A Hero Comes Home Read online

  Another shake of the head.

  He stepped to the side, deliberately. They were a short distance from her cottage by now, and she could see what his large body had been hiding from her view.

  A black sedan with a white license plate and blue lettering, clearly marked “US Government,” sat on the street. There were small American flags on either of the front fenders. Standing beside the vehicle was an older, gray-haired man in full military uniform, the four stars on his epaulets denoting him a general. Beside him stood a distinguished-looking, fortyish black man in a tan suit who she could swear was Senator Bolton Smith, North Carolina’s newest bright star on the political horizon.

  Sally’s knees went weak and she might have fallen if not for Kevin’s firm hold around her waist. This was shades of the death notification visit she’d gotten from the Army three years ago, but then it had been a lower-level Delta Force officer and a military chaplain.

  What does it mean?

  What is the worst thing these people could tell me?

  Jake is dead. He can’t be declared dead again.

  Maybe it’s some posthumous medal he’s being given. Well, forget that. She’d had enough with the military long before Jake had left for his last deployment. But Jake had been gung-ho Uncle Sam and God Bless America to the end, bless his patriotic soul.

  “Mrs. Dawson?” the general said when she got close enough to notice the grim expression on his face, which matched the one on Kevin’s face, as well as that of the senator who had a cell phone in one hand, which he was tapping away at with an expert thumb. How rude! But then, maybe it was an important call he had to make. Direct line to the president, she joked to herself.

  But then she heard him say, “Yes, Mr. President.”

  Holy frickin’ hell!

  “Yes. I’m Mrs. Dawson,” she said to the general.

  Kevin walked away, leaving her on her own.

  It was all so strange. If she’d felt like Alice falling through the Graceland rabbit hole before, now it was more like Alice in Woo-Woo Land.

  Only seconds had gone by, but her brain reacted like it was viewing a series of slides. Pictures on the walls of her brain that went click, click, click.

  Kevin greeting her before she reached home, a warning of sorts in his caring eyes.

  The black sedan with the government plates in front of her house. Didn’t they see the no parking sign?

  A high-ranking military man waiting. For me!

  And a senator, for heaven’s sake. In Bell Cove! The townies will have him over at the Elvis diner doing the Shag, if they find out.

  The surprisingly absent sound of three boys laughing and shouting at the same time, each vying to get her attention, especially after a day fishing. What does it all mean?

  The military man coughed to clear his throat and said, “I’m General George Parker from the Joint Chiefs. In Washington.”

  She tilted her head to the side and waited.

  “I have some good news for you, Mrs. Dawson,” he said, though the tone of his voice didn’t sound like it.

  “That’s great. I could use some good news.”

  Was it ironical, or what, that the bells of Bell Cove began to ring then? A drumroll couldn’t have done it better. Bong, bong, bong, bong! Ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong! Clang, clang, clang, clang!

  When the reverberation of the bells stopped, into the silence General Parker announced, “Your husband is alive.”

  Chapter 2

  He could “go home again,” but he didn’t want to . . .

  “Oompfh!” The muscles in Captain Jacob Dawson’s scarred back screamed with agony as he lowered the bar on the weight machine. The compact multifunction gym station, which probably cost a cool fifty grand, worked every part of the body imaginable. Today, Jake was concentrating on lost upper body strength. An uphill battle to say the least . . . and painful!

  “Jake, my man, you are sweating like a fisherman hauling in two-hundred-pound gill nets under a blistering Outer Banks’ sun.”

  Surprised, Jake twisted around on his seat, too quickly, and about passed out at the lightning bolt of pain that struck the back of his skull. Even so, he reached, reflexively, for his trusty Ruger, which, of course, wasn’t there. All this happened within a split second, and he was about to duck for cover when reality hit.

  It was just his longtime friend, second lieutenant Isaac Bernstein, who’d walked, unannounced, into his private room at the Landstuhl military hospital in Germany. “And, dude . . .” Izzie sniffed the air in an exaggerated fashion, ignoring Jake’s reaction, “you stink like bad tuna, too.”

  “Bite me!” Jake said and stood, taking a moment to get his balance. He still wasn’t used to the soft brace on his left leg. He limped over to the bench where he grabbed a gym towel and began to wipe the sweat off his brow and bare chest.

  “How’s the leg doing?” Izzie asked after watching his halting progress.

  “Just super. After three surgeries and a titanium rod implant that weighs about five pounds, I still can’t dance.”

  “Not even the Shag? Oh, man, you’ll lose your Carolina creds.”

  Jake threw the towel at Izzie’s teasing face.

  Izzie caught it midair and tossed it back at him. “Remember the dance contest in Myrtle Beach? You and me and the Marconi twins from St. Bernadette’s. I was the winner, as I recall. In more ways than one.” Izzie waggled his eyebrows for emphasis.

  “Dream on, brother. Even at sixteen, I could beat your ass in any contest, whether football, swimming, fishing, or . . . dancing.”

  “I don’t know about that. I have fond memories of Angela Marconi. She was my partner that night, and . . .” He began to sing “Under the Boardwalk.”

  Grinning, Izzie stepped forward to give him a warm bro hug, despite his smelly body.

  Jake barely restrained himself from shoving his friend away. He didn’t like to be touched anymore, not even by his buddy since toddlerhood when they’d been dog-paddling side by side in the cool waters of Bell Sound, their mothers best friends since college, fellow teachers at Bell Cove Elementary School for many years. Of course, Jake’s mother was gone now, but he and Izzie had many shared memories.

  “Cool digs!” Izzie remarked a short time later, as he sipped at one of the beers he’d snuck in.

  Jake was sipping at the other, the first he’d had in the three months he’d been residing there. Didn’t matter that it wasn’t even ten a.m. Beer was the breakfast of champions on occasion.

  “A suite, no less!” Izzie continued as he gazed around the large room.

  Yes, Jake had a suite, if you could call it that . . . a traditional patient room with an adjoining sitting area featuring institutional-style furniture, a bare-bones couch, coffee table, TV, and dining table, and an alcove for the gym equipment. It was located in a private—in other words, secret—wing of the hospital where Uncle Sam hid those high-profile soldiers it didn’t want the public to know about. Down the hall, at the moment, were a congressman’s pilot son who’d crashed a billion-dollar aircraft in some reckless Top Gun maneuver, and two unidentified soldiers rescued from a work camp in Russia, where they had no business being. Probably SEALs.

  “Suite, my ass! They can call it that all they want, but, in the end, it’s a jail. I’m just as much a prisoner here as I was for three years in an Afghan cave.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “Yeah, I do. The surroundings might be more comfortable. The food a little better. And I don’t get tortured every other day, except by Nurse Hatchitt and his happy needle.”

  “His, as in male nurse?”

  Jake nodded. “Marine lieutenant Delbert Hatch, RN, as in registered nutcase. Solid gold butt-inator.”

  Izzie smiled at that reminder of the name the two of them, at the age of about ten, had given to anyone, mainly adults, they classified as assholes. “So, no pretty young things prancing around?”

  “Be careful where you talk like that, man.
Even I, isolated like I am, know what constitutes sexual harassment.”

  Izzie pretended to zip his lips.

  “And, no, there are no pretty young things here, not that I’ve seen. Personally, I think it’s just another form of legal torture Uncle Sam is inflicting on me. Visual deprivation.”

  Izzie popped the caps off two more bottles of beer and handed one to him. They moved to the low couch where they both leaned back and propped their shoes on the coffee table. A flat-screen TV on the opposite wall was showing yesterday’s Yankees game against the Red Sox, with an announcer narrating, at a low volume, the play-by-play in German.

  “Seriously, you know what would happen if I tried to walk out of this hospital with you, right?”

  Izzie took a long draw on his brew, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and raised his brows in question.

  “There would be so many sirens going off you’d think we were being attacked.”

  “They’re just trying to protect you.”

  “Bullshit! I can’t make a phone call, and my computer is locked so that I can read but not participate in any forum. Not even receive or send email.”

  “No interactive porn, huh?”

  “Hah! They’d probably encourage that. Do you know what my shrink—Dr. Sheila—asked me last week?”

  “I can’t begin to guess.” Izzie smirked.

  Jake elbowed him, and Izzie elbowed him back. Immature, yeah. A sign of longtime companionship, more so. They grinned at each other.

  “Dr. Sheila asked me if I’m suffering from wargasm.”

  Izzie’s eyes went wide before he let out a hoot of laughter. “What the hell is wargasm?”

  “Google it when you get home. You won’t believe it.” Jake took a small sip of his beer and set it aside. He really wasn’t in the mood for alcohol. The combination with his meds was making him a bit nauseated.

  “The private hospital wing, the mental and physical rehab, the isolation . . . all these things . . .” Izzie continued, “Well, I repeat, they’re protecting you until you’re well enough to return home.”

  “And I repeat, bullshit! They’re protecting their own asses. I leave here and tell the press what happened to me in that Taliban shithole, it will jeopardize that ridiculous truce with the Balakistan rebels. If the brass had their way—and they’ve been trying to brainwash me with some asinine ‘forgive and forget’ philosophy, for the sake of peace, for three months now—I would go home and keep my mouth shut. It’s all politics!”

  “Everything in the military—hell, everything in life—is politics. You know that.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t have to like it.” Jake gazed at his friend, who was wearing Army fatigues, and smiled. “Is that another bar I see on your chest, soldier?”

  Izzie puffed his chest out and grinned. “Yep. Finally made captain. Now I’m just like you.”

  “Hah! They want to make me a major and plant me in some defense department office, making ‘Hail to the Chief’ promo videos. Or some such crap.”

  “Be real, man, you’re in no shape to return to active duty, if that’s even what you’d want,” Izzie said, not in an unkind way.

  “Don’t I know it!”

  “A cushy job in DC sounds pretty good to me, short-term anyhow.”

  “Yeah, right. You’d be as miserable in a desk job as I would.”

  “Maybe.” He studied Jake for a moment. “You do look a lot better than you did three months ago when they brought me in to identify your unconscious body.”

  That had to have been hard for Izzie, but then, Jake would have done the same for him in a heartbeat. “I saw pictures in my file this week. I looked like Frankenstein’s younger, uglier brother. Now, I look like some Long John Silver Freakoid.”

  “You do not.”

  Jake put a hand to the patch over his one eye and then held out his hands to display his nailless fingers.

  “The nails will grow back, and your other injuries will heal eventually. Maybe not totally, but . . .”

  “Not my eye.”

  “The laser surgery didn’t work?”

  “No. They want to do another one in a month or so, but I am not sticking around this burg that long. Even if I have to rappel down the side of the building using bedsheets.”

  “And then what?”

  “Hell if I know!”

  “Still don’t want to go home?”

  “Still don’t want to go home,” Jake agreed.

  A sudden idea seemed to occur to Izzie and he said, “Please don’t tell me you had other injuries.”

  At first, Jake didn’t understand until he noticed the blush on Izzie’s face and his quick glance downward to Jake’s crotch. “No, the package is still intact. Wanna see?”

  “Hell, no!” Izzie relaxed visibly. But then he continued on the previous vein, “Don’t you want to see Sally? And your kids?”

  Jake shook his head.

  “They miss you.”

  The kids might. He wasn’t so sure about his wife. They’d exchanged words before his last deployment. Harsh words. As for the kids, three years was a long time in kid land. They probably didn’t even remember him.

  Jake had been sent recent pictures of his kids . . . and of Sally. The boys, Matthew, Mark, and Luke—yeah, he’d been on a Bible kick back then, and hoping for a John, eventually—were eight, seven, and five now. Luke had been only two the last time he’d seen him. He saw no resemblance to himself in the gremlins, except for their blue eyes . . . and maybe their mischievous grins.

  The boys, even the littlest mite, had attached themselves to Jake like leeches—adorable leeches—whenever he’d been home on leave. And wailed like banshees every time he’d had to leave.

  As for Sally, her long hair, a luxuriant light brown with golden sun highlights that he’d loved to wrap around his hands when—Not going down that road!—had been chopped off to an almost boyish style. The flighty girl’s parents had been artsy-fartsy Broadway set designers and had raised their only child with only one aspiration, to sing on the Great White Way someday. Until she’d met him, that was. Sal did have a voice like an angel . . . a powerful alto for such a petite woman, like that singer Adele.

  How had the girl who couldn’t boil water or balance a checkbook managed to open and operate a successful bakery? And why hadn’t she gone back to Manhattan and her parents and a possible singing career when he’d “died”?

  In answer to Izzie’s statement, though, about his family missing him, he replied simply, “They’ll get over it.”

  “But why? I just don’t understand why you’d want them to.”

  “I’ve changed.”

  “We all change. Hell, if you must know, you’re probably better looking with that broken nose.”

  “I’m not talking physical changes. Inside”—he pounded his own chest—“inside I’m like an unpinned grenade. The least jarring and I might explode. And don’t you dare tell that to my doctors or they won’t ever release me.”

  “You do know you have a serious case of PTSD, don’t you?”

  “No shit!”

  “PTSD isn’t terminal, my friend.”

  “Really, Dr. Bernstein? Now you gonna give me the talk? Boot Camp 101. ‘The Perils of Warfare.’ Blah, blah, blah. I’ve heard that lecture before. Next you’ll be telling me about STDs and the need for condoms, especially in foreign countries, complete with gory gonorrhea pictures. Did you bring pictures?”

  Izzie sighed. “So, what . . . ? You gonna go off and live in the woods by yourself, or something?”

  “Something like that. Maybe I’ll be like one of those new frontier Alaska guys. Alone in the wild. Just me and the bears and wolves.”

  “You hate the cold. You’re an Outer Banks boy to the bone. A sun lover.”

  “Well, maybe some warmer frontier,” he conceded. “A jungle, maybe. Aren’t there still frontiers in the Amazon?”

  “Sorry, bud, but you gotta go back to Bell Cove. At least for a while. They won’t release
you if you don’t agree to that.” A slow smile twitched at Izzie’s lips as he seemed to think of something. “Actually, you’ll fit right in back home with that eye patch.” Izzie went on to fill him in on the latest antics in their crazy-ass hometown, this time involving some shipwreck discovery which was being celebrated with a pirate theme during the Labor Day Lollypalooza, whatever the hell that was. They were even trying to get Johnny Depp to come, dressed in a Captain Jack Sparrow costume.

  “Figures,” Jake said. “I hope they don’t expect me to play the part.” Another reason for him not to go home.

  Which brought them to the big elephant in the room.

  “Don’t you want to know about Sally?” Izzie asked.

  Jake remained silent, working hard not to show any emotion. It wasn’t as hard as you would think, being as dead inside as he was.

  “My parents moved to Seattle to be near my sister Leah. So, not much reason to return to Bell Cove.” Izzie sighed deeply and said, “I do talk to Sally occasionally on the phone, but that’s kind of awkward, y’know what I mean.”

  “Because I was dead?”

  “Well, yeah. Anyhow, I haven’t seen her in three years, ever since they declared you dead and a memorial service was held, but . . .”

  Izzie’s nervousness raised some alarm bells in Jake’s aching brain. He needed a Vicodin, or five, which he wouldn’t take. The painkillers dulled his senses too much. “What?” he demanded.

  “She just started dating.”

  Jake felt like he was kicked in the guts, even though three years was a long time for a wife to stay loyal to a husband she thought was dead. He shouldn’t care. He didn’t care. Still, he asked, “How do you know?”

  “Uncle Abe told me. Did I tell you that Uncle Abe’s deli was featured on that Food Network show, Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives? They called his Reuben sandwich ‘Reuben’s Greatest Masterpiece.’”

  “That’s nice. So, who’s the guy Sally is dating?” he asked nonchalantly.

  “A Navy SEAL.”

  A SEAL? Fuck! “That’s nice.” You hypocrite wife of mine! You berated me up one side and down the other for being in the military. You constantly demanded that I quit. Called me a selfish bastard. Now you take up with the most military of all the services? Shiiit!