Navy Christmas (Whidbey Island)

by Geri Krotow

  It still stung that they’d been hit on U.S. territory, in Pearl Harbor.

  “Wake up, Henry!”

  “I’m up, I’m up!” He zipped up his flight suit on the run. They all slept in their suits when they were on ready alert, prepared to go in an instant. Gravel and jungle compost crunched under his feet as he pounded toward the runway.

  Fifteen pilots crowded into the ready room, a makeshift shack near the end of the runway.

  They all stopped in shock as they recognized their briefing officer.

  General Claire Lee Chennault. Founder of the American Volunteer Group—AVG—that made up the entirety of the Flying Tigers. General Chennault was famous for showing up, unannounced, for briefings just like this one.

  The mission had to be crucial.

  “You’re launching in five minutes, gentlemen. The Japanese are on their way to take out Rangoon.” Rangoon was a port city crucial to the Allied war effort. Henry and his colleagues were silent. While no mission was ever the same as the last, their past several had been to protect Rangoon. Three of their P-40 Warhawks hadn’t come back in the last mission he’d flown, thanks to the murderous pilots who flew highly maneuverable Ki-43s against them. It was overwhelming to think about the sheer numbers of war machines, both on the water and in the air, that the Japanese had. But one good hit could take an aircraft out. That was Henry’s job and what he had to stay focused on.

  He wanted to get in, take out as many of the enemy as possible and get back to base before they even knew what hit them.

  The general finished his briefing and within twenty minutes Henry was clawing for altitude in his P-40 Warhawk on Cappy’s wing on the way to Rangoon. It was pitch-dark, but by the time they got there, the morning sun would be their guide to the bombers they’d take down.

  Henry didn’t like the transit part of any mission. It allowed too much time to think, even during the short twenty-to thirty-minute run to Rangoon.

  He pulled out the photo of Sarah and Dottie that he kept in his front right chest pocket and gave it a quick kiss before turning to the last leg of their ingress.

  “Bandits ten o’clock!” Cappy’s voice crackled, and Henry watched him break hard to port to go after the Japanese fighter. Another Ki-43 was headed straight for Henry. He aimed, fired, and knew a bittersweet satisfaction when the aircraft took a hit and started to spin out.

  “Cripes, they’re hard to hit!” he shouted into his mike, warning his squadron mates that the Ki-43 was every bit as maneuverable as the general had warned, and a challenge to the AVG. On previous missions the Japanese Ki-21 “Sally” bombers had been unescorted by the Ki-43 fighters and been easier targets.

  Henry took out two more fighters, maneuvering to get the enemy bombers in his sights. One was in his line of fire but he needed to close the gap. After a tense five minutes of outshooting a second Ki-43, Henry fired on his first bomber of the mission. It didn’t go down right away, but when his ammo hit its fuel tank, a fiery ball engulfed the aircraft. Henry throttled back and turned to starboard, avoiding the debris of the explosion and coming face-to-face with a second bomber. He had to fly under the belly of the bomber and throttle back before he could line up on the bomber, firing into the cockpit as he raced by the port side of the war bird as it jerked into a nosedive.

  “Come on, where are you?” Henry looked for more fighters to take out until the second wave of Japanese bombers showed up.

  Thwack.

  It was much quieter, stealthier, than Henry would have expected. His bird had been hit, and he watched in horror as smoke from the burning engine began to fill up his cockpit. He’d lost control of his plane, and was headed toward the ocean at deadly speed.

  “No!”

  He had to get back to Sarah.

  The fighter who’d hit him was below him to starboard, obviously not concerned that Henry had a chance at survival. With what little maneuverability he had left in the bird, Henry tilted the wings to give him a chance of hitting the bastard. Henry gritted his teeth and pulled up on his throttle. Nothing.

  “Damn it!”

  He wasn’t in a dive; that was a small consolation. He’d lost too much altitude to bail out, however. He was going down with the aircraft.

  The ocean raced past him and he made out several spots of white sand circling lush green growth on the horizon.

  “Aim for the islands,” General Chennault told them during training at this last brief: if they had to go down, land on one of the uninhabited islands that surrounded southern Thailand.

  Henry aimed for the one with the widest beach and prayed he’d be able to land without the bird flipping over and trapping him in the cockpit during the inevitable crash landing.

  He had minutes until his fate was determined. Seconds, perhaps.

  Sarah was going to kill him. If the crash didn’t.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Whidbey Island

  Thanksgiving Day

  JONAS GROANED AS his oldest brother Paul swiped the basketball from his sweaty palms.

  “You’re not going to get the house back, bro.” Paul dribbled the ball in the corner where his garage met the driveway. Paul’s know-it-all-attorney smirk irritated Jonas.

  “Watch me.” Jonas held up his hands to catch the swift pass Paul attempted to make to Jim, and loped up to the basket to dunk the ball.

  “Let it go, man, Paul’s right.” Jim caught the rebound and winked at his girlfriend, Lucy, before he attempted a long shot. Jonas intercepted the ball as it bounced off the rim.

  “Stop showing off for your girl, fire-boy.” Jonas loved teasing Jim, the family fireman. Jim had always been fascinated by explosions as a kid—including blowing up their Lego models with firecrackers. The name had stuck when he went to firefighting school.

  John, a successful landscaper and closest in age to Jonas, hovered behind Jonas, not allowing him to attempt a basket. Jonas long-bounced the ball to Paul.

  Jonas had been back an entire two weeks from deployment, and they were all gathered at Paul’s house for Thanksgiving. He finally felt as though he was shaking off the last of his jet lag. He’d even made it through his first week at work. He laughed at how good it felt to be with his brothers, all four of them in the same place again. Thanksgiving dinner was going to be brutal when they sat down to the turkey Paul’s wife, Mary, was preparing with John’s wife, Jackie, but Jonas was grateful they were doing it together—all four of them in the same place again.

  It was their first holiday season without Dottie.

  “Are we sure they got the right person?”

  Jonas’s question was as effective as a fire hose as his three brothers froze in their places. No one else had mentioned the arrest, the trial or the sentencing of the mentally imbalanced woman charged with Dottie’s murder. Apparently they didn’t expect him to, either.

  “Go help Mary and Jackie in the kitchen, will you, Lucy?” Jim, the second oldest, spoke quietly to his girlfriend.

  “Of course.”

  They waited until the storm door closed and Lucy was safely out of earshot.

  “Why the hell are you asking that now, Jonas?” Paul took over his eldest-brother role.

  “Yeah, happy effing Thanksgiving. Pass the gravy.” Jim dribbled the ball.

  “Give him a break, he wasn’t here.” John was quick as always to stick up for their little brother.

  “Why don’t you all just kiss my ass? I was gone and I only know what you told me, which wasn’t a whole hell of a lot.”

  “That’s because you were at war and didn’t need the distractions. The psycho woman who killed her was deemed mentally ill. Jackie has to diagnose these kinds of folks all the time.” John owned a thriving landscaping business on Whidbey. Jackie was a psychiatrist.

  “Does that mean she’s locked up for life?” Jonas
hated opening the wound for his brothers, but he had to ask the questions that email, internet searches and long-distance phone calls couldn’t answer for him. He needed to be with them, see their expressions. Needed to know that everything that could be done was done.

  “She should be. Laws change all the time, and where she’ll be incarcerated may change. She’s criminally insane. She also got away with proving she never intended to kill Dottie.” Paul, ever the lawyer, kept his voice low, his expression neutral as he delivered the bombshell.

  “What?” Outrage blasted through Jonas. “How do you kill someone deliberately by drowning and get the jury to agree that it was a mistake?”

  Jim put a hand on Jonas’s shoulder. “You’re not asking anything we haven’t all gone over more than once. Dottie could conceivably have had a stroke while she was on that underwater treadmill.”

  “AquaTracker.” Paul spoke up. Paul ran a good-size legal firm on Whidbey and knew the case inside out.

  “Yeah, the AquaTracker in the physical therapist’s clinic. The murderer set Dottie up to go under the water, supposedly just for a few seconds. But it ended up being minutes, and at her age, Dottie didn’t stand a chance.”

  Jim shook his head. “I was there with our fire engine, Jonas. Dottie was gone before we started CPR.”

  “I’m so sorry I wasn’t here to help you all through the trial.” Jonas meant the words more than he was able to express. They sounded inadequate to him, though. They didn’t truly describe his visceral reaction to the murder of the woman he’d loved so much. The woman who’d taken him in and given him what he’d lost when their mother died unexpectedly, leaving their dad a widower at forty-four with four boys to raise.

  “It’s worked out, Jonas. Believe me, it’s better that you, of all of us, weren’t here. You would’ve beaten yourself up for not being able to save her yourself.” Paul knew what it was like to hear about a death that could have been prevented with the right people there.

  “It took me a long time to get over seeing her in that way, man.” Jim ran his fingers through his hair.

  “You’re probably right. But still, I hate that you all had to handle it without my help.”

  “There wasn’t anything to do. By the time we got the call...” Jim spun the basketball on his index finger, his expression blank.

  Jonas took it all in—his three brothers, the crisp air, the scent of roasting turkey coming out of the house through the chimneys and back door.

  “It’s just not right. Dottie should be here.”

  “We’re lucky we had her as long as we did.” Ever the optimist, Paul shoved his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and rocked on his sneakers. “As horrible as how she died was, we didn’t have to see her suffer for years with an awful disease.”

  Anger mixed with the frustration that simmered in Jonas. He saved people for a living but he couldn’t change what had happened to Dottie. “And now I find out I don’t have the house I always thought I would. The house she promised me. What have I missed?”

  “You need to get over it, brother. Dottie wasn’t crazy and I’m sure she had her reasons.” Jim tossed the ball to Jonas, who grasped it to his chest. Just above where the ache was from all the loss. Dottie was gone, his career was in for a serious plateau during the next three years and his dream of refurbishing the family home had disappeared.

  “Serena didn’t grow up with us, but Dottie had the right to leave the house to whoever she wanted to.” Paul’s deep voice rumbled with emotion. “I realize that’s easy for me to say—Dottie’s place wasn’t the first home I remember.”

  “No, it’s not.” Jonas dribbled the ball three times and then passed it to Paul. “I don’t even remember our mom—Dottie’s always been my mom.”

  “Are you still set on trying to buy the house back?” Jim had expressed his opinion that he thought Jonas was causing himself too much grief when Jonas emailed them all and said he’d try this tactic.

  “Call me crazy, but yes, it’s worth a shot.”

  “Serena and her son have been living there for over six months. Doubtful that she’ll up and sell it to you.” Jim stared at Jonas. “And she’s got something with Dottie none of us ever had—a blood connection. By rights she’s a Forsyth, and Dottie’s father always meant for the farm to stay in the family.”

  “Dottie accepted us as her family the minute she fell in love with Dad.” Jonas couldn’t shake the image of Dottie’s grief when his father had passed away—he’d been her one true love.

  “Winter’s setting in. When she sees how cold it gets, and once we get a good rainstorm that gets the roof leaking like it’s bound to, she’ll be happy to move out. This isn’t Texas.”

  “I represented Serena during the initial investigation until she was cleared of any wrongdoing. Serena’s a nice woman, and her kid is sweet. She’s a Marine widow. It’s what Dottie would have wanted. They deserve a new start, and I’m glad she had time to get to know Dottie even if it was too short.”

  Leave it to Paul to defend the interloper.

  “Shut up, Paul. Obviously you’ve been listening to Mary. Mary thinks everyone deserves a second chance. If you’re so crazy about the lady who stole our house right out from under us, why didn’t you invite her to Thanksgiving?”

  Jonas’s heated comment made the others laugh. Mary was a social worker who’d worked with many of the same clients as the physical therapy clinic had.

  “Mary did, in fact. But Serena already had other plans.”

  “Probably to redo the entire house.” Jonas knew it was her house, no matter how much Dottie’s not leaving it to him stung. But he couldn’t budge from his position, not in front of his brothers.

  “Quit it, Jonas.” Paul was in full oldest-brother mode. “Serena is a great woman, and it wasn’t her fault that Dottie died, nor is it her fault that our uncle was her biological father. Shit happens.”

  “Do you have the hots for her, man?” John looked so sincere Jonas almost laughed...while he waited for Paul’s answer.

  “Give me a break, you squirt. You know Mary’s the only woman for me. Serena’s got a legal résumé any firm would scoop up. I hope it’s mine that gets her.”

  “You want to hire her?” Jim’s curiosity was more ambivalent.

  “I offered her a position at the firm whenever she’s ready to get back to the law. Although with the way some of us are behaving, I’m going to lose her to my rival firm in Langley.” He referred to the city on the south side of the island, closer to Seattle, as he shot a mean stare at Jonas.

  “Whoa, I didn’t mean to rile everyone up. You want to hire her, go ahead. I don’t want to get in the middle of her life. I’m still sore about the house. But you’re right—she’s a nice lady. Her kid’s cool, too.” He looked at each of them for a moment. They needed his sour attitude like they needed dried-out turkey.

  “So you’ve seen her since you’ve been back?” Paul missed nothing.

  “She and Pepé came by the clinic. I should go visit her at the house and let her get to know me better. Hopefully she’ll realize I’m not some ogre intent on stealing her new home.”

  “Aren’t you, Jonas?” Paul’s voice reflected Jonas’s conscience.

  He sighed, spinning the ball on his finger. “I was, I am— If there’s any chance she’ll give the house up, I don’t want to risk it going to some stranger.”

  “I still think Dottie had some reason for doing this, other than Serena showing up. Dottie could have left Serena the money and you the house. Why didn’t she?” Jim cocked a brow at Jonas, his knowing gaze annoying as hell.

  “Let’s leave the problem-solving to Paul. Dottie wanted the house kept in her family—her biological family.” As he said the words Jonas didn’t completely believe them. Dottie had always had a motive for her actions. She hadn’t become the most succe
ssful Realtor on Whidbey Island for nothing.

  He looked at his brothers. “It is what it is. Nothing we can do right now. So...let’s play ball.”

  Jonas tried to get his mind off his heartache and his brothers off the topic of the house and back onto basketball. But he made a mental note to ask Mary a few questions about Serena. It never hurt to go into battle with an assortment of ammunition.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Whidbey Island

  Friday after Thanksgiving

  SERENA LISTENED AS Pepé sang along to the music from Walt Disney’s Frozen while she drove them back on island. They’d spent Thanksgiving Day at Beyond the Stars as planned.

  Since they’d lost Dottie this past summer, she and Pepé were alone on Thanksgiving. She could have taken them back to Texas, but she wasn’t ready to face her extended Mexican-American family at a big holiday. Not yet. She and Pepé needed time to forge their own traditions, their own family way of doing things. She sent up a silent prayer of gratitude that Juanita had been so gracious about her decision to stay on Whidbey through the holidays. Otherwise, it would have been hard to fight her mother’s pleas to come home to Texas for Christmas.

  Pepé had made many friends in his school on Whidbey and their families had in turn befriended Serena, so she never felt alone.

  But when Val Di Paola, the director of BTS, had sent out the Thanksgiving invitation, Serena had jumped at it. Pepé had been excited to go back to San Juan Island, too, where he’d learned to jump off a diving board into the deep end of a pool.

  Serena smiled. She could still hear Pepé’s squeal of delight when he found out that Val kept the BTS pool and sauna tub heated and running year-round, at her husband Lucas’s insistence. Pepé had frolicked in the water, and made Serena stay in the pool, as well, until they’d resembled the dried cranberries that had been in the turkey stuffing.

  The air was crisp and clear and she was glad to be off the ferry after their rough crossing. Ferries were a necessity in Puget Sound, but Serena was a land girl through and through—give her a four-by-four truck any day. She drove the crossover hybrid, a fuel-conserving SUV that she’d traded in her truck for, off the ferry with care. The water was beautiful but bouncing around on it when the gales blew wasn’t her idea of fun.