“Say again, ma’am. You said your father is Colonel Garrett… and he’s dead?”
The concern and sincerity in the man’s voice caught Amanda off guard. Her mind flashed back to a few days ago when the two soldiers had come to her mother’s house to inform her about her father’s death. The major had openly wept. She was getting a sense of her father’s gravitas outside of her mother’s orbit.
“Yes. I was notified about a week ago. He wanted me to come here to his house. Our house. It’s in his will. Jake drove me.”
The two officers exchanged a pained glance.
Jake’s cuffs had been removed, and the four of them had gone back into the house. They sat in the family room on the sofa and two leather chairs.
“What is NCBI?” asked Amanda.
“North Carolina Bureau of Investigation. Sort of like the FBI, but for the state,” Agent Rogers said. He was the tall, blond one. The other had introduced himself as Agent Landers.
“How do you know my father?”
Landers spoke up first. “I was in Special Operations with him a while back, but everyone around Fort Bragg knows your dad… excuse me, knew him, anyway.”
“When is his funeral, if I may ask?” This from Rogers.
“They haven’t told me yet.”
Landers paused a second, seemed uncomfortable, and then began speaking. “Why would your mother report you as kidnapped, if you weren’t?”
Amanda hesitated, looked at Jake a moment, then back at Landers. “I don’t exactly know. Maybe she really thought I was.”
The two agents gave her a discerning look. She could tell that they knew she was hedging, protecting her mother from a counterclaim by the government of filing a false charge. It was second nature to her to defend her mother. Hell, it was her responsibility.
“We understand.”
They sat in the room for a few minutes before Amanda bolted upright and said, “I almost forgot. We’ve got to get back now. Nina’s in the hospital, and Mom says she might not make it.”
The two agents looked at each other, and then Rogers said, “We have to file a report, but we will write it up as a misunderstanding. Everything should be okay. But we can’t leave you in the house. We’ll need the key you used to get in, and we can’t let you travel back with Jake. Or it’ll be our ass.”
“I hope you understand,” Landers said. “We will put you on a plane to Spartanburg, Miss Garrett, and Jake can drive back in his truck.”
Amanda protested but saw the futility. Jake turned over the key to the agents and then kissed Amanda good-bye. He told her that he would probably beat her home.
He pulled out of the driveway, waved to the agents, winked at Amanda, and then began to retrace his route out of the neighborhood.
The two NCBI agents dropped her at the Raleigh-Durham Airport, which was on the other side of town.
“Why don’t you guys just drive me the extra ten miles to Spartanburg,” she quipped.
Agent Rogers smiled and pulled a card from his jacket pocket, handing it to Amanda. “Call us when you know about the funeral. We’re sorry about your loss.”
As she was boarding the airplane, it dawned on her that they had not retrieved a single item from the house. The wicker rocking chair, the paperwork, the DVD, everything, were all still there. She would return, perhaps, on her way to Virginia for the funeral.
Yes, she determined that’s exactly what she would do.
Finding her seat in the front row of the Canada Air Regional Jet, she glanced back through the cabin at the usual assortment of travelers. Several were chatting away on their cell phones. A few were pecking on Blackberry palm digital assistants with heads bowed as if in worship.
She buckled herself into her seat, hoping that Jake would be okay on the long drive alone. With time to think, she began to wonder about the emotions beginning to rustle inside her like the wisps of wind against the sea oats that precede a not too distant hurricane.
Jake watched from the side parking lot of the Texaco as the NCBI van passed him on Ramsey Street. He waited another two minutes, inhaling a microwave cheeseburger and downing a Classic Coke from the stained bench and table provided next to the lotto kiosk inside the food mart. Several Central Carolina Community College students drifted through the venue, most grabbing snacks on their way to their dorms, he figured. Once he was certain that the van was committed on its path to the airport, he doubled back into the neighborhood and pulled into the driveway of Colonel Garrett’s house.
After trying the front door and the breezeway entrance with no luck, he walked around the house to the backyard. Pushing on the back door proved futile as well. He stood on the stoop, looking at the ground, noticing a gravel drainage area where the gutter downspout terminated. On a whim, he reached behind the downspout and was amazed to learn that the colonel kept a magnetized spare key box hidden.
He let himself in and walked around the two-car garage, admiring the colonel’s Denali SUV and sturdy workbench. He handled a couple of the items, a hammer and screwdriver, on the workbench for no particular reason, then replaced them. He opened the breezeway door from the garage and then tried the key into the kitchen. It worked.
And it was obvious to him what he needed to do.
Del Dangurs watched it all from his excellent automobile and found the entire scene quite fascinating. He wanted to get into the house to dig for more insider information on Colonel Garrett and his Pulitzer prize winning series on the paradox between those in combat and those on the home front. After all, it had been his call to Nina that had prompted the whole NCBI idea. He was truly brilliant.
Now, he needed the football player out of the house and then the possibilities were endless. Perhaps even go find Julie Nguyen and soil the good Colonel’s bed sheets. Sweetness.
He watched the football player enter from the rear and then come running out of the house quickly, looking over his shoulder, as if being chased.
CHAPTER 29
Mary Ann Singlaub, military correspondent for the Charlotte Observer, tossed her Greenbeans Coffee cup into the trash receptacle, blew her bangs away from her forehead and grabbed her steno pad. There was a story brewing. She could feel it, and it wasn’t at the Big Army end of the base here in Afghanistan.
The shooting down of the MH-47 was the big news, but that story was out. She had been able to get a couple of exclusives with some of the recovery team who had cycled back from the crash site, which was some damn good journalistic work, if she did say so herself.
On her third tour in a combat zone, Mary Ann had become expert at using her best asset to her advantage. At the end of the day, it was all very simple. She was a strikingly beautiful woman who, with those deep brown eyes and chestnut hair, could make even the most hardened Special Operations soldier blush. She always chose her attire carefully, definitely LL Bean and Northface, which allowed her to blend in. But some days required a size 2 instead of a size 4 in order to set the hook, get them looking.
Today was a size-2 kind of day.
With just two days remaining until she jumped on an airplane to head back to Charlotte, she wanted the juice one last time. Always in a constant battle with her editor, Mary Ann refused to write a story that was in any way negative or inflammatory. She wrote human interest stories that somehow always seemed to work. In her view, there were enough journalistic predators out there digging for the nefarious deeds, and she was quite comfortable that all that was bad would be sufficiently reported. No, her perspective, her niche, was to bring home the good news. She sought the uplifting news about heroism and triumph over tragedy.