Something seemed off to him as he walked toward the front steps. He took out his flashlight and shone the beam along the matted dirt. Instinctively, he rested his hand on his holster. In all his years as a Shepherd’s Bay cop, he’d not once fired his weapon. He had taken it out a few times but thankfully had never had to use it.
He climbed the stairs. The briny tang of ocean struck him as particularly strong as a breeze blew in from the northeast. On a clear day, one could see the ocean from here, as well as all the expensive homes that had been built on Harper’s Point. A new monstrosity had risen up on the north side of the peninsula, and it looked more like a castle than a home, replete with a giant rotunda. Although many of these newcomers had become year-round residents, some who lived in these McMansions stayed in them only a few weeks each summer.
His heart raced in his chest, not from fear but from the anticipation of seeing Isla. They’d spoken off and on throughout the years, whenever they bumped into each other at the post office or the supermarket. They spoke awkwardly, like exes were prone to do. Sometimes, on slow days, he’d cruise past her salon in the center of town and catch a glimpse of her cutting a client’s hair. One day he had even sat in Cafe Bello across the street and had watched her work. He hadn’t thought she could see him from where he sat, especially while wearing a baseball cap with the visor pulled low. Although it had pleased him to watch her, it had also filled him with guilt and made him feel like a stalker, and he’d never done that again.
Something had passed between them the day they bumped into each other at the missing boy’s vigil. An understanding? The realization that there but for the grace of God go I? It just as easily could be their own child who had disappeared instead of Dakota James. The mystery of the kid’s disappearance fourteen weeks ago had been driving him crazy. He had been struggling to find a clue indicating where he’d gone or who had taken him. Was there a killer in town? Had Dakota bolted from an unhappy home and settled somewhere else? Or if someone had killed him, was his body still in Shepherd’s Bay?
He knocked on the door and waited a few seconds. What would he say to Isla? How would she react upon seeing him again in person? He stared down at his feet for lack of anything else to do. Finally, the door opened, and he raised his head in anticipation of old times.
ISLA
HER FATHER GAZED INTO THE BARREL OF THE GLOCK, LOOKING AT her with a puzzled expression. Gray whiskers poked out of his chin and cheeks, and he had cuts from where he’d shaved. Isla froze upon seeing him. On the floor lay shards of broken glass. All the lights in the kitchen shone down upon them. Her father, barefooted and in his boxers, turned casually away from her and began to shuffle toward the refrigerator, mindless of the fact that his daughter had a gun pointed at him.
Isla felt a tear forming. And yet before she had a chance to process her father’s reaction, Scout turned the corner with a bell in his mouth and dropped it at her feet. It was the dog’s way of telling her that her son’s blood sugar was rapidly dropping. She turned and ran frantically up the stairs toward Raisin’s room. Scout followed behind her.
After waking Raisin up, she inserted a test strip in a blood glucose meter, then used a lancet to prick Raisin’s fingertip. She drew a drop of blood, and then touched and held the edge of the test strip to the drop of blood. Seventy. The reading was low but not dangerously so. But that number could change quickly if the boy didn’t get sugar into his system. She cradled Raisin’s sweaty head in her arm and lifted him up to a sitting position.
“What’s the m-m-matter, Mom?”
“Scout alerted me, honey. You need sugar,” Isla said. She grabbed the packet of Skittles on his nightstand and emptied a handful into his sweaty palm.
“But I feel fine. I just want to go back to sleep.”
“You know the drill, kiddo. Now hurry up and swallow these.”