He tossed. Why did exhaustion preclude sleep? He thought sleep more indicative of boredom—and he was anything but bored. Sleep required shutting down the inquisitive mind, and a police officer’s mind seemed to race nonstop. Always questioning. Always thinking. That was why cops drank a lot—even cops from small towns such as Shepherd’s Bay. To drown out the many voices in their brain that were competing for attention.
That evening alone with Isla had made his overnight shift more manageable. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. He wanted to find Katie alive and well and become Isla’s white knight. Feel her embrace when she thanked him profusely for returning Katie home to her. How nice it would be to wrap his arms around her and feel her lips pressed against his like when they’d been teenagers.
Fat chance.
What if he could do something about her shitty marriage to Swisher? Like set him up by putting drugs in the cab of his pickup truck. Bad thoughts filled his mind. Swisher didn’t deserve a woman like Isla. The guy couldn’t even take care of his own sick son. Karl had seen him stumbling out of a fishermen’s bar one evening with a woman hanging on his arm, the two of them laughing drunkenly as they staggered along the sidewalk. He’d debated pulling him over for a DUI, but then they had disappeared into another bar, and he had decided to put it out of mind. Forget it had ever happened.
Before he did something he might regret.
Like Taser him and kick the shit out of him. Only problem was that Swisher was an ornery bastard when wronged and was tough as nails. But Karl knew he’d had righteous indignation on his side—and a wood baton.
His alarm went off, and he realized he’d fallen asleep. The sun shone through the gauzy white curtains, momentarily irritating his eyes. He needed sustenance before he resumed his search for those two missing girls and the James boy. He showered and dressed and then headed out. On his way to the station, he stopped at a nearby convenience store for his first shitty coffee of the day.
Live to fight another day, he thought as he took the first sip.
ISLA
SIX IN THE MORNING AND THE TEMPERATURE HAD NOT YET HIT FIFTY: that was Maine in a nutshell. By noon it could hit eighty degrees, with high humidity. Or it could be raining, with thunder and streaks of lightning. Old-timers frequently talked about the snowstorm that had hit in June one year. Isla pulled up to the designated spot near the coast and noticed that she was the first person to arrive. With what little money she had, she’d gone into Baker’s Donuts and tried to purchase two dozen assorted for the volunteers. But then Ed Baker had come out of the fry room, covered head to toe in flour, and had refused to take her money.
A steaming cup of coffee sat in the cup holder between the seats. She let the engine idle a few seconds so she could bask in the heated cab for a bit longer.
Her sister-in-law had come over earlier in the morning to keep an eye on Raisin. She could trust Deb with her son’s life, as Deb knew what to do in the event of an emergency. Although she was Ray’s older sibling, Deb felt more like a sister to Isla than anything else, and she felt fortunate to have her in her life. Deb had also agreed to watch Isla’s father. Up until the other night, her father had been able to stay home alone, but now the disease seemed to be progressing so rapidly that she wondered if she could adequately care for him.
The ocean glistened a thousand feet from her car. Whitecaps rolled in along the seaweed-encrusted beach. A little ways up the shore, it turned rocky and rugged. Developers had for the past few years been trying to decide how to build more homes atop these rocky outposts.
Hunger gnawed at her, and she realized she hadn’t eaten since supper last night. She sipped her hot coffee and stared out at the ocean. An oil tanker cruised off in the distance. The sugary, yeasty scent of fried dough filled her nostrils, and she found her hand digging into one of the pink boxes, which had been secured with pastry string tied up into a bow. At random, she pulled out a powdered molasses doughnut and bit into it, then followed it up with a sip of coffee. The pillowy mix of sugar and dough practically dissolved on her tongue once the hot coffee washed over it. Ed Baker made one helluva doughnut.
What’s taking everyone so long to get here? We need to start searching for the girls.
Staring out at the ocean, she remembered a time when these monstrous mansions didn’t exist. When this strip of land accommodated modest homes inhabited by lobstermen and their families, before ocean views became a valued real estate feature. When that happened, the swift rise in property values and real estate taxes pushed all these old families out, making the area affordable only to affluent out-of-staters looking for a bargain.
The changing nature of Shepherd’s Bay had been a sore topic around town. Isla had concluded that change was inevitable. On one hand, it made her sad to realize that Shepherd’s Bay was not the same town she grew up in. And yet many of her new clients happily paid top dollar for one of her cuts. And cutting men’s hair was so easy, it felt like stealing money. Most of the older men had receding hairlines and little to no hair to cut, and they never fussed or complained afterward. More clients kept coming to her as the word spread in town, and the fact that the nearest barbershop to hers in Shepherd’s Bay was twenty miles away helped, too.
She remembered walking along that same beach with her parents when she’d been a little girl, her mother cradling her baby brother in her arms. They had set up blankets and chairs and then had swum for hours. Her father had taken her by the wrists and towed her through the churning waves. He’d been a handsome guy back then; many said he’d resembled that actor who appeared in all those old black-and-white Twilight Zone episodes.
Now there were lawsuits and questions about who controlled the beach access behind these mansions. The owners of these homes didn’t want the public mucking about on what they believed was their private property, obstructing their spectacular view and invading their privacy. It disgusted her that people from out of state would have the audacity to take what had been a natural right to citizens for as long as anyone could remember.
Before she knew it, cars started to turn into the parking lot. Finally! She got out of the car with boxes in hand and offered doughnuts up to the volunteers, desperate to start searching for Katie . . . and Willow. She prayed that all this had been staged for Gil’s stupid reality show.
Drew pulled up in his truck. Then he and his three husky friends piled out, carrying energy drinks. They made a beeline for the doughnuts and wolfed down half a dozen before Isla shooed them away and offered doughnuts to the other volunteers.
Drew seemed anxious and pissed off about the whole ordeal. He missed Katie, but Isla also knew how much he despised all these wealthy newcomers.
A Mercedes SUV pulled up, and Gil Briggs emerged from it with his fragile wife. She looked sickly and frail and wore a blue scarf over her head. Her thin hands were buried deep in the pockets of the designer jacket she had on, and her mysterious eyes hid behind designer sunglasses. Had she ever seen the woman’s eyes? Isla wondered. Drew glanced at the couple and scoffed, grumbling something rude under his breath, but he knew better than to confront grieving parents.
Isla approached Gil with the boxes of doughnuts. Only a few remained. Gil’s eyes appeared red from crying. As she approached, he reached out and embraced her, sobbing violently. It occurred to her that maybe he hadn’t set all this up in order to spice up his reality show. She shared his pain but wanted to stay strong for Katie’s sake. Because she knew in her heart that Katie was out there, alive and well, and waiting to be found. And if Katie was alive, she was the type of kid who would make sure her friend was alive, too.