“Are you going to have both sides of this conversation, or am I allowed to speak now?” The older man’s amused drawl was a gentle, but unmistakable, rebuke.
Do- Lord pressed his lips together and nodded.
“I’m not holding you responsible for Delvecchio, and neither is anyone else. But I am worried about you. You haven’t been yourself since Afghanistan. You fake being laid-back better than anybody I know, but you’re too tight. I know you’ve got a degree in clinical psychology, but you can’t treat yourself. Find somebody to talk to, get it off your chest, and get your head back where it needs to be.”
Lon was thinking post-traumatic stress. The thought had occurred to Do-Lord too. It explained the difficulty paying attention, the sense that some nameless something was wrong, the oppressive boredom. He was sure it explained the crazy moment in Afghanistan when he’d almost fired on a man he was tasked to protect. He still woke up in a cold sweat from nightmares in which he saw Calhoun in his rifle scope and did squeeze the trigger.
He’d put the whole event down to combat stress, some aberration induced by the fatigue of unrelenting vigilance in a land where the enemy could be anyone, anywhere. The popular press often attributed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (once called “battle fatigue” until it was recognized that many people who hadn’t been in wars had the same symptoms) to one horrific, traumatic event.
In fact, people were amazingly resilient, and one terrible event in an otherwise stable, supportive environment didn’t usually induce PTSD. Instead it was an accumulation of stresses: being in constant danger from which there was no escape, assaults on the emotions which one dare not feel, morally ambiguous situations which many were far too young to comprehend, much less grapple with, that eventually overwhelmed the mind’s defenses.
The men he was responsible for, he carefully monitored for signs of combat stress, but apparently it had snuck up on him. He still couldn’t believe that, even for a second, he had risked the careers of every man in the unit, especially Jax’s, his best friend. His own career he wouldn’t have needed to worry about. Someone would have seen to it that he left Afghanistan in a body bag. And he would have thought the punishment just. He was grateful that the deeply indoctrinated ideals of loyalty, responsibility, and awareness of consequences had pulled him back from the brink, but the shame of that moment crawled up his face in a hot slither. He couldn’t possibly, ever, tell anyone.
Anyway, he already knew what a therapist would tell him. In Afghanistan, though he had done what he should, he hadn’t done what he wanted to. Therefore, what was troubling him now was lack of closure.
He was determined to stop thinking like a hotheaded teenager and start thinking like a SEAL. Whether caused by PTSD or not, if he had lived up to his promise, instead of burying his past when he buried his mother, the moment in Afghanistan would never have happened.
When he made the vow with a teenager’s intensity, he’d wanted justice and seen it in black and white, a life for a life. With planning, nothing would be easier than to kill Calhoun. But now that he’d had time to think rationally, a clean head shot was too good for the senator. If he thought about justice for his mother in a balanced way, Calhoun hadn’t murdered Do-Lord’s mother. He had destroyed her life. It was a subtle, but important distinction.
So, thinking like a SEAL, he needed to do the most damage to Calhoun’s life with the least expenditure of resources. That was exactly what Calhoun had coming.
The first step was to gather intelligence, and he had begun. He had bought a cheap laptop to be destroyed later, which he used only for surfing the Net for every detail he could glean about Calhoun. Eventually, he would learn where Calhoun was vulnerable.
Most men returning from deployment had the occasional image or idea they couldn’t dismiss. He had it under control. His symptoms weren’t anything to worry about unless they didn’t go away. He slid his trademark lazy smile onto his face hoping it was good enough to get past Lon’s radar. “You’re right. I guess I just feel sorry for Carmine-it’s a tough break. It sucks, and I wouldn’t want it to happen to anybody.”
Lon appeared satisfied. “Right. In case a bone marrow transplant will help, Davy will take blood samples from anyone who wants to donate. In the meantime, see if there’s anything Carmine or his family need.” Lon shoved out of his chair. “But while you’re at it, plan to get away. You know I’ll approve leave anytime you ask. We call the world of operations the ‘real’ world, but if we really believe that’s reality, we’re in trouble.”
Chapter 2
Sessoms Corner, North Carolina
The trailer he grew up in could have fitted, with room left over, into the double parlor of the late Victorian house where a wedding breakfast for Jax and his bride Pickett was taking place. A corner of Do-Lord’s mouth kicked up in amusement. The most room would have been left at the ceiling. Decorated with intricate crown molding, these ceilings were easily fifteen feet.
Painted a cheerful lime green and filled with comfortable upholstered sofas and chairs as well as what even he recognized as priceless antiques, these were clearly rooms to be lived in, not just displayed to company. The house had been in the family for over a hundred years, and oil portraits of ancestors, not all terribly good, were scattered among hunting scenes and landscapes.
By the time he’d helped himself to the sausage casserole, fruit compote, fried green tomatoes, venison loin in gravy, and grits on the table in the dining room, the autumn leaf design on the porcelain plate was completely obliterated. He carried it very carefully across priceless Oriental carpets, grateful he wasn’t expected to balance it on his knee. The warm sunny day, unusually balmy for November in North Carolina, had allowed the hostesses to set tables outside on the wide porches where thick white paint gleamed on columns and rails.
A light breeze carried the scent of autumn leaves and the earthy tang of newly-dug peanuts. It fluttered the peach tablecloths and played with pretty girls’ hair. A couple of the girls smiled invitingly. He smiled in return, but he set his plate down at an empty place at the table where Jax’s bride, Pickett, sat with two of her cousins. Pickett looked bright as an autumn leaf herself with her gold tumble of curls and orange silk dress.
Last night at the wedding rehearsal, Jax had caught him watching Pickett and leaned over to say, “Pickett’s mine. Get one of your own.” Jax’s words kept reverberating in his mind. They popped up at the oddest, and sometimes most inconvenient, times. Jax had said them in jest-well, partly in jest. Jax laughed when he said it, but there wasn’t a doubt i
n Do-Lord’s mind he’d also been warned away.
Jax had it wrong. Do-Lord liked Pickett. He thought she was perfect-for Jax. During the rehearsal he hadn’t been eyeing Pickett so much as trying to understand how she came to be best friends with Emmie Caddington, who was the maid of honor. Pickett and her sisters, who were her other attendants, were all remarkably pretty, remarkably poised women, while the friend had to be one of the blandest people he’d ever seen. It was like she intended to be a nonentity, but in a reverse way she stood out precisely because there was nothing about her to draw the eye. Still, birds of a feather flock together. Puzzling how she could be Pickett’s friend was a way to keep himself entertained through the interminably silly proceedings.
SEALs believed in rehearsal. A practice run for the ceremony was the first item on the three-day wedding agenda that had made total sense to Do-Lord-until he found out it was bad luck for the bride to rehearse her own part, so she sat on a pew, while the maid of honor pretended to be the bride. SEALs rehearsed one another’s roles all the time. But unless they thought Emmie would marry Jax if Pickett was out of commission, making her rehearse Pickett’s role in addition to her own didn’t make a lick of sense.
He also hadn’t seen why Emmie, whose arm was in a cobalt blue sling (the only colorful thing about her) had to mime bending down to straighten Pickett’s train, which as maid of honor was one of her duties. She shouldn’t have been doing it at all. Being able to use only one arm made her clumsy, and it had to hurt like hell. He was standing right there, he could move the damn train. He’d give her credit. She hadn’t complained once, but he’d been so irritated after a while, he’d had to find a way to take his mind off it.
Pickett smiled and indicated the empty chair when she saw him approach the table. Do-Lord carefully laid his fork to the left of his plate and put his knife on the right. Chiefs were taken in hand by older chiefs as soon as they were promoted and taught table manners that could get them through a formal seven-course banquet. The wedge of quiche on Pickett’s plate looked untouched. Offering to serve others before seating oneself was good manners, but it was genuine concern that made him ask, “Can I get you anything from the buffet?”
Pickett shook her head. “Thank you, but I have to leave in a minute. Jax and Tyler will be here soon, and I can’t let Jax see me. Bad luck, you know.”
Oh yes, the notion that it was bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the wedding. There seemed to be no end to traditions and superstitions surrounding a wedding. No limit to how seriously intelligent, educated people took them. “Why is it bad luck?”
“Because, if he sees her, he might change his mind,” one of the cousins joked with a horsey laugh. Between guys a jab like that might be a sign of affection, but Do-Lord didn’t miss the way she flicked her eyes to see if the punch connected.
Pickett laughed too, but the corners of her mouth looked tight.
He pretended to think it over. “Naw. That cain’t be it. A smart man like Jax? He knows he’s getting the prettiest girl here-don’t you think?” Do-Lord kept his country-boy smile until she dropped her eyes.
“Everybody has always said Pickett’s sister Grace is the beauty of the family. Pickett’s the smartest.” The other cousin covered Pickett’s hand. “But I have to say, Pickett you look the prettiest today I’ve ever seen you.” Meaning what? What was the matter with these people? “I’m so happy for you,” she added with a genuine smile.
Pickett squeezed her cousin’s hand in return, then folded her napkin. “Well, I don’t know what my bad luck would be, and I don’t want to find out. I’m going to take my leave now.”
In a few minutes the other two women excused themselves.
Alone at his table at last, Do-Lord checked the master schedule of events he’d loaded into his smart phone, cross-referenced with directions to every breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dance, and the names of the hosts with degree of kinship to Pickett’s family. Etiquette demanded he thank his hostess before departing. As soon as he found at least one (there were twelve), he could return to the hotel and nap awhile.
Do- Lord returned his phone to his belt and hefted his empty plate. It didn’t seem right to leave it on the table.
“Here, I’ll take that.” Pickett’s grey-haired great-aunt spoke from his elbow. Her complexion was artfully preserved. Except for the obviously young, all the women appeared at least twenty years younger than they probably were. “Isn’t it nice the weather has cooperated? On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, you never know what the weather will do. But with Pickett’s sister Grace directing the wedding, why am I surprised? Everything she does is perfect.” The old lady rattled on in seemingly inexhaustible chatter. This was the woman he was looking for. He called up the correct leave-taking phrases and waited for an opening. “Nobody else could have pulled off a wedding with only a month’s preparation,” she continued. “It won’t be what it could have been, of course, but Grace swears Pickett wanted a small wedding. You should have seen the weddings we did for Pickett’s older sisters,” she sighed. “Still, family has to rally at times like this, don’t you think?”
Do- Lord wouldn’t know. His family had consisted of himself and his mother. When Social Services had returned him to his mother, he’d made sure any shortcomings about his home life were never noticed again. Theoretically, he must have had grandparents, cousins, maybe aunts and uncles, but not a one that he knew of had ever rallied.
“Yes ma’am.” He used the smile older ladies in almost any culture reacted well to. “Having family you can count on makes all the difference.”
Emmie Caddington was looking for a man. In a very short-term-goal, temporary sort of way, that is. Right now, before the wedding breakfast could break up, she needed to find Caleb Dulaude, the one everybody called Do-Lord.
Eastern North Carolina men carry nicknames like Potlikker and Choo-choo to their graves without loss of dignity. Among them, a name like Do-Lord was unexceptional, but somehow, she couldn’t make herself use it. Despite his down-home persona, his rust-red hair, and the tan-over-freckles skin of an outdoorsman, there was an austere integrity to his features, not as obvious as handsomeness, that made the name all wrong for him.
Whenever she saw him she longed for her pencil, or better yet, pen and ink to trace the relationships of broad, rather prominent brow ridges and longish nose, uncompromising cheekbones, and mobile mouth. When he was a boy, he’d probably been on the homely side. Bony features like his would take some growing in to.
Even the unconscious flexing of her fingers as she mentally drew him started up the throb in her shoulder. Having her right arm immobilized in a sling while a dislocated shoulder healed was the reason, the o
nly reason, she needed him. If she hadn’t been in denial about how long it would be before her arm was usable, she wouldn’t have waited so long before seeking him out.
Of course, she might not have been in denial, if the thought of being anything but carefully polite to him wasn’t anathema to her. He and those like him represented everything she thought the world would be better without.
Pickett’s sister Grace, her knit dress of lapis silk jersey nailing the “dressy casual” the invitation had called for, halted Emmie’s attempt to thread her way through the crowd around the buffet table.
Every few millennia nature reaches the apex of an evolutionary line and produces a creature so perfect, so exquisitely adapted to its ecological niche, that it seems the environment was made only to be a setting for it.
Such a creature was the exceedingly well-named Grace. She was absolutely everything a young matron of her class should be. She was beautiful, smart, alarmingly competent, and tireless in her devotion to her family and her life’s work, which was (as the oldest of the sisters and her mother’s right hand) to present them to the world as polished and perfected as she could make them. Aiding her mission, she had the sublime confidence of one who has never questioned, or needed to question, her place in the great scheme of things.
“Where are you going,” Grace asked, “and with that look on your face?”
Emmie wasn’t sure what expression might be on her face, but she didn’t miss the look of exasperated affection with which Grace swept Emmie’s beige Land’s End blazer and matching beige skirt. Emmie wasn’t by nature rebellious. With her logical mind, the thousand slippery rules governing style were simply incomprehensible. By the time she’d entered college she was already a true eccentric-a nerd who couldn’t even conform to the rules of nerd-dom. She had accepted her singular state and come to prefer it. Accepting it was easier than trying to fit in.
Sealed with a promise Page 3
