Navy SEAL's Match

by Amber Leigh Williams

  Today Mavis and Zelda weren’t here to debunk the Leightons’ claims. They were on hand to aid in what was sure to be an exhaustive search. Mavis had come dressed for dirty work in a gray cropped T-shirt and a thin plaid work shirt unbuttoned over fitted workout capris and black-and-white high-tops. She came prepared with EMF readers and a shovel of her own. Olivia had called on Briar, her first cousin, and Cole. It was Gerald’s idea to prepare the family-style fiesta.

  “I thought you weren’t interested in what Zelda and I do,” Mavis said as they joined the queue for plates.

  “I’m not interested in joining the revelry,” Gavin claimed. “But I bet from a distance it’s fair entertainment.”

  “That proves you’ve never seen EMFs operate,” she said. “Ever worked with a metal detector?”

  “At least they find treasure,” he said, handing her a plate off the stack and motioning her ahead in line. “Or tinfoil.”

  “Depending on the contents of Olivia and Ward’s time capsule,” Mavis replied, “we might be finding more than that today.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it, Frexy.”

  * * *

  THE BLADE CUT deep into the dirt. The smells of earth, clay and rain enriched the air as Gavin worked under the baking sun.

  “Mind you don’t come up against any bones,” Olivia stated. “‘Round here’s ’bout where we buried Rex.”

  Gavin’s shovel paused. Visions of a clumsy Irish wolfhound he’d chased through the inn gardens alongside Kyle hit him full force. Next to him, William Leighton’s shovel stilled, too. “Now you tell us?” he demanded of his mother.

  “No worries, gents,” Gerald said, and grunted. He’d joined the digging. The polished vowels of his British upbringing rang clear. “Rex is entombed under that iris bed over there. Remember, love?” He addressed his wife. “To keep a fair distance from the roots.”

  The roots. Right, Gavin thought. They’d come up against a rough dozen as they dug around the tree closest to the brick house. It was an ancient specter. On the few occasions he’d visited Olivia and Gerald and their boys at the pecan orchard in the past, it had been an impressive sight. He recalled thick gnarled limbs weighted by healthy green foliage, perfect for climbing. It had had a rope swing tied in its boughs and the initials of Olivia’s grandparents carved into the trunk.

  It was difficult to reconcile memories with what remained. According to Gerald, the tree had taken a direct hit from a lightning strike. Now it was as black as night. Not a speck of green decked its stark skeleton. Most of the branches had fallen or been removed for safety. From the house, its bare silhouette looked like a dancer stuck in a painful arabesque.

  But the damned roots remained. Gavin’s arms sang as the shovel blade sliced into another thick offender. He lifted the shovel with both hands, bringing it down in decisive strokes to break it up. The tree was dead. How was it that so many of its roots remained lodged in the earth—as if time or disaster had never taken place?

  He stopped to sweep his forearm across his brow. Sweat had built there. It soaked through his clothes. He thought of removing his shirt.

  “They should take a break,” he heard Briar say. “The heat. It’s getting worse.”

  “They can hear you,” William called to her. Humor lilted from his voice.

  “Yeah,” Cole piped up from Gerald’s other side. “They’d like a beer, maybe.”

  William and Gerald made affirmative noises. Gavin kept slicing the blade through unbroken ground, tuning in to the song of metal and clay. His blood, too, was singing. He ached with effort. The release was sweet.

  His head had screamed all morning, since 3:30 a.m. when dreams had tripped him awake. With a meal in his belly, however, and the lull of early afternoon on the orchard, plus the added work...the feeling of industry...he could almost convince himself he was enjoying all of it.

  And there was Mavis. It had all started with her, the shovel in her hands. The EMF meters had found anomalies, suggesting activity of some kind. Gavin had heard her struggling with the blade near the woodshed, then the front porch of the house, and finally closer to the irises. When she’d stopped to drink the glass of lemonade Briar brought her, Gavin had yanked the shovel and picked up where she left off. William and Cole had followed his lead. Soon there was a trench around the dead tree beside the irises.

  “We close, Frexy?” he called out to her without looking. He felt her watchful eyes.

  “It doesn’t work like sonar. There could be something here. There could be nothing.”

  “It’s a hotbed, for sure,” Zelda said.

  “If it’s buried here, it shouldn’t be but a few feet down,” Mavis said.

  “They wouldn’t have buried it deeper,” Olivia said.

  A hand found Gavin’s shoulder. He looked around to find his father as flushed as a red pepper. “Dad,” Gavin said, alarmed. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Cole grunted. He leaned into Gavin.

  Gavin cupped an arm around his shoulders. Like the others, Cole had sweated through his T-shirt. His breathing was a touch more labored. “Sure?” Gavin asked.

  Head low, Cole nodded. “The heat. Can’t take it like I used to, I guess.”

  Gavin had already lifted a hand to his stepmother.

  Briar linked an arm around Cole’s waist. With the other, she took a firm grip on Cole’s shovel. “Let’s go back to the house for a breather.” Steering her reluctant husband in that direction, she reached back to pass the shovel off to Gavin. “Don’t any of the rest of you let it get to be too much.”

  Gavin watched the line of his father’s back retreat until it wavered and became shaded. Damn.

  The weight of the second shovel lifted. Mavis tugged at the handle. “Go with them. I’ll pick it up.”

  “I can’t let you dig,” Gavin said. “Not after that.”

  She tugged again until his hold loosened. “Move aside.”

  He watched as she shed her overshirt, the plaid number. She tied it around her waist, then hoisted the shovel. He moved to the right until her blade split fresh topsoil he already knew to be soft. And he watched her, her hair slicing backward just like the dull edge of the long-handled tool. The pale curve of her cheek. The lines of her. She was small with, he suspected, curves that she drowned subtly with her wardrobe of ceaseless black.

  There was muscle there, too, he found. Will and might. He considered changing her nickname again, this time to Mighty Mouse. She dug without slowing or even a grunt of effort. She culled clay from its earth bed. He nodded approval, then began working beside her, letting their actions fall into rhythm.

  He’d knowingly overlooked her for most of her life. Who knew Kyle’s sister would wind up an endless source of fascination?

  The end of his blade met something solid as he sank it decisively into the loose ground. The impact sang up his arms and filled the air with a satisfying thunk. “Aha,” he heard Zelda utter.

  Mavis dropped her shovel and knelt as he raised his blade. She didn’t hesitate to sink her hands into the red-tinged dirt, combing it up the sides of the hole.

  Gavin took a knee beside her. He took over, leaving her to tug aside loose black roots moist from internment. The smell of earth was darker, richer. Gavin could practically taste it. It coated them both to the elbows as inches gave way to the flat face of a handmade box.

  They worked together to loosen the ground hugging it close on either side. Finally, with one hand over and another under, Mavis hefted the box from its resting place. Gingerly, she placed it on the ground as Olivia and Gerald flanked her.

  The flat of Olivia’s palm dusted the lid. Gavin leaned in until he could make out the carving of a rose. Until he could inhale Mavis’s mango scent and realized how close he was to brushing his lips across the point of her shoulder.

  Gerald found a screwdriver to loosen the lid. As he
pried the old screws from their corners, nobody moved.

  “It should be you,” Gerald said as he looked to his wife. “Go on, love. Let’s see what Ward and his Olivia found worth saving.”

  “Not me,” Olivia said. She beckoned William closer. “Come ’ere, Shooks.”

  William obeyed, hesitant. “Mom. You’ve waited...”

  “You never knew them,” she told him, scooting so that William could wedge his way between her and Gerald and take a knee. “I should wait for Finny, but God knows he didn’t give me a single patient bone in my body.” Placing a hand on William’s arm, she lowered her voice and said, “Go ahead.”

  William paused only briefly before appeasing his parents’ ill-contained curiosity. He pried the lid free. Mavis, who had shifted over with the others, was practically beneath Gavin. He felt the excitement all but zipping from the top of her head even if it wasn’t her gasp that rent the air. “Letters,” she said.

  “What’s the date on the postmark?” Olivia asked as Gerald lifted a ragged envelope to the light. “Is the stamp still legible?”

  “It is.” A wondering laugh shook Gerald’s shoulders. “July 18, 1953.”

  “Six months before they were married,” Olivia calculated. She handled the envelope with care. “From her to him.”

  “It’s not the only one,” William said as he riffled through the collection. “The bundles tied with the ribbons are the ones she wrote, from the looks of it.”

  “You can tell by the writing,” Olivia noted. “I’d forgotten how precise her penmanship was...”

  “And the ones tied with the leather straps are his,” William finished. “Look, Dad. We found someone wordier than you. But I don’t get it.”

  “What don’t you get?” Olivia asked absently as she thumbed through a stack.

  “They both grew up here, or close by,” William said. “Didn’t they?”

  “He was from Fairhope,” Olivia said. “She lived more toward Malbis.”

  “They had cars in the fifties,” William expounded. “Why so many letters? It’s not like they lived on opposite corners of the globe. Even if they did, there were phone lines, telegraphs...”

  “People used to communicate differently,” Zelda explained.

  Olivia carefully unfolded a page of a letter. She sounded far off, near dreamy, when she added, “And when you love someone that much, there’s nothing like writing it down on paper.”

  “It’s recorded,” Mavis concluded. “This way they could relive the feeling and pass it on.”

  Gavin frowned at the side of her head. “Since when’re you a romantic?”

  She glanced up. Her eyes went round when her nose nearly touched his. The gap widened as she edged back, but he saw her dark gaze race across his face in quick perusal. His mouth went dry. “I’m not,” she claimed and looked away.

  “Mmm-hmm,” he said, unconvinced.

  Underneath the point of his chin, Mavis’s shoulder hiked in a shrug. “It’s history, right? I like history. Especially the kind I can hold in my hands.”

  Like those giant genealogical tomes back at Zelda’s.

  A smile crammed, foreign, in the ball of his jaw joint. It felt out of place, but it hung there, like a lazy, back-sliding moon in its crescent. He was aware of it, just as he was aware of Mavis and aware of all the places inside him that didn’t feel dark when she coaxed it out of him.

  He should move away. It was too hot to be this close. The contents of the box were too intimate. Ward and the first Olivia’s messages weren’t for him.

  But Mavis smelled like earth and life and threw all the shady parts of him into stark contrast when he breathed in and filled up with her scent.

  The heel of his shoe caught the lip of a hole and he nearly tripped into it. Stumbling only slightly as he straightened, he looked down to keep from twisting his ankle in any of the rest of them.

  They were spread out under the dead eaves of the tree, the grass-covered glade broken up by ruts and dirt tossed haphazardly. A minefield.

  No. He blinked. The battlefield couldn’t intrude here.

  But he had intruded, and the battlefield was always with him. Damned if he’d ever be rid of it, anymore than the stench of the loner—the outsider.

  His mind began to grind into the sick death spiral of anxiety. He braced his palm against his brow. It was covered in clay. Red clay. Even the cloying scent couldn’t stop the visceral flash-bang of memory.

  “He’s down! Benji’s down!” he all but wailed into his comms over the sound of cover fire. “Bring the Bradley! Bring that bitch around!”

  “It’s four minutes out,” Pettelier said.

  Benji was bleeding out against the underside of Gavin’s palm. “Get inside my pack. Get me the gauze.”

  Benji struggled to talk through a taut grimace. Gavin couldn’t hear him over the sound of M60s going haywire. He leaned down.

  “...in the gut.”

  Gavin shook his head automatically. “Nah. The ribs. We’ll stop the bleed. You’ll be a’right.”

  “No bullshit,” Benji muttered. “Don’t...b-bullshit me.”

  Gavin knew where the bullet had gone through. He knew what gutshot meant as much as the next soldier in line out here in no-man’s-land. And he denied it. “Bradley’s comin’. Gonna be fine.”

  Benji coughed.

  Don’t do that, Gavin shouted from the walls of his head. “Pete! Where’s the fucking gauze, man?”

  “Got it right here,” Pettelier grunted.

  Another team guy shouted from behind, “We’re covered up!”

  From comms, he heard, “Bradley, five minutes out!”

  “Slow son of a...” Gavin pressed his teeth together. They stayed clenched. If they weren’t clenched, damn it, they’d be chattering. He moved his hand to plug the wound.

  Blood rushed at him. Benji shuddered. Spasmed.

  Gavin pressed his hand against the flow. He wasn’t a goddamn surgeon. He needed a surgeon!

  “Harm.”

  The name had Gavin riveted to Benji’s pained expression. The light hung there, but it was hard and forced and it caught Gavin like the last blind scream of sunlight off the bay at the end of a winter’s day.

  Gavin shook his head. “Shut up, you’re fine.”

  “I got somethin’ to say.”

  I’m not a surgeon! “We’re not doin’ this!” Gavin said out loud.

  The ground shook, the world coming apart with noise. Gavin threw himself on Benji as dust and mortar fell.

  “The hell...we’re not,” Benji said. And he coughed again.

  “I’m gonna save you,” Gavin persisted. He ground it from the marrow. “I’ll get you to a surgeon. This ain’t but a flea bite on a dog’s ass and you’re going home, you son of a bitch.”

  The faint flicker of humor eclipsed pain momentarily. Benji’s mouth fumbled. “A s-s-sheepdog’s ass.”

  “Right.” And thinking of his sister, Benji’s wife, thinking of Kyle and his father, Cole, the inn and the bay and everything about life there that was growing harder and harder to retrace in his mind, Gavin placed his hand over Benji’s brow and stroked. “You’re damn right, brother.”

  The rest came at him in a rush. The squad hadn’t been able to hold their ground. The Bradley was eight blocks away. Running retreat was all they had. Benji had gone out on Gavin’s shoulder.

  He died in the stupid Bradley, less than halfway back to base where even the surgeons couldn’t do a damn thing for him. He’d wanted Gavin to tell her—Harmony. Benji had wanted it to be him.

  Gavin had failed there just the same. He hadn’t made it back stateside before Kyle had raced off to Wisconsin where Harmony was flying aerobatics to deliver the news.

  She and Benji had been married less than a year. She had only just found out she was pregnant with Bea.r />
  And Gavin hadn’t been there. Because even if he had made it back to the States before Kyle had gotten to her...he wasn’t sure he could’ve told her he was the one who couldn’t save Benji.

  It was the anger that came swinging through the flashback, crashing through it like a ram. Gavin grabbed it by the horns, rode it bucking and thrashing—

  A hand closed around his elbow. He threw it off to dislodge the hold, poised for attack.

  Mavis’s features struck him, freckles dark, eyes round.

  He let the fight go out of him when the shock painted her. He stepped away, seeing the others casting looks in their direction.

  She shook her head and spoke first. “I’m sorry.”

  “What for?” He shot it off like a curse. He forced his feet into backward motion, winding away from her and the rest.

  “Are you okay?” She reached out.

  “Fine,” he said, still verbally swinging. She needed to go. He needed to get away from her before she found out how cold and vast the dark side of the moon really was. He moved in the direction of the house...or what he hoped was the right direction.

  She came after him. “Gavin...”

  He pointed at her. “Stay. I mean it,” he added in resignation before lengthening his stride.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “WHERE IS HE?” Mavis asked. She’d changed from the work wardrobe she’d dirtied up into black jeggings and a tank. After checking on Cole and Briar to see that Gavin’s father had recovered from the heat, she’d hunted Gavin through Olivia and Gerald’s homey abode.

  Harmony came down the stairs. “He’s taking a shower.”

  Mavis could tell by her expression that she’d seen him. “How is he?”