Page 89 of Carry on Wayward Son

The drive into town took only about fifteen minutes. The night was chill, with few folks out and about. That suited me fine. We wouldn’t have to vie for a table, and I’d have fewer distractions from what I needed to do.

I knew Pelican Point, though it hadn’t opened until after I’d graduated high school. It was where you went for the occasions that called for white tablecloths and a wine list that had no business existing this far from a city, the one room on Hatterwick arranged out over the water to make you feel like the kind of person who deserved it. I’d eaten here several times over the years, most recently with Layla, across a plate of expensive fish, working Marcus Teller as a lead. I’d known then that Teller owned the place, known he was Tidewater’s local face. What I hadn’t known, sitting in this same room a few weeks ago, was that my own father’s money ran through the man.

There was something fitting about coming back to ask John about Teller’s money inside a restaurant Teller owned. If it registered with my father, he gave no sign. But not noticing inconvenient things was the whole architecture of the man.

He was already at the table when I arrived. Of course he was. He’d have come early to be seated first, to be the one receiving rather than arriving, a small choreography of control he probably didn’t register doing anymore.

“Jace.” He stood, and we did the thing we did that wasn’t quite a handshake and wasn’t quite anything warmer. “I didn’t think you’d take me up on it, honestly. You seemed eager to be gone the other night.”

“Layla wasn’t feeling well.” The lie was the same one I’d give about the party regardless. “And we didn’t get much chance to talk, with the crowd.”

“No, we didn’t.” He settled back, pleased, a man who believed the evening was already going his way. “I’m glad you reconsidered. I meant what I said at the party—there’s a lot worth discussing, if you’re finally in a place to discuss it.”

A server appeared. My father ordered a bottle of something I didn’t pay attention to, waving away my non-participation with the ease of a man accustomed to ordering for the table, and I let him, because letting him run the small things would make him comfortable, and comfortable was what I needed.

“So,” he said, when the server had gone. “How much longer do they have you out here? Whatever it is you’ve been doing for six weeks.” He said it lightly, but the question underneath it was the same one he’d been asking since the party—whether I was between things, whether I was reachable, whether the Navy still had a claim on me he’d have to work around. “You’ve been vague about it.”

“It’s been a quiet posting.” I gave him nothing. “How long are you on the island?”

“Flying out in the morning.” He turned his glass by the stem. “Which is why I wanted tonight. We didn’t get to anything real at the party, and I don’t like leaving things half-finished.” A pause, the pivot coming. “Edmund’s doing some genuinely interesting work down here. I think you’d find it worth your time, if you were ever inclined to look past the uniform.”

“How is it you know Edmund Ashmore?” I asked it easy, conversational, the way you ask anything over the first glass of wine, and I watched my father’s face for the thing that would tell me whether the question landed anywhere it shouldn’t.

He answered without a flicker. “Edmund? We’ve been moving in the same circles for years now. You don’t get far in coastal development without crossing paths with the Ashmores eventually.” He smiled. “Sharp man. Old money, but not lazy about it, which is rarer than you’d think. He’s got vision and the kind of holdings most people would just sit on. But he’s always developing, always looking at the next thing. Pity you didn’t get a chance to meet him the other night.” He set the glass down. “Why the interest?”

“Curiosity. It’s been a while since I knew anything about your life.”

And there it was, the opening I’d handed him, the door swung wide. My father leaned into it, into the version of this dinner where his estranged son was finally circling back toward the orbit he’d been bred for, and he started to talk.

I let him.

Forty-Six

LAYLA

I’d pounced on Dax’s file the second Jace got out the door.

Gabi had given up on the financials and migrated to the kitchen to help Willa with something that involved a great deal of chopping. The afternoon light had long since faded. Madden had pulled her chair around next to mine, and we’d been working through it side by side for an hour, the two of us moving through the deeper Ashmore business structure—her with the prosecutor’s eye, me with professional understanding how money like this moved and hid and laundered itself clean.

John Hollingsworth’s name was all over it.

Neither of us said anything about that for a while. We just kept seeing it—on funding documents, on the formation paperwork for ventures that traced back to Ashmore capital, on the Teller projects specifically. Madden knew where Jace had gone. Or at least suspected. I’d seen her watch him leave and seen her decline to ask, the same way she’d declined to push when he wouldn’t name his lead. She was a smart woman. She’d done the math.

“Here,” she said quietly, and turned her laptop toward me.

I looked.

It was a series of entity records, the kind of dry administrative filings that meant nothing until you laid them in sequence, and the sequence told a story. John Hollingsworth had been a managing member, a signatory, a name on the documents of several of these ventures. And over the last few weeks he’d been coming off them. Resignations of position. Transfers of interest. His name being unwound from the structure, methodically, one entity at a time.

“He’s being removed,” Madden said. “Cleanly. Look at the dates. This isn’t him divesting on his own timeline. It’s coordinated. Somebody’s scrubbing him out of the architecture.”

I looked at the dates. She was right. There was nothing organic about it. It was the careful, sequential work of someone sanitizing a structure, the same way you’d wipe down a surface you intended to walk away from.

“Why would they unwind him?” I was thinking out loud, the way I did when the pieces were close but not touching. “If he’s an asset—if he’s the respectable money that makes the rest of it look legitimate—why pull him out?”

“Could be a lot of things.” Madden pulled her glasses off and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “He could be retiring. Winding down his own holdings, getting his affairs in order, nothing sinister. People restructure.”

“Could be.”