He didn’t know which was worse. Her nerve, her strange behavior and odd request, or his inability to say no.
Eric almost considered her petition. For about a second. Because of the General, his former commanding officer. Then he remembered who he was dealing with. This girl wasn’t an ordinary damsel. Black widow was more likely.
“You’re about eleven years too late, Gracie.” Eric’s icy tone chilled his throat. He turned away from her and snatched up his beer. “Go find yourself another whipping boy.”
“Eric please...” She touched his arm. “You’re the only one I can trust.”
Laughter snorted out through his nose.
She trusted him. Since when?
He jerked away. As if putting a few inches between them made a difference. Not with all the vulnerability frozen on her face. He should’ve paid better attention in science class, then he’d understand how something so cold and unmoving had managed to melt his resistance.
Eric sighed and sat the beer bottle on the counter. Maybe appeasing her would eventually get rid of her. “All right.” He hoped his tone, bargaining and provisional, saturated her with misgivings. “I’ll see you to the cemetery,” he said, “but then you’re on your own.”
“After we go to the cemetery—” She straightened her posture and shot him a glare that nearly set him on fire. “If you can walk away, I won’t try to stop you.”
CHAPTER 2
DURING the drive to the cemetery, darkness had begun to ink out the twilight’s shadows. She’d opted to follow him in her little blue sports car and he kept checking his mirror, half-expecting her to disappear. She’d done it before. Grace Hendricks was good at vanishing.
Eric envied her, wishing he had such a gift.
Just outside the cemetery’s gate, he pulled off the side of the road and he let his umbrage go before exiting the car. After a couple of steps toward her, he stopped. She rolled the window down and he slid his hands inside his trouser pockets.
“You’ll probably want to get in my car,” he said.
“Why?”
“I doubt they’ll let you, a civilian, inside in the dark.”
“You’re a civilian too now.”
“And you know this how?” he asked.
“Because I went to Cherry Point after I left here, to see if I could find you.”
“What made you think I’d still be here?”
“Oh, I didn’t. I was shocked to say the least.” She wrapped both hands around the steering wheel and focused on the darkness in front of them. “I asked for a location on you and Marcus.” The mention of their best friend’s name brought both pleasant and painful memories. “I’m not really sure I can trust anyone else.”
There it was again. The notion that she trusted him. Ironic. Eric’s overpowering reaction to her filled him with a bittersweet sensation. He shoved the fleeting moment aside and summoned a safer, albeit uglier, mood. The safety device wrapped around him like a security blanket. “The chance of finding me or Marcus was slim at best.”
She held his stare, taking his remark in stride. “They told me you retired. Today.”
“Yes, but...” Eric needed to get back on track and find out why she was here. The real reason, which he doubted had anything to do with him personally. “I may be retired, but the guard here at the cemetery doesn’t know that.” He turned on his heel and headed back to his car. Either she was going to follow him or not. He didn’t care, one way or another. He’d just as soon go home.
Her car door slammed, and going home slipped off the table. At least until he visited the General’s grave.
The General’s grave? What was she up to? What kind of angle was she working?
Grace slipped into the passenger’s seat without waiting for him to open or close the door.
And women bitch about how guys aren’t chivalrous anymore. Yet, he couldn’t remember the last time one had given him the chance.
They passed through the gate without incident, and Eric intuitively remembered the way. Amazing since he hadn’t visited the General since the day of his funeral, and the man had almost become his father-in-law. But that was more years ago than Eric cared to count.
In the western section of the southern region, he braked alongside the lane. He shifted the car into park and stepped out into the warm night air. A chill sped through the balmy twilight and wrapped itself around him. Eric scanned the area and leaned against his car door.
The Crape Myrtles, a southern staple, had begun to bloom and their soft scents filtered through the cemetery. Their fragrance mingled with Eric’s reservations about trekking through the cemetery at night. Not to mention the age-old question rattling around in his head—where the hell had she been?
Grace hopped out and scrambled through the field of tombstones at a speed-walking pace. Eric hurried after her. She was on a mission and it would take a lot to dissuade her. Just keep up with her, and defer the inevitable until later.
Roaming around the cemetery at night didn’t seem to bother her nearly as much as it did Eric. His usual indifference to the dark offered hollow comfort now. He didn’t like it. Not one bit.
The desire to demand answers swelled inside his head. He wanted to restrain his need to know, but the monster was out of control.
“I can’t believe you’d just show up here after all this time and from out of nowhere.” His voice had gone high and squeaky but that didn’t stop him. “And what do you do? You drag me to a graveyard in the middle of the night.”
“Come on...” She latched onto his hand and dragged him behind her.
Her touch felt too good. He didn’t like it. “Can we step back and regroup?” He tried to retrieve his hand.
She tightened her grip and quickened her pace. “No. We cannot take a break.”
“Why not?”
“Because...” She stopped abruptly. “You need to tell me how this happened.” She folded her arms at her waist and waited. After a brief interlude, her lips parted as if she wanted to say something but couldn’t make up her mind.
Eric shook his head. She wasn’t supposed to get to him so easily. He let the zillion questions that’d come to him over the years slip through his thoughts. Maybe it would diffuse her influence over him, or take over and do what needed to be done—demand an explanation.
Right about now that sounded like a good idea.
“Well that’s a hell of a question.” A strong suggestion of reproach came out in his odd, yet gentle tone. “How this happened?” He ground the words out between his teeth, until finally, his anger bubbled over. “You want me to explain to you...how it is that it took you eleven years to show up?”
His demands seemed to roll off Grace like she was shielded by some imaginary protective barrier. She threw back her shoulders and appeared to grow a full two inches before pointing to the grave before them.
Her golden-brown eyes never left his steady gaze. “Where is my father?” Grace’s doleful, given-up look hardened the center of his heart.
Eric let his attention fall on the headstone. She’d said something about her father, but the marker suggested they were standing in front of the final resting place of Captain Harry Reynolds, who’d supposedly died a full ten years before the General. He tried, without success, to wrap the confusion wandering around his mind in reality.
Was this supposed to be the General’s grave? Eric checked the plot markers. He paced the length of several graves on either side. They had to be on the wrong aisle. The wrong block. The wrong row. Something. There had to be an explanation. A missing grave was crazy.
A hollow, left-behind feeling swept over him as he stopped at the foot of the Captain’s grave. “What the hell’s going on?” he whispered, staring at the marker.
Eric knew, as well as Grace, this plot was the General’s final resting place no matter what the damned tombstone said.
Granted, Eric hadn’t been here in a while. Not since that fateful day, but he hadn’t forgotten. He had a lucid recollection of where the burial had taken place. Right here in front of him. Which is why a captain’s grave marker in place of the General’s made no sense.
He cast an accusatory glare over Grace, and she wilted under it. “What is this? Some kind of joke?” Eric couldn’t bring himself to believe her capable of something so despicable.
“Well, if it is,” her voice took on an offensive tone, “it’s not very funny.”
Eric paused, stalling, waiting for this peculiar night to right itself. It didn’t. “What do you want from me?”
“I want you to help me figure out what’s going on.”
“Give me one good reason why I should, Gracie?”
The utterance of his pet name for her sparked a glow that lingered long after Grace’s expression tempered. Her brown eyes still held the hints of a tawny hue, and something new—a hardness, a cool and aloof distance not quite camouflaged inside her poignant stare.
“Okay, how about this...?” She gestured toward the grave but her focus remained on Eric. “Where is my father?”
Mixed feelings of hope and dread surged through Grace. She had to find out what happened to her father, but she worried Eric would refuse to help.
Fear hardened his expression even though an implication of annoyance hovered in his striking ice-like green eyes. She waited for his answer, but none came. Still, his unyielding glare showed no signs of relenting, yet his slouching posture suggested otherwise. He looked as if he wanted to disagree, but like her, couldn’t find a valid argument.
Her father’s grave had disappeared. Who could explain that away?
“Do you have any idea what’s going on?” she asked, a bit weaker than intended.
Eric surveyed the darkness around them and raked his hand through his almost non-existent hair. Grace wondered if he’d let it grow now that he and the Marine Corps had parted ways.
“I can’t even fathom a guess, Gracie.” Eric propped his hands on his hips and shook his head. “This makes no sense.” He struggled with the words, the idea, the implication.
“Well, I think it’s pretty obvious.”
“What is?”
“So what do you think...? The United States Military ran out of room to bury their dead?” She held the screams of frustration at the back of her throat. “You think they’re planting people on top of each other now?”
Eric’s eyes lit up like a light bulb had turned on inside his head. “Who all knows about this?”
“Just you and me,” she said. “Oh, and the state of North Carolina.”
“North Carolina?”
“Well, the vital records office.” She gave a dismissive shrug. “I asked them for a copy of daddy’s death certificate. They said there wasn’t one.”
“Of course there’s a death certificate,” he said in a chilling, sarcastic tone. “Didn’t you get a copy when he died?”
She nodded.
“So why ask for one now?” he asked. “What’d you do, lose it?”
She ignored the bit at the end. “Because his military records are all screwed up. The death certificate in there says he died on Christmas Day. In Arizona.”
That look crossed Eric’s face again. The one that said, this makes no sense but he wasn’t willing to acknowledge it. He’d never been one to admit there were things he couldn’t explain away. This weakness probably had something to do with his childhood and the fact that his mother had been so horribly absent. He couldn’t explain that away any better than he could this.
Why in the heck had Grace chosen Eric to come to for help? Mr. Ignore-it-and-it’ll-go-away.
“Don’t look at me like that.” He showed no signs of relenting.
Okay, so contacting him—bad idea. Grace took a couple of steps backward and turned away. “Just take me back to my car,” she said. “I’m sorry I bothered you. I’ll figure this out myself.”
Seeking out Eric had been a mistake. One she planned to rectify immediately.
“Gracie,” his voice charged after her like a pissed off bull after a matador.
She picked up the pace. The front gate was close, maybe she’d walk to her car. Far be it from her to inconvenience anybody, especially the one man she thought she could trust.
“Grace, please wait.” He latched onto the upper portion of her arm with enough strength that she stumbled backward when he stopped.
“Look, you obviously don’t want to be bothered.” She looked at his hand on her arm and tried to will it away.
“I never said that.” He released her. “It’s a lot to take in.” His frustration morphed him into a shell of vulnerability. “You’re suddenly here. The General’s not only gone, but somebody’s taken his place.”
“Yeah, it kind of freaked me out, too.”
They started moving again, in the direction of Eric’s car. He opened the passenger door and waited for her to slip inside before easing the door shut and trotting around to the driver’s side.
His door closed and a sense of claustrophobia thickened around Grace, tangling her in a web of impulses. She wished her father were here. She wanted all this craziness to go away. And, she needed Eric’s forgiveness.
Eric’s punishing glare told her none of those things were happening. He wrapped his fingers around the steering wheel. His lips moved, twitching, but no sound emerged.
Whatever his reason for not walking away, she knew she hadn’t sold him on staying either. Gaining his help would take more than a pretty smile and a missing grave.
He finally spoke. “You said the death certificate in his military records has the wrong information?”
“Either that,” she said as if the possibility were real, “or I’m nuts.”
“Well, if that’s the case—” He almost laughed. “Then you and I are having the same psychotic episode.”
“What are the odds of that?” she said with a measure of reluctance.
“Where’d you get his military records from?” he asked, ignoring her inquiry.
“V.A.”
“When?”
“Last month.”
His stare drilled into her. “And you obtained these records why?”
“Genealogy.”
“Genealogy?”
“Yeah, you know...family history.”
“I know what genealogy is.” He stiffened as though she’d struck him. “I just don’t understand what you thought you’d find in a V.A. file.”
“The names of my grandparents.”
“You didn’t know that?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. She didn’t recall her father ever, not once, mentioning her grandparents’ names.
Suddenly, Grace felt clueless.