Page 92 of Carry on Wayward Son

Knowing what not to look at.

There it was. Not innocent. Not guilty. A man who had built an entire life out of the disciplined refusal to see anything that would inconvenience him, who had taken money from people he had to have suspected and put it to work. And then slept just fine, because not-knowing was a skill he’d honed to a fine professional edge. The same not-looking that had let him sign the papers committing his own daughter and never once examine what he’d done. It was all the same muscle. He’d just spent his whole life exercising it.

I couldn’t prove he knew. I was nearly certain he didn’t, in the way that mattered legally—that he’d kept himself deliberately ignorant precisely so that this conversation, if it ever happened, could go exactly the way it was going. And the part of me that had come here braced to find my father at the center of it sat with the strange, hollow non-relief of having found something worse and smaller instead. There was no catharsis in it. He wasn’t a monster I could hate cleanly. He was just a man who’d decided long ago that other people’s suffering was a thing you didn’t look directly at if looking would cost you, and he’d been right that it never had.

What I couldn’t tell was whether the not-looking was the whole of it. Whether my father was exactly what he appeared to be—a man who took dirty money and kept his eyes politely averted—or whether there was something underneath that he was performing his way around even now, with me, over the wine. I’d come braced to read the truth off him in person, and the truth I’d read was maddeningly partial. He was in it. He wasn’t at the center of it. Past that I had nothing solid, and I was out of time to dig, because the check had come and my father was reaching for it with the flourish of a man who enjoyed paying.

“Let me,” he said. “Least I can do, for getting you out on my last night.”

I let him. It cost me nothing, and it kept him pleased, and pleased was how I wanted him when I walked out, so he’d have no reason to think the dinner had been anything but what he believed it was. A son coming back around.

“I’m glad you came, Jace.” He stood, settled his jacket. “Think about what I said. The coast. There’s a place for you in it, if you want one. You don’t owe the Navy your whole life.”

“I’ll think about it.”

We did the not-quite-handshake at the door. He held my hand a beat too long, the way he’d held Layla’s, the way he held everything he wanted to keep. Then he went toward the car waiting to take him to wherever he was staying his last night, and I went toward my truck, and that was the last I’d think about my father for a long while.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket as I crossed the lot.

I’d kept it silenced through the meal out of the same instinct that had kept my father comfortable. No interruptions, full attention, the performance of a man with nowhere else to be. Now the screen lit up with the backlog.

Missed calls. Layla, twice. A text from Layla. Then Madden, three times. Willa, twice. The calls stacked tight together in the last forty minutes, a cluster of them, the pattern of people trying to reach someone and not getting through.

The cold crawled up my spine before I’d consciously read any of it.

Layla’s text first.

Layla:

Thinking about you. Tell me when you’re heading home. Koa misses you.

Wrong. Every word of it was wrong. She didn’t send texts like that. Koa misses you. Koa was the tell, the thing that meant she was reaching for me, that something was off, that she needed confirmation I was okay. She’d sent it, and I’d been sitting in a restaurant with my phone in my jacket, letting my father pay for dinner.

I started to call her back. My thumb was on her name when the phone buzzed in my hand. Willa, calling again.

I answered it, already moving faster toward the truck. “Willa.”

“Jace, oh God, where are you?” Her voice was high and fast, the panic in it stripping the bottom out of my stomach. “Layla’s gone. She said she was taking Koa to the yard, and then we heard the Bronco, and by the time we got outside she was already down the drive and she’s not answering. We’ve been calling. None of us can reach her.”

“When?” I wrenched the truck door open. “Willa. How long ago?”

“Fifteen minutes? Twenty? We didn’t realize at first. We were heads down in the records and she just… Jace, she found something in those files, she and Madden both, and she got this look and wouldn’t say what and now she’s not answering.”

“I’m on my way.” I had the engine cranked, the truck already moving before I’d fully closed the door. “Call Rios. Now. Tell him Layla’s missing, tell him I’m on it. Stay in the house. Lock it. Do not come looking. You understand me?”

“Jace—”

“Lock the house, Willa.” I hung up.

The coast road was the only way she’d have come. There was one route between Sutter House and the village, the dark stretch where the forest ran down one side and the dunes and ocean fell away on the other, no lights and no houses, and I took it at a speed that road was never built for, my headlights tearing through the dark, every cell in me gone cold and clear and operational because operational was the only thing keeping the other thing down.

I found it four miles out of the village.

The Bronco was nose-down off the right shoulder where the dunes fell away, canted hard in the soft sand, one headlight still burning out across the dark slope toward the water. I had my truck stopped and angled to light the scene before I’d finished registering the rest of it, and I was out with my weapon drawn and clearing the angles before my brain caught up to what my eyes were taking in.

No one. Whoever had done this was gone, and had been gone long enough that the dust had settled and the road was silent except for the tick of the Bronco’s cooling engine.

Across the asphalt, low and dark, a line glinted in my headlights. I recognized what it was before I got to it. A spike strip, the professional kind, laid across the road where the dark was thickest and a driver would have no time to react. Deployed and left. They hadn’t even bothered to retrieve it.