Second Watch

by JA Jance

  On Thursday morning we were up early. Ida Witherspoon was there to do her stuff. This time we did one and a half times around the running track. I was starting to get the hang of it. There was a soft rain falling, a light drizzle. Not enough to get really wet, and not enough to stay completely dry, either.

  By eleven or so, Mel and I were in the car and on I-5, headed north toward Anacortes, Deception Pass, and eventually Whidbey Island.

  “I don’t understand why we couldn’t just catch a ferry,” Mel said.

  “Sorry,” I said. “The vagaries of the Washington State Ferry system are more than I can understand at times. We just have to drive.”

  “You don’t look happy about this,” she added. “The words ‘invitation to a beheading’ come to mind. You were in better spirits on Monday on our way to Leavenworth.”

  “On Monday we were going to help Hannah Wellington close an old wound. Today I’m afraid we’re going to reopen one for Bonnie Abney.”

  Had Mel been any other kind of wife, she might have taken that moment to point out that finding Bonnie Abney was something I myself had set out to do and that I had only myself to blame. She didn’t have to point it out. I was busy blaming myself without the need of any outside assistance.

  By the time we were approaching Coupeville, the weather was starting to clear. The morning drizzle had dried out and the sun was breaking through the cloud cover. The GPS warned us that it would not be able to provide turn-by-turn directions. We had backstopped that with a downloaded MapQuest document that did, but in the end, taking that precaution wasn’t necessary. We drove straight to the right street. Once we reached the proper address we turned onto a narrow lane that wound through the woods. After several turns we found ourselves in a clearing on a bluff overlooking the slate blue water of Penn Cove. The cozy house was covered with weathered shingles that were punctuated by picture windows. The flagstone porch out front was lined on two sides by massive baskets of slightly faded summer petunias.

  I had opened the car door and was struggling to get my canes organized when an immense black-and-white dog, barking his head off, bounded out of the house. A tallish blond woman wearing black slacks and a bright red sweater followed the huge dog into the yard.

  “That’s Crackerjack,” she explained, pointing at the hundred or so pounds of gamboling black fluffy fur. “He’s a Bernese mountain dog, and I’m Bonnie. You must be Jonas.”

  Her information from the guy running the reunions had come from my military records, where I was inevitably listed by my given name.

  “Most people call me Beau,” I said.

  By then, Mel had come around to my side of the car and had thrust her hands deep into Crackerjack’s wondrously thick coat. “And this is Melissa Soames, my wife,” I added. “Most people call her Mel.”

  “Welcome,” Bonnie said. “I’m glad the weather cleared up enough to enjoy the view. Do come in.”

  We followed her into the house. It was the kind of comfortable place that makes a visitor feel instantly at home. Light streamed through six triangular skylights that also gave view to the tall pines and cedars that soared above the house. Windows across the front offered panoramic views of the cove with its sailboats and the lush pastures of the Three Sisters Cattle Company far across on the opposite bank. In the rustic living room a wood fire crackled in the fireplace and on the mantel above it sat two small velvet-covered jewel boxes. I didn’t have to open them to know what would be inside—Lennie D.’s medals, his Purple Heart, his Silver Star.

  Standing before them, I instantly recalled the play Kelly had starred in while in high school—The Old Lady Shows Her Medals. It’s the story of an old London charwoman during World War II. When her coworkers start bragging about their sons’ heroic exploits on the battlefield, the childless old woman pretends to have a son of her own by plucking the name of someone else’s son from news reports and laying claim to his battlefield accomplishments. Eventually the soldier gets wind of the old woman’s subterfuge. He comes to town and gives her hell about it. Later, though, when he dies in battle, he sees to it that his medals are sent to her.

  At the time, seeing my daughter playing the part of the old charwoman, grieving over the loss of her pretend son, had left me breathless. I had sat in a dead-silent auditorium along with the rest of the audience, too stunned with emotion to applaud. Now, all these years later, with those two boxes sitting on the mantel in front of me, I was shocked to realize that the old woman in the play, the one who had seemed so ancient back then, must have been about the same age Bonnie Abney and I were now.

  “I don’t usually keep the boxes out in plain sight,” Bonnie said, crossing the room to stand beside me. “I brought them out today to show them to you.”

  We stood there looking. She didn’t touch the boxes, and neither did I.

  Nodding wordlessly and searching for a way to move away from the boxes and all they meant, I glanced around the rest of the room. On a wall to one side of the fireplace was a portrait, and I stood transfixed once more, gazing up a pencil sketch of a young Lennie D. I saw again the same confident eyes and crooked smile, a handsome young guy resplendent in his West Point uniform.

  Bonnie’s eyes followed mine. “I had that done for Doug’s mother the year he was killed,” she explained. “It hung in her living room for many years, and it was returned to me when she passed away some years ago.”

  “It’s him,” I said with a lump in my throat. “It’s absolutely him.”

  She nodded. “The flag from the coffin went to his mother,” she said. “It was in one of those ceremonial glass boxes, and I would have liked to have it, but somehow it disappeared.”

  “And his West Point sword?” I asked.

  “That went to one of his younger brothers, Blaine.”

  That hurt. Hannah Wellington had her candles. Bonnie Abney had her medals, but she didn’t have either the sword or the flag.

  We stood there in silence. After a moment Bonnie took a deep breath and seemed to recall her position as hostess. “Won’t you sit down?” she urged, pointing me toward an easy chair. “What can I get you? Coffee, tea, some wine—white or red?”

  Mel sat down on a nearby couch. Crackerjack had evidently decided she was the best thing since the invention of kibble, and he was seated directly in front of her, soaking up 100 percent of her attention, and although he was seated on the floor and she was on the couch, I noticed they were almost eye to eye.

  “If he’s too much, I can always send him into the other room,” Bonnie offered.

  “Oh, no,” Mel said. “He’s gorgeous. I love him.”

  “It’s a good thing you’re wearing black pants,” Bonnie told her. “He sheds like crazy. Now, what to drink?”

  Mel and I both asked for coffee. I had spent the whole trip trying to decide if I should let her broach the subject or if I should. Ultimately I had determined that sooner was better. If it all went south from there, Bonnie could go ahead and hand us our walking papers without having to go through the trouble of serving us lunch.

  With that in mind, once Bonnie disappeared into the kitchen to fetch the coffee, I reached into my pocket and pulled out those six items that seemed to be burning a hole in my pocket. When Bonnie returned to the living room, she was carrying a tray laden with mugs of coffee, cream, and sugar. By then my peace offerings were spread out on the coffee table in front of me.

  Bonnie looked at them, but she said nothing as she set down the tray. After passing mugs to Mel and me, Bonnie turned her full attention to the items lying there, waiting for her. She picked them up one at a time, first the hunks of metal and then the playing cards. Holding them nestled gently between her hands, she sank down onto the couch next to Mel.

  “Tell me,” she said, looking at me. “Please.”

  And so I did—all of it, starting with my very first meeting with Lennie D. after I arrived in camp and his giving me the cards and the book. I told her everything I could remember about the firefight that
had cost Doug Davis his life. She listened with rapt attention. I was an eyewitness. I had been there. When I explained how the book Lieutenant Davis had given me—the one I carried with me into battle—had saved my life, she began to cry. She didn’t sob. Silent tears slipped down her cheeks and dripped unnoticed onto the sweater she was wearing.

  “And these are the cards he gave you?” she asked when I finished.

  “The very ones,” I said.

  She held them to her cheek briefly, as though some trace of Lennie D.’s touch might still linger on the smooth surface.

  “They told me about you when I went to the Cacti reunion,” she said quietly.

  That one stunned me. “They did?”

  “Yes, they told me the story of the guy who didn’t die because he had borrowed one of Doug’s books. I never imagined that I’d have the chance to meet you and speak to someone else who was there when it happened. And I actually saw the book, by the way—The Rise and Fall, with three jagged holes burned almost all the way through it. Gary Fowler brought it to the reunion and showed it to me. He was the one who told me the story.”

  “Lieutenant Davis was a good man,” I declared. “The best. He was brave. He was loyal. He cussed like a sailor, but he was also kind and generous, and it was his kindness in lending me that book that saved my life. I wanted you to know that. I wanted to be able to tell you so in person.”

  “But why now?” she asked. “Why after all this time?”

  “I had surgery on my knees,” I said. “And while I was under the influence of the painkillers, I had a dream about . . .” I had to pause for a moment to compose myself and to remember to call Lennie D. by the name Bonnie Abney used. “About Douglas,” I concluded finally. “The dream reminded me that I had never come to see you; that I had never said thank you or told you how sorry I was then and still am for your terrible loss.”

  Bonnie didn’t say anything for a few moments. Instead, she used the back of her hand to wipe away the tears.

  “So what have you done with your life, Beau?”

  It was the same question the dream Lennie D. had asked me, and Bonnie was asking for the same reason. Her Douglas had died. I had lived. She wanted to know what had I done with my side of that bargain.

  “I joined Seattle PD after I got out of the service. I spent most of my career there working as a homicide detective. Since then I’ve worked for the attorney general’s office.”

  “We both do,” Mel put in. “We’re assigned to the Special Homicide Investigation Team. Sometimes we work new cases, sometimes we work old cases. That’s where we met.”

  “So you’ve been together a long time?” Bonnie asked.

  “Not long at all,” Mel said. “It took us a while to get it right.”

  Mel and I had both finished our coffee by then. Bonnie’s cup sat untouched and cold on the coffee table, but she seemed to decide that the time had come to serve our late lunch.

  “I’ll go put the food on the table,” she said. “I made a chicken salad, and this morning I baked some sourdough bread from a ninety-year-old starter my sister brought down from Alaska. That’s where my family came from originally.”

  She got up then. When Mel went to see if there was something she could do to help, Crackerjack proved fickle and turned his considerable attention and charm on me. His coat was amazingly smooth and soft and brushed to a glossy high sheen. As he stared into my face, I was glad to think that Bonnie had the dog’s solid presence in this comfortable but solitary place.

  When lunch was served, we sat in the dining room, again overlooking the water. The wind had come up. Even from this distance we could see whitecaps churning. “It was still this morning,” Bonnie said, “still enough that I went kayaking with some neighbors. Douglas would have loved it.”

  Just that quickly, she slipped away down memory lane, telling us about the blind date in Florida that had brought them together—a soldier about to head for Vietnam and a young flight attendant; how they had walked and talked until the wee hours of the morning; how he had walked her to her airline’s operations department in Miami when it came time for her to board a flight to Rio; how he had shipped off to Ranger school for six weeks, leaving her to wonder why she hadn’t heard from him when, in truth, no calls or letters were allowed.

  The story took a turn then. He had shown up, fresh out of Ranger school and wanting to visit with her before going home to Bisbee, Arizona, to see his family for Christmas. For the next several weeks, before he shipped out for Vietnam, they traveled together. It wasn’t a matter of them falling in love, because that had already happened for both of them.

  During their idyllic time together, they managed to grab a few more days together in Hawaii. Then he left for Vietnam and was gone. She told of going to Bisbee and waiting in the desert for the train that brought Doug’s body home for burial. Of going to the wake and meeting a young Hispanic man who’d told Bonnie that one cold morning over that last Christmas vacation he had encountered Doug in downtown Bisbee. Doug had handed him his jacket and then walked home in a cotton shirt because he was going to Vietnam and wouldn’t need a jacket.

  After that Bonnie told us about her life after Douglas—about working and eventually marrying. But that marriage had never quite worked as well as either she or her now former husband would have liked. She had been promoted to director of training at the airline, written a book, become a management consultant, and created her own company, one that specialized in executive training all over the globe. And now, after years of living and working on the road, she had retired to this little haven of a house on Whidbey Island.

  I listened to her story with an ache in my heart, because I, of all people, understood. She had had her Douglas Davis; I had had my Anne Corley. The cases were so similar that it took my breath away. Anne had arrived in my life in a whirl of passion that had taken us both by surprise and turned our worlds upside down. The same thing had happened to Bonnie and Doug. Both Doug and Anne had shot through Bonnie’s and my separate lives like a pair of brilliant comets, and when the two of them were gone, Bonnie and I were left with our worlds in pieces, our hopes shattered, and our dreams in ashes.

  It took me years to grow beyond the legend of Anne Corley so I could find love and comfort in the presence of someone else. It wasn’t until I found Mel that I was truly able to put what happened to me back then with Anne in the past.

  Maybe that wouldn’t happen for Bonnie—maybe the legend of Doug Davis was more than she could ever put behind her—but as I listened to her story, I finally understood what I was doing there in her living room, why I had come. It was my job to listen and to be there because I was the one person in the whole world who could listen to Bonnie’s heartbreaking story and truly understand.

  Mel and I stayed for hours longer than we expected to. We had dessert back in the living room. I took my next batch of pills with a dose of carb-heavy red velvet cake. Marge Herndon would have been appalled.

  As we were gathering up to leave, Bonnie asked me if I wanted the cards back. “No,” I told her. “They’re yours now, along with the shrapnel.”

  Nodding, she picked them up, carried them over to the fireplace, and put them on the mantel next to the jewel boxes. She had put them in a place of honor, and I was moved beyond words.

  By the time Bonnie and Crackerjack walked Mel and me back out to the car, it was almost dark. My hand was on the door handle when Bonnie reached up and gave me a hug.

  “Thanks for listening,” she said. “I haven’t told anyone that story in a very long time. It’s such ancient history and most people don’t care to hear it.”

  “That’s what friends are for,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if they’re old friends or new friends. They’re the kind of people who will listen as long as you need them to because, sometimes, telling the story and having someone listen is the only way to figure out how to move on.”

  Bonnie turned to Mel then, and enveloped her in a hug, too. “I’m happy for you
,” she said. “I’m happy for you both.”

  Then, with Crackerjack at her side, she turned and walked back into her solitary house. I watched her go. Watched her turn off the porch light after she closed the door.

  The sky was dark overhead. Only one star—I’m not sure which one—was visible in the distance. Logically, I know that Lennie D. and that star have no connection whatsoever, but somehow, when I spoke, I believed they were both listening.

  “I did it,” I said. “I hope I measured up.”

  CHAPTER 26

  In the world of scripted television shows, everything gets wrapped up in an hour of prime time—forty-two minutes of story and the rest of commercials, often for drugs where the announcers spend far more time listing dozens of dire side effects than they do singing the praises of the medication’s supposed benefits.

  Life isn’t like that. DNA PCR takes time. It isn’t an instant process, but it’s not like I didn’t have one or two things to occupy my time while I waited to see if the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab could deliver the goods.

  I had been up doing more than I should have been doing for a number of days. Marge Herndon was quick to point out that I was able to function that way because I was still taking far more pain medication than I realized. Soon after we got back from Whidbey, she set off on a program to wean me away from them, and that was no picnic.

  For one thing, as I went through withdrawal from narcotics, I found that it would have been all too easy to once again fall prey to booze. On that score, I went to meetings and spent plenty of quality time with my sponsor. Even when Ida Witherspoon’s mandatory visits ended, I continued to do the PT, sometimes doing two and three turns around the running track at a crack, first with the walker, then two canes, then one, and, finally, on my own.

  Marge finished her stint as my drill sergeant and went back home to her own place in Shoreline. In some ways, Mel and I were glad to see her go, but in terms of having food magically appear at mealtimes, we both agreed that we missed having her annoying presence bustling around the place.