by Dana Mentink
“Do you know Lila Brown, too?”
“She didn’t grow up here. Moved in as a junior, I think. Had it bad for Julio, but Iona didn’t approve.”
“Why?”
“Lila was a party girl. Lived with her older brother. Never did know what happened to her parents. She was into drinking and having a good time. Got kicked out of school for truancy. When Julio’s grades started to suffer, Iona blamed Lila and made Julio’s life miserable until he broke it off with her, or at least that’s what he told his mama.”
Angela looked thoughtful. “Did Lila have a relationship with Tank also?”
Violet looked away. “Gonna have to ask Iona that.”
Angela’s face went slack. “Iona lives nearby then?”
“Sure does. She’s at a retirement home ’bout thirty miles from here. Assisted living. She had a stroke after Julio was killed.”
The stress of a soldier’s death rippled through so many lives, parents, siblings, spouses, friends. He shot a look at Angela, pale and staring. Navy chaplains, too. What sort of mess had Tank gotten involved in this time? He prayed it would not result in another tragedy being laid on Iona’s doorstep. How much grief could one heart hold?
He looked at Angela, sitting up now, arms wrapped tightly around herself. She was only a few feet away from him, but it might as well have been a universe. How much grief could one heart hold?
Plenty, he thought.
ELEVEN
Torrey returned and gestured for Dan to join him in the hallway. “Ms. Gallagher insists it wasn’t Tank who attacked her. Thinks it was Harry Gruber.”
“Then I believe her.”
He frowned. “I called up her CO in San Diego. She’s on leave for stress.”
“The CO didn’t tell you that.” The navy protected the privacy of its people.
“Not in so many words, but I can read between the lines.”
Dan held Torrey’s gaze. “If she says it was Harry Gruber that attacked her, I believe it.”
“Why? Because you served with her?”
“I believe it,” he repeated.
“I get it,” Torrey said. “That wartime bond. My son did two tours before he got sick. Relocated here on the coast.” Torrey’s face grew bitter. “Guess that healing ocean air doesn’t work on the kidneys.”
Dan felt a surge of compassion at Torrey’s bleak expression. “Bad?”
“Approaching failure. Again.”
Again. There was such a heavy weight in that single world. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. If there was a loving God up there, He would have given us a few extra kidneys.” His laugh was bitter.
Realization sparked in Dan. “Did you donate a kidney to your son?”
Torrey sagged in defeat, looking at a spot somewhere over Dan’s head. “No. He wouldn’t take that, or anything else from me.”
“He’s on the transplant list?”
“Sure.”
“So you’ve got hope then?”
Torrey shoved his hands in his jacket pocket. “Is there any other choice but to have hope for your kid?”
Dan had always dreamed of having a family. He and AnnaLisa had talked a good deal about their plans after he returned stateside, for marriage and children. She wanted to wait until she’d earned her PhD, but he’d come home impatient to marry and build a family. He’d seen so much death, witnessed how lives could be irrevocably altered in a moment, he no longer wanted to put off having kids. AnnaLisa did not feel the same urgency. He wasn’t a parent, but he could still imagine there would never be a time when a father stopped holding out hope, no matter how slim, for a child’s recovery. “No. I’m sure there isn’t,” he said.
Torrey shrugged and continued on down the hallway.
Marco and Donna were with Angela when he returned to her room.
“I’m getting out of here,” Angela was saying.
“The doctors said you should stay and rest for a little while,” Donna said.
“I’m leaving,” Angela repeated.
Donna shot Dan a look. “Of all the sisters, she has the most common sense, but that’s not playing out at the moment.”
Angela grabbed her soiled jacket. “Do you know how much time I’ve spent in hospitals, Donna?”
Throughout her chaplaincy and her sister’s injury following their father’s murder, he didn’t doubt she’d done a lot of time in hospitals, but at this moment, she could not do her job and it tormented her.
And him? Is that why he’d been dragging his feet about coming back? He flexed his fingers. No, it was purely a necessary delay.
“Okay. Come back to the hotel. Take a shower. Get into bed. Marco and I will keep working.”
“I want to take a walk.”
Donna shook her head. “Marco, you tell her.”
Marco folded his arms across his muscled chest. “Sometimes it’s better to be moving.”
Donna shot him an aggravated look, but Dan could tell that Marco was a man who understood trauma.
Donna huffed out a breath. “All right, we’ll go for a walk then.”
“I’ve got a place on the beach,” Dan said. “Great porch for sitting and a beach for walking, which I like to pretend is my own, though the town of Cobalt Cove would tend to disagree. Come over.”
Angela looked as though she was going to cry. “I need to be alone.”
Alone. What a dangerous place to be, both physically and spiritually, he thought.
“I’ll drive you to my place and show you the beach trail,” Dan said quickly. “Then I’ll keep my distance.”
“But—” Donna started.
Marco put a hand on her arm, eyes riveted on Dan. “We’ll keep up the search for Tank. Meet up later.”
Donna started to protest again, but Marco guided her to the door. He put a hand gently on the bed, not touching Angela but close.
“Right here if you need us.”
She nodded but didn’t look at him.
“Right here,” he repeated.
Dan walked Marco and Donna out while Angela put her shoes on. Marco faced him full-on. “This beach trail?”
“I can lay eyes on it the whole time.”
“I’m worried about her,” Donna said. “She hasn’t been the same since she came back from Afghanistan.”
No one ever is, he felt like saying.
“And with my father and now this...” Donna pursed her lips in a way he’d seen Angela do. “And you’re going to keep your distance?”
Dan nodded.
Marco gave him an appraising look. “Not too much distance.”
He shook his head, and they reached a silent understanding right there in the bland hospital corridor.
“Going to go find out where Tank might be holing up,” Marco said. They made arrangements to meet up later in the afternoon and Donna reluctantly allowed Marco to lead her away.
Not too much distance, he silently echoed. Far enough to respect Angela’s wishes, but close enough that she would not be hurt again.
* * *
Angela tried to bottle up her desperate need to be outside as Dan drove her back to his house on the beach. A blanket of smothering anger enveloped her, and she was afraid it would come out via angry words that Dan did not deserve. He turned on some gospel music, and she tried to focus on the lyrics.
I stand at the door...
It took her back to that moment in church when she was fifteen years old. She remembered the pastor’s voice, low and resonant, “Behold I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear My voice and open the door, I will come into him and sup with him and he with Me.”
She had felt her calling so clearly from that moment forward, until that one day, that one moment when the bullets sta
rted flying. Was her faith so fragile? Had she misheard and misunderstood? Had she been an unqualified preacher, with the necessary pastoral credentials but no depth of faith when her life fell apart?
Since her time at the Navy Chaplain School at Fort Jackson some ten years prior, she’d conducted services everywhere from hospitals to the back of supply trucks to bombed-out houses. People were always surprised to know that her job involved ministering to soldiers of all faiths, helping all her charges worship. All those souls in her hands, ice-cold hands that now trembled in her lap as she got out of the car.
“Would you like to come in?” Dan asked. “Have a cup of tea or coffee?”
“No, thank you. If you’ll just point me to the trail...”
“I’ll walk you down. Was going to check the tarp on my kayaks, anyway. It’s supposed to rain soon.”
“And you want to keep an eye on me.” She felt a kindling of anger, but his smile and shrug disarmed her.
“You’re a good-looking gal, and I’m a red-blooded boy. Of course I’m going to want to keep my eyes on you. Who wouldn’t?”
Her cheeks warmed, the only heat she could feel through her numbness. She didn’t know how to respond except to follow him as he headed down the slope away from his house. The ramshackle structure surprised her. She’d pictured him in a fancy place, accomplished surgeon that he was. This was a weathered old building that would soon be in need of a new roof.
Dan walked past the house, down the slope to a dock where two kayaks were bobbing on the water. One was a double-seater. She wondered if his former fiancée had paddled the bay with him. The wind was cold, whipping her face and cheeks, and she realized her back stung where she’d been cut and her ribs ached from the pressure of the man who’d nearly killed her.
Her legs began to shake. Don’t think about it. But her limbs started to tremble until she sank down on a bench nearest the dock. Dan did not comment but stooped over one of the kayaks. It was the double-seater.
“I think I’m going out for a paddle. Want to come?”
A paddle? Now when she’d been nearly killed? When her body felt bruised and battered? But something deep inside whispered, Go. And she found herself easing closer until in a few moments she was seated in the back of the kayak, a paddle in her hands. Dan tossed a waterproof blanket over her legs.
“In case you get splashed,” he said.
They left the dock with a lurch. Soon he settled into a steady paddling rhythm, wide shoulders moving easily. “I can paddle for both of us,” he called.
And he could; she had no doubt. Her own back stung from the attacker’s wound, but the cut seemed to have etched a strong rebellion in her. As much as she wanted to run back to Coronado and hide, she would not let herself be helpless. Bad enough she could not shake the war from her mind; she would not be a victim of a homegrown thug. Where the resolve came from, she did not know. It was a new and unexpected feeling. She picked up the paddle and began to dip in the water. It took her a few moments to synchronize with Dan, but once she did the kayak moved smoothly through the water.
And what was the strange emotion she felt inside? A tiny flicker of courage. From her? A wounded woman? A useless chaplain? Inadequate to the job of investigator? To her utter astonishment, she felt an echo from long ago, a time when she had enjoyed being on the water and relished living on the exquisite California coast. It had been one of the places she’d so longed to return to during those parched days in the desert. It felt, just for a split second, as though she’d experienced a piece of home.
Cold wind buffeted her face, chilling her cheeks and making her eyes water, yet the kayak bore them on through the choppy waters of Monterey Bay and into a long narrow slough.
“If you come in the spring, you can see the snowy plovers, but there’s always something amazing here no matter what the season.”
She rested, taking in the rippled water, letting Dan guide the kayak near the bank where a dozen sea lions lolled, basking in the sun that poked through the clouds at irregular intervals.
Basking in the blessing. The thought startled her.
He turned. “Are—” He broke off. A look suffused his face for a moment before he hid it behind his charming smile.
“What?”
“I was going to ask if you were cold or tired.”
“Did you lose your train of thought?”
“No. The sun lit up your eyes just then. I forgot how bright they were, like the color of spring.”
The wonder and admiration in his expression made her blush. She pushed her hair away from her face. “I’m sure I look like a mess.”
“No,” he said, perfectly serious. “You are matchless.”
Matchless. How could he think so? Ruined woman that she was. Failed minister. Matchless. She turned the word over and over again as she picked up her paddle and helped pilot them back to the dock, tucking away the thoughts for later. In spite of the activity, she was frozen, teeth chattering by the time they returned and tied up the boats. Dan secured the kayak under a tarp. A sprinkle of rain hit her cheek.
“Come inside and I’ll make us some coffee. I’m a regular barista.”
She agreed, and he led her back to the house.
The inside was sparse, tidy, with a serviceable table and chairs and a personal gym set up in the corner. There were no decorations, no extraneous frills. As Dan set about fussing with a complicated coffee machine, she wandered to the wooden shelves that housed a neat collection of comic books.
“Are you a collector?” she said in surprise.
“Yeah,” he said. “Always wanted to be the hero, I guess.”
“Doctors are heroes.” She thought about the hundreds of lives he’d saved in Kandahar, the bodies he had snatched from the brink of death.
He sighed, pulling the levers and watching as the dark stream of coffee poured into her cup. “At the end of the day, I only get to save if that’s what God wants.”
“But putting yourself out there to be used,” she said. “In that horrible situation,” she forced the words out over a mouth suddenly gone dry. “That’s not something everyone would do.”
He handed her a cup, the warmth delicious on her cold fingers. “You did.”
“I ran away,” she blurted. From my grief. From God.
“We all run away sometimes, Angela,” he said softly. “I think the distance reminds us that we need Him. ‘If you remain in Me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from Me you can do nothing.’”
Apart from Me. She turned away from his intense gaze, the rich color shimmering like the potent coffee he was brewing. He began to fiddle with some milk-steaming device. Walking to the window, she looked out on the tossing waves. “Quite a view. Is that why you bought this place?”
“Yes. I had another home in Carmel. We were building it together, AnnaLisa and I.”
“Your fiancée?”
He sipped, joining her at the window. “You’re wondering why we broke up, aren’t you?”
“I was being polite and not asking.”
He laughed. “I should try that technique. Anyway, we broke up because I came back home a different man.”
“Different how?”
“After seeing what I’d seen...” His mouth tightened. “I just didn’t care as much about the things I’d cared about before, my career, the fancy house, traveling. I wanted to marry and start a family, not wait anymore until our careers goals were met. It wasn’t fair to change my priorities and expect that AnnaLisa would change hers. We’re still friends. She’s dating someone else, and I’m happy for her.”
She searched his expression and found sincerity there along with a small measure of regret.
“Did you come back a better man?” she asked.
He pursed his lips, the action throwing his strong profile into
shadow. She loved the way he considered the question. The answer, she knew, would be honest, even if it wasn’t what she wanted to hear.
The rumble of a motorcycle startled them both.
“Uh-oh,” Dan said, checking his watch. “Missed another one.”
“Missed another what?”
With a resigned sigh, he walked to the door as a heavyset man, probably somewhere in his midsixties, got off his motorcycle. The ancient bike had an attached sidecar from which a black Lab hopped out, scooting to the man’s side.
The man was out-and-out glowering as he stalked up the drive.
“Who is that?” she whispered.
“That’s my physical therapist, Jeb Paulson.”
“He makes house calls?”
“Only for his AWOL patients. I think I’m about to be court-martialed, or maybe drawn and quartered.”
Jeb pounded on the door.
Angela could not hold back a smile at the doomed look on Dan’s face as he went to open it.
TWELVE
Jeb did not wait for a polite invitation to enter, which wasn’t a surprise to Dan. He shook Angela’s hand solemnly and strode into the house, saving a hostile look for Dan as he passed. Dan thought he even saw a gleam of disappointment in Pogo the dog’s eyes.
Jeb sat on the sofa and folded his arms, Pogo alert at his feet.
“I’m sorry,” Dan said. “Some things happened today and I forgot about the therapy appointment. Inexcusable.”
Jeb said nothing, merely twitched a thick eyebrow.
“Um,” Angela said. “I think maybe I’m responsible for the missed appointment. Dr. Blackwater was helping me.”
“I appreciate you covering for him, missy,” Jeb said, “but I’ve heard this tune before, many times.”
Dan saw a glint of ire in Angela’s eye. No matter what she’d been through, Angela Gallagher was a commissioned officer in the US Navy. He had a feeling Jeb was about to meet his match. “You may call me Angela,” she said, “or Chaplain Gallagher, or even Captain, if you’d prefer.”
