Page 28 of Jonah’s Lure

The question hung in the room. Kovak stood silently with her folder.

Miguel looked at him for a long moment. Then at the badge inside the folder. Then back at Angus, and something behind his eyes shifted—not broke, but shifted, the way it does when a man stops holding his expression in place.

“I know,” he said quietly. Just those two words.

“Then believe me.”

Miguel’s throat worked. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, stripped of the professional register it had carried all morning. “I’m trying to, boss.” His hand tightened around the notebook. “I’m trying.”

It was the most honest thing he could have said and they both knew it.

Angus nodded once. He picked up his jacket from the hook behind the door and walked out.

Standing on the steps outside, the cold air hit him. The harbor was visible at the end of the street, unmoved by what had just happened in the building behind him.

He hadn't expected it to feel like this. He'd been preparing himself for the weight of it—the badge going into Kovak's folder, the credentials, the weapon—and he'd expected it to feel like grief, like loss. What it actually felt like was exposure. Like something that had been between himself and the world for nine years had been removed, and the world was now pressing in at all the places it had once covered.

He walked down the steps. His jacket felt wrong without the gear underneath. Lighter in a way that registered as wrong rather than free.

The parking lot was ordinary. A deputy's truck. The sky the same flat late March gray it had been for two weeks. A gull rode the thermal above the harbor, dropped toward the water, and rose again without landing.

He'd thought about faith often in the context of patience—waiting on God's timing, trusting the process even when it moved too slowly to understand. He'd written about it in his journal enough times that the language came easily. But standing in a parking lot with no badge and no weapon, and with a young man's location still unknown, that language felt thin. Constructed. The articulate version of something that was really just fear.

He said nothing to God. He didn't have anything formed enough to say. He stood with the wind off the harbor working through his jacket and asked, without words, for the thing beneath the thing—not answers, not restoration, just the capacity to keep going in the direction he'd been going without the tools he'd been going there with.

So he walked to the diner.

* * *

The door hadn’t fully shut behind him before he felt it.

Four people in the diner. The teenage boy clearing tables, not looking up. Two men at the far end of the counter who knew him—one turned slightly away, coffee cup raised, a study in deliberate inattention. And the woman at the window table: Diane Ferris. She’d lived on his street for seven years; he’d helped find her dog twice. She looked at him directly when he came in, and emotion flickered across her face—not anger, something worse. The expression of someone who had been hoping something wasn’t true but could no longer keep hoping.

She looked away.

He ordered coffee and sat at the counter.

He’d looked at the local online forums before dawn, sitting at his kitchen table when sleep stopped coming. Jonah Holt’s name was there, along with Frank Holt’s and his own. The threads had been building since Friday—careful, measured words, the kind people used when they were thinking something they weren’t ready to say outright. A woman he didn’t know had posted: Nine days and nothing. That poor family. Forty-three responses, most of them careful in the same way. But the shape of what they were thinking was visible in the spaces between the words.

Nine days.

People in small towns understood what nine days meant. They didn’t say it directly. They said that poor family and praying for answers, but they knew that men who walked away from their lives came back within days; men who didn’t come back after nine days sometimes didn’t come back at all.

And the sheriff who had been suspended in connection with the case, was sitting at the diner counter on a Monday morning with no badge on his belt.

He drank his coffee and let the thought settle.

* * *

Twenty minutes later the door opened, and Clara Holt came in.

She stopped at the counter and looked at him. “I went to the office first,” she said. “Jeanine told me you’d walked here.”

He nodded. “Have a seat, Clara.”

She did. She put her bag on the floor, placed her hands flat on the counter, and looked at him with the same focused certainty she’d carried into every room since this began—the certainty of a woman who had done the accounting and wasn’t going to be argued out of her conclusion. She was thinner than she’d been nine days ago, the sharpness of her jaw more pronounced, the marks of inadequate sleep visible around her eyes. She’d been holding her father together as well as herself, and the cost showed in every line of her face.

“I don’t believe you took my brother,” she said.