by Sophie Moss
He stood at the stove, his hand resting calmly on a sixty-quart steamer pot. He was wearing the same clothes he’d worn out on the boat that day—the gray T-shirt, the faded jeans, the fraying baseball cap—but there were questions in his eyes now, so many questions, in those pale, almost see-through gray eyes.
The timer on the oven binged and he turned slowly back to the stove, lifting the top off the pot. A cloud of steam billowed out, and he reached in with the tongs, pulled the steaming hot crabs out of the pot, and transferred them onto the tray.
Paul slathered them with a few more handfuls of seasoning, then picked them up and looked at Izzy. “Would you grab the door for me?”
Izzy nodded, crossed the room to the door, and held it open for him.
Paul paused in the doorway and lowered his voice. “You all right?”
“Yes,” she said, looking away.
“Good,” he said, then grinned. “You’ve got some pretty badass reflexes for a cook.”
Izzy blinked, stunned. She lifted her gaze back to his, but he was already walking away. She stared after him, noticing, for the first time, how easily he navigated the steps with two prosthetic legs, how well he hid the slight limp on his right side when he walked. Slowly making her way across the grass, she met the eyes of a few people who glanced up from the picnic tables. There was no judgment on any of their faces, just kindness and compassion and understanding.
Why had she assumed they would all judge her? That, just because her wound was invisible, they couldn’t possibly understand?
Hailey scooted over as soon as Izzy got to the first table, making room for her. Izzy sat down, and saw that Hailey’s plate was already filled with fried chicken, butter beans, coleslaw, and sliced tomatoes. She was about to offer her a crab from the pile Paul had left in the center of the table, when she remembered that Hailey wouldn’t be able to pick it.
She only had one hand.
Was that why Della had made all this extra food? So Hailey wouldn’t feel left out?
Wondering if she should offer to pick a crab for her, she saw Kade snag a big crab from the pile, rip all the claws off, and hand them to Hailey.
“Thanks,” Hailey said, admiring the big chunks of meat hanging off the end of each claw.
Kade looked over at Izzy. “Yo.”
“Yo, yourself,” she said, watching him carefully. She couldn’t tell from his expression if he’d heard about what happened, if he knew anything at all.
He cracked the body of his crab in half, then nodded to a spot on the table in front of her. “We gave you a mallet instead of a knife.”
It took a moment for the words to sink in, for the meaning behind them to register. But when she looked around the table and saw that everyone else had a knife for their claws except for her, she started to laugh. And then Hailey started to laugh. And then Kade started to laugh—a deep, infectious rumbling that had everyone around them laughing, too.
By the time she got a hold of herself, and started to pick her first crab, she had to wipe away a few tears. She looked around the yard, at the people seated at the other two tables, searching for Will so she could apologize as soon as she finished eating. But it didn’t take long for her to realize that he wasn’t there. And neither was Annie…or Taylor.
And she knew, as her heart sank, that that was a very bad sign.
* * *
Annie waited until Taylor was safely tucked away in her bathroom with the shower running, before turning to face Will. “I’m not okay with this. I’m not okay with it.”
“I know,” Will said calmly. “I understand.”
“No,” she snapped. “I don’t think you do.” Sunlight streamed through the skylights, flooding the second-story landing with light. On any other day, she might have taken a moment to admire the way it enriched the warm, golden hue of the walls.
But not today.
Today, all she could think about was that her husband had almost been attacked by one of the veterans he was trying to help. “This is our home, Will. I have boundaries. And she just crossed one of them.”
“I understand,” he repeated, in that same calm, measured tone that was starting to piss her off. “But I’m okay. Everyone’s okay.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m a child!”
“Annie.” He reached for her, but she took a step back.
This wasn’t some lover’s spat that he could soothe away with a hug and a few murmured apologies. He could have died down there. She could have lost him. “What if it had been Taylor? What if it had been Della?” Her voice broke, betraying the fear underneath the anger. “She could have sent someone to the hospital today, or worse.”
“She could have,” Will said evenly. “But she didn’t. She stopped. The moment she turned around and saw me, she stopped.”
No. Annie shook her head. That wasn’t good enough for her. “The woman shot someone, Will.”
“Allegedly.”
“She pled guilty in court. Under oath.”
“To get the deal the prosecution offered,” Will said. “I might have done the same thing.”
She stared at him. “Accepted a criminal record for life? Even if you didn’t commit the crime?”
“If the evidence was stacked against me. Sure.”
Annie turned, walked to the window, and laid her hands on the sill. How could he be so calm about this? How could he not understand that this had changed everything?
She took in the crowd of people gathered around the picnic tables. They were picking crabs as if nothing had happened, as if no one had pulled a knife on her husband less than an hour ago.
Violence might be normal to them, but it wasn’t to her. And she wasn’t going to pretend, even for a second, that what happened downstairs was okay. “I’m all for helping veterans who want to be helped,” Annie said, “but Izzy’s had an attitude from the moment she walked through the door. There are plenty of other veterans who would be happy to take her place. We’re only one week into the program. It’s not too late to open up her spot for someone else. Maybe this isn’t the right place for her. Maybe she needs to be somewhere else.”
“Where?” Will asked incredulously. “Jail?”
Annie turned back to face him. “Maybe.”
“No,” Will said, shaking his head. “This is exactly why Colin and I opened this place. To catch the people the system failed. To make sure that no one under our care slips through the cracks. She doesn’t belong in jail.”
“How do you know?”
Will dragged a hand through his hair. “Because that could have been me, Annie.”
It was the one thing he could have said to make her pause.
“That was me,” Will said, lowering his voice. “Six months ago, I was the one having flashbacks. I was the one waking up in a cold sweat every night. I was the one wishing I’d died instead of my friends.”
Annie said nothing. Because she knew it was true. She’d been right there beside him through most of it.
But she’d never once thought that she and Taylor were in any kind of physical danger.
Could they have been, if he’d let his PTSD go untreated? If he’d let all that pain and trauma bottle up inside him until it came out in an explosion, like Izzy’s had today?
“The thing is,” Will said, taking a breath. “I think someone hurt her. And I think it might have been someone on the inside—someone she worked with. It would explain why she’s been so isolated from the other veterans. Why she doesn’t trust anyone.”
Yes, Annie thought. It would. And she could read between the lines of what Will was saying. But she wasn’t ready to make that leap yet. Not until she got some answers first. She pulled her phone out, dialed a number, and lifted the device to her ear.
“Who are you calling?”
“Grace,” Annie said as the shower in Taylor’s bathroom clicked off. “To find out if you’re right.”
Twelve
Grace liked it when her friends called her for help. Sh
e enjoyed being pulled into the dramas on Heron Island. It made her feel like she was still part of the community, even though she’d left over ten years ago.
Pouring herself a glass of wine in the kitchen of her small Capitol Hill apartment, she couldn’t help feeling envious of her brother. Before Ryan had made the decision to move home, she hadn’t considered that that would be an option for either of them, at least not at this stage in their careers. But, somehow, in the past year, he had managed to pull it off.
And Ryan wasn’t the only one. Will, Becca, Colin, and Annie had all managed to carve out a niche for themselves on the island, causing her to reflect on her own life circumstances.
There was a part of her—a large part—that wished she could join them. But what would she do there? Her job was here, in the city. And she loved her job. She needed her job. Not just for the money, but because it was how she made sense of things.
She’d gone into journalism—a truth-seeking career—because her childhood had been shrouded in mystery. Losing a mother had been bad enough, but the fact that they still didn’t know what happened to her was what haunted her the most.
She had questions, so many questions, that had never been answered, but the biggest one was why? Why had their mother left them? Why had she walked away from a husband and two children when her life, from everything Grace could remember, had been a happy one?
It didn’t make any sense.
She’d gone over the events of the days leading up to her mother’s disappearance a hundred times, and nothing had seemed out of the ordinary. For years, she’d been convinced that someone had taken her, that the cops had closed the case too soon. But with no signs of a struggle, or any indication that her mother had been abducted against her will, they’d had nothing to go on.
If only her mother had left a clue, just one clue, Grace would have been able to pick up the investigation on her own. But she’d taken nothing. Not her wallet, not her jewelry, not a single piece of clothing except for what she’d been wearing. And neither her brother nor her father would talk about it. Whenever she brought it up, they changed the subject as quickly as possible.
She knew they both secretly blamed themselves, because she blamed herself, too.
How could she not?
She must have done something wrong for her mother to abandon her.
Picking up the glass of wine, she carried it out to the balcony and prepared to spend the rest of the evening funneling all those childhood frustrations into an investigation where she did have a lead to follow.
Isabella Rivera.
The woman’s name had come up not once, but twice, in the past week. When Annie had called and explained what had happened at the inn earlier, her friend had been understandably panicked. From the moment Annie had set foot on Heron Island, she had made it clear to everyone that Taylor’s safety was her number one priority. Now, she and her daughter were sharing their home with a criminal—one who had pulled a knife on her husband less than an hour ago.
The question was…how unhinged was this woman?
Opening her laptop, Grace ran a search on Izzy’s name and scanned the first few hits that popped up on the page: “Army Cook Earns Bronze Star,” “Military Chef Awarded Medal for Bravery in Combat,” “Sergeant Isabella Rivera Honored for Heroic Actions in Afghanistan.”
Grace’s eyes widened. She hadn’t been expecting that. Scrolling through the rest of the links on the page, she paused at the gallery of images. When she saw a picture of Izzy for the first time, her brows shot up.
Whoa.
That was Izzy Rivera?
She clicked on a few of the images, zoomed in. Even in her uniform, with her hair slicked back in a tidy bun, the woman was stunning. Like Penélope Cruz or Salma Hayek stunning.
No wonder her brother hadn’t been able to get her off his mind.
She felt a familiar humming sensation, the same one she got whenever she realized that a crucial piece of information had been left out of an earlier conversation. Scrolling through the long list of links regaling Izzy’s exemplary military service, she finally found one that connected her to a shooting that had happened in Baltimore earlier that year. She clicked on the story, skimmed through the first few paragraphs, then slowly sat back in her chair.
She remembered this story.
The shooting, which had taken place in the impoverished neighborhood of Sandtown-Winchester on Baltimore’s west side, had led to the arrest of one of the biggest drug dealers in Maryland.
Tyree Robinson, the man Izzy had shot, had worked for that drug dealer. When the EMTs had transported him to the hospital for the gunshot wounds, they’d found heroin on him and turned him over to the police. As a third-time offender, Tyree had been facing serious jail time, so the police had offered him a shorter sentence in exchange for his help bringing down his boss. Tyree had taken the deal, and with the information he’d provided, the cops had been able to gather enough evidence to put his boss behind bars.
It had been a huge coup for the Baltimore Police Department.
But what Grace wanted to know was how Izzy fit into all of it? What had she been doing in Sandtown-Winchester that night? And why had she shot Tyree in the first place?
Knowing that she wasn’t going to find the answers to any of those questions online, she grabbed her phone and scrolled through her contacts. When she found the name of an old friend who’d transferred from the D.C.P.D. to the Baltimore P.D. a few years ago, she hit ‘call’ and waited for him to pick up.
“I have a feeling my day’s about to get more complicated,” Keith Nichols said.
Grace smiled. She’d met Keith over ten years ago, when they’d both been in their early twenties. He’d been a beat cop, fresh out of the Academy, and she’d been a rookie staff writer, covering mostly robberies and assaults. He’d been one of her earliest sources, and they’d built up a mutual respect for each other over the years. If there was anyone who’d be willing to trust her with inside information on a case, it was Keith.
“How much do you know about the Tyree Robinson shooting?” she asked, diving right in.
“A fair amount,” he said. “It was a pretty big case.”
“Did anything seem off to you about it?”
“Off in what way?”
“I don’t know,” Grace said. “Any loose strings that never got tied up? Lingering questions that never got answered?”
“Why don’t you call the detectives who worked the case and ask them that?”
“Because they’d refer me to your public relations department,” Grace said, “and I’m not looking for a scripted response.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m going to stick to the script on this one. The Tyree Robinson shooting led to one of the biggest arrests the Baltimore P.D. has made in decades. We put a drug lord behind bars. What else do you want to know?”
“I want to know about the woman who shot Tyree.”
There was another pause, longer this time. “What about her?”
“Did they know each other?” Grace asked.
“No,” Keith said. “Not that I’m aware of.”
“Then why did she shoot him?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“Nobody knows,” Keith said. “After her initial confession, the only person she ever spoke to was her lawyer. By the time her court date came around, she’d already agreed to a plea deal. We don’t usually spend too much time asking why after someone pleads guilty.”
“But—”
“Look,” Keith said, cutting her off. “No one in the department was thrilled with the idea of putting a female vet behind bars, especially one who was a first time offender and who actually did us a service by pumping a few bullets into Tyree. Most of us were relieved to hear that she got off on probation.”
“So…you don’t think she’s a threat?”
“I think,” Keith said, “that as cases go, this was one of the few
where everything got tied up in a nice, tidy, little bow. So whatever it is that you’re looking for, you should let it go.”
No, Grace thought, she wasn’t going to let it go. Not until she found out the truth. And he was hiding something. She could tell. “Let’s just say, hypothetically, that you did want to ask why. Where would you start?”
Keith sighed. “Don’t you have anything better to do on a Sunday afternoon than stir up trouble with the cops?”
“I would never dream of stirring up trouble,” Grace said innocently, and pictured him rolling his eyes.
“Where’s all this coming from anyway?” he asked.
“I’m doing some research for a friend,” she said. “It’s not even work related.”
“You’re not writing a story about it?”
“No.” At least, not yet, anyway.
“So anything I say would be off the record?”
“Of course.”
“Then I’d start with the police report.”
Grace reached for her laptop. “The police report from the night of the shooting?”
“Yes,” Keith said, “and I’d pay particular attention to the entry points of the three gunshot wounds.”
Grace made a note on her screen. “Entry points?”
“That’s right,” Keith said. “One in the right shoulder. One in the left hip. One just above the right knee.”
Grace stopped typing. “Those shots are all over the place.”
“They sure are,” Keith agreed.
“That’s kind of strange, isn’t it?” she asked. “I mean, I would have thought that a veteran—”
“—would know how to shoot a gun?” Keith finished. “Yeah, me too.”
“So…she’s got bad aim?”
“That’s one theory.”
“Well, if she was a cook,” Grace said, searching for a reasonable explanation, “she probably didn’t have to fire a weapon very often.”
“She might have been a cook, but she served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. She would have known how to handle a weapon, especially at that range.”
Grace sat back, her eyes widening. “You don’t think she did it.”
