Page 4 of Undertow

Cara looked up from the coffee filter she was filling. “Has anyone?”

“Not lately. But Maya Reyes told me her aunt was asking around town about ‘the bakery people who helped with that thing last fall.’” Piper hooked air quotes. “Which, first of all, we need a better description. ‘The bakery people’ is lame.”

“What did Maya’s aunt want?”

“No idea. Maya said her aunt heard about us from the Michaelson’s.” Piper started refilling the napkin holders. “I told Dad. He said to pass it along to you and Reagan.”

Cara filed it away. The Michaelson’s. Of course. Winnie Michaelson could not keep a secret at gunpoint, which had turned out, twice now, to be unexpectedly useful.

“It’s been quiet, though,” Piper said, with the tone of someone who finds quiet personally offensive. “Like, actual quiet. We haven’t had anything real in almost two months.”

“The Morrow situation was real.”

“The Morrow situation was a missing dog.”

“The Morrow situation,” Cara said patiently, “was a missing dog that turned out to be evidence in a small-claims insurance dispute, and your dad had to explain blockchain transaction records to a seventy-year-old judge in Tillamook County, which I will consider a legitimate team achievement for years to come.”

Piper conceded this with a small grin. “Okay. That part was pretty good.” She was quiet for a moment, arranging sugar packets with more care than they required. “What about the one before that? The lady from Astoria?”

Cara set down her pen. Outside, the rain intensified briefly, drumming hard against the front windows before settling back to its baseline gray misery.

"Ms. Vanden," Piper said quietly.

Cara looked up.

"I keep thinking about her." Piper turned a sugar packet over and over in her fingers. "How she sat in that corner booth for forty minutes before she said anything. Just watching you work."

"She'd been turned away by two different agencies. She wasn't sure we'd be any different."

"But we were." Piper set the sugar packet down. "Reagan was."

"Reagan rocked that. Proving that those four notaries faked Ms. Vanden's signature on documents they'd never seen and she'd never signed. That woman is a force of nature." Cara moved to the espresso machine and pulled a shot she didn't need, just for something to do with her hands.

Piper propped her chin in her hand and looked out at the rain. "That one felt like the reason. You know? Like — that's why we do…whatever this is we do."

Cara looked at her. Piper was sixteen and had, over four cases and six months of basement meetings, developed opinions about justice that most adults took decades longer to arrive at. It was occasionally alarming and mostly wonderful.

"It is the reason," Cara said.

"So why does quiet feel so wrong?"

Cara didn't have a good answer for that. "Because we're all still paying attention," she said finally. "We don't know how to stop."

The cat dropped off the stool, landing with surprising dignity, and walked to the back door. He sat in front of it and looked at Cara with the expectation of someone who had a previous engagement.

“He’s not ours,” Cara said, mostly to herself, and went to put down a second dish of water anyway.

The afternoon light, such as it was, had given up entirely by four-thirty, and the rain had found yet a new gear. Cara turned the closed sign, switched on the warm lights over the display case, and stood for a moment in the quiet of a bakery after hours — flour dust and butter and the low tick of cooling sheet pans.

Movement caught her eye through the front window. A figure heading up the sidewalk at a jog, collar up against the rain, shoulders hunched against the wind like someone who had decided getting wet was inevitable.

"Hunk alert at 10 o’clock," Piper announced, appearing at her elbow with the silent efficiency she deployed exclusively for moments like this. "Your boyfriend’s on his way in."

Cara winced. "Gabe’s not my boyfriend."

"He wants to be. I mean, seriously, he’s making a coffee run at four-fifteen." Piper's tone was deeply, cheerfully unconvinced. "In a monsoon."

"It's not a monsoon."