The Island by Jill Jones

Author:Jill Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-62681-524-7
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2014-11-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Had he ever been afraid? Jack drew in a deep breath. If she only knew. “Of course. I’ve been afraid, many times.”

“When was the first time you remember being afraid?”

It was Jack’s turn to be unsettled. That was a difficult question. There had been so many moments of fear during his career as a cop. But he had to go back many years before that to reach his first memory of having been afraid. “When I was five,” he said at last, struggling with the emotions that had launched a surprise attack on him. “When two men came to my house and told my mother that my father had been killed in Desert Storm.”

“Desert Storm?”

Jack forgot that Keely would never have heard of a country called Kuwait, much less that a nasty little war had been fought there. He explained it to her briefly.

“I am so sorry,” she said.

Jack shrugged. “It was a long time ago, and I barely remember him.”

“Did you grow up without a father?”

“Yes…” he started to reply, but was hit with another sudden realization. “…and no.”

Keely frowned. “I do na understand.”

For years, Jack had considered Garrison’s financial support to be an excessive gesture of battlefield loyalty. But Keely’s questions sparked a memory…

“The man who I told you hired me to find out who shot Brad, Garrison Holstedt, was in the war with my father. When Dad died, he promised to take care of us.” A painful knot constricted his throat as the memory grew clearer, and Jack was ashamed that he’d forgotten how much more Garrison had done for him than provide for him financially.

How he could have forgotten the day when Garrison had intervened on behalf of a reckless teenager about to take some wrong turns in life? The day he’d taken on the role of the father Jack had so desperately needed?

Jack took a deep breath and told Keely something he’d never shared with anyone in his life, not even his sister. “When I was a teenager, I got into a lot of trouble for fighting in school,” he said. “I was unhappy, angry all the time, and I didn’t know why. So I became sullen and rebellious.” It was odd to hear himself talk objectively about those days. He’d tried hard to forget them, for he was not proud of the way he’d been. He cleared his throat and went on.

“One day I was catching hell in the principal’s office when Garrison unexpectedly showed up. I never knew it, but he had kept a close eye on Melinda and me as we grew up. My mother couldn’t handle me, and I was about to get kicked out of school, so the principal called him. I guess,” Jack said, the picture continuing to unfold, “he decided to step in where my own father could not.”

Jack could not continue until he could process that idea. When he spoke again, it was barely above a whisper. “Garrison changed my life that day. The principal left us alone, and Garrison began to talk about my father.

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