Shit, this family business hurt his head.
“I will definitely call you when I come back,” he said seriously. And he would. He just knew Lauren would love the geezer, whose eyes were getting wet again. Jesus, he had to get out of here fast, his own eyes were burning. Shit.
Jacko got back in his truck and made his way to the ranch. His grandfather’s ranch. God.
Mayer had given him elaborate instructions and he had GPS but in the end it was easy as anything. He just took the main road north out of town, went ten miles, turned left and there it was. The house was on a slight rise so he could see it from outside the gates—big, imposing, abandoned.
One key opened the gate. Amazing. Kindergartens nowadays were better protected. How could people not be security conscious? The whole area was like Trust Central. None of the houses along the road had security cameras. Some didn’t even have gates. You could just walk up to the front door.
It baffled him.
He’d been security conscious his whole life. Even in childhood, with drunk ex-boyfriends trying to batter their way into the trailer he shared with his mother. All the neighbors in the trailer park had been dangerous and he’d learned early and well to keep the place as secure as he could.
Being a SEAL hadn’t done much to convince him the world was a safe place, either.
Must be a whole different mindset to live with no security, he thought as he opened the front door with another simple key. So simple you could open the door by blowing on the lock the right way.
It meant Lee Garrett and his wife had felt themselves protected their whole lives. And who knew? Maybe they were. Maybe growing up in a place where everyone knew your name was its own form of protection.
Though Jacko himself would take motion sensors and security cams over that any day.
The house was dark inside, all the shutters closed, curtains drawn. Someone had cleaned the place thoroughly; there were no smells of something rotten. The place smelled of dust and closed rooms. He entered carefully, boots making no noise at all, just as he’d been trained. He felt unsettled, exactly as if he were entering a possible danger zone.
No danger, though. No danger, no life, no nothing. Dust and silence. Jacko went from room to room, opening the curtains and windows, letting in the bright sunlight, airing the place out.
He felt weird doing it, thinking he had no right, though actually, he did. He had every right. The place was his.
Wasn’t that a kicker?
His.
Jacko had never owned property. Ever. He had a lot of money in the bank and followed Suzanne Huntington’s investment advice religiously and his money just kept growing. Kept making him more.
He lived with Lauren in the house she’d bought with her inheritance. Lately, they’d been talking about buying a bigger house, moving closer to the area where Joe and Isabel and Jack and Summer lived. Metal and Felicity were thinking of moving to the same area. He’d put in his money, too, and they could afford to buy something really nice.
And now that a kid was on the way…
Jacko stumbled and looked down at his boots on the wide, flat hardwood floor. There was nothing to stumble over, except what was in his head. The notion of his kid.
Focus.
Okay.
Jacko started with a big sideboard that was shoulder height. They were called madias. Jacko knew that courtesy of Lauren, who seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of types of furniture and styles going back to the caveman era. It was going to be fun bringing her here. She’d know the name for everything.
He was in an enormous living room that took up almost the entire ground floor, so presumably the bedrooms were on the second floor. The huge room was broken up into sections by the furniture and it was pleasant to look at. You could easily imagine a family in it.
The madia’s top was filled with silver-framed photographs. It was like reading a book. It even went left to right. These were private family photos, unlike the ones he had looked at on Felicity’s monitor.
The first frame on the left was huge and embossed. Lee and Alice’s wedding photo. Mid-sixties, judging from the clothes. Jacko reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the printout of the wedding certificate Felicity had found. Lee Garrett and Alice Hopfer, wed in San Diego in October, 1963, a month before Kennedy was shot.
Jacko studied the photo, angling it so that the bright sunlight streaming in showed up every detail. Lee and Alice looked young and happy. Lee had on an ill-fitting suit, white shirt and bolo tie which must have been really dorky in those days. But Alice was looking up at him as if he were George Clooney and Brad Pitt combined. She had on a flowing white gown, a crown of white flowers around her head, and was holding a bouquet of white roses. There were a lot of photos of the wedding. Lee and Alice cutting the cake, feeding it to each other, dancing outdoors in a pretty garden surrounded by smiling people clapping.
If you could look past the weird clothes, it was really sweet. Jacko didn’t know these people and now never would, but he knew that their marriage had lasted a lifetime, ended only by Alice’s death. Lee mourned her until the day he died.
Exactly the kind of marriage he wanted with Lauren. Forever.
Moving right, he saw a pregnant Alice, and an Alice with a newborn in her arms, Lee looking down at the baby with a smile on his face. From then on, it was all Sara, all the time. From toddler to grade schooler to high schooler.
A visibly happy family.
And then the photos stopped. There were only two others, and only the parents were shown: one of a birthday and the other of what looked like an anniversary. Both Lee and Alice were shockingly aged, bent and unsmiling.
Okay. He’d just seen a happy family turn into a desperately unhappy family, almost overnight.
Try as he might, it was hard to identify with them. His life and theirs had had no points in common other than Sara, and that was not a happy connection. And though he looked really hard, Jacko could see no physical resemblance at all between himself and the Garretts. He knew he hadn’t looked like his mother, either, but then his mother had always looked like shit for as long as he could remember.
Okay, moving on. First he did a tour of the house to get his bearings. Everything was neat and squared away, coated with six months of dust. It was a comfortable house, kept in good repair, though nothing was new or fancy. The kitchen and bathrooms were dated, though serviceable. Whoever was going to buy the house would have to remodel. Gut it and start over.
Like a flash storm, something rebelled inside him at the thought of someone else living in the house. He couldn’t figure that out. What the fuck was wrong with him? What the fuck did he care? He was going to sell. What was he going to do with a freaking house in Rancho San Diego?
Feeling uneasy, like he was invading someone’s privacy, Jacko went through Lee’s desk and found that Lee was a man who liked order. Bills were paid promptly, checkbooks balanced, taxes paid. He gave generously to charity and had made loans to friends, which had been paid back. He was a sponsor of the local library and had donated a pediatric dialysis machine to the local hospital.
He’d been a canny businessman, disciplined and organized. Lee owned shares in three quietly prosperous businesses—a feed store, a camping equipment store and a country club. The businesses brought in about three hundred thou a year.
Jesus. He inherited that stuff. Mayer had made it clear that he was sole heir, so Jacko owned shares in those businesses now.
Fuck. Jacko was…yeah. He was a rich man. With his own job, he would have an income of over half a million a year and property worth a million dollars. That was rich by anyone’s count.
But he didn’t come here for the money, he came for intel. He had a sense of Lee and Alice Garrett. And now for the hard part.
It was late afternoon when he found the courage to walk up the oak staircase and into Sara Garrett’s bedroom. His mother’s bedroom.
He was a grown man. He’d been in combat. He was tough
as nails. And yet he hesitated on the threshold of the room. He’d put everything to do with his mother behind him, in a locked box. He didn’t want to open that box, ever, but now he had to. Do the hard thing. The Navy SEAL motto.
The Garretts had left their daughter’s room exactly as it had been when she’d disappeared. Jacko could picture Alice dusting and cleaning a teenager’s room, even though Sara would have been a grown woman. It must have been amazingly painful, not knowing whether Sara was alive or dead.
Neither, as it turned out. Sara had been alive in only the biological sense of the word. Any humanity in her had died long before her body.
He did a perimeter walk. It was a spacious bedroom, where a girl could sleep, study, read, listen to music, entertain her friends. The furniture must have been top of the line at the time. Once he’d walked around to get a general feel, it was time to dive into the contents of the room.
He sat down on the pretty, delicate chair of her desk and heard it creak. Sara had been a slender teenager and they wouldn’t have thought to buy a desk chair that could bear the weight of a man as big as he was.
The idea of breaking that chair freaked him, so he hunkered on the floor with her diaries and school notebooks and read about his mother’s life as a child and teenager.
Unlike her parents, Sara had been wayward and rebellious by nature. Jacko could read it in her notebooks. English and math notebooks that should have been full of homework assignments were full of photos cut out from gossip magazines. The Bee Gees and John Travolta and The Eagles. Then the Sex Pistols and Alice Cooper. Sara’s school notes were disjointed, ungrammatical, incomplete. A clear case of undiagnosed ADD, which at that time had probably not been on anyone’s radar. Her grades were just passing. School wasn’t important to her. Boys and clothes and makeup and music were.
Then, when she was seventeen, she met an older guy and it all went to hell. Jackman. What little she wrote was disjointed, handwriting all over the place, words making no sense. She began taking drugs and wrote of her “little friends.” She was mad at her parents all the time. One page was just I HATE THEM written over and over in shaky handwriting.
And then, the notebooks took a turn toward the crazy. Fuck and shit written over and over, underlined until the paper tore. A teacher gave her a failing grade and Sara drew her face with a bullet hole in the forehead. She was sure some girls in her class were stealing from her. One page was a chilling scenario of blowing up the school.
It turned Jacko’s stomach.
The explosion of craziness began when she started going out with the new guy, RJ for Robert Jackman. But more than the guy, it was the drugs. Weed, uppers and downers led fast to blow and coke. The kind of drugs that would mess up a young mind for good, forever.
A couple of weeks of frenzy, where her life seemed to be made up of sex and drugs and then…nothing.
Sara was gone, leaving two brokenhearted parents behind.
It was late afternoon when Jacko read the last of the notebooks. The golden light of the setting sun lit up the room—which was pretty and orderly, in contrast to the ugly mess of Sara’s mind just before she ran away.
It was so hard for him to imagine anyone throwing away the life she’d had because he knew firsthand the life she ended up with. The filthy trailer house, the succession of low-wage jobs until she couldn’t hold any job at all. Constantly scrambling for money to feed her habit, willing to do anything to anyone just to get one more high. Sara Garrett had left such devastation behind her—the grieving Garretts, himself. He was lucky he’d escaped intact from the disaster that was Sara.
What a waste.
Jacko’s heart swelled with pity for the Garretts and with contempt for his mother. She wasn’t a worthy daughter, and she sure hadn’t been a worthy mother. But at least he knew her craziness wasn’t hereditary. It was born with her and died with her.
Jacko was free.
As darkness filled the house, he realized his business here was over. There was one more stop to make but it was to complete the circle. The low-level hum of anxiety that had plagued him all his life—the fear his blood was somehow tainted on both sides—was gone.
In this pretty room of a teenager who’d thrown her life away, Jacko was made whole and would go back to his Lauren a better man. The man she deserved.
As the sun slid beneath the horizon, he pulled out his cell and called Lauren.
“Hello?”
Lauren’s soft voice froze him. He opened his mouth and his throat clicked. He couldn’t say anything at all. Goddamn, he was over this shit, wasn’t he? He had a lot to say to her. Things she had a right to know. So why the fuck couldn’t he talk?
“I hope you’re finding what you’re looking for, darling.” He could just picture Lauren, in one of her jewel-tone track suits she never ran in, but wore when she created. Like an art goddess ninja. Right about now, she’d be curled up on the couch with a cup of tea and a book. Soon, she’d move into the kitchen for dinner. If he was coming home, she’d cook a nice meal. When she was alone, she often just had something light—a slice of cheese and fruit with a glass of wine.
No wine tonight, though. Because she was pregnant.
For the first time, that thought didn’t send off alarm bells in his head. Before, he hadn’t known how to handle the hot, jagged emotions flooding him every time he thought about the baby. Now?
He breathed out.
Her voice turned amused. “I just want you to know you’re going to get a lot of flak from Metal when you get back. And Jack and Joe, too. I told them you’d come back just as soon as you could, but they’re sort of mad at you. They’ll get over it. I made it clear I’m not mad at you. You’re doing what you think you need to do, otherwise you’d be here with me. I believe that with all my heart.”
Jacko clung to his cell, fingers clutching tightly. It was a miracle he didn’t shatter the plastic and Gorilla Glass. He was listening hard to every word she said, and to what was underneath the words.
Love. Love for him was in her voice.
“So do what you have to do, my darling. And take care of yourself. Stay safe.”
His breath whooshed out of his body. She must have heard.
“I remember the first time I said those words to you,” she continued. Her voice was lower now, softer. “It was the first time you left for a business trip after we started living together. I’d bought you that big thick cashmere scarf, remember?”
God yes. It was in his vehicle.
“You always take such good care of me, Jacko. Always making sure I’m comfortable and safe. I wanted to do something for you, so I bought that scarf. This was before I realized you honestly don’t feel the cold. I got it for you because you made me shiver every time you went out in the dead of winter with a tee shirt and a jeans jacket. I noticed you always put my scarf on before going out, even though it probably makes you sweat. I’m sure you snatch it off your neck the instant you drive around the corner.”
Bingo. He hung his head and smiled, his first smile in two days. It was a beautiful scarf and hot as hell. He hated wearing it.
“So I wrapped that scarf around your neck and kissed you and told you to be careful, to take care of yourself, and you froze and your eyes grew wide, as if you’d never heard those words before. And I thought—maybe he hasn’t. Maybe no one has really looked after Jacko, cared enough about him to say those words. Your teammates sure wouldn’t tell you to be careful. You guys are such hardasses, I am absolutely certain Metal has never told you to be careful. Not once, in all the time you’ve known him.”
Yeah. No one had ever told him to take care of himself. Since childhood Jacko had done a really good job of taking care of himself, and SEAL training just made him stronger.
But…the thousand ways she showed she cared for him blew him away. She watched his diet, fussed over him if she thought he was getting sick. Jacko never got sick, ever, but he’d contemplated faking a sneeze because man, being on the receiving end of all that
care was amazing. It took her a long time to realize he didn’t feel the cold and she was always buttoning up his jackets, trying to get him to wear a wool cap. The big scarf was just the one thing out of many.
He heard her sigh and then she continued. “So I guess all of this is my way of saying—take care of yourself. Wherever you are.”
She closed the connection and Jacko sat in the room while the sun disappeared and the room grew dark. Holding his phone in his hand, unwilling to break this connection with Lauren.
Finally, it was time. He stood up, walked downstairs. He took one final long look at the row of family photos, studying each face. Lee. Alice. Sara. He could see no resemblance whatsoever to him in any of the faces, but he was tied by blood to them. Two good human beings, one train wreck. Two out of three.
Not bad. Better than some.
Take his buddy Joe, for example. Drunk mess of a father, mom who ran away when he was a kid, drunk grandparents on both sides. And look at him now. Decorated SEAL, successful member of ASI. Engaged to Isabel Delvaux, scion of America’s top political family, though they were all dead now except for her brother Jack.
Peace was settling inside him in this quiet room. He’d come to find out where he came from and now he knew. He came from two good people. His mom—she’d fallen into drugs so young it had scrambled her brains. His dad? Who the fuck knew? What difference did it make at this point?
None.
The blood of two good people flowed in his veins; that was all he needed to know.
The weight of a lifetime of unspoken doubt lifted from his shoulders. Jacko cracked his neck, shook his hands. He felt light. Free.
Time to go. He’d come back here, with Lauren. They’d decide together what to do with this house, the land. Sell it, keep it. Whatever she wanted to do was fine with him. He was okay with all of it.
Who knew? Maybe they’d keep it. Vacation here. God knows a vacation spot away from Portland’s rainy climate might be fun. They could all fly down for long weekends. The house was big enough for the whole crew.
MIDNIGHT QUEST: A Short 'Men of Midnight' Novel Page 8