Sitting alone in a corner of the crowded bar, Kevin Tucker wondered, not for the first time, if he ought to be checking on his daughter. Amy had been back for a while now, returned from her walk at least a half hour ago. She had seemed upset, though, which was why he thought he’d been doing the right thing by staying at the bar and leaving her alone—but now he was second-guessing himself. The point of this trip was to spend some time together, find some common ground, try to reconnect, but how were they going to do that if they spent the whole weekend apart? He glanced toward the lobby, then back at his watch. He decided he would give it another ten minutes. On the table in front of him was the case file Jack had given him earlier that day; Kevin would first read over his brother’s case notes, get prepared for tomorrow, then head upstairs to check on her. Besides, despite Jack’s ulterior motives in sending him here, a job was still a job, and Kevin wanted to make sure he was adequately prepared.

Kevin already had a general understanding of the case. A young local man by the name of Ryan Porter had gone missing, and Kevin had been sent to Seabrook to inform the father that the investigation was to be closed. The task was, as Jack had described, entirely routine.

But as Kevin flipped open the folder and read more closely, details of the case began to intrigue him. After Ryan had been reported missing, two horses were discovered in the forest bordering the family property. The local sheriff had suspected something untoward, which is why state police had gotten involved, but a search of the area had turned up nothing. The young man had seemingly vanished off the face of the earth. Ninety percent of missing person cases were runaways, and Jack had concluded that Ryan was one of them. And there were some contributing factors that suggested this might be true.

Ryan had led a challenging life. He’d lost his mother at a young age, then witnessed his father suffer a debilitating stroke, the combination of which had left him with responsibility over the family’s affairs. For the last four years, he’d been overseeing his father’s recovery while also managing the ranch. But there was a sizeable debt hanging over them, a debt the father apparently had no knowledge of. It seemed that Ryan had drawn a loan against the ranch and gone to great lengths to hide its existence.