Warrior Without a Cause by Nancy Gideon

Author:Nancy Gideon
Format: epub

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Chapter 10

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"It was like seeing a ghost. I thought I was imagining it at first."

Tessa watched her mother pace the plush white rug. She'd never seen Barbara smoke before but she did it with a familiar ease. Nor had she ever seen her mother entertain even the UPS man without having her makeup flawless. This morning, her skin was unusually translucent, her eyes shadowed darkly by fatigue. And she looked her age.

"You're sure it was him?"

Barbara glanced at Jack long enough to smile thinly. "Oh, yes. I never liked Chet. There was something too high-strung, too intense about him. He took important things lightly and the trivial too seriously. He had a way of looking right through you that … well, it was unnerving. But he was Robert's friend, one of the Three Musketeers, so I tolerated him even though he made my skin crawl. When Robert told me he'd died, I remember thinking, horribly I know, that he was the sort of soldier that should never come home. He liked war. After basic, he told me he couldn't wait to get shipped out to start collecting trophies. I didn't know what he meant at the time." Her arms wrapped around herself to suppress a hard shiver. "I do now. He was a scary, dangerous man."

"I know the type."

Tessa glanced at Jack. Seeing him sitting comfortably in her mother's elegant living room dressed in dark slacks and shirt under a well-made tan sport coat, he seemed surprisingly domesticated. But paint his face in camo colors, put him in fatigues and send him into the jungle with an automatic weapon, what would he become then? Something very scary and dangerous. He knew the type because he was the type. The type the average citizen wanted to have in a foreign country to fight for their safety but not on their streets living among them. No wonder Jack preferred his wooded retreat. He'd never left the jungle behind, either.

"What did Robby tell you about how Allen died?" Stan asked from where he sat looking uncomfortable on one of the brocaded chairs. He'd picked Jack and Tessa up at daybreak to smuggle them into the D'Angelo home. At Jack's insistence, he'd made a spot for himself in one of the first-floor spare rooms where he could keep an eye on the surveillance equipment already in place and on the extra gadgets he'd added as per Jack's instructions.

"He didn't like talking about things that happened over there," Barbara answered. "Once he got home, he just wanted to put it all behind him. I didn't push. I didn't want to know what he'd gone through. I was just glad to have him back. He had the rest of our lives planned out and if he wanted to pretend nothing happened while he was away, I was willing to go along with it. But he did send me a peculiar letter, the last one I got before he was shipped Stateside. He sent some pictures, some clippings, but I didn't pay much attention to them.

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