The Greater Good

by Casey Moreton

  Megan sobbed, her knees buckling.

  Joel held her, cradling her in his arms. He had so many things to ask her, so many things to tell her. But they would all have to wait. First, there would have to be healing. And healing came only with time and patience and love. For now, it was enough just to hold her again.

  63

  July

  THE PRIVATE AIRSTRIP WAS A STRAIGHT BLACK LINE OFasphalt that ran for several hundred yards atop the high-mountain plateau. The Learjet had dropped through the clouds and glided through the towering mountains of Montana. The Weavers had never seen such country.

  A blue Jeep was waiting at the small log building that served incoming aircraft. A good-looking young man dressed in a zippered jacket, heavy boots and jeans, who introduced himself as Kyle, helped them into the Jeep, and they headed off down a rough-and-tumble mountain road.

  The cabin was seven miles from the airstrip, up near the clouds and God. It was a beautiful structure, made of logs but very modern in its architecture and amenities. Dean elbowed his wife when he spotted a TV dish on the red-tin roof. They pulled through a circle drive, and the Jeep came to a stop. Kyle showed them inside.

  The cabin sat at the very lip of Glacier National Park. They moved through the rooms and spotted a sliding glass door along the back wall. Grace opened it and stepped onto a broad deck overlooking a large mountain lake. The perimeter of the lake was outlined by a cathedral of jagged, snow-covered mountain peaks. It was breathtaking.

  Kyle came up beside her.

  “Ma’am,” he said. “Brooke tends to take long hikes around this time of day.” He turned so that Dean could hear him. “She’s gone for hours at a time. There’s a cell phone here, and her number is written on a pad of paper on the kitchen table. She takes the phone with her.”

  “Thank you,” she said with a tired smile.

  “My number is on there as well,” he said. “Call me if you folks need anything. I’m available twenty-four seven.”

  From the front door, they watched the Jeep wind back down the mountain pass. The entire trip had been arranged and furnished by Jefferson Peel. The private jet and mountain cabin were both his. He owed much to their daughter, he had explained, and this was just one small way in which he could say thank you. Peel had attended Wyatt’s funeral, the second week of February. It was now the middle of summer, and the events of those frozen months seemed like only a bad dream.

  Brooke had left her job. Exactly what she’d do next was still up in the air. She’d chosen to take some time off, just to think and clear her head. Peel had offered her the use of his Montana cabin on an indefinite basis. As far as he was concerned, she could stay there for the next decade. He rarely used it. Kyle was his hired hand, and her parents and even Peel himself had no inkling of the fact that Kyle and Brooke had grown quite “close.”

  Both Weavers were standing out on the deck. Up here the air was unimaginably clean. The sun was almost directly overhead, reflected in the lake below. Though they’d spoken nearly every week to Brooke on the phone, they hadn’t seen her in months. So much had gone on that Brooke explained she needed time to recover, to reorganize her life and her mind. They understood that she needed space. They planned to spend the week with her, to enjoy the mountains and the solitude. Getting away from upstate New York was good for them. Everything at home reminded them of Wyatt.

  Dean put his arm around his wife’s shoulders and kissed her cheek, and together they waited for their daughter.

  Brooke sat perched on a boulder at the edge of the lake, with her arms around her knees. A stiff breeze disturbed the surface of the water, and blew her hair across her face.

  Lately, she spent most of her daylight hours near the lake. Part of her considered living out here for good. But sooner or later, she knew, she’d need people again. For now though, she would simply take her time, enjoy the purity of the great outdoors, then ease back into the stream of the life she was born to be a part of.

  A half a year had passed since the events of December turned her life upside down. It seemed like yesterday, yet it also seemed like years ago. And, more than anything, it seemed like the whole crazy rush of events had happened to somebody else. Many of her wounds were gradually beginning to heal, though her emotions remained raw. Sitting there, her thoughts went to Darla and the other members of the team. Her eyes misted. There was nothing fair or just or logical about what had happened, and she refused to diminish the memories of her friends. She’d spent the majority of her adult life with them, and she’d loved them like family. Then had come the news of Terri’s murder. She couldn’t deflect the horrid feelings of guilt, taking on herself absolute responsibility for her best friend’s death.

  And, of course, there was Wyatt. He had stayed strong right up to the end. But his body had simply given out on him. If there was one thing among the tragic circumstances of the past six months she could be thankful for, it was that she’d been at his side when he passed away. She’d held one hand and her mother had held the other, and they clung to him as he made the transition from this life to the next.

  A cardinal alighted on a nearby branch of a tree only a few yards to her right and flitted its wings. She took it as a sign that Wyatt and her friends had made it safely to the other side.

  The criminal prosecution of the president and his henchmen had dominated the news as well as much of the public discourse. Dozens of indictments had been handed down. In the wake of Yates’s fall from grace, Anthony Philbrick had reluctantly taken the oath of office. Much speculation had revolved around whether Philbrick might grant Yates a pardon. But he hadn’t. Yates would go down hard, and he would likely spend many of his golden years far away from the life of luxury he’d come to know. They had found Julius Albertwood in his wheelchair in his penthouse with a bullet in his head. The wound had been self-inflicted. The CIA was working on Bertrum Stott. He was not an American citizen and lived outside of the country. Government and media experts highly doubted that anyone could touch him.

  Brooke herself had become something of a media darling, and that attention had drained her physically and emotionally. She hadn’t asked for any of it. It was probably a splendid time to be in the news business, but to her, nothing could have seemed less appealing.

  From the cabin she’d watched minimal TV. She’d again watched as Ettinger spilled the terrible truth about the most powerful man on the planet. But she couldn’t take it for long. She’d had enough television to last a lifetime. For many weeks, she’d holed up in the cabin, shutting out the world and the way it had so ungraciously intruded upon her life. As summer arrived, the cloud around her slowly began to lift, buoying her spirits.

  The afternoon sun was reflected in the water. She glanced at her watch. Her parents had probably arrived by now. She wondered what they’d thought of Kyle.

  She smiled into the breeze. The mountains were magnificent. All in all, she was happy. Time would heal her wounds. Seasons would change. And most importantly, life would go on.