Page 162 of Secrets Along the Shore

God, please show me what to do. I don’t know where to go from here.

Despite what I’m saying, my prayer isn’t actually “show me what to do.” What I actually mean is, “give me another option,” because I already know what I should do.

Ishouldrecuse myself. Step away from the investigation. If my people are tangled up in it, I’ve got no business being the person in charge, even though I’ll do the right thing when it comes down to it. If someone’s guilty, I’ll bring them in, no matter who they are.

Or who they are to me.

The problem is, if I step away, I’m basically nailing the coffin with James’s House-of-Representatives aspirations inside. It’s a near certainty that the leak—be it in the sheriff’s department or the D.A.’s office—will let it slip that I’ve recused myself. Suspicions will be aired, whether they’re factually grounded or not. After that, even if—no,when—it turns out there’s a legitimate reason for Edward’s comments, it’ll be too late to save James’s political career.

My stomach growls, and I realize, not only have I been out here for almost an hour, but the headache that’s begun picking at the inside of my head may be due to more than just the moral quandary I’m facing.

I need food, and I need sound advice.

There’s only one place where I can get both.

“I’m sosorry you’re having to deal with this, hon,” Grace says from across the table in her kitchen, her hand laying sympathetically over mine.

Grace’s house sits next door to the Ink & Ivy, closed and quiet at this hour. Jake is at school so we have the place to ourselves, though evidence that this is his territory—Legos, action figures, a baseball—is scattered around the butter-walled, lace-curtained room.

Despite the hunger which partially drove me here, my pancakes and bacon sit untouched on my plate. I have, however, finished another cup of coffee. The underlying current of electricity hummingthrough me prompts me to vow to stick to water for the next couple of hours.

“I just don’t know what to do. I could step down from the investigation. But if I do, and people find out?—”

“Which they have a way of doing in a small town,” Grace says.

“—Which they do—I’ll have lit a fuse that will blow up James’s chances without knowing for sure that my suspicions have any root in the truth. He could lose the election, and it might be for nothing. And our relationship would never recover.”

“What does your gut tell you to do?” Grace asks.

“It told me to drive here,” I say, offering a weak smile. “What does your gut tell you I should do?”

Grace withdraws her hand and pours herself another cup of black tea from her Brown Betty teapot. She drops a sugar cube in, stirs it with a small spoon, then takes a sip before setting the cup down.

“Your grandfather was your mentor, right?”

“I don’t know about mentor, but hero, yeah. And he’s the reason I got into police work.”

“Okay, so what would he tell you to do?”

That’s an easy one to answer. “Follow the facts to the truth, and the truth to the end.”

Grace smiles. “You pulled that out quickly.”

I shrug. “It was his motto. Made me memorize it. When I was twelve, I gave him a T-shirt with it printed on the front.”

“Hmm.” She taps her teacup. “You think you can do that?”

I close my eyes and rub my right temple, because we’ve finally arrived at the core dilemma. “Say I keep going, and I find a perfectly good explanation and conclude Edward and James have done nothing wrong.” I tilt my head and cut my eyes at Grace. “Say I move on and keep working to find the true culprit, and my life goes on as planned.”

“Okay. Let’s say you do that.”

“But what if I’m wrong, even though I think I’m right? What if down the road, we learn that Edward and Jameswereinvolved, despite what I thought was true at the time? It’ll look like I was biased—that I cleared them because that’s what I wanted the truth to be. Or worse,people might think I knew they weren’t innocent and cleared them anyway.”

“Whichever way you go—whatever you decide—there are risks. But it seems to me that the path with the least risk of collateral damage is staying the course. Keep going and find out everything you can.”

My phone buzzes with an email alert. “Sorry, one second,” I say, as I grab it from my pocket.

The email is from the lab about the evidence taken from Kamden Avery’s vehicle. A quick scan of the results reveals that they found fingerprints belonging to dozens of people, some identified in the system, some not. The ones in the system come from a variety of sources—convicts, a couple of lawyers fingerprinted for licenses, a doctor, teacher, military personnel.