Second Watch (31 page)
Authors: JA Jance
I
wish I could say it felt triumphant that Saturday morning when Mel and I went back to Leavenworth to tell Hannah Wellington that we had solved her daughter’s murder for real this time, but it didn’t. It felt like too little, too late. Kenneth Adcock would have the best legal representation money could buy. By the time the judicial wrangling was over, it would be a miracle if he served any prison time.
Still, as we drove back to Seattle, it seemed as though I had done all the things I had been charged to do by the people who had emerged from my past and thrust themselves into my drug-fueled present. A sudden snowstorm hit as we headed down Stevens Pass. Driving into it and trying to see the road through a snow-obscured windshield, I suddenly realized that there was something else I should do, not because I had to but because I wanted to and because I was the only person who could.
The next day, Sunday, I made several phone calls. Only when I had the arrangements in place did I call Bonnie Abney.
“What are you doing on November eleventh?” I asked her.
“November eleventh?” she said. “I don’t know. Why?”
“Mel and I would like you to meet us at Boeing Field at eight o’clock that morning. We have a surprise for you. We’re going to take a little trip.”
“What kind of trip?”
“I’m not telling, but dress warmly. It’ll probably be cold.”
“All right,” she said. “But before I say yes, I’ll have to see if I can board Crackerjack. On such short notice that might not be easy.”
“Don’t bother boarding him,” I said. “He’s welcome to come along.”
That was how three humans and one very large black-and-white dog flew out of Boeing Field bright and early on Veterans Day.
“Have you figured out where we’re going?” I asked.
“Bisbee?” she asked.
“That’s right.”
“But why?”
“I’m not telling. You’ll see when we get there.”
We landed in Tucson a scant two and a half hours later. We’d had a catered breakfast on the plane, so we didn’t need to stop for lunch.
Instead, we got into our waiting rental SUV and drove straight to Bisbee, where we spent some time driving around and doing sightseeing. Bonnie pointed out the house Doug had grown up in and had us drive past the ballpark where he had played both football and baseball and the Catholic church where he had served as an altar boy.
We stopped by Evergreen Cemetery. That’s where I discovered that one of Doug’s two younger brothers, Blaine, was also laid to rest there. Bonnie explained that he had come home from his service in Vietnam as one of the “walking wounded.” He had died in 2002. I left the cemetery shaken by the terrible price that one family had paid in the course of a misguided war.
Last but not least, we drove by all of the schools Doug had attended. We arrived at the last one of those, the one she referred to as the “new” high school, at exactly three o’clock, which, according to my schedule, was right on time.
Joanna Brady had told me that was when they usually held the memorial ceremony—right after school got out, so teachers and students could attend if they chose to do so.
It wasn’t until Bonnie saw the crowd of people assembled in the parking lot—the uniformed band standing at attention, the cops and Boy Scouts also in uniform and standing at attention—that she finally realized this wasn’t just an ordinary trip down memory lane.
I had called my friend Joanna Brady, and, as promised, she had pulled out all the stops. She had put together the largest Veterans Day gathering Bisbee, Arizona, had seen in many a year, including the appearance of a military band from Fort Huachuca. Joanna had told me to come to where the flagpoles stood in front of the school office and that the memorial to the Bisbee boys lost in Vietnam was nearby.
Mel stopped the SUV long enough for Bonnie, Crackerjack, and me to step out of the car. Then she drove away. Spotting a small lectern set up on a raised stage, I led the way there with Bonnie leaning on my arm and Crackerjack following sedately at her heel.
Once we reached the stage, I led her up on it and seated her on a chair someone had thoughtfully provided. Two months after my knee-replacement surgery, I was able to negotiate the three steps leading up to the stage with no difficulty and no assistance. Under my breath, I breathed a silent thank-you to the doctors and nurses and OT ladies who had made that possible.
I turned back to the audience in time to see Mel slip into an empty chair in the second row, next to Sheriff Brady. Not knowing what else to do, I stayed where I was, standing next to Bonnie on one side while Crackerjack guarded the other.
Eventually, a man who referred to himself as the mayor stepped to the microphone and called the event to order. He introduced a woman minister whose name was Marianne something, who opened the proceedings with a short invocation. The prayer was followed by the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance and a stirring rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung by a young uniformed soldier with the band playing the accompaniment.
When the last strains of the national anthem died away, Sheriff Brady came forward, stepped up to the microphone, and introduced me. Then, with my new knees knocking behind the lectern, it was my turn to speak.
I had told the story to Mel and to Bonnie Abney in the privacy of Bonnie’s living room, but that chilly afternoon, under a cloudy sky and in the face of a blustery wind that threatened rain, I told my story in public for the very first time. I don’t see myself as any kind of orator, but when you have an important story to tell, the words you need seem to come of their own accord.
I wanted the people in Doug Davis’s hometown to know the real story about one of the young men whose names were carved in that stone. They knew him as Doug, but I told them about Lennie D. I told them about the four aces and about how he was the lieutenant who did the best job of bringing the scared newbies into the platoon. I told them how he had earned his Silver Star and Purple Heart by showing extraordinary bravery during second watch on the afternoon of August 2, 1966. I wanted the townspeople to know that he had given his life in the service of his country and out of loyalty to what he called “his guys.” I wanted them to know that I was one of those guys and that he had saved my life as well.
Finally I told them about my own Purple Heart, also earned on August 2, 1966. That’s the one I keep hidden away in the cigar box because I have never felt I really earned it.
When I finished speaking I stepped away from the microphone to a round of subdued but respectful applause while a local priest took my place at the lectern. Slowly and with all due respect, he read aloud the names of the seven men listed on the monument—Leonard Doug Davis, Richard Allen Thursby, Leonard Carabeo, Richard Lynn Embrey, Robert Nathan Fiesler, Willard Wesley Lehman, and Calvin Russell Segar.
I had come to Bisbee in order to pay my respects to Lennie D., but I was glad the others were remembered and honored as well. They all deserved it.
After reading the names, the priest gave a short benediction, and then someone played “Taps.” The bugle echoed clear as a bell across that cold parking lot while a team of uniformed Boy Scouts carefully lowered the flag and folded it. As they did so, I realized that it wasn’t a new flag, one that had been taken out of its box and flown for the first time on that occasion. No, it was an old flag, one that had flown for months or maybe even years on that very flagpole. The colors had faded some in the hot desert sun, and the seams were slightly frayed from flapping in the wind. That struck me as right, somehow. This was Doug’s flag, Lennie D.’s flag. It had flown over the school he loved in the town he loved.
When the well-seasoned flag was folded and tucked into its proper triangle, one of the Boy Scouts, a kid wearing a newly minted Eagle badge, stepped up onto the podium and offered it to Bonnie, just as I had requested. As far as she was concerned, the gesture was completely unexpected. She shot me a questioning glance. I gave her a slight, confirming nod.
“Thank you,” she whispered. Then, reaching out, she gathered the flag into her arms and clutched it to her breast. There were tears on her face by then and on mine as well. Doug’s mother’s flag had been lost. It was high time Bonnie Abney had another.
After the ceremony ended, we drifted up the breezeway to the cafeteria, where some of the mothers from the Boy Scout troop had put together a reception complete with homemade cookies served with weak coffee and genuine Hawaiian punch. Crackerjack went with us into the cafeteria, and no one objected to his doggy presence.
I stayed close by and eavesdropped on the people who came to pay their respects to Bonnie. Some of them were strangers to her because they were parents and brothers and wives of the other men whose names were on the monument down by the flagpole. One by one, they exchanged greetings and hugs. One woman pressed a jagged-edged photo into Bonnie’s hand.
“From our Latin Club,” she murmured. As the woman melted back into the crowd, I caught a glimpse of the photo over Bonnie’s shoulder. It was Lennie D., Doug, wearing a Roman toga and with a garland on his head.
Another guy handed her a gold pin shaped as a football. “I played football with Doug,” he said. “This is one of the varsity pins that went on our Letterman sweaters. I thought you might like to have it.”
Bonnie looked at the pin and then slipped it into her pocket.
An older woman approached Bonnie and whispered something in her ear. The look that crossed Bonnie’s face was indecipherable, but then she turned to me and handed me Crackerjack’s lead. “I’ll be right back,” she said.
She hurried away from me, walking out of the room and disappearing from sight behind the cafeteria. I caught Mel’s eye. “Is she all right?” Mel mouthed.
All I could do was shrug in answer, because I didn’t know. Bonnie was gone only a few minutes. When she came back into the cafeteria, there was a smile on her face, as though she knew a secret to which no one else was privy. She was actually glowing.
We left shortly after that because we had a plane waiting and needed to get back to Tucson.
“I went outside to see Jack,” she explained as we settled into the car. “I wondered if he’d come, and he did.”
“Who’s Jack?” Mel asked.
“Doug’s younger brother. He’s troubled. He has a small house outside town, but he lives a vagabondish life. He doesn’t come out in public much, but I was glad to see him. One of their mother’s friends tracked him down and let him know I’d be here. He stopped by to say hello, but he didn’t want to come inside.”
I wondered about Jack but I didn’t say anything. He sounded like someone with serious issues, and I wondered how much of that had to do with losing both his older brothers.
It was dark as we drove back through town. Bonnie asked us to take the main drag rather than the highway. Tombstone Canyon, the road, winds through Tombstone Canyon, the place, through the businesses of downtown Bisbee and the residential areas above that.
Bisbee is built just over the crest of a mountain pass that Bonnie referred to as “the Divide.” When we merged back onto the highway, I watched in the mirror as she turned and stared out the rear window at the lights of the town receding into the distance. Once we entered the Mule Mountain Tunnel, the lights disappeared completely, as though someone had flicked off a switch. It was only when Bonnie turned to face forward again that I noticed she was still cradling the flag.
Bonnie caught my eye in the mirror. “I’m glad you didn’t tell me where we were going,” she said. “I might not have come. It hurt so much when they brought Douglas home to bury him that it eclipsed everything else. I could barely believe it was happening. This hurt, too, but in a different way. The other time they brought Douglas home. This time you brought me home, Beau. You and the people who came reminded me of how much I loved him and of how much he loved me. Thank you.”
That’s when I realized that I had done exactly what Lennie D. had asked of me.
“You’re welcome,” I said. “Believe me, it was the least I could do.”
S
econd Watch
is a work of fiction. Some of the people in this book are real and their names are used by permission, although many of the events depicted about them are fictitious as well. The one true part of this book is that the names of Bisbee’s Vietnam dead, the ones engraved on the memorial on the Bisbee High School campus, are all too real: Leonard Douglas Davis, Richard Allen Thursby, Leonard Carabeo, Richard Lynn Embrey, Robert Nathan Fiesler, Willard Wesley Lehman, and Calvin Russell Segar.
It is in memory of their lives, their service, and their sacrifice that I dedicate this book.
Leonard Douglas Davis
1943–1966
E
very story has a beginning.
For me, this one started in Mr. Guerra’s Latin 2 class at Bisbee High School, in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1959. I was a sophomore, as were most of the other kids in the class. The one exception to that was an upperclassman named Doug Davis.
I was the scrawny awkward girl, the one with glasses and a fair amount of brains, sitting in the third seat in the row of desks next to the window. Doug sat in the third seat in the middle row. If I was the wallflower, he was the star, literally the big man on campus.
Doug was an outstanding student. He was smart, tall, good-looking, and an excellent all-around athlete. He wore a Letterman’s sweater loaded with all the accompanying paraphernalia—the pins and stripes—that showed which years he had played on varsity teams and in which of several sports. He had a ready smile and an easygoing way about him that was endearing to fellow students and teachers alike.
Doug was a junior then, and why he was in class with a bunch of sophomores remains a mystery to this day. But I remember him arriving in the classroom early every day and then standing beside his desk waiting for the teacher to show up. He moved from foot to foot with certain impatient grace, like a restless, spirited racehorse ready to charge out of the starting gate. As soon as the teacher called the class to order, Doug was on task. His homework was always done and done right. He always knew the answers. He put the entire class on notice that he was there to learn. He wasn’t mean or arrogant about it; he was simply focused.
It turns out that Latin 2 was the only class I shared with Doug. My talents didn’t carry over to the kinds of advanced math and science classes in which he excelled. But in that one class we had in common, Doug was the yardstick by which I measured my own efforts. When Mr. Guerra allowed some of us to do an extra-credit paper to help improve our grades, mine came back with a life-changing notation written on it in bright red pencil: “A+/Research worthy of a college student.” I was a high school sophomore, but that was the first time anyone had ever hinted to me that I might be college material. That was a milestone for me. In case you’re wondering what kind of a grade Doug got on
his
paper, don’t bother. He already had straight A’s in the class. He didn’t need any extra credit.
I was a bookish young woman, and I know that Doug and I were often the only two students prowling the stacks looking for books after Mrs. Phillippi threw open the school’s library doors before class in the morning. Doug was a voracious reader, and so was I. I mostly read novels. I believe he was one of the only kids in the school who checked out and read all the volumes from Edward Gibbon’s
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
The guy was a hunk. It’s beyond doubt that I had a crush on him at the time. Since he was clearly out of my league, I simply admired him from afar and let it go at that. When Doug’s class graduated from Bisbee High in 1961, he was the valedictorian. I know I attended the graduation ceremony because I was in the school band, playing endless repetitions of “Pomp and Circumstance”
while members of the class marched to their places under the bright field lights shining over the infield in Bisbee’s Warren Ballpark. I’m sure I heard Doug’s valedictory address; unfortunately I don’t recall any of it.
Once Doug graduated, he disappeared from my frame of reference. I had no idea that he had gone on to West Point or that from there, after attending Ranger school in 1965, he had shipped out for Vietnam.
My life went on. I, too, graduated from Bisbee High School. With the help of a scholarship, I became the first person in my family to attend and graduate from a four-year college. I had always wanted to be a writer. In 1964, when I sought admission to the Creative Writing program at the University of Arizona, the professor in charge wouldn’t let me enroll because I was a girl. “Girls become teachers or nurses,” he told me. “Boys become writers.”
That’s why, when I graduated from the U of A in May of 1966, it was with a degree in secondary education with a major in English and a minor in history. By the end of that summer, I was hired as a beginning English teacher at Pueblo High School in Tucson. Sometime early that fall, I received a letter from my mother telling me that Doug Davis had been killed in Vietnam.
This was long before the advent of the Internet or Facebook or Twitter or any of the many other devices that allow us to stay in touch with one another. By the time my mother’s letter arrived, the funeral had already taken place. I was not a close friend of Doug’s. No one thought to notify me in a more timely fashion, and my mother sent the information along as an interesting scrap of news from home the way she always did—in her own sweet time.
Tucson is only a hundred miles from Bisbee. If I had known about the funeral before it happened, I would have made an effort to be there for it. The upshot was, of course, that since I didn’t know, I wasn’t there. I suspect that a shard of guilt over my unwitting absence stayed with me through the years—a splinter in my heart that periodically festered and came to the surface.
The first instance of that occurred in the early eighties, shortly after I moved to Seattle. A cardboard replica of the Vietnam War Memorial came to town and was put on display at Seattle Center. My children and I were living downtown then. One afternoon, I took my two grade-school-age kids to Seattle Center to see it. Doug’s name was the only one I looked up, shedding tears as I did so, explaining to my puzzled children that Doug was someone I knew from Bisbee, a soldier, who had died in a war. It was only then, in looking up his name, that I learned Douglas was his middle name. His first name was Leonard, but no one in Bisbee ever called him that. Back home he was simply Doug—Doug Davis.
Time passed. Despite the opinion of that Creative Writing professor about girls’ inability to write, I nonetheless managed to do so. I wrote nine Beaumont books as original paperbacks. When my first hardback,
Hour of the Hunter,
was published, my first publisher-sponsored book tour took me to Washington, DC. One afternoon, between events, I asked my media escort to take me to the Vietnam Memorial. It’s the only “tourist” thing I’ve ever done on a book tour before or since. While I was there, walking past that long expanse of black granite with all those thousands of names carved into it, again there was only one name that I searched out and touched—Doug’s.
More time passed. I wrote more Beaumonts and the first Joanna Brady book,
Desert Heat.
For years the grand opening signings for my books were held at the Doghouse Restaurant in downtown Seattle. By the time Joanna # 2,
Tombstone Courage,
went on sale in 1995, the Doghouse had closed, so we had the grand opening at a Doghouse wannabe, a short-lived place called the Puppy Club. I was seated at the signing table when a woman came up to me, introduced herself as Merrilee MacLean, and asked, “Have you ever been to Bisbee, Arizona?”
“I was raised in Bisbee, Arizona,” I told her.
Merrilee followed up with another question. “Did you ever know someone named Doug Davis?”
“Of course I knew Doug Davis!”
For the next several minutes, Merrilee told me about her sister, Bonnie Abney, who at the time was living in Florida. Bonnie had been engaged to marry Doug when he died. According to the sister, Bonnie had been a flight attendant back then. She’d had a bag packed to go to Japan for Doug’s R and R, at which time they planned to be married. Instead, at age twenty-two, he came home to Bisbee in a flag-draped casket. Bonnie was twenty-six when she waited alone, in a car parked by a lonely railroad siding in the middle of the Arizona desert. Nearby, two Davis family friends sat in another parked car. Eventually a speeding freight train hove into view. First it slowed; finally it stopped. The door on one of the cars was rolled open, allowing attendants from Dugan’s Funeral Chapel to unload Doug’s casket from the train and into a waiting hearse.
According to Merrilee, some months before the
Tombstone Courage
signing, Bonnie had read
Desert Heat.
In it, a drug cartel’s hit man guns down Joanna’s husband, Andy. In the aftermath of Andy’s death, there’s a moving funeral scene that takes place in Bisbee’s Evergreen Cemetery, the same cemetery in which Doug is buried.
As soon as Bonnie read that scene, she was convinced there had to be some connection between whoever wrote the book and her beloved Douglas. For months afterward she carried that eventually very tattered paperback volume around in her purse because she couldn’t let go of the idea of that connection, and of course, she was absolutely right. There was a very real tie between Doug Davis and the woman who wrote the book—that gangly girl from Mr. Guerra’s Latin 2 class.
Bonnie’s family hailed from Alaska originally, but many of her relatives had settled in the Seattle area. The next time she came to town to visit, she and I got together for lunch. I went armed with my collection of Bisbee High School yearbooks, my
Cuprite
s.
Our meeting was supposed to be lunch only, but we huddled over those books for a good three hours. Bonnie knew some of Doug’s classmates from West Point, but she knew almost nothing about his high school years. The photos from the yearbooks filled in some of those blanks. We saw Doug in his various sports uniforms; Doug as valedictorian of his class; Doug in a toga for the Latin Club’s annual toga party; Doug in the National Honor Society. And as we examined those photos, a lasting friendship was formed. Bonnie Abney and I have been friends ever since.
During lunch she told me a little about how she met Doug on a blind date in Florida in the fall of 1965, after he graduated from West Point and before he went to Ranger school. She told how their short time together was inadvertently extended by the arrival of Hurricane Betsy. She told how lost and alone she had felt after he died. She told me of her marriage to someone else some six years later—a relationship that was not as successful as it had promised to be.
Bonnie’s days with Doug have remained a treasured time in her life. I understand that. As a writer, I saw that happen with Beau in the aftermath of his torrid romance with Anne Corley. She shot through his life like a shooting star and then was gone as suddenly as she came. While after lots of years and many books Beau eventually found happiness with Mel Soames, Anne will always remain an indelible and important part of his life.
After our lunch together, Bonnie and I stayed in touch with Christmas cards and periodic short visits. After a career with the airlines, first as a flight attendant and later as director of training, she went on to write a book on management. Later she opened and ran her own management consulting agency, one that trained executives for major companies all over the globe. A few years ago she left Florida behind and retired to a place in the Pacific Northwest on Whidbey Island.
In the meantime, I was writing books, one after another. It was invisible to me, but between one Beaumont book and the next, a certain period of time would have elapsed both in fiction and in real life. Not only was I getting older, so was J.P. Last summer, as I prepared to write Beaumont #21, my son suggested that since Beau was getting a bit long in the tooth, perhaps it was time for me to consider writing a Beaumont prequel.
People often ask me where I get my ideas. They come from things people say to me and from things I read. According to my husband, ideas come into my head, where they undergo a kind of “Waring blender” transformation. When they come back out, leaking through my fingertips into the keyboard on the computer, the stories are different from how they went in.
The other thing about writing books is that they take more thinking than they do typing—approximately six hundred hours of the former and three hundred hours of the latter.
About six months ago now, I sat in my comfy writing chair in front of a burning gas log, wondering what on earth I was going to put into the next Beau book. In twenty previous books, written over a period of thirty years, Beau had evolved into a somewhat curmudgeonly old cuss, a guy with a pair of chronically bad knees, a somewhat younger wife, and a full panoply of coworkers, friends, and relations. The idea of seeing Beau at a younger age had some appeal, so I went back to
Until Proven Guilty,
Beaumont #1, and started reviewing his history.
I was halfway through that book, reading about his experiences with his dying mother, when I came upon the word “Vietnam.” It was almost as if someone had flipped a switch in my head. Had Doug Davis lived and had Beaumont been real, the two of them would have been about the same age. They would have served in the same war. What was there to keep me from blending fact and fiction and having the two of them meet in Vietnam?
That very evening I wrote an e-mail to Bonnie Abney, telling her about my idea and asking for her help. She wrote back the next day, signing on for the project. The result of our collaboration is woven into the fabric of Beaumont #21,
Second Watch.
