The Jackal (Dominion Hall #19)

Chapter 1

MAGNOLIA

The thing nobody tells you about owning a house is that the house immediately begins owning you back.

I'd been in Charleston six months and mine was small enough that I could stand in the middle of the living room and touch two walls, if I had longer arms and slightly fewer scruples about how that would look to the neighbors.

It was a single-story bungalow with a crooked front porch, original heart-pine floors the color of weak tea, and a backyard that the listing had generously called "a verdant retreat" and that I had immediately recognized as "a place where three large dogs can do damage to property I now legally owe money on. "

My father had put up the down payment. He'd done it the way he did everything—without ceremony, without making me feel small about it, a wire transfer and a text that said don't tell your mother the number, she'll have opinions.

Gary Bennett had spent thirty-one years in the Army and retired a full bird colonel.

The man could not relax to save his life.

Give him a folding chair and a sunset, and he'd find something to fix within four minutes.

Which was why, on the second afternoon of his weekend visit, he was crouched on my back patio in cargo shorts and reading glasses, assembling a grill the size of a small sedan that he had purchased that morning without asking me, because he had decided—unilaterally, the way he decided most things—that a person did not truly own a home until they could char meat on the premises.

"It's got a side burner," he said, not looking up. He said it the way other men announced the birth of a child.

"I see that."

"You could do a whole sauce out here. Reduce something." He turned a knob, frowned, turned it back. "You're not going to reduce anything, are you?”

"I'm going to put hot dogs on it and feel a complicated kind of grief about my life choices."

"That's my girl."

The dogs, meanwhile, were conducting a tactical sweep of the yard.

I had three of them at the moment, which was either one too many or exactly the wrong number, depending on whether you asked me before or after coffee.

Duke was the permanent fixture—a retired military working dog, a German shepherd with a gray muzzle and the bearing of a man who had once been very important and had not entirely accepted his retirement.

He was thirteen, dignified, and completely insane in one narrow and specific way, which was that he had spent his career detecting explosives and had never received the memo that he was done.

Duke could not pass a backpack without alerting on it.

He had sat, beautifully and with great seriousness, in front of my microwave, my dad's gym bag, a propane tank, and once, memorably, a Honda Civic in the Publix parking lot, after which I had to explain to a frightened retiree that her vehicle was not a threat to national security.

The other two were fosters. Tiny was a shepherd-mix the approximate size and density of a vending machine, sweet and dim and prone to walking directly into the sliding glass door with the optimism of someone who genuinely believes that this time it will be open.

And Beans was a young Belgian Malinois, which is to say Beans was forty pounds of exposed nerve wired directly to a tail.

Beans did not have moods. Beans had weather systems. Right now, she was patrolling the fence line at a dead sprint, ears up, absolutely convinced that the squirrel in the live oak was running an operation.

"They're going to dig under that fence," my dad observed.

"They have a tunnel started by the azaleas. I've decided to respect it."

He laughed, low, and went back to the grill.

It was the kind of Lowcountry afternoon where the heat had real weight to it, where the air came in off the harbor thick and salted and the cicadas were running their engines in the trees.

I'd grown up in Georgia, so I knew this heat in my bones—knew the particular surrender of it, the way it made you slow down whether you wanted to or not. But Charleston had its own version, wetter, heavier, like the whole city was breathing on the back of your neck.

The dogs felt it. Tiny had already flopped into the one wedge of shade by the steps and was panting like a broken accordion.

Which was the reason for the kiddie pool.

I'd bought it at the hardware store that morning—a hard, plastic clamshell printed with cartoon turtles, marketed at toddlers, purchased by a grown woman for her trio of working dogs.

I dragged the hose over, wrestled the pool level on the patchy grass, and started filling it while all three dogs gathered to supervise with the intensity of a Pentagon briefing.

"Okay," I told them. "This is for cooling off. This is a luxury. This is—Tiny, do not."

Tiny got in before it was a third full. He didn't ease in.

He committed, all at once, sending a wave over the lip that soaked the cartoon turtles and most of my left leg.

Then, he stood there in two inches of water looking deeply satisfied with himself, tail going like a metronome.

Beans, who could not abide another dog enjoying anything she wasn't, launched herself in from a running start and immediately the pool became a contested territory, a churn of paws and water and two dogs reenacting a beach landing.

Duke watched all of this from the patio with the flat contempt of a senior officer observing recruits.

Then, he walked over, stepped in with enormous dignity, sat down in the middle of the chaos, and refused to move.

He just sat. Water to his chest, gray muzzle high, while the other two scrambled around him like he was a statue in a fountain.

A monument to himself. He looked at me as if to say I have earned this, and honestly, he had.

I was laughing so hard, I had to sit down on the steps.

"You've got a good setup here, Maggie," my dad said.

He'd abandoned the grill—it was lit now, ticking and warming, the coals going pale at the edges—and come to sit beside me with two beers, one of which he handed over already sweating in the heat.

"Place of your own. Job you wanted. Dogs that love you. "

"Three dogs and a kiddie pool." I took a long pull of the beer.

It was cold and good and tasted like the start of something.

"Dad, I'm one bathrobe away from being the lady the whole neighborhood whispers about.

You know that, right? I'm going to be the crazy cat lady.

Except dogs. The crazy dog lady. They'll find me in forty years buried under a pile of shedding shepherds and nobody will be surprised. "

"You're not going to be the crazy dog lady."

"I have so much dog hair in my house that I've started thinking of it as a finish. Like a coat of paint. There's a tumbleweed of it under my sofa that I've named."

Dad didn't laugh that time, which is how I knew he was about to say something I'd actually have to sit with. He turned the beer bottle in his hands, looking out at the dogs, and the lines around his eyes did the thing they did when he was choosing his words like he was clearing a room.

"You moved to a city where you didn't know a soul," he said, "for a job most people don't even know exists, taking care of animals that gave everything and got handed back broken.

You did that alone. At thirty." He took a sip.

"I've commanded men who couldn't do half of that.

You've got more to offer than you let yourself believe, Magnolia.

The right person is going to look at all of this—" he tipped the bottle toward the yard, the dogs, the absurd turtle pool, the small, crooked house "—and understand exactly what kind of luck they walked into. "

I didn't say anything for a second. The cicadas filled it in for me.

It would have been easy to make a joke. I'm good at that, the deflection, the quick pivot before anything lands too hard.

But my dad didn't hand out reassurance the way other people did, automatic and weightless.

When Gary Bennett told you something, it was because he'd done the math and the math came out that way.

He'd spent my whole childhood doing math—the math of deployments, of moves, of which base, which school, which Christmas he'd actually be home for.

The math that had eventually added up to my parents sitting me down when I was sixteen and explaining, kindly and without raising their voices once, that they loved each other and couldn't stay married to each other, and that none of it was the Army's fault and all of it was.

My mom was a physician. She'd spent fifteen years restarting her practice in fifteen places, building something and leaving it, building it again, until one day, she simply didn't want to anymore.

I understood it. I understood both of them.

That was the cruel part—there was no villain in my parents' divorce, just two good people and a career that asked for everything and got it.

Which was maybe why I'd ended up where I had.

First with the nonprofit in Virginia Beach, working with the families—the spouses holding it together through the deployments, the kids counting months on calendars.

And now here, with the dogs. The ones who'd done the work and come home changed, who needed someone to learn their fears and sit with them in the dark.

I knew how to do that. I'd been training for it my whole life, even when I thought I was just surviving it.

"You're getting that look," my dad said.

"What look?"

"The one where you're three states away."

"I'm right here." I bumped my shoulder against his. "I'm just thinking I got lucky in the dad department, even if you did buy me a grill the size of a chest freezer without asking."

"It's got a side burner."

"You said."

In the pool, Beans had discovered the hose and was now biting the stream of water with single-minded fury, getting absolutely nowhere and refusing to learn.

Tiny had given up and lay half-submerged like a capsized boat.

Duke still sat in the center of it all, monarch of his small, wet kingdom, watching the squirrel watch him.

My phone buzzed against the step, and I already knew without looking that it was my mother, because she had a sense for these moments the way some people could feel a storm coming in their knees.

How's the colonel behaving? the text read, and then, before I could answer, a second one: Send me a picture of the dogs in the pool.

My parents hadn't been in the same room in years and probably never would be again, but they'd somehow worked out a custody arrangement over me that required no lawyers and no calendar—he got the grills and the down payments, she got the late-night phone calls and the photos of the dogs.

Between the two of them, I had never once felt like a child of divorce so much as a child who'd been loved by two people from slightly different zip codes.

I took the picture. Duke looked regal. I sent it, and watched the three dots appear right away, the way they always did.

My dad got up to put the burgers on, and the smell of them hit the air a minute later.

For a while, there was nothing to do but sit on my own back steps, in my own crooked house, in a city that was slowly becoming mine, with a cold beer and three ridiculous dogs and a father who'd built his whole hard life around showing up when it counted.

I told myself I had everything I needed.

I almost believed it.