Page 41 of Carry on Wayward Son

“I keep thinking about her face when we left,” I said. “She was relieved. She’d been sitting on those numbers for years, and someone finally asked, and she was relieved to tell us.” My throat tightened. “And now she’s on a helicopter to the mainland, and I have no idea if she’s going to make it, and I was the one who⁠—”

“You asked her questions,” Jace said. “That’s what you did. You asked her about fuel numbers and empty slips, and she told you what she remembered. That’s it.”

“The timing⁠—”

“Is bad. The timing is bad, and it seems connected, and maybe it is.” He didn’t flinch from that. Didn’t try to pretty it up. “But Diane Crowell has been inside this operation’s orbit for over a decade. Whatever danger she was in, she was already in it before we walked through that door this morning. We didn’t put her there.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t. But the people who run operations like this don’t move on someone because a reporter asked about fuel numbers one time. They move on someone who is already a liability. Someone who already knows too much.” He paused. “If she’s a target, she’s been a target. We just weren’t aware of it.”

I looked at him. “That doesn’t make it better.”

“I know it doesn’t.” His hand came up to tuck a strand of hair that had come loose from my braid back behind my ear. Just that one gesture, and something in my chest cracked open a little. “It’s not supposed to feel better yet. It’s supposed to feel exactly like this. And then you sit with it for a while, and you keep going because the alternative is that nobody asks any questions, and people like Diane spend the rest of their lives sitting on things they should never have had to carry alone.”

I looked at him for a long moment.

“Is that what you tell yourself?” I asked. “After the things you’ve seen?”

“Some version of it.” The corner of his mouth moved. “Doesn’t always work. But it’s true, which helps.”

I exhaled. Let my forehead drop forward until it rested against his chest, just for a moment. His hand curved around my nape. The touch was somehow possessive and comforting at once. Neither was something I usually allowed.

“I think about her face,” I said. “That’s all. I just keep thinking about her face.”

“I know.” His thumb moved once, slowly, along the side of my neck, over the pulse that thrummed with dread. “I know.”

We stood there for a little while in the cold, outside the police station on a small island in December, while inside the SBI finished going through what was left of a corrupt department and somewhere over the water Diane Crowell was on a medevac heading for the mainland. Neither of us said anything else because there wasn’t anything else to say. Not yet.

Twenty-One

JACE

Panadería de la Isla opened at six-thirty. I was there at six-thirty-two, still half-asleep. Marisol took one look at me and said, “How many?”

“Six.”

I wasn’t caffeinated enough to care that I hadn’t specified what I’d even come for. All her baking was exquisite, and half a dozen of anything would be fine.

She boxed conchas without comment and wished me a good morning.

Rios and Madden’s cottage was a few blocks from the Brewhouse, in the center of a residential section of the island. Unlike the mega-mansions that lined either coast, this area was where most of the real islanders lived. The homes here weren’t huge or pretentious, but they were well kept and lived in. The one Rios and Madden rented belonged to Bree. She’d lived there with Willa for years. But that was before Willa and Sawyer got married. Before Ford came back to the island and found out he was a father. This morning, Rios’s truck still sat in the driveway, beside Madden’s sedan. The kitchen light was on, which meant at least one of them was already up.

I knocked.

Footsteps, and then Madden opened the door in a cardigan that had seen better days and reading glasses pushed up into her dark brown hair, coffee mug in hand. The complicated shift of her face told me she’d expected someone other than me.

“Jace. Good morning.”

I held up the box. “Conchas. Still warm. I come in peace.”

She looked at the box for a moment. Then she stepped back from the door.

The interior of the cottage was permeated with the scent of coffee made by someone who gave a damn, and my mouth watered at the thought of a cup with one of the sweet breads I’d brought. I’d been here plenty over the years Willa lived with Bree, and a lot of the same furniture was scattered about, but Rios and Madden had brought their own touch to the place. Books, legal pads, and other detritus of a former prosecutor’s methods of investigation were on nearly every horizontal surface. I spotted a laptop open on the kitchen table beside a half-eaten piece of toast Madden had apparently abandoned when I knocked. Rios’s boots were neatly placed in the tray beside the back door. Moonpie, Madden’s giant mastiff mix, heaved himself to his feet and padded over for pets.

I obliged as Madden called back toward the hallway, “Jace is here and he brought conchas.”

A pause. Then: “How many?”