Page 4 of Carry on Wayward Son

“He’s not going to know what to do with this,” Sawyer said quietly.

“No.”

“He’ll figure it out.”

“Yeah.” I watched Rios move through the people still waiting—a council member, a woman I didn’t recognize who said something that made him duck his head, a man who had the look of the docks, who shook his hand with both of his. “He’s been figuring out harder things than this his whole life.”

Sawyer and I made our way toward the front of the room where Willa offered her hug of congratulations. Madden was next. She waited with her arms folded until the others had cleared. When Rios turned to her, she said something too low to carry across the room, and he said something back with a look for her that spoke volumes about what she’d come to mean. Her lips curved in the faintest smile before he wrapped her in his arms for a long embrace. Nothing salacious, just relief and support on both sides.

The room was starting to empty out when Bree asked, “Brewhouse?”

“Obviously,” Ford agreed.

I put my hand out to Rios. He took it and pulled me in, and we held on the way we always had, since elementary school, raising hell on this island together.

“Chief,” I said.

“I will end you.”

“That seems like an abuse of your new authority.”

“I’ve been chief for ten minutes. I’ll figure out the limits later.”

Ford, already steering Bree toward the door: “I told him not to say it.”

“You did not,” I said.

“I thought about it very seriously.”

Rios looked between the two of us, and the corner of his mouth lifted in the barest of smiles, with the full weight of the day and his new charge in it.

He shook his head. “Brewhouse. Before I arrest both of you for something.”

Two

LAYLA

The ferry horn sounded once, and Cedar Island fell away behind us.

I’d gotten out of the Bronco as soon as we cleared the car deck, needing air more than I needed the illusion of staying put. As it was off season and a late crossing, the upper deck was mostly empty. No one was headed to the southern tip of the Outer Banks on a cold November Tuesday if they had a choice about it. A man in a Carhartt jacket sat near the stern with a coffee and his phone. A woman with two kids had claimed the row of plastic chairs along the back wall, the younger one already asleep across her lap. Nobody paying attention to anybody else.

I dug money from my wallet and fed it to the machine in the corner, waiting while it belched questionable coffee into a paper cup. Then I took Koa outside and found a spot at the rail with a clear sightline to the stairs and the length of the deck both directions, set my back to nothing, and stayed there as the wind did its best to whip my hair out of its braid.

Koa pressed his furry bulk against my left leg and didn’t move.

He’d been like this since the Virginia state line. Not fully alert, but watchful, as he got when he couldn’t quite locate the source of what he was tracking. He was tracking me. Whatever emotional state I broadcast, he read it, and what he was reading had his ears back and his body turned into mine. I dug one hand into his ruff and consciously slowed my breath, relaxing each muscle that had tensed on the ferry’s launch.

The mainland got small. Smaller. Gone entirely.

The Pamlico Sound extended around us, the kind of open water that made the boat feel briefly irrelevant. I’d grown up on Puget Sound, so I was no stranger to the ocean. But the Pacific Northwest coast was all rock and fir and mountains dropping straight to the water, the sky always doing something dramatic, the light always at a slant. This was different. The Carolina coast was low and patient, the land barely distinguishable from the water in the dark, the horizon a suggestion rather than a line. Even the cold was different. Damp and penetrating where home was sharp and clean.

I told myself it was the wind making me shake as I wrapped both hands around the vending machine coffee, willing the heat into my bones.

I knew fear. I knew horror. I understood the vacuum left behind when someone disappeared, leaving only questions with no answers. I’d built a career out of bringing attention to the missing from one end of the US to the other, putting my skills as an investigative photojournalist to good use.

This case was no different.

And maybe if I kept repeating that, I’d believe it.