by Geri Krotow
It was a floating death trap. The Allied submarines were going to take all of them out.
So this was what it came down to? He’d survived being shot down, being captured, to be set afloat in a Japanese tin can that would see the bottom of the Pacific before it got anywhere?
More yelling. He was almost relieved he didn’t know Japanese. He’d probably kill at least one of his captors with his bare hands before they drove their bayonets through him.
The swift crack of something hard on his skull drove him to his knees, bright spots floating in front of him above the hot sand that burned his skin.
He saw the carved toy airplane fall out of his front pocket, onto the sweltering ground.
“No!” His hand reached for his one link to home, all he had left for Sarah and Dottie. The wooden carving disappeared as the butt of a rifle crushed first the miniature P-40, and then came down a second time to crush Henry’s hand.
Pain made him gasp for breath and his logic fought with the primal anger that enveloped him.
“If you get taken, stay calm. We’ll come get you. Don’t give anyone a reason to kill you.”
The words of one of his instructors spoke as if from the grave.
The only thing he had to hang on to was the one place in his heart they’d never destroy.
Sarah. Dottie.
Family.
Philippines
April 1942
“THEY’RE GOING TO make us all walk to the end.” Bill Payton from Alabama was behind Henry, his words floating up to Henry from time to time as they crossed the Philippine jungle. Henry still couldn’t believe he’d survived the hellish transit from Thailand to the PI in that floating piece of crap. Once they landed he’d been relieved to be shoved into a group of seemingly thousands of Americans and Filipinos. Until he realized that the Americans had surrendered and the Japanese were intent on getting them all to one camp miles away.
Henry had only known the Philippines as a point on the globe before. Now, he felt that the Filipinos, along with all their Allies were his brothers. He’d seen what the Japanese had done to the natives when the tank ship they’d transported him on arrived to the PI. They’d slaughtered them by the hundreds, right before his eyes. He and his fellow prisoners knew it was a warning to them. Comply or die.
Screw them. He’d outlive these bastards who held him captive. He’d get back home to Whidbey. In one piece.
“They need our labor. They can’t afford to let all of us die.”
He muttered the words over his shoulder to his buddy, hoping the sound of their feet dragging through the overgrown jungle would muffle their sound.
Thwack.
The pain never got easier. He’d have thought by now that he’d be numb to whatever the bastards wanted to do to him. Then he’d witness or experience another form of torture heretofore unimaginable.
Trickling dampness that flowed thicker than the perspiration that covered him from head to toe told him that his back had been sliced open. Henry knew he had to keep going, keep walking, as if he hadn’t been struck a potentially fatal blow in the dank, humid jungle.
Infection was omnipresent without running water and soap to clean up wounds.
“How much longer?” he dared whisper to the Filipino, Tommy, who marched next to him. Tommy spoke English and Japanese, but their captors hadn’t caught on that he knew the enemy’s language.
“They said something about Camp O’Donnell.” Tommy’s voice was sober, tinged with fear.
“I heard that, too.” He could make out the English words spoken by his captors amid the static of their language.
“It’s fifty more miles.”
Henry didn’t reply. One of their four guards had walked up next to them, staring at him with dark, angry eyes. Henry was willing to die for his country but no sense giving this loser a reason to take him out before his time.
Sarah.
He stumbled, the soldier’s shirt in front of him brushing his nose. The cloth was rough against his sunburned skin, and Henry imagined his face was dripping blood instead of the sweat that had been a constant companion since he crash-landed his P-40.
He kept his faith, given no other choice.
He believed he’d live to see more days.
* * *
THE THIRD DAY Henry noticed he wasn’t sweating any longer. You couldn’t sweat when you weren’t taking in any water. They weren’t allowed anything for their thirst. Stopping for a leaf, a flower, in the hope of finding a drop or two of liquid, was reason for instant execution. The most common form Henry had witnessed was decapitation.
Local Filipinos had tried to aid some of them at their own peril. Two rows of men in front of Henry, Tommy and Bill had been either bayoneted or beheaded when they broke ranks to run down to a tiny stream that paralleled their path.
Henry was surprised to see blood flow from their wounds. Who had anything left inside?
More yelling, more groans. He’d had to let his bowels go sometime during the afternoon and continue to walk on. Otherwise, he’d never get back home.
Would home still be there for any of them?
* * *
AFTER SIX DAYS they reached not where Tommy had said they were going, Camp O’Donnell, but a place called San Fernando. Henry didn’t care anymore.
He’d walked through hell and seen images he knew would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Maimed, dismembered bodies. Men and women beheaded, cut down in the midst of a breath. Women’s bodies littered the road in some spots and had clearly been raped before their deaths. How could people do this to one another?
He was afraid to bring his memories of Sarah and Dottie to his awareness. Afraid of tainting them with the evil he walked through. Without them, he feared for his survival.
* * *
AT HIS FIRST sight of the cargo train, Henry wanted to cry with relief. Finally, a better mode of travel. No more walking through the thick heat. They’d get to the camp sooner, wouldn’t they?
His relief lasted until he was shoved into a car, not knowing if the air could reach them once the Japanese shut the metal doors. If there’d be enough air for all of them. How many would live until the end of the train ride?
* * *
HENRY SPLIT THE pile of rocks one by one, never looking up from his task. No talking allowed. He and his fellow prisoners had to wait until nighttime to attempt communication or risk death.
His back muscles screamed but he was past the point of letting the pain stop him. Instead, it drove him, proved he was still alive.
He still had hope—hope he’d make it back to Sarah.
Camp O’Donnell had the American sign on it, but the flag with the rising sun flew over what had been American soil only days earlier.
Where the hell was MacArthur?
By Henry’s count they’d left the port with at least ninety to one hundred men. Thirty of them stumbled into Camp O’Donnell. Maybe a few more had survived, but the train journey had shoved together men from different groups.
He’d never been in a place so crowded, not even during training exercises on the ground back in California. He and thousands of his closest allies were summarily hosed down and left to dry. Exhaustion seeped from every pore, and the stink of his skin should have made him vomit on the spot. In some macabre way he was adjusting to the constant rank smells, the sight of the sore-riddled faces of his brothers-in-arms.
Henry watched his captors as they ordered him from one impossible labor task to another. Did they have families? How could anyone with a mother treat a fellow human being this way?
His stomach sank as he comprehended the awful truth. He’d probably have years to contemplate that question. If his body held out.
Watching his brothers fight alongside him, he learned that it w
asn’t his body’s failure that would get him in the end. It would be the death of his spirit.
His loss of hope that he’d ever see Sarah or Dottie again.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Whidbey Island
Second week of December
AFTER A WEEK of unusual cold for early December, the clouds parted and sunshine bathed Whidbey Island in a soft white light. Because the days were short, Jonas had been ready and was halfway to Mount Baker before the sun rose. His skis had sat in the garage for too long and it was time to take advantage of being only two hours from a snow-covered mountain.
The quiet of the slopes soothed his anxiety as to when, or if, he’d ever feel like himself again.
How could he be, when he’d watched such horror unfold in his ER in Afghanistan? When he couldn’t save those children, couldn’t give them a chance at a peace like this?
It had been a war zone. It was beyond his control. He’d saved so many lives. That wasn’t enough to erase his guilt, his sorrow.
Usually he’d either have hooked back up with an old girlfriend by now, for laughs, or found a new one. Someone he could stay warm with through the chilly nights.
Instead, he had to contend with a woman who, until two weeks ago, had been a complete stranger to him. She lived in the house he’d grown up in.
His house.
No, not anymore.
It was Dottie’s to give to whomever she wished.
Still, what had changed her mind? She’d promised him the house long ago. They’d all joked about it, after his brothers had moved on and found their own places, and his Navy career had brought him back to Whidbey through no small effort on his part. He’d agreed to deploy this last time so he’d have his pick for his next tour—and he got it. Whidbey Island.
Yet he was still in the town house he’d lived in or rented out for the past fifteen years. He’d bought it as an investment after he was commissioned in the navy medical corps. It was his way of showing Dottie he planned on a future here in Puget Sound. This was his home.
Dottie knew that. And yet, she’d willed her house to a woman she’d barely met, biological niece or not.
What did any of them really know about Serena?
He ignored the self-recrimination that told him to give Serena a break. It was clear that she was the real deal. She wasn’t some kind of treasure-seeker.
The ski lift made light work of the slope he’d taken twenty minutes to descend, and within minutes he was back at the crest of the mountain, ready to hit the trail again.
Jonas paused at the edge and took in what he could see of Snoqualmie Valley. It was partially obstructed from his view by low clouds, but the sun shone off the Skagit River as it snaked through the fields that would be abloom with tulips come April. There, in the far distance, under what looked like a huge puff of cotton candy, sat Whidbey Island.
Home.
Did it really matter what house he lived in? The Pacific Northwest was as much a part of him as nursing was. Whidbey healed him the way he hoped he helped his patients heal.
It did matter, damn it. That was all he had left of Dottie—her house. Their family home.
Jonas pushed off and started to zigzag down the mountainside, taking it easy and breathing in the crisp cold air through his balaclava.
Dottie had knitted it for him years ago—he loved it. The newer microfibers were probably just as warm, but they weren’t made by Dottie.
“Why did you do it, Dottie?” He spoke to himself as he swished around a bend, narrowly avoiding a group of fir trees weighed down with globs of fresh snow. The snow sat so perfectly on each branch, it looked like the Grinch’s house could be around the next bend.
Dottie didn’t answer his question, which he thought was a good sign for his mental health. What he was certain she would’ve advised against was going too fast, putting pressure on Serena. Good things take time and patience, she’d tell him, like his medical degrees had.
Instead, he’d barreled his way into Serena’s life. Not to mention her son’s.
Jonas hadn’t been at his best at the Fords’ party.
When he’d seen her walk into the place, looking like the woman of his dreams, the logical part of his brain had stopped functioning.
But hey, he was an adult. Why couldn’t he have taken a moment to get himself together and act like one? No, instead he’d reacted as if he were a teenager.
It wasn’t the kiss—which had been pretty damned fantastic—that annoyed him but his crappy timing. He should’ve told her right away that he had the options on the lots surrounding the house.
Then when he kissed her he wouldn’t have felt like such a fake.
He slowed his pace, coming to a stop at the edge of the path where the view once again opened up to the valley below. The run was at the halfway mark, and he needed to take it easy if he planned to stay up here all morning. His deployment had been at a lower altitude, and his cardio limited to the machines in the base gym. That had been predicated by the heat. If it was too hot, no workout. Simply existing in the hellish conditions had been its own workout.
After the two Afghani siblings had died, he’d wished he could get on a pair of skis and head for the Himalayas, never to return to the real world.
War was like that. It made a man want to take off forever.
You’ve made it back.
He had. There wasn’t another mission pressing down on him, no rush of mortally wounded victims coming through the ER at NAS Whidbey. Sure, disaster could always strike, but if the past two weeks had been any indication, his life was going to be decidedly routine for the next few years.
Exactly what he’d asked for, thinking he’d be rehabbing and living in the farmhouse.
So why couldn’t he build a house on the adjacent land? The land had originally been in the Forsyth family for that very reason—to provide places for succeeding generations to build on. Homes would need to get bigger, more modern. Dottie knew that, but she’d never lived to see her dream of owning all the land, recreating the original property, come true.
Still, he could make it happen.
Serena was his only obstacle to achieving Dottie’s goal. Jonas had all the time in the world. Maybe if he kept telling himself that, he’d start to believe it. He really wanted to convince Serena that it was in her best interest to give the house up.
Kissing her had been stupid, but it had also been unavoidable. All that heat between them had to go somewhere. Now that they both knew how hot their chemistry was, they could either agree to a physical relationship with no strings, or they could avoid each other entirely.
Jonas grunted.
No way in hell would Serena take him into her bed. Not with her son around, and not while she knew he had one basic motive—to get his house back.
He’d have to appeal to her intellect and her good nature. Maybe she wanted to stay on Whidbey—fine. But it didn’t have to be in his farmhouse. And if he offered to buy it from her at a price that could guarantee Pepé’s college education as well as her own security for the foreseeable future, how could she refuse him?
She said she’s financially secure.
There was that.
As he descended the remaining part of the mountain, Jonas focused on the trail in front of him and tried to knock all thoughts of Serena Delgado from his mind. His mind wasn’t the problem, however.
The problem was he could still taste that damned kiss.
* * *
“THANKS FOR MAKING time for me, Paul.”
“Trust me, it’s my privilege. After you.” Paul Scott, Jonas’s oldest brother, motioned for Serena to go ahead of him into the large conference room. A long oak table occupied the center of the space, with ten executive chairs around it. A full sheet of glass window served as one of the walls, and Serena noted
that her heels sank into the rich carpet.
“Have a seat.”
She chose the first chair on one side while Paul sat at the head of the table.
“I’m thrilled you’re considering us, Serena. Your résumé is impressive, and with your expertise as a Gold Star spouse, you can relate to so many of our families on the island.”
She smiled. “It’s not a professional skill I ever wanted to have, but yes, you’re right. I know that I’ve learned how to navigate military red tape, which is something survivors as well as active-duty family members need to do.”
“Can I ask what made you decide to come in now?” Paul’s eyes were the same blue as Jonas’s. She had to make a conscious effort to stop the comparisons. This was her interview, Pepé’s and her future.
Jonas had nothing to do with it.
“I’m feeling settled. Not that I didn’t before, but when Dottie died...well, you know.”
He nodded.
Paul did know—he’d been her attorney when Dottie died. It could have been a conflict of interest as she’d warned him, but he’d insisted on representing her, on the recommendation of her boss at the time, Drew Brett. Drew was the physical therapist with whom she’d found her initial job. Paul had offered to represent her not just because of Drew, but because “Dottie loved you and this is what she’d want.”
He’d quickly ascertained that Serena wasn’t a suspect in the view of the Island County Sheriff’s Department, and she’d been grateful. Dealing with Dottie’s loss had seemed insurmountable at the time, since it was so soon after she’d adjusted as well as she could to losing Phil. She’d worried about Pepé’s reaction to their second loss in two years, but he’d taken it better than she’d expected.
She wished she had some of his youthful bounce-back ability.
“As I told you before, Serena, you don’t have to take on any more cases than you want to. That said, we have a good number of clients who would benefit greatly from your skills.”
“The only glitch I’m concerned about, frankly, is your brother. He still wants Dottie’s house. Will that be a problem for you and your family if you hire me?”