Page 65 of Carry on Wayward Son

“Come to Sutter House. It’ll be the whole group. Willa does it properly—tree, food, the full thing.” He kept his voice easy, like it was a simple offer and not another step in a direction I hadn’t meant to be walking. “You shouldn’t be alone in a rental cottage on Christmas.”

I hadn’t planned to be. I’d expected to be back in Washington, spending Christmas with my family. But I was still here. And as I looked at this man who had been quietly making coffee and keeping ten feet of proximity and positioning himself between me and doors that opened too fast, who was now standing under a kissing ball in a community center in December asking me to spend Christmas with his family, I found myself saying, “Okay.”

He smiled, and it wasn’t the practiced version of a man who knew how to work a room. It was just his face doing what it did when something had gone right.

“Good,” he said. “Now. Should we go back to the property records, or is there more to see here?”

I looked around at the market, at the sea glass and the honey and the hand-dyed fabric and Marisol’s line that had not gotten shorter. “One more pass,” I said. If I was staying, I for sure needed to start shopping.

He offered his arm, which was an entirely unnecessary and rather lovely thing to do. I took it, and we made one more pass.

Thirty-Three

JACE

The deck at Sutter House faced north, and on a clear night the Atlantic stretched out to the horizon and beyond, the kind of view that made the rest of the world feel small. Tonight the cloud cover had come in, so there was nothing to see, only the murmur of surf breaking somewhere below the dune line, the air carrying the cold salt scent of open ocean that had traveled a long way before it got here.

I’d grown up with that sound. I’d spent my adult life in places where the water, when there was water, smelled and sounded different, and I was still getting reacquainted with this version of it.

I sat on the top step of the deck and thought about Halston Ashmore.

Not for the first time since the property records. The name had been sitting in the back of my mind in the way names did when they didn’t quite fit the space they’d turned up in—a little wrong, a little insistent, refusing to be filed and forgotten. An Ashmore Holdings LLC with property on the south end of Hatterwick, acquired twenty years ago. No obvious connection to anything we’d been tracking. Clean on paper. Registered in Virginia. The kind of holding that might be the wealthy family’s vacation property it appeared to be and nothing more. Or it could be something else entirely.

My gut told me it was the latter. That instinct had been right often enough in my career that I’d convinced my superiors to give me the freedom to investigate the bigger picture of trafficking in the region my way.

I’d run the standard searches already—public records, corporate filings, what the internet would give up without being pushed. What I needed was someone who could go considerably deeper than standard.

I pulled out my phone and found the contact.

It rang twice. Dax Gregory never answered on the first ring, regardless of circumstances. He considered it a matter of principle.

“Hollingsworth. You’re calling from outside.” There was no particular inflection on it, just the flat delivery of a man cataloguing information. “Who are you hiding from?”

I didn’t even blink at the observation. Given his particular skill set, I wouldn’t have put it past him to have already triangulated my position via satellite imagery before picking up. “Nobody. I needed air.”

“It’s forty degrees.”

“You know I’ve got thicker blood than that.” I stretched my legs out on the step, crossed them at the ankles. “Where are you?”

“Does it matter?” The faintest trace of Georgia crept into the question—the tell he never quite buried, no matter how many years and time zones put distance between him and where he’d started.

“Guess not.”

“Zurich.”

Middle of the damned night for him, then. The math wasn’t complicated. “Sorry to call so late.”

“S’fine.” He didn’t sound like he’d been sleeping. Keys clacked in the background—Dax in perpetual motion, which had always been his default state, no matter the hour. He’d been out of Naval intelligence for four years and had constructed a private sector career that nobody outside a tiny, vetted circle had a clear picture of. He moved constantly between cities, billed extremely well, and maintained a studied vagueness about his current projects that I respected on principle and occasionally found professionally convenient. “What do you need?”

“Background on a family. The Ashmores, originally out of Virginia. Edmund and a son named Halston. There may be other family members worth pulling. I’m not sure of the full picture yet. I want the complete financial architecture—any connections to shell companies operating out of North Carolina, specifically a Wilmington law firm called Calloway and Pierce and an entity called Tidewater Marina Group LLC.”

“Ashmores.” I heard him turning it over, fingers already moving at blinding speed across whatever setup he had in front of him. “Edmund Ashmore with the endowed chair at UVA?”

“That’s the one.”

“Buildings named after him at two universities, a string of foundation boards, the usual apparatus that accumulates at that level of generational money. I don’t know the details of their private holdings offhand.” He paused. “Why are you looking at them?”

“Their LLC has property on Hatterwick. I’m working an investigation into a trafficking ring that’s been running on the island for at least fifteen years. The name surfaced in a property records search.”