THE PRICE OF ASH

Sixty-One Days

Damian Cross was awake before six, which was not unusual, fair-haired and blue-eyed, reading a shipping manifest by the window when Whitfield called. That also was not unusual. Whitfield calling this early was.

"She's gone," Whitfield said. No greeting.

Damian didn't ask who. There was only one she who would make Whitfield call before sunrise.

"Since when?"

"Bed check missed her at five. Could have been anytime after midnight rounds."

"And you're calling me instead of the police because?"

"Because the paperwork on her hold has a hole in it, and I'd rather you knew about it before someone else finds it." A pause. "One signature, not two. It's been that way for eleven months. Nobody's checked. Someone might now, given the circumstances."

"Fix it."

"Already did. Two signatures on file as of an hour ago. Second one's backdated, and it'll hold unless somebody pulls the physical logbook and checks ink age, which I doubt anyone would do."

Damian set the manifest down. "Where would she go?"

"She has no money and no identification," Whitfield said. "Her family ties end with your house." Whitfield's voice had the particular flatness of a man reciting a list he'd already made twice. "Statistically, not far. Realistically, I don't know. She wasn't statistically anything, that one."

"Keep looking. Quietly." Damian was reaching for his phone before he'd finished the sentence, a second call already forming.

"And if quietly doesn't work?"

"Then we get louder."

He hung up before Whitfield could answer that.

Griggs was in the doorway by the time Damian set the phone down. Someone on staff had heard enough of the call to know to fetch him without being told. Griggs didn't sit. He never did unless told to, and Damian had never once told him to.

"Pull the trust filing," Damian said. "I want to know how many days we have before her birthday makes this pointless."

Griggs didn't ask why a missing wife's birthday mattered more than the wife herself. He'd stopped asking that kind of question four years ago, right around the time it stopped being smart to. Whatever had made it stop being smart, Damian had never explained, and Griggs had never needed him to twice.

"Sixty-one days," Griggs said, without needing to check. He'd known the number before Damian asked for it.

"If she's not found and confirmed incompetent before that, the trust vests to her directly, and nothing about this family's plans for that coastline matters again," Damian said it without heat, absolutely flat.

He didn't need to look out the window to know which coastline he meant. He looked anyway, out of habit more than necessity. From this angle, on a clear morning, you could just make out the undeveloped stretch past the marina, the last piece nobody else had managed to buy, currently belonging on paper to a woman who wasn't in this house and might not be in any house at all this morning.

"You want the search widened."

"I want it widened. Quietly. Shelters first. Any friends or family in the area, however unlikely that sounds for her. Bus and train stations, anywhere with cameras. Hospitals too, eventually, but she walked out of that facility under her own power. I don't see why she'd need one."

"And if someone finds her before we do."

"Then we're the concerned husband and the incompetent facility that lost her, in whichever order looks best when the story gets told. Make sure it's told that way first."

Griggs left to do that. Odessa called twenty minutes later, before Griggs could have possibly reached her. Whitfield had another number to call before Damian's. That was a problem for another morning.

"I've got a statement ready," she said. No greeting from her either. "One version for if she's found today. Another for if she's still missing by tonight, worded so it doesn't imply we've stopped looking."

"You already wrote both."

"An hour ago." A short pause. "Do you want to know which one you're hoping for, or should I not ask that?"

"Don't ask that."

"Didn't think so," Odessa said, and hung up first.

Griggs left without asking how quiet was supposed to work alongside how fast.

His mother called forty minutes later, before he'd gotten around to calling her himself. Someone on staff had beaten him to it.

"Is it handled?" Celeste said.

"Being handled."

"That's not an answer."

"It will be by tonight," Damian said.

He didn't elaborate. Neither did she.

"The Cross Foundation gala is Saturday," Celeste said instead. Nobody had asked. "Whatever this turns into, it doesn't touch that."

"It won't."

"See that it doesn't." She hung up without saying goodbye. She'd done that on every call that mattered since his father died. She still answered faster than anyone else in the house, a habit that started the year she was waiting on a call that never came.

Damian stood at the window a while after that. Sixty-one days. Long enough, if nothing else went wrong. He'd learned a long time ago not to trust that phrase, and went back to his desk anyway, working through the rest of the manifest at the same pace he'd have set on any other morning. As far as anyone watching him was concerned, it was one.

Griggs was back within the hour, and didn't sit for that report either.

"Nothing at the shelters we could reach this morning. Working through anyone she might know in the area now, though there isn't much of a list. Bus and train stations by early afternoon."

"Make it not end of day."

"Understood."

"One more thing," Damian said before he could leave again. "If she turns up dead somewhere, I want to be the one who confirms it. Not the coroner. Me."

Griggs didn't ask why that mattered either. He just nodded once, the same nod he gave everything, and went to find out which one it was going to be.

Damian went back to the window before he went back to the manifest. The undeveloped stretch past the marina was still there, nobody's but hers on paper, waiting on a birthday that either mattered enormously or wouldn't matter at all, depending entirely on how the next sixty-one days went.