The Unsung Hero (3 page)
Death.
It wasn’t a very fun or happy word, with any particularly appealing images attached. Charles preferred the more euphemistic expressions. Kicking the bucket. Belly-up—that was a particularly bouncy, friendly-sounding one. And then there was the perennial favorite: shitting the bed.
No, strike that. He preferred the bare bones dying over that most unpleasant image.
The doctor had estimated that Charles had about four months before he’d pass on. Pass on—that was a stupid one. It made him think of passing gas, like dying was one giant, last-blast fart.
Of course, the precocious youngster with the medical degree had warned, he could be wrong and the moment of truth could be far sooner than four months.
Like maybe this morning.
Charles wasn’t afraid to die. Not anymore. Well, wait, strike that, too. He was afraid to die—on the bathroom floor. A thing like that would stay with a guy damn near forever.
“Remember Charles Ashton?” someone would say. “Yeah, right, Ashton,” would be the reply. “He died in his bathroom with his big bare ass hanging out of his pants.”
Forget about all the money he’d given to charity, all his philanthropic works. Forget the branch of the Baldwin’s Bridge hospital dedicated to children’s medicine, given in honor of both his own son who died from a ruptured appendix in 1947 as well as a little French boy killed by the Nazis, a little boy he’d never actually met. Forget about the war he’d helped to win. Forget about the trust funds he’d set up so that each year three promising young students from Baldwin’s Bridge could attend the colleges of their choice.
Forget about everything but his big bare ass, dead as a doornail on the bathroom floor.
Dead.
It was a cold word.
Charles had suspected the news was coming when he’d first met the doctor, even before he’d had the full barrage of tests.
“When you’re so old and your doctor is so young that you look at him and know you haven’t had sex since before he was born, chances are, he’s not going to have a whole hell of a lot of good news,” he’d told Joe grumpily as they’d driven home.
Joe hadn’t said much—but then again, Joe wasn’t a huge talker. Young Joe Paoletti—he was only seventy-six to Charles’s exalted eighty—merely gave Charles a long look as they’d stopped at a red light.
And Charles had wisely shut up. It hadn’t been the most considerate thing to say, considering Joe hadn’t had sexual relations since 1944. The crazy bastard. He’d been a heartbreaker, with a face like a matinee idol. He could have had a different woman for every night of the week. Yet he’d lived like a monk since they both had returned to Baldwin’s Bridge after the War.
The War. The one against the Nazis. Double-yew, double-yew, eye, eye.
He and Joe had met in France, of all places. Just after Normandy, that hell on earth. Joe hadn’t really been much of a talker back then, either.
Theirs had become the kind of friendship that only a war could make. It was like something out of a storybook. Two men from completely different walks of life. One the poor son of a hardworking Italian immigrant from New York City, the other the wealthy son of a wealthy son from an old Boston family used to summers spent relaxing in the cool ocean breezes of the North Shore town of Baldwin’s Bridge, Massachusetts. They’d fought together against Nazi Germany, and their relationship solidified into something beyond permanent, bonded together with Winston Churchill’s own recipe for an indestructible tabby: blood, toil, tears, and sweat.
Tears.
Joe had wept when the doctor told Charles the C-word. He’d tried to hide it, but Charles had known.
You didn’t spend nearly sixty years as someone’s best friend—even though you tried to deny it, even though you sometimes pretended he was only the gardener or the hired help or even just that stupid bum who’d followed you home from the War—and not know when he was hurting.
“You should’ve taken him first,” Charles scolded God now. “I could’ve handled it.”
With the last ounce of his strength, he heaved his pajama pants up around his waist. He lay there on the cool tile floor, his ass safely covered, coughing from the exertion, wondering if God could tell when he was lying.
Dr. Kelly Ashton was running out of time.
She parked her subcompact in her father’s driveway, next to Joe’s four-hundred-year-old but still pristine Buick station wagon, and turned off the engine, sitting for a moment, her head on her arms, against the steering wheel.
What she was doing was stupid. She was stupid. Trying to maintain her pediatrics practice in Boston while living here, an hour north of the city at her father’s house in Baldwin’s Bridge, proved it. She should give the Harvard diploma back. Obviously it was a mistake. She was too stupid to have earned it.
And she was doubly stupid since her father made it painstakingly clear that he really didn’t want her here.
He didn’t need her help. He’d rather die alone.
Kelly pushed open the car door, gathering the bag from the drugstore and the sack of groceries she’d picked up from the Stop & Shop on her way home. This was supposed to be one of her days here in Baldwin’s Bridge, but she’d gotten up at 4:30 to drive into Boston before the rush, to get some paperwork done. With her new schedule, she barely had time to think let alone do paperwork, and this morning she’d only managed to put a dent in the piles on her desk.
She’d also gone in early hoping that Betsy McKenna’s test results would be in first thing.
Kelly suspected the frail six-year-old had leukemia. And if that was the case, she wanted to be the one to tell Betsy’s parents, to talk about treatment, and to introduce them to the oncologist.
But at nine she’d called the lab and found out that Betsy’s blood sample had been shipped in a van that had been totaled in an accident. In fact, the entire day’s blood tests had to be redone. All those patients—Betsy included—would have to come back in. The results would be returned to Kelly stat. Tomorrow, they’d promised. Provided a new blood sample got to them today.
It was at that point she’d put the entire matter into the very capable hands of Pat Geary, her administrative assistant. And Kelly had given up on the paperwork and headed back here, to be near her father.
Who wanted nothing more than for her to leave him alone.
So she’d probably spend her day at home running around town, doing errands, trying to show him that she loved him in the only way she knew how. By being dutiful and obedient. By staying out of his way.
She gave the car door a hard push with her rear end, slamming it shut.
He’d always been a selfish bastard. What had he been thinking, anyway, having a kid when he was so damn old? He’d always been old—old and cynical and so jaded and sarcastic.
Kelly couldn’t imagine what he’d seen in Tina, her mother, other than her youthful body and pretty face. She knew, however, what Tina had seen in him. Charles Ashton was an elegant, beautiful, seemingly sophisticated, and very, very wealthy man. Even now, at eighty, he was remarkably handsome. He still had a thick shock of hair—though pure white now instead of golden blond. And his eyes were still a bright piercing blue, though by all rights they should be bleary, watery, and shot with red, thanks to the gallons of alcohol he’d consumed through the years.
It was only his soul that was ugly and shriveled.
And it was only now, when he was dying, that he’d finally stopped drinking. Not because he wanted to be sober, but because he was having trouble eating or drinking just about everything. The whiskey that had once been his cure-all now was too harsh on his cancer-ridden stomach.
The irony was intense.
It took looming, imminent death by cancer to remove him from the clutches of the alcoholism that had been slowly but surely killing him. At one point, Kelly had been sure the DTs would do him in, but the old man was tough and he’d made it through.
And now, for the first time since Kelly could remember, her father was sober all the time and capable of carrying on meaningful conversations.
Except he didn’t want to talk to her.
Charles didn’t need her, but dammit, she needed him. He had three months left—if that. And she needed to use that time to reach some kind of an understanding, if not with him, then at least about him. Even if all they managed to do was sit in a room together without one of them getting a rash, that would be more than they’d shared in the recent past.
He might be stubborn, but she was stubborn, too. It wouldn’t be easy, because she was, after all, an Ashton—raised to keep every emotion she was feeling carefully, politely inside.
Kelly went into the house and put down all her bags on the kitchen table.
The place was silent, but that didn’t mean a thing. This monstrosity that had been the Ashton summer home for the past hundred and fifty years was so vast that Charles could be in his TV room with the set turned up deafeningly, and she wouldn’t hear it in the kitchen.
Kelly began putting the groceries away as loudly as she possibly could, hoping—as futilely as the little girl she’d once been had hoped that her straight As on her report card would make her worthy of her father’s love—that for once Charles would hear that she was home and come say good morning.
On the other end of the phone, Adm. Chip Crowley was silent. And when he finally sighed, Tom knew this was not going to be easy.
“Tell me again who this Merchant is?” Crowley asked.
Tom couldn’t keep his voice from sounding tight. “Sir. I’d appreciate it if you did not patronize me.”
“I’m not patronizing you, Tom, I’m trying to refresh my less than perfect memory. Will you please just answer my question? And I’ll tell you right now to keep it at a decibel level that won’t hurt my ears. Don’t even think about giving me some of the same verbal disrespect that you dished out to Larry Tucker last week.”
Tom sat down at Joe’s formica-topped kitchen table. “Sir. Are you telling me you support Tucker’s attempt to shut down Sixteen and the SO squad?”
“I’m telling you nothing of the kind,” Crowley said. “Son, I’m behind your Troubleshooters two hundred percent. Team Sixteen’s not going anywhere. You have my promise. What Larry tried to do was dead wrong. But what you did in response was also dead wrong. And I have to confess to being a little concerned. There are ways to deal with assholes like Larry Tucker that don’t include going off half-cocked and getting yourself strapped down for a week’s worth of psych evals. The man I chose to lead Team Sixteen a year and a half ago wouldn’t have done what you did.”
Crowley was right. Tom’s head was pounding and he rubbed his forehead with his fingers, trying to relieve the pressure. The kitchen wall was dingy, he noticed, and he looked around the room, realizing it needed fresh paint. That’s what he should be doing with this weekend, not reporting sightings of dead terrorists, not putting his career even further at risk.
“Now why don’t you do me a favor and answer my question?” Crowley said more gently. “The Merchant. He had something to do with that embassy bombing back in, what was it, 1997?”
“ ’Ninety-six,” Tom said. “And yes, sir. He’s an independent contractor—a mercenary who was the brains behind the car bomb that took out the American embassy in Paris that year. A Muslim extremist group claimed responsibility for the blast, but NAVINTEL put the Merchant there. It was definitely his work. The bomb had his cell’s signature all over it.”
“You were part of a combined French–American force brought in after these terrorists were tracked to . . . London, was it?”
“Liverpool. The SAS played a part, too.”
They’d wasted a hell of a lot of time playing politics after the Merchant and his dirty band had been tracked to a warehouse in a particularly dank part of the English town most famous for being the home of the Beatles. In fact, Tom still believed that if they’d focused more on apprehending the terrorists rather than deciding the protocol of who got to kick down the door, they might’ve had five captured Tangos rather than four former terrorists in need of body bags and one terrorist—the Merchant—still “at large,” as the Feds so aptly put it.
“We had security-camera footage of the Merchant being hit by gunfire,” Tom told the admiral. “Through video analysis, his injuries were believed to be extensive. In fact, the word fatal was used. Even though he’d escaped, it was thought chances of his surviving were slim.”
Crowley was silent again, and Tom looked at the summer flowers Joe kept in a vase on the table. As far back as Tom could remember, Joe had had fresh flowers in his kitchen all spring and summer long.
It was one of the perks of being a groundskeeper, Tom supposed. Maybe that was what he could do after Tucker forced his early retirement. He could come back to Baldwin’s Bridge and act as Joe’s apprentice. Learn about roses and lawn grubs and all those things he’d been too impatient to pay attention to when he was in high school. He could eventually take over the position of the Ashtons’ groundskeeper from Joe, and when Charles Ashton died . . . If Charles Ashton died. The old man was just ornery enough to be immortal out of spite. If Charles died, Tom could work full time for his daughter, Kelly, because she would no doubt inherit this humongous estate—the main house and grounds, and even this little cottage Joe had lived in for over fifty years.
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