Page 99 of Hidden Tide

I know the feeling.

Mom sits frozen beside Nathan. She has one hand pressed to her mouth and the other wrapped around the pendant at her throat.

She wore that pendant to our father’s funeral.

I remember because I held it while she held me in her arms at the funeral.

I was thirteen, sitting on my mother's lap, bawling my eyes out.

Old enough to understand that Dad wasn’t coming home.

Too young to understand why Grandpa stood away from everyone else, staring at the coffin as though he blamed himself for what happened.

For years, I thought grief had made him distant.

Now I know he was already hunting the men who killed his son.

“How many men were connected to Blackwater back then?” I ask Thomas.

He looks at me.

“I don’t know.”

“Cross was one.”

“Yes.”

“Lawrence Vail?”

“James believed so.”

“Arthur Bell?”

“Possibly.”

“And now their sons are finishing what they started.”

“We don’t know that Elliot Bell is involved,” Marquez says as she ends her call.

“He asked Willow where she kept Grandpa’s watch.”

“That makes him a person of interest. It doesn’t make him guilty of murder.”

“What about Simon Vail?”

“Federal agents are looking for him.”

“Looking for him?”

“He wasn’t at his registered address or the Pacific Beacon Recovery office.”

Ben’s hand settles against my back.

“Because he knew this was coming.”

Marquez doesn’t disagree.

Keating’s radio crackles.