Big John and Ward Cameron? Partners? The whole idea sounded ridiculous. But then again, there was some method to the madness that could be distinguished. Ward Cameron had the resources, and Big John had the obsession. Finding the gold would've been plenty of reason for two unlikely allies to team up together. It just seemed so incomprehensible that two individuals of such strong personalities could find a way to come to some sort of agreement with each other. Looking at it now though, clearly things hadn't worked out like they'd been meant to, so their partnership hadn't worked so well after all. That made it all the more simpler for them to understand how easy it would've been for Ward to hide it all completely, since he was the one who had all the money and power. Did he even feel any remorse for the role he played in all of this?
Kie took the first step forward and crouched down slightly behind John B, before she placed a gentle hand on his shoulder in consolation.
"I'm so sorry, John B." Collins said softly. After all this time, to find out what happened to his father this way, it was a terrible thing for someone to go through. Not only did he have his dad to mourn, but all the time that he'd spent dealing with his disappearance that he now had to spend even more time grieving.
"He took everything from me." John B said, taking a sharp breath. He ran his hands through his hair and took fistfuls of his brown locks between his fingers in frustration over this whole ordeal. 
"What happened last night, John B?" JJ asked carefully. The way his friend was acting, he wouldn't be surprised if he'd done something really bad. JJ was the more impulsive one of the two, but given the circumstances, it was hard to guess what exactly John B was really capable of. They didn't want to think of their friend as someone who was capable of murder, but revenge had a way of making people do things you would've never imagined them having the guts to do.
John B clenched his jaw, still looking out at the water while he shook his head. "I fucked up, guys."
Furrowing her brows at him, Kie leaned in closer out of sheer curiosity to delve deeper into John B's blatant distress. His eyes were starting to look more red around the waterlines, and his breathing was getting increasingly more erratic. He refused to make eye contact with them. 
"What are you talking about?" Kie questioned him, terrified of his answer. 
"It's gone. All of it." John B dragged a hand over his face, the exhaustion and weight of everything pulling him down further and further into a rabbit hole of despair. "He killed my dad, and he took the gold. Everything I had, he took it all away."
The three went painstakingly quiet as they tried to sort through everything in their own heads. So Ward was alive but it wasn't any consolation when he'd stolen the treasure they'd spent the summer chasing. It was over. After all the effort they'd put in trying to get that gold, all the time, all the rules they'd broken— it was all for nothing? They'd actually been able to get their hands on some of it, felt the smallest fraction of the large fortune, only for the rest of it to be snatched away from them pretty much overnight. Collins struggled to wrap her mind around it. How sure was John B of this?
Who was she kidding? Of course he was sure. She just didn't want to believe it herself. 
Because if it was really true, and their only chances of getting disgustingly filthy rich had gone swirling down the drain at the flushing hands of Ward Cameron, then Collins had screwed up by astronomical proportions.