by Jason Luke
In Love with a Master
Interview with a Master 2
Jason Luke
Dedication:
I want to dedicate this book to a number of people.
Firstly, I want to acknowledge the help of Jen and Tai Freligh who run a social media company called ‘Cheeky Monkey SM’. The Freligh’s are fine, passionate people. When ‘Interview’ became such a big success, Jen and Tai were always on hand to help with social media. I am forever grateful.
I would also like to thank every single blogger and reader who shared and promoted the first book. It is because of them that Jonah and Leticia became so popular with people all around the world.
And finally, I would like to dedicate this book to an amazing, caring lady who I have never met, but consider a good friend. Debbie Kagan is an American lady who sent me the most amazing ‘author survival kit’ all the way from the States to Australia just a week before I began writing this book. Debbie, thank you – for your support, your insight, your humor and your friendship.
This book is for you…
Chapter 1.
The telephone rang, unnaturally loud and shrill in the darkened room – and I felt my nerves screw taut as I stared down at the desk.
The phone rang again. I watched it, sitting frozen in the big leather chair. The sound of the double note seemed somehow urgent and insistent in my ears. The telephone kept ringing until at last I leaned forward reluctantly and reached out for it.
The sound stopped abruptly as my hand hung over the receiver. I leaned back, relieved.
A few minutes later Mrs. Hortez appeared timidly in the office doorway. She was wiping her hands on the tails of her apron. She knocked on the open door and ducked her head into the gloomy office.
“It was her again, Mr. Noble,” Mrs. Hortez said in broken English, her voice almost apologetic. Then she held up the pudgy fingers of one hand. “That five times so far today.”
I nodded. The leather chair creaked as I shifted my weight. I propped an elbow on the armrest, and cupped my chin thoughtfully in my hand. My fingers grazed across the unshaven stubble that bristled my cheeks.
“Thank you, Mrs. Hortez,” I said quietly. “Did you tell her that I was unavailable?”
“Si,” Mrs. Hortez nodded heavily, like she was somehow saddened. “But she clever girl, Mr. Noble. She no believe me.”
The silence drew out. I said nothing. After maybe another minute, Mrs. Hortez ghosted from the room, pulling the door quietly closed behind her.
I sat alone in the dark. Outside my window a grey blanket of clouds hung low over the distant mountains. I could see the faint wink of far away lights like pinpricks in the night. Scudding mist hung like a shroud, smearing away the mountain peaks and wrapping the twilight sky in a heavy grey gloom.
My eyes drifted back over the darkening shapes of my desk: files, paperwork, a dust-covered statue of the Egyptian deity, Horus. I closed my eyes and sat back wearily in the chair.
Dust to dust…
Leticia Fall would make it as a journalist – of that I had no doubt. She had the raw talent, and she had the persistence to hunt down a story lead and pursue it with the tenacity of a bloodhound given the scent.
Today she had phoned five times. Yesterday it had been the same. Even over the weekend she had made repeated calls to the house.
I had avoided her for two weeks, but I knew I could not avoid her forever.
It had been exactly forty-one days since I had sent her away – almost six weeks since I had told her I was dying, and watched her walk, crushed and broken, to her car… watched her drive out of my life.
Not a minute passed that I didn’t think of her; recall the brilliant, disarming flash of her smile, or the innocent beauty of her features, or the quizzical way she tilted her head and watched me as I had paced the room telling my story.
Not a minute passed where the pain in my chest and the ache in my heart did not threaten to well up tight and strangle me.
Sometimes doing the right thing can feel so very wrong.
Would that line be my epitaph?
I mused darkly. Would that noble sentiment be the words carved into my headstone – the phrase the world would remember me by?
I muttered the line out loud, and the words jagged in the back of my throat like broken shards of glass.
I didn’t want to be gallant.
I wanted to live.
Nobility, honor… how much had my moral code cost me? How high the price I had paid?
The phone rang again, the sound jarring in the tomb-like darkness of the office. My hand reached out for it instinctively – I snatched it away at the last instance as though scalded.
Abruptly the sound was cut off.
I waited.
Mrs. Hortez knocked on the office door then pushed it open a few inches, looking harried and sounding out of breath.
I sighed. “Was it Leticia Fall again?”
Mrs. Hortez shook her head. She looked disturbed. “No, it is someone else. He sound important.”
She gestured with her head that I should pick up the extension. My hand stretched out slowly.
“This is Jonah Noble.”
There was the sound of milling voices in the background and above it all a man’s voice, gravelly and somber. I was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of doom. I clutched at the edge of the desk.
“Mr Noble, this is the Hampson Valley Hospital. I’m calling about an employee of yours named Travis Dickson.”
Tiny – my driver. My best friend.
I felt an ice-cold fist of dread deep in my chest. I felt a sudden dizzy sense of vertigo, and my eyes lost focus. Everything in the gloomy room became suddenly dark. My hands became hot and clammy. The blood drained away from my face and an icy sweat broke out across my forehead. I leaned forward in the chair with a sudden sense of foreboding and jammed the phone’s receiver hard against my ear.
“I regret to tell you, Mr. Noble, that Travis was fatally injured in a car accident an hour ago. He was rushed by paramedics to the hospital, but passed away soon after on the operating table.”
A loud roar – a surging, pounding rush of noise seemed to hiss in my ears. The shock of it made me flinch. The silence drew out until it became deafening, and I felt the searing sting of tears well up in my eyes.
“Can you tell me how it happened?” I choked the words out.
There was a brief pause. “It appears as though the car that Travis was driving went off the road on a bend,” the man said. “The police are still investigating.”
“Was anyone else hurt?”
“No. The authorities still do not know if there were any other vehicles that might have been involved in the incident.”
I clung tightly to the receiver feeling the blood drain from my fingers and knuckles. I felt my entire world tilt off its axis.
“Thank you for calling,” I said numbly. “I will come to the hospital.”
I threw the phone down. It clattered across the desk. The clenching fist in my chest uncoiled like a serpent and wrapped itself around my heart. The pain of it came suddenly like a plunging blade that ripped at my very soul.
Tiny – the one man I trusted. Tiny – the one man who had been a loyal friend for so many years, was dead.
An unbidden image of the man’s big smiling face played across my imagination. It came wavering from beyond the shadows, taking on detail until it was so real, so true that I blinked in disbelief. I tried to hold that picture in my mind, tried to cling to it and keep it alive, but it drifted and then faded away as a dark shutter flickered over my vision.
Cold, numb despair seeped into my bones. I felt suddenly very old and forsaken, drained and withered. I slumped back in the big chair and stared,
desolate, at the ceiling. Tears spilled down my cheeks. I slowly lifted my fingers and touched at my face, vaguely surprised to feel that the skin there was not as brittle and dusty as old parchment.
I closed my eyes, and my grief swept me away to the only place that was safe… the darkness.
Chapter 2.
I came back from the hospital late. I went upstairs to my office. I sank into the big leather chair heavily. On a side table was a bottle of whisky and a crystal glass. I filled the tumbler and sipped the alcohol, feeling the warmth of it spread through my body and unravel the knots, the tension and despair. I lowered my chin onto my chest and closed my eyes. The world was completely silent – not a sound but for the rasp of my breathing.
Tiny was dead, and the shock of it seemed to come again and again in crashing waves of dismay that flooded over me. I emptied the glass and refilled it. I screwed the lid tight onto the bottle and set it back on the side table. This one I would drink more slowly, making it last for maybe an hour. But the alcohol was no comfort. The burn of it in the back of my throat did nothing to defuse the creeping chill of cold loneliness that numbed my body. I opened my eyes slowly and looked around the gloomy room and I smelled the musty scent of death.
I pushed myself out of the chair and carried the glass of whisky, touching pieces of furniture as I moved listlessly about the room. I went to the window and stared out into the dark night. An icy wind began to howl down through the mountains. Boiling clouds tumbled upon each other, heavy and black, blocking out the moon. A blast of wind punched suddenly against the glass and the air became filled with swirling debris.
Time drifted away from me and the blackness of night deepened as the storm clouds seemed to gather and the wind became more intense. A jagged sheet of lightning flickered in the distance before dying into darkness. The thunder came seconds later as a shuddering boom of heavy bass that rumbled and rolled amongst the clouds. I drew the heavy drapes across the window and the last of the light vanished until I was alone and in complete darkness.
I had spent a lot of time in the office – a lot of time sitting in the dark, haunted by regrets, and somehow angry with God for a life of opportunity that I was never going to live. I thought about those times that I had wasted, those moments that I had hesitated, and those chances that had passed me by.
And I thought about Tiny. He had had his whole life ahead of him only to have it snatched away in the blink of an eye – in a single tragic moment. He had been the same age as me, full of love and life and energy.
And now he was dead, and I was alive.
I set the empty whisky glass back on the edge of the desk and closed my eyes. In the silence I thought I heard Tiny’s voice. I listened hard, but the sound became just the fluted shriek of the wind.
Far away in the empty hollow of the house, I heard a clock chime midnight.
I was one day closer to dying.
I reached across and flicked on the tableside lamp. A soft pool of dull yellow light illuminated one edge of the desk and cast tall sharp shadows against the wall. I swept scattered files and paperwork off the polished surface and stuffed them into a drawer. I switched off the lamp, walked numbly to the darkened doorway, and stepped out into the brooding silence of the house.
I could hear the echo of my steps, leaden and heavy, as I made my way passed the closed door of the training room towards my bedroom. Every sound seemed a mocking echo. The big house creaked and groaned around me as it settled for the night.
I stood outside my bedroom and listened in the silence. I could hear the distant sound of thunder sweeping across the mountains and boiling above the valley. The storm was moving away to the north.
I pushed the bedroom door open and stood for a long moment on the threshold. The room was dark – completely dark. The drapes across the big window had been drawn tight, and although I knew this room so well, I waited for a moment until my eyes began to adjust and faint familiar shapes of furniture began to emerge. I felt old before my time, seized by a lethargy of misery, and drained of will. I kicked off my shoes and padded towards the bed. The coat I wore felt like a straightjacket, the pants rubbed like sandpaper against my legs. I crushed the clothes into a tight knot and flung them away into a corner of the room.
I drew back the drapes and uncertain grey light spilled in through the big bedroom window. Cloud banks raced across the darkened sky, torn and shredded by the talons of the wind. I stared out into the storm-filled night for long minutes, then went through to the bathroom and splashed hot water over my face.
My reflection peered back at me from within the vanity mirror as water poured from the tap into the basin, and a cloud of steam crawled up across the glass. I recognized the face: the same hair, the same eyes, but tragedy had eroded the granite of my features so that they somehow seemed blurred and crumbled. My bloodshot eyes were sunk deep into plum-colored hollows below my brow and a dark shadow of stubble covered my jaw. The face that stared back seemed gaunt and hunted and fatigued – full of harsh angles beneath tightly drawn skin.
There were new deep lines bracketing my mouth, and the corners of my eyes had cracked into a spider’s web of fine creases, chiseled there by tragedy. I touched at the ashen flesh of my forehead and noticed the bony skeleton of my fingers.
The phantom of death had hung over me – perched on my shoulder like a vulture for so long – that it had become a part of who I was. Now the desolate weight of Tiny’s loss hung around my neck like a millstone, so that as I stared at my haggard, hollow reflection I questioned the point of even going on.
Chapter 3.
It seemed so wrong.
The sky was a brilliant cloudless blue, and a warm gentle breeze rustled through the leafy treetops. The flowerbeds were a riot of reds and vibrant yellows, and the songs of birds filled the morning air.
The day we gathered for Tiny’s funeral was a perfect day to be alive.
But he wasn’t.
The cemetery was a shady pasture surrounded by wrought iron fences and gates. The cars lined the side of the road and mourners dressed in black milled around on the edges of my vision as I stood over Tiny’s grave. The soft brown mound of fresh earth was covered in flowers, the lush grass around the site made flat by all those who stood weeping.
The priest who had presided over the burial service was from Tiny’s church. He looked unremarkable – with a different guidance counselor he could easily have become a pharmacist or maybe a school teacher. He had a lean trim frame, and a thick crop of wiry dark hair. His face was broad, and although his eyes were set into soft pouches of dark skin, they were kindly and compassionate. The priest read passages from the open Bible in his hand and then slowly closed the book and lowered his head in a moment of silent prayer. The gathered mourners began to sob softly, clinging to each other for support and strength.
I stood alone with my hands behind my back, my head bowed, my eyes closed, feeling myself swaying and wavering.
I felt the sharp ache in my chest swell so that my breathing was ragged and shaky.
The priest looked up from his prayer at last and placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. Then he walked quietly away into the gathering: holding hands, comforting weeping people with sad and somber nods, acknowledging the loss of a man too young to die – a man who would be missed by so many who had loved him.
I closed my eyes again, and the image of Tiny’s smiling face that had come to me in the darkness of my office returned. I wrapped my mind around it to protect it, like the vision was a small precious flicker of light, until it finally faded, and I sensed the mourners around me begin to drift away from the grave and return slowly to their cars.
When I opened my eyes again they were swimming with unshed tears.
“You were my one true friend, Tiny,” I muttered the words softly under my breath, hearing the strangled choke in my voice. “I wish I had told you that… ”
I felt someone nearby. They peeled away from the shadows of the trees and came quietly towa
rds me, their steps tentative and hesitant, as if they were fearful of intruding. I turned slowly.
It was Leticia Fall.
Her face was pale and stricken with anguish. I could see the despair in her expression. She wore no makeup. Her eyes were red, her cheeks sleek and damp. She looked very small and very frail. She was wearing a black dress. She had her hands clasped tightly in front of her.
She said nothing. We stared at each other. Leticia was shaking her head slowly from side to side. Her lips were pale and trembling. Her eyes began to slowly fill until they were huge and sparkling, tears clinging to her long dark lashes like drops of morning dew. Her shoulders began to shake.
Perhaps she saw the same grief reflected in my own eyes, for she came to me with a sudden impulsive rush of need, and I opened my arms for her to fall into my embrace.
Leticia’s back heaved. She wrapped her arms around me and crushed her face into my chest. Her body flattened against me. I felt her tears soak my shirt. She sobbed as she lifted her chin and whispered,
“Jonah, I’m so sorry for your loss.”
I said nothing. I pulled Leticia close to me and let the sorrow come at last. I let my anguish rise to the surface, so that we clung to each other crying pitifully as a sea of great crashing waves swept over us, leaving us weak and hurting – drowning in our sadness as the world somehow continued to turn.
Chapter 4.
I lost all sense of time. Day became night and I retreated into the sanctuary of my office and into the darkness and its comfort. I drank, and I stared out through the window watching the world go by as though I were a spectator – as though none of it mattered anymore.
I was cold, but I knew the room was warm. The fire still flickered, and burning embers glowed in the dark. I closed my eyes and rubbed at the pain at my temples with my fingertips but I knew the ache would never go away.
Somehow I slept fitfully until the weather woke me.