Wayne caught Jake’s eye and tipped his head toward the office, then pushed away from the desk quietly. After a moment of hesitation, Jake followed, limpingslowly around the back of the desk and then toward the office. When they got there, Wayne shut the door behind him and let out a long breath, running his hand through his thinning gray hair.
“Well, hell, Jake. This is wild. Never in a million years...” The older man’s gruff voice sounded even rougher than normal now, and he cleared his throat with a short cough.
Grimacing, Jake leaned back a bit against the wall to take some of the weight off his bad leg. “I remember watching the news when I was a kid, but I can’t even imagine...” He shook his head. “You all went through that, right here?”
“It was hell. Christ, Rachel was still new here, and she was on call alone that afternoon. It’d been such a quiet day. Then everything went to shit. We looked everywhere. Hell, we had everyone in the whole town lookin’ for that kid. And then everyone in the county! Detectives and investigators came in from all over. The FBI showed up. Goddammit, where the hell has he been all these years?” Wayne blew out another breath and slumped down into his chair as though feeling all of the defeated exhaustion he must have lived through fifteen years ago.
Jake swallowed hard, his gut twisting. Just the mere thought of where Rye had been... He didn’t even want to imagine, and yet, pieces started to fall into place. His voice caught as he spoke. “Wherever it was, Wayne, it had to have been worse than awful.”
“Yeah, you said as much. He’s terrified of near everything and won’t talk?”
“That’s, uh, the lightest way to put it.” Odd moments from the last week jumped back into focus. And suddenly, it was painfully clear why Rye had gotten so agitated when he’d found out it was November of2024. “Ah, fuck. He didn’t know what year it was, Wayne.”
“What?” Wayne was rubbing the bridge of his nose now as he stared down at a file on his desk—one of those old manila file folders marked with the logo of the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department.
“He didn’t know what year it was. He was looking through myNat Geomagazines on my bookshelf, and he pulled out the most recent one. He didn’t pick it because of the articles or the image on the cover. Dammit, why couldn’t I...” Jake balled his hand up into a fist and exhaled a frustrated breath. He should have known sooner that there was something worse going on than just... a man in trouble or whatever explanation Jake had ended up settling on in his head. “He picked the mostrecentone and then brought it over to me and...”
“He wanted to know the date?”
Jake nodded, and then he turned and looked out the small window of the office back toward the main room. They hadn’t moved. Rye was still hugging hismom, who didn’t seem able to let go of her son. Or maybe it was even the other way around.
God. Goddammit. He should have known. He could have gotten them back together days sooner. They’d have called out the coast guard for this, no question. Or heck, even just Hal with his string of boats for rent, like Krista had suggested that very first day.
“And we’ve got nothing else? He hasn’t told you anything?”
Jake shifted to look back at Wayne, shaking his head. “Nothing. I tried a couple of times, but he doesn’t talk much, and anytime I brought anything up, it was...”
“Upsetting?”
With a nod, Jake closed his eyes. “Yeah. Something like that.”
The sound of rustling papers had Jake opening his eyes again. Wayne was staring down at the writing on the top page in the manila folder, shaking his head.
“I’ve gotta call...” Wayne paused and blew out another long breath as he glanced at his watch. “Ah, hell, it’s already after five. I’ve gotta call the county, hopefully Craig is still in. Although I bet they’d send an officer out to his home for this, even if it was the middle of the night. And I need to call Roscoe at the FBI too.”
Jake nodded in response. It all sounded a bit daunting, and yet Jake could still feel all the overwhelming emotions from a few minutes before—all that love and hope and joy from Shirley and the incredible relief from Rye.
The phone calls Wayne had to make were what his sister would call “a good problem to have.”
He inhaled a long, deep breath and shifted uncomfortably. He’d been doing a good job of ignoring the pain heating up his thigh and radiating into his hip, but he couldn’t for much longer. He needed to sit. Soon.
From his seat at his desk, Wayne looked up at Jake, grimacing. “I don’t expect any of us will be sleeping tonight, really. They’ll send people out here right away. And they’re gonna need to question you, and the poor kid.”
Jake frowned. “He’s not a kid anymore, Wayne.”
“Christ, that’s right. Fifteen years. Dammit, he’s twenty-three now, isn’t he?” Wayne’s grimace deepened. “How the hell did we miss this? Where was he all this time?”
They were rhetorical questions, Jake knew, but god, how he wished he could answer them.
“Be soft with him, please, Wayne,” Jake said. “He’s terrified. Whatever happened to him...”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Maybe he’ll talk to Rachel. Or Sue. She should probably do anexam—”
“Pretty sure he’ll refuse that,” Jake cut in, shaking his head. He pushed away from the wall and glanced back out the window to the main room. “And I mean, I’m not one to tell you how to do your job, but...” Jake trailed off, grimacing as he looked to Wayne.
“I know, this needs to be handled delicately. And I’ve never really been known for being delicate. Dammit.” Wayne set his hand on top of the file folder on his desk, one finger tapping roughly on what looked like a date. “Alright, well, do you mind sticking around for a while yet? Or we can just call you to come back in? It might be hours, I suppose, until someone can get here. And that’s assuming...”
Wayne’s sentence faded out without finishing, and he seemed to become lost in thought. Then he was picking up the phone. “I’d better get started on these phone calls. Just don’t go far, okay? And, ah, hell, we don’t know who did this and if they’re still out there.”
