MIDNIGHT QUEST: A Short 'Men of Midnight' Novel (11 page)

Try as he might, it was hard to identify with them. His life and theirs had had no points in common other than Sara, and that was not a happy connection. And though he looked really hard, Jacko could see no physical resemblance at all between himself and the Garretts. He knew he hadn’t looked like his mother, either, but then his mother had always looked like shit for as long as he could remember.

Okay, moving on. First he did a tour of the house to get his bearings. Everything was neat and squared away, coated with six months of dust. It was a comfortable house, kept in good repair, though nothing was new or fancy. The kitchen and bathrooms were dated, though serviceable. Whoever was going to buy the house would have to remodel. Gut it and start over.

Like a flash storm, something rebelled inside him at the thought of someone else living in the house. He couldn’t figure that out. What the fuck was wrong with him? What the fuck did he care? He was going to sell. What was he going to do with a freaking house in Rancho San Diego?

Feeling uneasy, like he was invading someone’s privacy, Jacko went through Lee’s desk and found that Lee was a man who liked order. Bills were paid promptly, checkbooks balanced, taxes paid. He gave generously to charity and had made loans to friends, which had been paid back. He was a sponsor of the local library and had donated a pediatric dialysis machine to the local hospital.

He’d been a canny businessman, disciplined and organized. Lee owned shares in three quietly prosperous businesses—a feed store, a camping equipment store and a country club. The businesses brought in about three hundred thou a year.

Jesus. He inherited that stuff. Mayer had made it clear that he was sole heir, so Jacko owned shares in those businesses now.

Fuck. Jacko was…yeah. He was a rich man. With his own job, he would have an income of over half a million a year and property worth a million dollars. That was rich by anyone’s count.

But he didn’t come here for the money, he came for intel. He had a sense of Lee and Alice Garrett. And now for the hard part.

It was late afternoon when he found the courage to walk up the oak staircase and into Sara Garrett’s bedroom. His mother’s bedroom.

He was a grown man. He’d been in combat. He was tough as nails. And yet he hesitated on the threshold of the room. He’d put everything to do with his mother behind him, in a locked box. He didn’t want to open that box, ever, but now he had to.
Do the hard thing.
The Navy SEAL motto.

The Garretts had left their daughter’s room exactly as it had been when she’d disappeared. Jacko could picture Alice dusting and cleaning a teenager’s room, even though Sara would have been a grown woman. It must have been amazingly painful, not knowing whether Sara was alive or dead.

Neither, as it turned out. Sara had been alive in only the biological sense of the word. Any humanity in her had died long before her body.

He did a perimeter walk. It was a spacious bedroom, where a girl could sleep, study, read, listen to music, entertain her friends. The furniture must have been top of the line at the time. Once he’d walked around to get a general feel, it was time to dive into the contents of the room.

He sat down on the pretty, delicate chair of her desk and heard it creak. Sara had been a slender teenager and they wouldn’t have thought to buy a desk chair that could bear the weight of a man as big as he was.

The idea of breaking that chair freaked him, so he hunkered on the floor with her diaries and school notebooks and read about his mother’s life as a child and teenager.

Unlike her parents, Sara had been wayward and rebellious by nature. Jacko could read it in her notebooks. English and math notebooks that should have been full of homework assignments were full of photos cut out from gossip magazines. The Bee Gees and John Travolta and The Eagles. Then the Sex Pistols and Alice Cooper. Sara’s school notes were disjointed, ungrammatical, incomplete. A clear case of undiagnosed ADD, which at that time had probably not been on anyone’s radar. Her grades were just passing. School wasn’t important to her. Boys and clothes and makeup and music were.

Then, when she was seventeen, she met an older guy and it all went to hell. Jackman. What little she wrote was disjointed, handwriting all over the place, words making no sense. She began taking drugs and wrote of her “little friends.” She was mad at her parents all the time. One page was just
I HATE THEM
written over and over in shaky handwriting.

And then, the notebooks took a turn toward the crazy.
Fuck
and
shit
written over and over, underlined until the paper tore. A teacher gave her a failing grade and Sara drew her face with a bullet hole in the forehead. She was sure some girls in her class were stealing from her. One page was a chilling scenario of blowing up the school.

It turned Jacko’s stomach.

The explosion of craziness began when she started going out with the new guy, RJ for Robert Jackman. But more than the guy, it was the drugs. Weed, uppers and downers led fast to blow and coke. The kind of drugs that would mess up a young mind for good, forever.

A couple of weeks of frenzy, where her life seemed to be made up of sex and drugs and then…nothing.

Sara was gone, leaving two brokenhearted parents behind.

It was late afternoon when Jacko read the last of the notebooks. The golden light of the setting sun lit up the room—which was pretty and orderly, in contrast to the ugly mess of Sara’s mind just before she ran away.

It was so hard for him to imagine anyone throwing away the life she’d had because he knew firsthand the life she ended up with. The filthy trailer house, the succession of low-wage jobs until she couldn’t hold any job at all. Constantly scrambling for money to feed her habit, willing to do anything to anyone just to get one more high. Sara Garrett had left such devastation behind her—the grieving Garretts, himself. He was lucky he’d escaped intact from the disaster that was Sara.

What a waste.

Jacko’s heart swelled with pity for the Garretts and with contempt for his mother. She wasn’t a worthy daughter, and she sure hadn’t been a worthy mother. But at least he knew her craziness wasn’t hereditary. It was born with her and died with her.

Jacko was free.

As darkness filled the house, he realized his business here was over. There was one more stop to make but it was to complete the circle. The low-level hum of anxiety that had plagued him all his life—the fear his blood was somehow tainted on both sides—was gone.

In this pretty room of a teenager who’d thrown her life away, Jacko was made whole and would go back to his Lauren a better man. The man she deserved.

As the sun slid beneath the horizon, he pulled out his cell and called Lauren.

“Hello?”

Lauren’s soft voice froze him. He opened his mouth and his throat clicked. He couldn’t say anything at all.
Goddamn
, he was over this shit, wasn’t he? He had a lot to say to her. Things she had a right to know. So why the fuck couldn’t he talk?

“I hope you’re finding what you’re looking for, darling.” He could just picture Lauren, in one of her jewel-tone track suits she never ran in, but wore when she created. Like an art goddess ninja. Right about now, she’d be curled up on the couch with a cup of tea and a book. Soon, she’d move into the kitchen for dinner. If he was coming home, she’d cook a nice meal. When she was alone, she often just had something light—a slice of cheese and fruit with a glass of wine.

No wine tonight, though. Because she was pregnant.

For the first time, that thought didn’t send off alarm bells in his head. Before, he hadn’t known how to handle the hot, jagged emotions flooding him every time he thought about the baby. Now?

He breathed out.

Her voice turned amused. “I just want you to know you’re going to get a lot of flak from Metal when you get back. And Jack and Joe, too. I told them you’d come back just as soon as you could, but they’re sort of mad at you. They’ll get over it. I made it clear
I’m
not mad at you. You’re doing what you think you need to do, otherwise you’d be here with me. I believe that with all my heart.”

Jacko clung to his cell, fingers clutching tightly. It was a miracle he didn’t shatter the plastic and Gorilla Glass. He was listening hard to every word she said, and to what was underneath the words.

Love. Love for him was in her voice.

“So do what you have to do, my darling. And take care of yourself. Stay safe.”

His breath whooshed out of his body. She must have heard.

“I remember the first time I said those words to you,” she continued. Her voice was lower now, softer. “It was the first time you left for a business trip after we started living together. I’d bought you that big thick cashmere scarf, remember?”

God yes. It was in his vehicle.

“You always take such good care of me, Jacko. Always making sure I’m comfortable and safe. I wanted to do something for you, so I bought that scarf. This was before I realized you honestly don’t feel the cold. I got it for you because you made me shiver every time you went out in the dead of winter with a tee shirt and a jeans jacket. I noticed you always put my scarf on before going out, even though it probably makes you sweat. I’m sure you snatch it off your neck the instant you drive around the corner.”

Bingo. He hung his head and smiled, his first smile in two days. It was a beautiful scarf and hot as hell. He hated wearing it.

“So I wrapped that scarf around your neck and kissed you and told you to be careful, to take care of yourself, and you froze and your eyes grew wide, as if you’d never heard those words before. And I thought—maybe he hasn’t. Maybe no one has really looked after Jacko, cared enough about him to say those words. Your teammates sure wouldn’t tell you to be careful. You guys are such hardasses, I am absolutely certain Metal has never told you to be careful. Not once, in all the time you’ve known him.”

Yeah. No one had ever told him to take care of himself. Since childhood Jacko had done a really good job of taking care of himself, and SEAL training just made him stronger.

But…the thousand ways she showed she cared for him blew him away. She watched his diet, fussed over him if she thought he was getting sick. Jacko never got sick, ever, but he’d contemplated faking a sneeze because man, being on the receiving end of all that care was amazing. It took her a long time to realize he didn’t feel the cold and she was always buttoning up his jackets, trying to get him to wear a wool cap. The big scarf was just the one thing out of many.

He heard her sigh and then she continued. “So I guess all of this is my way of saying—take care of yourself. Wherever you are.”

She closed the connection and Jacko sat in the room while the sun disappeared and the room grew dark. Holding his phone in his hand, unwilling to break this connection with Lauren.

Finally, it was time. He stood up, walked downstairs. He took one final long look at the row of family photos, studying each face. Lee. Alice. Sara. He could see no resemblance whatsoever to him in any of the faces, but he was tied by blood to them. Two good human beings, one train wreck. Two out of three.

Not bad. Better than some.

Take his buddy Joe, for example. Drunk mess of a father, mom who ran away when he was a kid, drunk grandparents on both sides. And look at him now. Decorated SEAL, successful member of ASI. Engaged to Isabel Delvaux, scion of America’s top political family, though they were all dead now except for her brother Jack.

Peace was settling inside him in this quiet room. He’d come to find out where he came from and now he knew. He came from two good people. His mom—she’d fallen into drugs so young it had scrambled her brains. His dad? Who the fuck knew? What difference did it make at this point?

None.

The blood of two good people flowed in his veins; that was all he needed to know.

The weight of a lifetime of unspoken doubt lifted from his shoulders. Jacko cracked his neck, shook his hands. He felt light. Free.

Time to go. He’d come back here, with Lauren. They’d decide together what to do with this house, the land. Sell it, keep it. Whatever she wanted to do was fine with him. He was okay with all of it.

Who knew? Maybe they’d keep it. Vacation here. God knows a vacation spot away from Portland’s rainy climate might be fun. They could all fly down for long weekends. The house was big enough for the whole crew.

There was one last thing to do, one last burden from the past. It would take him a little over twenty-four hours. He hadn’t slept much last night and the smart thing to do would be to sleep here and take off tomorrow morning for Texas.

But Jacko wasn’t tired. He felt fine. He felt revved, even. He didn’t need to sleep. He wanted to get this over with, get the lingering shadows out from his life so he could go back to Lauren free of darkness.

He was more than willing to become the husband she needed. And he was beginning to suspect he could be the father his child deserved.

Just one last thing to do before going home.

He headed out.

Lauren walked back out into the living room. She’d gone into the bedroom to take the call when she saw it was from Jacko. No one else should be listening.