Electronic delivery to this address is preferred.
* * *
Regards,
* * *
Madden Reilly
* * *
CC: Barbara Channing, Town Clerk
By the time I made it through my third draft of the FOIA request, my eyes burned. I read it one more time to double check for typos—as if that would make anyone more inclined to cooperate—and hit send. The email vanished off the screen, leaving me staring at the empty inbox like something might magically appear to justify the effort.
“Congratulations,” I muttered. “You’ve sent one bureaucratic request. Gold star.”
I pushed back from the tiny dinette table on the Second Wind and scrubbed my hands over my face. A half-empty mug of coffee cooled next to my laptop, the surface sheen gone dull. I took a sip anyway. Bitter. Lukewarm. Fitting for the past fifteen hours of research.
The other tab I’d left open showed the Seaside Sentinel’s online archive. I’d fallen down that rabbit hole at eleven last night, chasing headlines: petty thefts, noise complaints, seasonal ordinances, the occasional human-interest piece about somebody’s impressive tomato harvest. Nothing about vanished women. Nothing about tourists who didn’t make their checkout times. Nothing about patterns.
Just Gwen.
Always Gwen.
I’d reread those articles, too. That had been a mistake. It was one thing to know the words by heart. It was another to see them again—the grainy yearbook photo, the hollow-eyed photos of my aunt begging for any information about her daughter, the confident assurances from Chief Carson that gave way to the exhaustion of “We have not forgotten.”
My sleep after that hadn’t been sleep so much as a slow drowning in old images. Gwen’s laugh. Gwen’s empty bedroom. The bonfire. The way I’d sat in the back of Carson’s office at seventeen, listening as adults talked about my cousin like she was a puzzle instead of a person. She’d ceased to be Gwen and had instead become her disappearance.
I stared at the laptop until the letters blurred.
None of this told me whether Priya was the first since Gwen. Or just the first one who had people who refused to let her be written off.
A voice cracked across the water, sharp enough to jolt me out of my spiral. “Reilly!”
I blinked, shoved my chair back, and stepped out of the cabin into the bright slap of morning.
Rios stood on the deck of his boat in the next slip over.
Shirtless.
For a second, that was the only detail my brain registered. Broad chest, shoulders cut with muscle and scattered with old scars, a line of dark hair arrowing down as he wiped sweat off his neck with a towel. The sun glanced off the damp planes of his skin like the universe had decided subtlety was overrated. I spotted dark lines of ink on the curve of one biceps, but I couldn’t make out the design from here. Not that my brain was doing a whole lot of processing just now.
Holy hell, the Navy had done incredible things for that body.
My mouth went dry.
He hooked the towel around his neck and lifted his chin. “You alive over there?”
Barely.
“What?” I managed.
He jerked his thumb toward the dock, all business. “We heard from Sanders. Get dressed. We’re going.”
Right. Willie Sanders. The dockhand. Our only known witness.
I dragged my eyes up to Rios’s face. Only marginally safer territory, because scruff darkened his jaw in a way that made him look deliciously dangerous. Like every good girl’s bad boy fantasy come to life.
