The Gardener and the Marine (Ellery Mountain Book 9) by RJ Scott

Author:RJ Scott
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781785642944
Publisher: Love Lane Books Ltd
Published: 2021-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

Toby

I FELT an enormous weight settle inside me when I took the notebook—as if this was some significant test.

I was worried I would fail somehow, and he would leave, and that would be us finished. How my thoughts had spiraled that far in such a short snap of time, I didn’t know, but the weight was like a stone, and I had to try hard to smile at him and pretend there were no issues at all. Luckily, he wasn’t looking at me. Instead, he focused on the pale gray pattern on the covers, tracing it with a finger.

I turned to page one, a picture of Harrison in his uniform, with a group of guys that had to be his team.

“That’s Danno, then Spook, then Diaz, and on the right next to me is Brat.”

“Your friends.”

“Yeah. I mean, there were more of us for sure, but the five in the photo, we were tight.” My heart ached for the four smiling men with Harrison, knowing they were gone.

I turned the page and saw a rough sketch of five shapes that mimicked the photo, with the names under each one as a key.

“They did that in case I forgot, but I never once forgot the others because they were from before.”

On page three, I met Nurse Jonah Lewis for the first time. He introduced himself on the page, alongside a photo, an image of a brain calling for help, and a rough drawing of cartoon Jell-O, complete with lines to indicate wobble.

“Tell me about the green Jell-O?” I asked quietly, hoping that it wasn’t wrong to prompt Harrison to tell me what he recalled.

“Jonah loved it, and I hated it, and from the start, we would have these epic battles whenever I ended up with it on my dinner tray. There was this whole mess of…” He massaged his temple, and I waited. “We said… no, he said, that I was angry because I didn’t have a choice over whatever they gave me… I think he was right. It wasn’t just the fact I had green Jell-O. It was that some nameless person had chosen to dump it on my tray without asking me.”

“You were helpless,” I murmured, and he nodded. I turned the page, and the cartoon wars between Harrison in uniform and the evil warlord Green Jell-O were exaggerated battles that, at first glance, were cute and funny. But under each of them there was a reminder of who Jonah was, in neat handwriting, and what seemed to be a lesson of the day, along the lines of what Harrison had recalled. There wasn’t much at first, but as the Jell-O wars intensified, so did the memories, and some of the cartoons changed to reflect darkness that had to have come from Harrison himself. Green Jell-O was winning at one point, and flicking back, I could see the journey from the character being nothing more than annoying, to becoming a nemesis in Harrison’s memories.

One day, I wanted to

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