Knowing that Arnie was looking for her, knowing that he’d probably have this chance, had just made him realize how pathetic his life actually was. He’d been lying to himself the last couple of years. He was basically going nowhere, fast. What he needed was an in with a bigger source, to create an even bigger side hustle. He didn’t mind taking the chances. He could move drugs. Hell, he knew weapons well enough he could move them, too. Smuggle some people across the border? Yeah, as long as they wanted to come, he could do that as well.
I just want to cash in big enough to get the fuck out of here. He didn’t know why, but every place he went here in Dallas reminded him of his time in prison. He felt prison crawling on his skin. Nothing had worked out for him since he’d been sprung.
Anger was a black mass within him, hot and bitter, and he wondered, some days, if he’d be able to contain it. What he needed was to pour it out, just puke it all over someone who really deserved it. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Peyton, his fucking supervisor, headed toward him.
Wonder what the fucking bastard wants now. He’d put in his ten, and he was fucking well calling it done. The anger seethed and told him Peyton could use a good smack-down. Come on, you prick, just give me one good reason.
“You good to go for your vacation, Jordan?”
He’d almost forgotten that he’d told the asshole that he wanted a couple days to go visit an old pal who’d just come home from overseas. Jordan blinked and understood the question had been asked kindly and that Peyton was waiting for an answer.
“Yeah. I’m heading out as soon as I get home and get changed.”
“Enjoy yourself. We’ll see you next Monday, then.” Peyton headed out and didn’t even look back.
Jordan grunted. It took a few moments for him to get the feeling of rage to settle down. He really did have a better target for his anger than a dickwad like Peyton Smith.
It took him only a half-hour to get home. By the time he’d showered, changed, and packed his gear, the sun was cresting the horizon. Thanks to the info Arnie had given him, he knew exactly where he was going. He didn’t have much information about the place his ex had landed, except it was a small town not far from the Hill Country. A small town probably meant a bunch of good ol’ boys, guys he’d likely be able to con if he had to. After all, the bitch had been his wife. Anyone saw him with her would probably look the other way. But he’d study the situation, first.
Jordan pulled into a truck stop at the edge of the city and grabbed a few packs of beef jerky, some peanuts, chips, and a couple of bottles of water. That was the last thing he’d had to get, rations. He had everything else he needed—to get the job done.
He’d get the lay of the land, and if it was as small town and as isolated as Arnie said, he’d hole up somewhere during the day and do some searching around at night. There might be a bar someplace close. He could check it out, check out the people. Gather intel. It would be just like being back in the army. He knew what to do because Uncle Sam had trained him and trained him well. And when Arnie showed up, he’d share his intel, and then together they’d figure the next step.
He got back behind the wheel of his aging Ford and turned the key. As he left Dallas behind, and headed south-west, he began to get himself into the headspace he’d need to be.
First, he’d do recon, and then he’d met with his bud and make his final plans.
Chapter Thirteen
Jason had never visited the grave of his great-grandparents before today. In point of fact, it had never even occurred to him to do so, and wasn’t that just…wrong, somehow? He wouldn’t cut himself any slack about it, either. Sure, this was his first visit to Lusty. But he’d been here about three weeks now and coming here hadn’t even really been on his radar, until today.
The truth was he should have made an effort to come to Lusty when he first heard of the place, after his brothers had married Bailey and settled in this small town.
The family cemetery was Jason’s second stop of the day. He’d just spent a couple of hours at the museum with Aunt Anna. He’d listened as she’d related the story of the founding of Lusty. Anna Jessop’s narration had brought his ancestors to life. She should, he thought, be a writer. Or a teacher.
Anna Jessop had answered all his questions and had even told him anecdotes from bygone days—some taken, she confided, from the personal journals of Sara Carmichael Benedict and Amanda Jessop Kendall, the matriarchs of the family. But some of them had been told to her by Grandma Kate.
Jason had known that Grandma Kate was in her nineties, but he hadn’t understood that she’d actually known both of those first grandmothers, Sara and Amanda.
Known them? Hell, to hear Aunt Anna tell it, they’d more or less arranged for a young Major Kate Wesley, U. S. Army Nursing Corps, to come here so that their grandsons, recently repatriated pursuit pilots, who’d been serving with the RAF at the beginning of World War Two, could marry her. I’ll bet that Sara Carmichael Benedict and Amanda Jessop-Kendall knew all about setting goals and having a plan to get things done. And they hadn’t neglected family, either.
That had been a disturbing, yet whimsical thought. Jason smiled as he studied the headstone of his great-grandparents—James and Jacob Benedict and their wife, Rosie O’Toole Benedict. He frowned as he studied the dates. Generally—at least from what he’d seen so far—the women outlasted the men in his family. He calculated the years. Great-Grandmother Rosie had been barely sixty-five when she’d passed.
He knew the names of their other children now, thanks to Aunt Anna, and so he looked for their graves. Of course, his grandfather had been laid to rest in New York, and he knew that Edward, the youngest, had been buried in Normandy, at the American cemetery there. He’d known, because his father had mentioned, that one of his father’s brothers had made his life and died in Montana and the other two had stayed overseas after the war. Now he understood the impact of that reality.
Here lay his great-grandparents, for all intents and purposes, alone. Jason wasn’t certain what that….desertion had done to them, emotionally. But this epiphany, this now heart-knowledge, sure as hell was affecting him. Jason focused on the name, Rosie O’Toole Benedict. He thought of his mother, of how she would be if he and the rest of her children were never to go home again.
Jason felt heartbroken for a woman whose name he hadn’t known until today.
Those weren’t the days of rapid transport or easy communication. He supposed his great-grandmother might have heard from her sons and grandsons via phone calls or letters. And maybe, they might have visited a couple of times.
God, I hope they at least did that.
Benches had been set at various places throughout this very well-kept cemetery. It feels more like a garden or a park than a final resting place. Rose bushes grew intermittently, and there were tall trees—what he’d learned were called live oaks—keeping the benches mostly in shade.
He chose a bench and sat, needing the peace here, and, yes, maybe something of the essence of his forebears, to process all he’d experienced since coming to this town. He’d learned so much, and not just about his family but about himself. He realized, as he let his gaze wander, that he was between the grave of Kate’s husbands and their parents and Charles, Samuel, and Madeline Kennedy Benedict.
The sound of a light, brisk step snagged his attention, and he looked toward that sound. Grandma Kate, carrying a basket and wearing a straw hat, was walking toward him. Jason got to his feet. He’d thought he’d wanted to be alone, but now he knew that wasn’t so at all. He found it easy to smile at the nonagenarian, because he really was very happy to see her.
“It’s a good day for grave sitting,” Kate said. “May I join you?”
“Please do.” He waited until she sat then took his place beside her. “Grave sitting. I’m not sure if that was what I was doing, or not. I’d just been to the museum, and this…” He looked around, taking in his surroundings. “This seemed to be the logical next step.”
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br /> “It’s a lot to take in, the history of this family. It’s so for those who were born and raised here. So I know it’s especially a lot for those who have recently discovered Lusty.”
Jason felt his face heat. “Not so recently for me, really, Grandma Kate.”
“Two years wasn’t all that long ago, dear boy.” Kate looked around at what, to her, must be a very familiar place.
He nodded toward the grave of his great-grandparents. “Did none of their children ever come home?”
“For visits, a couple of times, yes. But not to live here. Emerson settled in Montana after the war. A good number of his grandsons are here, now. But Howard and Lincoln? They came, each of them, once to visit and then again for their mother’s funeral.”
“I wonder if that’s why she died so young. Because her sons more or less deserted her.”
“We all treated them as grandparents of our own children, those of us who lived here, Benedicts, Kendalls, and Jessops alike. We were family, and that was what mattered most. But between you and me?” Kate sighed. “Rosie’s youngest had died, and that was a heart wound to her. I never fully understood that, until I lost a child.” Kate nodded toward one of the gardens he’d noticed earlier, in the near corner and tucked against the small picket fence that surrounded the yard.
“Those are antique roses. They were a particular favorite of my daughter, Maria. She and her own daughter, Amy, perished in a plane crash in 1990. The accident happened over the Atlantic Ocean, and they were never found. My husbands and I chose that garden as a way of memorializing them both here.”
Jason saw pruning shears and gloves in the basket and reasoned Kate had come today to tend that garden.
They sat quietly for a few moments. Jason didn’t mind the silence. It felt good, here. Not just a place for holding bones, but maybe secrets, too. The kind of secrets that give meaning to a life.
“I recall a similar day, forty-four years ago,” Kate said. “I encountered a young woman here, a woman I’d never met. She was sitting on a blanket, right over there.” Kate pointed ahead and to the right. “That young woman looked as if—well, she looked as if she was all alone in the world and completely overwhelmed. Which, as it turned out, she had been and was. You see, she had believed herself truly orphaned and alone in the world, with the recent deaths of her grandmother and then her mother. But in the aftermath of those two stinging traumas, she discovered that her grandmother, Maude Parker, had been born and raised in Lusty.”
“So that made her family to you.”
Kate’s smile beamed. “Yes, and she still is and even more so, because the young Miss Parker married my younger sons, Carson and Michael.”
“You’re talking about Aunt Abigail!”
“I am, indeed. She never learned who her father or even her grandfather were. But she came here and found family, and her destiny.”
“It matters.” He looked at the stone memorials and the garden. He took in the park-like setting and understood it was a park, one to be visited and enjoyed. “It matters, because there were relationships. Not just lives lived from birth to death in the pursuit of goals. Not just facts and figures, successes and failures. But lives lived, touching other lives.”
“It matters, yes. And that’s the point of it all, don’t you think?”
“I’m beginning to. I’m remembering a warning about gaining the world and losing one’s soul.”
“Precisely. In the end, of all the things we acquire and things we accomplish, it’s the love, the family, and the friendships, the relationships made and the memories that remain. The building you work in won’t ache for you when you’re gone the way your loved ones will.”
Jason shook his head. “I don’t know why I let myself get so…so damn rigid in my thinking, as if people, hell as if emotions didn’t matter.”
Kate opened her mouth and then closed it again. Jason perceived she wanted to say something but hesitated to share what was on her mind. Right then and there, he knew he very much wanted to know what Grandma Kate had to say.
“Please don’t censure your words. I thought I came to this spot to be alone. Now I think I’m here because I need to hear whatever it is you have to say.”
Kate met his gaze and nodded. “All right, then, I will. Do you remember your early school experiences? Kindergarten through fourth or fifth grade?”
That’s a strange segue and an even stranger question. Jason tilted his head to the side. “Not very well, no.” Then he sat a bit straighter. There was one thought he could share. “I don’t think I liked school at all until sixth or seventh grade. That’s when I discovered a book. A wonderful book called The Mind Key by Travis Pendleton.”
“The book that made everything click for you.” Kate’s words echoed what his father and grandfather had said. And how he’d been thinking of that book for years.
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Your grandfather wrote to me about it,” Kate said. “He and your parents were so thrilled that you finally developed the ability to comprehend the words on the page. Once you hit that milestone, you never looked back.”
Something in the way Kate spoke stirred something in his memory. But it was something that remained elusive. “I’ve forgotten something, haven’t I? Something important.”
Kate nodded. “In third grade you were diagnosed with a learning disability. Not a severe one, mind, but it was enough to impede your progress and frustrate the heck out of you. Your parents hired a special tutor, and you worked with her and your teachers. Previous teachers had proclaimed you were lazy, but you weren’t. You’d thought you were stupid, you see, but of course you weren’t that, either.”
Jason felt a shock wave travel through him. He hadn’t thought about those early grades in years, and yet the moment Grandma Kate began to speak about that time in his life, he knew she spoke the truth.
“You had that breakthrough with that book, and you finally made the connection between the words on the page and the thoughts they inspired.”
“My God. I remembered reading that book, must have been five or six times, about setting goals and achieving them. And it was as if I finally got it. That’s why I thought nothing made sense until then.”
“You did indeed finally ‘get it’! Who could blame you for holding that breakthrough dear?”
“I don’t know why I didn’t remember about having that disability. I think that was the only thing that mattered to me when I was a kid.” An image formed in his mind, one where he cried himself to sleep at night. “Why didn’t I remember?”
“Because you overcame it. And likely, because you were teased by some of your classmates. Children can be cruel.” Kate nodded. “The human subconscious has a tendency of helping us, especially when we’re young, by tucking the icky stuff away.”
“I don’t remember the teasing exactly, only that I hated going to school. I mean I really hated it. Until that book.” Jason sat back. He was glad to have spent this time with Kate. “That’s probably why I felt the way I did about Alice. From the moment she was born, a part of me must have remembered and been determined to protect her from all of that.”
“I have no doubt about that. You were a very good big brother to her, too.”
Jason smirked. “Yeah, I was. Until I wasn’t.”
“I’d say you’ve made some important discoveries since you’ve been here,” Kate said. “Now you have to decide what you’re going to do about them.”
“Yes.” He turned to Kate. “Is this why you wanted me to stay for a while?”
“First, let me ask you a question. When was the last time you took an antacid tablet?”
Jason received his second shock of the day. “I…I don’t think I’ve had any since we decided to stay for a while.”
“Good. And that is part of your answer, right there. As well, you were tired and needed a break. When Maggie told me you’d booked a room, I thought, if we gave you the chance, you might decide to stick around for awhile, so yes
.” She grinned and then leaned in a bit closer. “So we had a house made ready for you and Phillip so you’d have a space of your own while you were here. But everything was always up to you. And so is whatever you choose to do, going forward. Including this—you don’t have to leave here, if you don’t want to. That house you and Phillip are in is yours for however long you want it.”
Kate’s words didn’t surprise him. He nodded slowly. “I still have a lot of thinking to do. And some of it, not alone.” He needed to talk to Phillip, and he needed to talk to Leesa.
He sat back and let his surroundings fill him. He did have a lot of thinking to do. And he had plenty of time in which to do it.
A vibration in his pocket announced a phone call. He hesitated, not wanting to let reality intrude on this moment. Wow, talk about a complete one-eighty.
Whoever was calling wouldn’t likely be a business contact. He pulled out his phone then pressed Accept when he saw Phillip’s name.
“Hey, Phil—”
“I’m at the sheriff’s office with Leesa. She’s okay, but we need you here.”
“On my way.” He ended the call and turned to Grandma Kate.
“Trouble?” Then she shrugged. “I’ve good hearing.”
“Phil didn’t sound stressed, but there’s something, because...”
“Because otherwise why be at Adam’s office. Go. Let me know if I can help.”
Jason leaned over and kissed Kate’s cheek. “You already have, Grandma Kate, more than you could possibly know. Thank you.”
Then he left the past behind and ran toward his present.
Chapter Fourteen
Leesa never would have believed the difference it made, having both Jason and Phillip there with her, sitting on either side of her, with a hand clasped by each of them—if she wasn’t living it right then.
Her experience of marriage, of a relationship, she knew now, was so far skewed as to be no experience at all.
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