Face the Music: Beyond Jackson Falls Book 1

by Laurie Breton

  “I have something for you.” He held up the blue fabric bag by its handles so she could see it more closely. She didn’t respond, but he could tell she was curious in spite of her misgivings. “It’s your father’s ashes,” he said. “And the flag from his funeral. They gave them to me after the service, but I thought they really should go to you.”

  She froze. A range of emotions flickered across her face. Then a single tear escaped from the corner of her eye and rolled down her cheek. “Damn you, Daddy,” she whispered.

  “Can we talk?”

  She looked past his shoulder, saw Spike watching them from the truck cab. “Get your dog,” she said. “You can’t leave him in the hot sun. You drove all this way, you might as well come in.”

  The house was simple but immaculate, reminiscent of a kinder, gentler time. Fresh flowers in a vase, crocheted doilies adorning chair arms. “This is Momma’s house,” she said. “We moved here after she and Daddy split.” Her voice held a lovely Southern lilt that surprised him. Gunther’s accent had clearly marked him as a Midwestern boy. “Can I offer you a glass of lemonade?”

  “Thank you. That would be nice.”

  While she busied herself in the kitchen, he took the time to look around. The curtains were antique lace affairs, the furniture plush and inviting. A single framed photo of an older woman adorned a side table. She had gray hair and kind eyes, and the same facial features as her daughter.

  “That’s Momma,” she said, coming up behind him so quietly he hadn’t heard her. She handed him the glass of lemonade. “Sit, please.”

  He sat, took a sip of the cool, refreshing drink. “You look like your mother.”

  “Yes. People tell me that all the time.”

  “Is she here? I’d love to meet her.”

  Jenell’s face darkened. “Momma passed away a year ago.”

  Surprised, he said, “I’m sorry. I had no idea. Gunther never said anything.”

  “I didn’t notify him. Quite frankly, Mr. Lindstrom, I didn’t think he gave a damn. That train left the station decades ago.”

  “He did care. He never stopped loving her. Or you.”

  “Odd that he showed it with thirty years of silence.”

  “I understand where you’re coming from, better than most. My mother left when I was nine years old. My dad raised me. Somehow, we got past it. Sometimes things aren’t what they seem. Mom and I are cool with each other now.”

  Spike waddled over to her, sniffed her ankles. She reached down to rub his ears. “Cute dog,” she said. “What’s his name?”

  “Spike. He belonged to your father.”

  “Oh.” She seemed taken aback. “I hope you’re not expecting me to—”

  “No. Spike and I are on a road trip.”

  “To where?”

  “To find myself.”

  “Well. Good luck with that.”

  He set his drink on a coaster. “Listen, Jenell,” he said, “there’s something you need to know. Your dad left everything to me.”

  He mouth tightened. “There couldn’t have been much.”

  “Actually, he owned his own business outright. A little country store. Land, buildings, inventory. An apartment upstairs where he lived. Apparently there was a great-aunt who died a few years ago, and she left him a considerable amount of money. He invested a chunk of it in the business. The rest of it’s in the bank, earning interest.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I don’t want any of it. I’ve signed it all over to you.”

  Her mouth fell open and she gaped at him, as if it was incomprehensible that a stranger should do such a thing. “What’s the catch?” she finally said.

  “There is no catch. He was my best friend. He loved you more than anything or anybody else in the world. He told me to do with it whatever I thought was the right thing. I think the right thing is to hand it over to you. Because you were his heart and soul.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You don’t have to say anything.” Mikey took out his wallet, pulled out Brendan Bedard’s business card. “This is his lawyer. Give him a call.”

  She took the card in stunned silence. “He loved you unconditionally,” Mikey said. “Right up to the day he died. He told me a thousand times that it was the great sorrow of his life, losing you. He kept hoping that sooner or later, you’d open one of those letters, and he’d miraculously get his little girl back. It never happened.”

  “Don’t make me feel guilty. I’m not the villain in this piece.”

  “No. You’re not. You had your reasons for sending the letters back. You grew up without a father, and you blamed him for it. That had to hurt. If he’d made better decisions, things might have been different. Or maybe they still would’ve turned out the same. You can’t second-guess the past. Just remember that he wasn’t the villain either. He was a good man. If there has to be a villain, then blame it on the war. Because that’s what screwed him up. He was lost, and instead of trying to get found, he chose to drown his sorrows in alcohol. It only made things worse, but it took him a couple of decades to figure that out. By the time he did, you’d moved on with your life.”

  “I loved him,” she said. “He was my daddy, my whole world. And I know that he had problems, but I was too young to know it at the time. All I knew was that I adored him, and then one day he was gone. And he never came back. It broke my heart.”

  “I’m sorry. But maybe this will help.” Mikey reached into the bag and pulled out the stack of letters, held together with a big red rubber band. Jenell sucked in a breath when she saw them.

  “Five years of letters,” he said. “Gunther saved every letter he ever wrote you. Every letter you sent back unread. I found them in his dresser drawer after he died. They’re yours now. I don’t care what you do with them. Read ‘em, save ‘em, torch ‘em, it’s up to you. Same thing goes with the store. Keep it. Run it. Sell it. Burn it to the ground. I don’t give a damn. I just want you to have what’s rightfully yours. And I have a feeling that wherever Gunth is now, he’s pleased. This is what he really wanted all along.”

  He stood, whistled to the dog, who scurried to his side. “Thanks for the lemonade, Jenell Ostrom. Your dad was a great man. Maybe we’ll run into each other again someday.”

  Ten minutes later, he was back on the highway. With his wheels humming under him, a snoring dog in the passenger seat, and John Stewart on the radio singing about a woman named July, Mikey Lindstrom crossed the mighty Mississippi, heading west into the sunset.

  And his future.

  PAIGE

  THE CHAIRS IN this hotel conference room left a little to be desired. Surrounded by a stack of résumés and a cluster of empty Diet Coke cans, she just wanted to escape. They’d interviewed nine candidates for the security position, and after sitting in this rock-hard chair for hours, her butt had gone numb. In between candidates, Lucy and Tony had discussed the merits of various individuals, but to Paige, they were indistinguishable. A never-ending line of beefy men with big muscles and bigger egos. Some of them were eminently qualified, but she couldn’t find herself mustering enthusiasm for anyone. The final decision would be hers to make, but she would probably defer to the wishes of her companions. Tony, because he was by her side onstage, night after night, for months on end. And Lucy, because she’d become Paige’s functioning brain ever since her own brain had gone on the fritz.

  “One more,” Lucy said, “and then we can call it a day.”

  “Please make this be over. Can I sit this one out?”

  “No,” Lucy and Tony said in unison.

  “Come on, guys. It doesn’t matter, you know. I’ll work with whoever gets the job. You could have gone through this whole process without me.”

  “You’re the CEO of this enterprise,” Lucy said. “It’s your responsibility to be involved in the hiring process.”

  “Bite me.”

  Lucy tried to hide her grin, but she wasn’t entirely successful. �
��Tony and I will go get him.”

  “Whatever.”

  Hunched over her laptop, Paige opened the airline’s website for the eighteenth time today, and checked ticket prices for a flight from LAX to PWM. Nothing had changed since the last time she looked, forty-five minutes ago. She could fly into Boston for half the cost of Portland, but then she’d have to go through the hassle of renting a car and driving all those hours, and just the thought was exhausting. If she flew into Portland, Dad could scoot down and pick her up, and she wouldn’t have to expend all that extra effort. Besides, she was loaded, so what difference did price make? She could afford to pay the exorbitant prices they were asking to fly her home.

  She’d spent so much time on this website over the last few days that her browser should have taken her there automatically. And still, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to click the BUY button. Mikey had made it clear that they had no future together, that there wasn’t room for her in his life. So why couldn’t she let go? Instead, she was sitting here, debating the merits of buying a plane ticket, prepared to grovel, if that’s what it took. Prepared to walk away from her life and her career, to buy a one-way ticket home if it meant she could be with the man she couldn’t seem to live without.

  She’d tried. She’d gone into the recording studio and spent two weeks of twenty-hour days putting together the album. She’d attended a small dinner party with a few people she considered friends, but all they wanted to do was talk about what a shit Ryan was, and she’d moved so far past Ry that he might as well be on another planet. She’d even let Lucy talk her into going on a date with the brother of a friend, because Luce had insisted that if she was too damn stubborn to fight for the man she really wanted, then she needed to get her ass over him, stop whining, and move on, chica. Noah was a sweet, ordinary guy who wasn’t in the business, and they hit it off. But nice as he might be, he wasn’t Mikey. There was no point in even trying. She called an early end to the date, paid for her own dinner, shook his hand, and left. Clearly, she was a one-man woman. Even if that one man couldn’t get his head out of his ass long enough to realize what a mistake he’d made.

  Her cursor hovered over the BUY button.

  Her finger hovered over the ENTER key.

  One click, that’s all it would take, and she’d have a first-class ticket home. So she could grovel and beg. Strip off her clothes and throw her naked self at him. Demean and debase herself, all in the name of love.

  You’re a fool. He doesn’t want you.

  It doesn’t seem to matter. I want him.

  He’ll break your heart all over again.

  It’s already in a million little pieces. I don’t think it could get any worse.

  What about your pride?

  Pride’s hard to cuddle up to on a cold winter night.

  You live in Southern California, Einstein. There are no cold winter nights.

  “Screw it,” she said, and clicked the button. At this point, she really had nothing to lose, other than the price of a plane ticket.

  “Paige?” Lucy said.

  Shit. The next applicant was here. She glanced up, blinked a couple of times, then arranged her features in one of those patently fake “nice-to-meet-you” smiles. A long, lean male body stood directly in the line of fire. Narrow hips. Washboard abs. Strong, muscled forearms. Military posture. The hair on the back of her neck rose as her gaze moved slowly northward until it landed on a pair of somber, dark eyes. Eyes she’d been trying to forget. Eyes she hadn’t expected to see again.

  Her smile froze in place. “I’ll just leave the two of you,” Lucy said. “Play nice, kids.” The door shut behind her with a click.

  She tried, and failed, to wrap her mind around the fact that he was here, standing in front of her, smelling of soap and shampoo and looking like sex on a stick. There was uncertainty in his eyes, and a scar still visible at his temple. “Go ahead,” he said. “Throw it all at me. I deserve whatever I get.”

  Paige cleared her throat. Cleared it again. “You’re not real,” she croaked, her heart beating so hard she feared it would burst from her chest. “You can’t be real. I just bought a plane ticket.”

  “I have no idea what that means, but I’m definitely real.”

  “You broke my heart, you son of a bitch.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, Paige. You can’t know how sorry I am.”

  “I’ve been trapped in the third circle of hell because I made the mistake of falling in love with this jackass-stubborn imbecile who had his head so far up his ass, he wasn’t capable of looking in front of him and seeing what was standing there. And you’re sorry?” Relief at seeing him here, alive and clearly well, made her words harsher than they might have been. “Do you have any idea how many times I called you before I gave up and left town?”

  He closed his eyes. Opened them again. “Seventeen.”

  She didn’t expect him to know. The fact that he did brought a huge lump to her throat. “How the hell did you find me?”

  “I had a little help from your dad.”

  “Dad?” she said, disbelieving. “My dad? The one who hates you?”

  “It turns out he doesn’t hate me. He just loves you. He’s doing what fathers do best, being protective. I laid it all out in front of him. Seems he’s a sucker for a sob story. He put me in touch with Lucy. And here I am.”

  “I suppose you’re here to grovel.” She tried to forget the fact that just minutes ago, she’d been ready to do that very thing.

  “I’m here,” he said, “to tell you a story.” He looked around behind him, found the interviewee chair, dragged it closer to her table, and sat. Rested his elbows on the arms of the chair. “I hope you’ll hear me out. Afterward, if you want to tell me to go pound sand, fine. But I hope you’ll listen to what I have to say first.”

  She tapped her pen against the table. Caught herself, and lay the pen flat. Folded her hands together in her lap. “Talk.”

  “Her name was Rachel Watson,” he said. “Her father was a general, stationed in Iraq. I loved her. And I killed her.”

  She made a tiny sound, somewhere deep in her throat. “Not the way you think,” he said. “But it was my responsibility to keep her alive. And I failed. Spectacularly.”

  It explained the tattoo. It explained a lot. “Oh, shit, Mikey,” she said.

  “About three years ago, I landed this plum assignment, working security for the general and his family. Except that the only family he had was Rachel. His wife had died years earlier, and he’d pampered and spoiled Rach. Trying, I suppose, to make up for the loss of her mother. When I first took the job, Rachel was back in the States, in college, working on a journalism degree. After she graduated, she came to Iraq to be with her father. She’d traveled with him all her life, and he was the only family she had. Because he was worried about her safety, General Watson pretty much put me in charge of her. As much as anyone could have been in charge of Rachel. I was supposed to drive her around, act as a bodyguard, whatever she needed from me.

  “She was twenty-two years old and beautiful, inside and out. Smart and funny and feisty, stubborn as an old goat. Headstrong, and so full of life. She lit up any room she walked into. Loaded with passion and promise. And fearless. Utterly, stunningly fearless. She was a lot like you.” He gave her a brief smile. “Rach was planning to be a freelance photojournalist. To travel around the world, selling stories and photos to magazines. She carried a camera with her everywhere. Just about drove me crazy with it. She loved people. That was what she took pictures of. People. And she had a story to tell. She wanted to share those photos with the world. Wanted those of us thousands of miles away, living our boring, superficial lives, with our smart phones and our lattes and our tanning beds, to see the faces of people whose lives had been destroyed by war. To look into those faces and see the humanity there. Like I said, she was twenty-two years old, and an idealist.”

  “She sounds like an amazing person.”

  “She was. And we fell in
love. I wanted to get her out of there. It wasn’t a safe place for anyone, especially not for a Western woman who refused to wear a head covering, a woman who ran around in men’s clothes, who had a habit of walking up to strangers with that damned camera in her hand. We made plans. I was getting out of Iraq as soon as I could, coming home to the States, and she was coming with me. We were getting married. We hadn’t said anything to her father yet. We were waiting for my transfer to come through.”

  Paige waited, her breath jammed so hard in her chest that it ached.

  “It was a Tuesday.” He spoke so quietly she could barely hear him. “She’d insisted on going out that morning to a village not far up the road, to talk to some elderly gentleman she’d been told about. They said he had quite a story to tell. And Rach was determined to be the one to tell it. She’d studied Arabic in college, and we both knew a little Kurdish. Enough to get by. And a few of the locals could speak English, so she figured that one way or another, we could communicate.”

  He cleared his throat, eyed the empty cans that littered the table. “You wouldn’t happen to have a cold one of those, would you?”

  Paige opened the cooler next to her chair, pulled out a can, and handed it across the table. He popped it open, took a long, drenching swallow. Wrist trembling, he set the can on the table.

  “Damn it, Mikey, you don’t have to do this,” she said. “If it’s too hard for you. I don’t need to hear the rest.”

  Those dark eyes, a little more glossy than usual, studied her face. “I owe you an explanation,” he said. “The full explanation. What I did to you…Christ, Paige, it was monstrous. And I need to tell you. If we don’t get it all out there, it’ll stand between us forever. I can’t have that.”

  “Fine, but if it gets to be too much, I’ll understand if you need to stop.”