Page 51 of A Sea of Unspoken Things

“Let’s go over it again,” I said, waiting to see if Micah would argue.

He didn’t, giving me a nod. We’d spent half the drive nailing downthe timeline until it was in an order that made sense, and each time I repeated it, the events felt a little less convoluted.

“Okay,” I began. “Johnny borrows your truck and heads out to the gorge on November ninth. He would have arrived there in the late afternoon?”

“Early evening. Enough time to make camp.”

“Okay, so he stays the night and shoots the next morning, November tenth—that’s when Autumn’s backpack shows up in the film.”

“So, she could have met him out there, like you said. But for whatever reason, he returns to Six Rivers earlier than he planned,” Micah thought aloud.

“So, what? Why does he go all the way out there just to leave suddenly?”

“Maybe he forgets something or the weather turns.”

I shook my head. “I checked. There wasn’t a storm that day. There wasn’t even a drop of rain.”

“Okay, so if he’s out there with Autumn, maybe they get in a fight?”

“Maybe…” I murmured, still thinking. “And she goes back to San Francisco? There’s nothing to suggest that she came back to Six Rivers.”

“That would explain why Johnny would have been calling her. Maybe she leaves the gorge angry and he’s trying to get ahold of her.”

“But he didn’t say anything to you when he got back?” I turned to look at Micah.

“I wasn’t home when he dropped off the truck. I just came back and it was there.”

“And you didn’t talk to him at all before he went back out to the gorge?”

“No. I was booked solid that whole week and I was barely in town. But I came home that day and the truck was gone again. He’d dropped off Smoke and just took off.”

“November twelfth,” I said. That was the day he died.

“So, he goes back out to the gorge without telling anyone. Doesn’ttake any of his gear. He’s up on the ridge on the other side of the ravine, and…” He didn’t finish.

“Was he going back out there to meet her again?”

Laying out the facts did little to ease my mind. There was no evidence that Autumn had ever answered Johnny’s calls, and there were no other communications I could find between them. Maybe the most concerning part of all of this was that Autumn seemed to have been meticulously scrubbed from Johnny’s life, but I was far beyond trying to dispel my own suspicions about what Johnny was hiding. The bottom line was that if Autumn was there that day, then she was the last person to see Johnny alive.

“And when you found him—” I paused. “He didn’t have anything with him? Nothing that indicated why he’d been up on the ridge or what he was doing out there?”

“No, nothing. He was just lying there. He looked like…” Micah swallowed. “He almost just looked like he was asleep.”

That image alone was enough to make a cold silence settle back in the car. Micah’s eyes were cast out the window, but I could see the tension of the memory in every inch of him. Like remembering it was physically painful.

“Let’s say Johnny did go out to meet Autumn on November ninth,” I said. “There’s something wrong about that, am I right?”

I waited for Micah to look at me as confirmation. When he finally did, it made my heart sink. There was no getting around the fact that Autumn was an eighteen-year-old girl and that Johnny was a significantly older man who was in a position of power and influence over her. And I also couldn’t ignore that Autumn was both beautiful and talented.

“Maybe he had a good reason.” Micah’s voice lowered.

“Can you think of one?”

Micah was quiet for a long moment. “No.”

We didn’t talk for the rest of the drive, which allowed the possibility taking root. I had to acknowledge that the way this all looked, it was plausible that Johnny had gotten himself into an unforgivable,inexcusable situation. And when Johnny got himself into trouble, there was a protocol. Micah and I took care of it. We covered for him. But if Johnny had done what I thought he’d done, I didn’t know if I could do that this time.

Once the forest finally thinned and the land turned into steep shoreline, we took curve after curve until town appeared in the distance. The sky was cast over with a gray haze when we arrived in Fort Bragg, and the air was full of mist, making my hair curl up with damp the moment I got out of the car.