinished quality of a girl who hadn’t grown into herself yet. Christ, she’d been young. The computer rendering aged her forward, and her face narrowed, the jaw more defined, the eyes the same but older. They’d done reasonable work with it. They usually did these days. But there was something in every age-progression image that never quite resolved, some quality of personhood the algorithm couldn’t generate because it had never known the missing. The woman on the poster looked like someone who might have been. A possibility. Not like herself.

She would have been thirty yesterday.

The ache pinned me in place until I realized the line had moved. I pulled my focus back to the bakery and inched forward, scanning both the chalkboard menu suspended from the ceiling and the case of glistening, carb-based jewels in front of me. I ordered a coffee and cinnamon roll from the Latina woman behind the counter, who looked at Koa in his service dog harness and smiled.

“What a good boy. Can he have a little treat? I make biscuits for the local pups.”

“Oh, that would be great. He’d love that. Thank you.”

“For here or to go?”

“To go, please.”

She rang me up. “Give me just a few minutes.”

I stepped to the side to wait.

A scrap of conversation reached me from the table nearest the window.

“—about time, I say. Though I still think it’s strange putting Rios Carrera in charge, after everything.”

I glanced over and spotted two women hunched over mugs of coffee, with no apparent concern about being overheard.

“After everything.” The second woman’s tone made her position on that clear. “After everything done to him is what you mean. He was railroaded.”

“Maybe so. But you have to admit it looked suspicious at the time. He was the last one to see her.”

“That doesn’t make him responsible. It never did.”

“I’m just saying what people were saying back then.”

“People said a lot of things back then that turned out to be completely wrong. Carson had his reasons for letting that story run, and none of them had anything to do with finding that poor child.”

My pulse sped up. Were they talking about Gwen?

A pause.

“At least he found the Shah girl. That’s something.”

“Small mercy.” The first woman wrapped both hands around her mug. “At least she came home. Gwen never did.”

Seeing the woman behind the counter with my food, I walked away from the temptation to eavesdrop more, grabbing my coffee and bag of pastries and pushing back outside, Koa on my heel.

I walked toward the boardwalk that ran for a stretch along the sound-side beach and found a bench to eat my breakfast and think. I offered Koa the fancy bakery dog biscuit. His nostrils rounded, and he turned a fast, excited circle before plunking his butt to the ground and offering a paw. I shook it and gave him the signal for down. He stretched out on his belly. I balanced the biscuit across the top of his nose and watched his eyes almost cross with focus.

“Hold.”

Koa didn’t move a muscle.