“Sorry. That was out of line.”

He better cool it if this is going to work.

What he wants is an excuse to get out of the station.

What he wants is an excuse to talk to Charley again, and this is most certainly it.

Of course, he could always just apologize. Which he knows he’ll end up doing if he goes and talks to her. But he’d like to arrive with his hat on, and then remove it at the moment of his choosing. What’s the matter with feeling useful while you’re being forced to eat crow?

“You’re just going to talk to people around town?” Mona asks.

“Well, they’re not buying it sight unseen, so they must have been poking around before now. I’ll find out if anyone strange has been around recently.”

“Stranger than you, you mean?” Judy asks.

He gives her a frosty look, which she returns with a coy smile.

“Maybe I’ll check in with some of the folks who, uh, we thought might be paying visits to the old place. See if they’ve seen any other activity.”

“The social justice looters, you mean? You think they’d tell you if they had?”

“I think I can get you a pretty clear picture of what’s been going on out there.”

“All right. Just go. I can tell you’re antsy. When you’re done, finish up with some patrols; then radio in.”

He grabs his hat and windbreaker off his desk.

A thought strikes him at the door and he spins.

“Mona!”

“Sheriff,” she says quietly when she reappears at her office door.

“Sorry. Sheriff. What are they gonna do with it?”

“Apparently Graydon’s getting in to the leisure business. The company’s got a venture capital arm that stashes their money in different places. But this is the first time they’ve done anything with a hotel. So the plan’s the same as it ever was. Turn it into a resort. If it’s real, it could be great for the town. So find out if it is.”

He nods. As he turns to go, he hears Judy say, “Maybe they’ll leave an antidepressant on everybody’s pillow at turndown.”

Marty’s truck isn’t parked in front of his trailer, but he recognizes the guy sitting on Marty’s steps as one of the crew he threatened to run a few days before. With the surliness of a teenager whose parents have taken his smartphone away, the guy tells him Marty’s shuttling back and forth between job sites. When Luke asks him about Charley, he goes quiet.

How much does the guy know, Luke wonders, besides the fact that Marty ordered him to watch over his home for the day?

As worry knits his expression, the guy stares past Luke, and that says his worry’s got nothing to do with Luke and everything to do with the subject of the question.

“She went off on her own, didn’t she? And Marty told you not to let her.”

“Something like that,” the guy grumbles. “She went up to the lake. Said she’d only be gone for a half hour.”

“How long’s it been?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“What’s she driving?”

“My Camaro.”

Lake Patrick is a quarter of the size of Nacimiento to the south, and it’s hardly a tourist destination even on the weekends, so he’s not surprised to see the guy’s battered white Camaro is the only car in the parking lot next to the boat launch on a Monday. And he’s not surprised to see Charley walking the narrow crescent of gravelly beach, which, like the lake itself, seems to appear out of nowhere amid the tinder-dry golden hills.

At the sound of his cruiser, she looks up, drops the stick she’s holding in her hand.

Only now does he realize how little real shelter his last-minute mission gives him. When their eyes meet, all the anger and embarrassment of their fight comes rushing back. She looks better, more well rested. But it also looks like her new store of energy has allowed her to retreat deeper inside herself after applying a thicker skin.

“Hey,” he says.

The same thing he said to her when he almost touched her in a sudden, unplanned way.

It wasn’t intentional, but she blinks and looks to the sand. Is she trying to avoid that little memory, too?

All things considered, hey is a pretty hard word to avoid, and if they actually end up speaking to each other again, maybe they’ll have to agree to just let that little moment between them go.

Or maybe he’s reading too much into this, into her. Maybe that little moment meant far more to him than it did to her.

“So I have some news,” he says.

“I’m listening.”

“It’s not Bailey. I haven’t heard anything from him yet.”

“OK.”

“It’s Graydon. They’re buying the resort.”

She’s so startled she seems to forget the tension between them.

“For what?” she asks.

He repeats what Mona told him moments before, putting special emphasis on the detail about the mayor’s office, because that makes the whole thing seem more real.

She doesn’t say anything for a while. Just stares out at the placid black water reflecting the few strands of cloud overhead. She’s pondering this news in some faraway place in her head, but she hasn’t asked him to leave, so maybe she’ll invite him to join her there in another second or two.

“Thanks,” she finally says, then turns her back to him and picks up her stick again.

“Thanks?”

“Yes. Thank you for bringing me this information. It’s very helpful. I will be resuming my treatment now.” She drags the stick through the gravel and sand at her feet.

“Oh, don’t be a . . .”

“A what? A woman who can remember two days ago?”

“Did it ever occur to you I might be afraid of you getting hurt?” he asks.

“Did it occur to you before you said all those shitty things to me?” she asks.

There’s some method to whatever she’s doing with the stick in the sand.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“None of your business. You’re out, remember?”

“Look, we were both a little out of line that night.”

“Oh, is that what you’ve decided, Dad?”

“Oh my God. I went to San Francisco State, for Christ’s sake. It’s not exactly a bastion of the patriarchy, all right? Can you stop talking to me like this?”

She turns, and for a second, he’s afraid she might throw the stick at him. “You called me Burning Girl, asshole, after a whole day of trying to prove you weren’t the guy you were in high school.”

“You know, maybe, just maybe, you could stop bringing up the way I was in high school every time I do something you don’t like.”

“Act different and I will.”

“All I did was say things you didn’t want to hear.”

“No, you had a meltdown. You had a meltdown because for three hours I was stronger than you were.”

“Stronger than I was? You were stronger than a speeding truck! Give me a break. So I freaked out. What do you expect me to do? Ask you to rob a bunch of banks with your bare hands?”

“I gave you a break, and you were a dick.”

“Well, that’s not when I had a meltdown, by the way.”

“So we agree it was a meltdown and not you being the voice of mansplainy reason?”

“Call it whatever you want. The point is, I didn’t freak out when I saw what the drug can do. I freaked out when you said you were going after a serial killer. Because I don’t want you to get hurt. And I don’t want you to get hurt because I . . .”

Shut up, fool.

At least it’s not Reggie’s voice this time. It’s his own.

His throat’s closed up, and his chest’s suddenly made of metal. And even though he knows on a conscious level that his arms and legs are still attached to his body, it doesn’t really feel that way. Charley’s just staring at him, her expression unreadable. It seems a little tense, a little wary, and a little skeptical, all at once. As if she knows what he was about to say and doesn’t believe it. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to.

“I just . . .”

“You just what?” she asks.

“I liked helping,” he finally says. “I want to help. And I fucked up. And I’m sorry.”

Before she can respond, there’s a buzzing sound from her pocket. She pulls out a cheap-looking cell phone. “Prepaid. Marty bought it for me.” She reads the text message, drops the stick, and walks past him.

“Where are you going?”

“Package just showed up at Marty’s house. No return address. Strange delivery guy. Marty’s on his way there.”

He’s tempted to follow her, but he’s distracted by something else.

Now that she’s moved out of his way, he can see a pattern to the marks she was making in the sand. They’re words.

He walks closer, positions his back to the lake so he can read them clearly.

PLANNING. PLEASE BE PATIENT.

She’s right next to him suddenly. When her hand comes to rest on his shoulder, he jumps, but she’s too busy pointing up at the sun with her other arm to notice.