Chapter 5. Ace
Ace
I hated afternoons.
I don’t know why I tolerated the intrusion, only that I likely would have starved to death if she hadn’t brought me dinner every day. I wasn’t interested in cooking. Two weeks ago, I’d come back to my grandmother’s small bungalow in Riverstone, locked the door, and started drinking the pain away.
She’d showed up exactly three days after I’d arrived.
I went to bed in the darkness and woke up in the light.
Janice had cleaned up the garbage, tidied the house, bought groceries, and cooked a meal.
“Your grandmother would have done no less for my Dan,” she said, referring to her son who had been injured in a car accident and now ran a hardware store in the center of town.
After that, she stopped by every day. I was grateful for the hot meals. Not so grateful for the incessant chatter that accompanied them. Still on my forced “vacation,” and with no desire to leave the house, I was a captive audience.
So, every day at 2:45 P.M ., I pulled on a clean shirt, ran a comb through my hair, sat at the kitchen table, and persevered to honor my grandmother, who would have been ashamed of the state I was in.
I persevered when Janice pulled open the curtains to let in the sun, imagining the moment when she left, and I could plunge the house into darkness again.
I persevered when she boiled the kettle and poured two cups of tea.
And when she settled down to tell me all the news in town, I persevered, praying she wouldn’t mention the one name I most dreaded hearing on her lips.
Perseverance would take me through the one hour and twenty-seven minutes of Janice’s daily visit until she looked at her watch and said, “Oh my. Look at the time.” And then, as soon as she was gone, I ate the meal she’d prepared, pulled out a bottle of whiskey, and drank until I could slip into a coma where the nightmares wouldn’t find me.
At least that’s how things usually went. But not today.
“Ace?”
My bedroom door creaked open, and I threw my arm over my face to block out the light streaming in my doorway.
Although my grandmother had passed away over four years ago, I still slept in my old bedroom.
I’d never had a room of my own growing up, and it was comforting to sleep in a place that had always and would always be mine.
“Janice…” I groaned. “What are you doing here so early in the morning?”
“Nine A.M . is not early.” Janice marched over to the window and pulled the blinds, searing my eyes with sunshine. “Are you ill?”
I wanted to lie, to tell her I had the plague or some other highly contagious disease, but I was long past hiding anything from Janice. “Jeff didn’t show up with my delivery yesterday. It was a bad night.”
Jeff was the grocer’s son, the grocer being Ben Galloway, a member of my senior class, who had taken over his father’s store when his dad passed away. I had a standing order for exactly two bottles of whiskey to be delivered every day at 5:00 P.M . It was the perfect way to end each day.
“Well, today’s a new day. You’ve been locked away in this house for the last two weeks, and now it’s time to start living again. You need to take a shower and get dressed so you can eat your breakfast before Senator Chapman arrives. She wants to have a little chat with you.”
“Wait. What? Why?” I pushed myself up to sit. “How does she even know I’m here?”
Matt and Haley’s mother was the last person I wanted to see.
It had been hard enough to talk to her at the funeral.
Hard to shake the hand of the woman who had welcomed me into her home and treated me like one of her own.
Hard to listen to her tell me it wasn’t my fault when I knew I was to blame.
Matt would never have joined the air force if not for me.
He wouldn’t have been in the B52-H that crashed into the Mediterranean Sea during a routine air refueling training mission.
He would have come home safe to his family, just like I promised Haley. Instead, he returned in a coffin.
“You’ll find out when she gets here.” She patted my shoulder and a few moments later I heard her bustling in the kitchen. I briefly considered returning to my bed, but I knew she would be back. Janice didn’t take no for an answer.
“Well, that’s better.” Janice smiled when I joined her twenty minutes later at the kitchen table. She handed me a cup of tea and a plate of bacon and eggs.
I gave a noncommittal nod and took a sip of the bitter brown liquid she’d poured for me. I hated tea. I hated the taste, the heat, the reminder of sitting around the fire in the desert at night on deployment with Matt talking about our plans for a future that would never come to be.
“I was talking to Esme Duncan about you,” Janice said. “I told her you were back. She offered to come out and visit to cheer you up. Didn’t you two used to date?”
“Briefly, but that was long ago, and I’m not interested in seeing anyone while I’m on vacation.
I don’t want to give any wrong messages.
” The last thing I needed was Esme Duncan in my house.
I’d dated her in high school. Although I’d ended our relationship before I left home, she’d made it clear that she was willing to wait for me no matter how long it took.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her it would be forever.
There was only one woman I truly wanted—the woman I could never have.
“I think she just meant to come out as a friend,” Janice said. “She’s engaged to Blake Forester. Do you remember Blake?”
Yes, I knew Blake. He was the quarterback of the football team and the guy I’d beaten up after I caught him taking Haley to “see the stars” during her first high school dance.
As a rule, I didn’t do dances. I had two left feet and no sense of rhythm, but I’d heard Haley’s name in the locker room after senior football practice, and something about the tone of Blake’s voice had made my skin crawl.
Matt had dismissed my concerns out of hand.
Haley could take care of herself, he said.
He was right about that. Haley had a bit of wild in her and wasn’t afraid to speak her mind.
But she was also trusting and innocent and as susceptible to Blake’s considerable charms as anyone else.
I got there just in time.
I heard her say “No,” and his crude response. I heard the fear in her voice when she asked him to let her go back to the dance. I don’t remember much else. At some point she stopped me from beating him unconscious and Blake got away. That was the first night I held her in my arms.
I was pulled out of the memory by the knock on the door, followed by the whirlwind of energy that was Senator Elizabeth Chapman.
She was a short, heavyset woman with cropped curly hair, and she radiated power in her bright pink suit jacket.
She looked like she was about to walk into a meeting rather than sit down to tea in my grandmother’s worn country kitchen.
“It’s good to see you, Ace.” She shook my hand across the table, a cold contrast to Janice’s warmth, but then the senator had never been an overly affectionate person. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen her hug Matt and Haley, and that was only before her husband died.
“Senator.” I gave her a nod.
“No need for formalities,” she said, taking a seat across from me. “You’re family. Call me Elizabeth.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her lips thinned for the briefest moment, but then the smile returned.
“How are you? I was in town two weeks ago and I bumped into Janice. She mentioned you’d come home.
I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to stop in but it was a whirlwind trip to check on the house and touch base with some party donors.
She said you’ve been working with a security company in LA, looking after celebrities. It sounds very exciting.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Janice also told me you’re here on vacation.”
“Yes, ma’am. I was thinking of selling my grandmother’s house, so I thought I’d use my time off to fix it up.”
“Um-hmm.” She glanced over at Janice, and I knew right away that Janice had let her know exactly how much fixing had been going on.
“Are you planning to stay long?”
“I’m heading back to LA in four weeks.” There was no question that I would go back.
What else would I do with my life? I had always wanted to become an engineer, but that was the dream I’d had with Matt, so going to college now was out of the question.
I couldn’t reenlist. After witnessing the crash that killed my best friend, I’d developed PTSD and the air force had made it clear I couldn’t come back.
“Would you consider cutting your vacation short?” She sipped her tea. “I need your help. It involves Haley.”
My breath left me in a rush and my fingers tightened around the handle of the porcelain cup so hard it snapped off.
“I’m sorry.” I stared at the fragment of porcelain in my palm.
“It’s all right.” Janice took the cup from my hand. “They were your grandmother’s cups, not mine.”
“Is Haley okay?”
Senator Chapman nodded. “I’m not sure if you know that she and Paige went to Havencrest University in Chicago after they graduated.
She’s studying psychology. At least I thought that was what she was doing, but it turns out she is still trying to make it as a singer in her spare time, playing gigs in shady bars and busking on Michigan Avenue.
” She shared a look with Janice and shook her head before filling me in on the attempted kidnapping.
“Did they catch the guy?” It was an effort to stay in the chair. All I wanted to do was fly to Chicago, hunt the guy down, and make him pay.