ChapterOne
Emery Reeder walked along the Hafen Lake Park Trail in Mesquite, Nevada. Her headlamp cast eerie shadows from the bushes and trees to the lake’s calm surface. It was June, four-thirty in the morning, and already eighty degrees. Sheesh. She didn’t reside in Hades, but summer in Mesquite was a close neighbor.
As soon as the sun came up, being outside was like being the chocolate chip cookie dough on the top shelf of an oven. In her humble opinion, cookie dough was ruined by cooking it and should always be consumed raw. She figured she shouldn’t let herself be cooked, either.
Sleep was overrated and baking from the outside in wasn’t good, but fresh air was a necessity. So Emery stubbornly set an alarm for four a.m., placed said alarm across the room, and then crawled on hands and knees to the alarm as it screeched through the formerly peaceful room each morning. It was only way to force herself outside before sane people woke for the day.
She’d agreed to help teach summer school this year, excited about the extra money and extra time with some of the students who struggled, forgetting the misery of staying in Mesquite throughout the summer. Not that she had anywhere exciting to go. She adored teaching fourth grade and thought her little people were hilarious. If she could keep the parents from the extremes of either indifference about their children’s futures or trying to bulldoze their children’s paths, she’d have no complaints about her job.
In the four years since she’d graduated college, Emery had been completely self-sufficient. She’d had to rely on scholarships, grants, and early morning janitorial work to make it through college, and she was grateful to be past that. She was an independent woman, and she needed to stand on her own two feet.
Over the past four years she’d saved like Ebenezer Scrooge, living on eggs, no-name peanut butter, and all the fruits and veggies she could harvest from hours spent in her church’s community garden after work. It had been worth it. She’d saved enough for a large down-payment on her cottage. She’d dubbed her little home “the Shack,” and she loved having a place that washers.
Now she could eat meat occasionally, but she was still building her savings account back up. Hence the desperate move of teaching summer school instead of renting a cabin in the woods or flying to visit a college friend. Maybe she would soldier through the drive to Salmon, Idaho to visit her favorite foster family. Or hitchhike, the price of gas being the obscenity it was. Was hitchhiking even legal? She could ride her beach cruiser. That wouldn’t get old for seven hundred miles. She could imagine her aching rear end already. Could she earn an iron butt award or something cool like that, or was that just for Harley guys? She wasn’t riding seven hundred miles in leather chaps. The award wasn’t worth that.
Her phone rang, startling her from her random thoughts. She yanked it out and stared at the unknown number. Chicago area code. Her brother was stationed at Great Lakes Naval Base in Chicago, but he hadn’t called often since she’d seen him six months ago after he returned from Iraq. They used to be so close, and she never expected that the distance his deployment put between them might never be healed.
His last deployment had irrevocably changed him. They still talked over FaceTime occasionally and texted often, but he wasn’t himself. She kept praying he could be healed, maybe find a sweetheart of a woman to mend his heart. As a civilian, she had no idea what Travis had gone through as an Ensign in the Navy during two deployments. She used to ask him to share, but he always told her she was too good to be exposed to what he’d seen and done.
Had he gotten a new number? Then her chest tightened as panic hit her full force. What if it was someone calling on his behalf and something was horribly wrong?
She slid the phone on. “Travis?”
“Miss Reeder?” a compassionate male voice asked
“Yes?”
“I regret to be the one to inform you that your brother was killed in a special ops mission.”
Emery’s stomach filled with acid. Her vision swam and she stopped walking as her legs turned to lead. She clung to the phone as her worst nightmare became reality.
Dead? Travis? There wasn’t a bench nearby, so she sank onto the trail cross-legged and leaned her head into her hand. Horror washed over her and cold sweat covered her body.
She prayed desperately for it to not be true. How could her brother be dead?
Yet hadn’t she always known his military path was dangerous? She’d dreaded something like this happening, had tried to prepare herself. Her stomach churned, and she swallowed down bile. There was no possible way to prepare for something like this.
How had he been killed? Where? When? Travis had never told her he was special ops. She swallowed and tried to speak, but she had so many questions and no idea where to start. Travis had told her how closed-mouth the military was. She doubted this man would tell her the details of his death. Did she even want to know? It would make it too sickeningly real.
“Miss Reeder? I can’t imagine how troubling this is. Are you all right?”
Not all right. She couldn’t even speak it hurt so bad.
“Are you there, ma’am?”
She cleared her throat. “I’m here,” she managed. There were no tears. They’d come. Soon. She didn’t even know how to mourn losing her only family member. Crumple into a ball and never move again?
She and Travis had been inseparable as children, shuffled through foster care homes when their mom was declared unfit and forced to give up her rights. Travis had been five and Emery three. She didn’t even remember her mom and nobody knew who their dads were besides knowing they weren’t the same person, as Travis had obvious Hispanic heritage.
Their foster parents through high school, the Weatherspoons, were good, solid Christians. They’d never been able to have children and weren’t always patient with two rambunctious teenagers as fifty-year-old first-time parents, but they’d done their best. Emery still drove the ten hours to Salmon once or twice a year to visit them and talked to them on holidays and birthdays.
Travis had joined the military at eighteen with the help of Sister Weatherspoon, as her foster mom had insisted they call her, and he’d flourished. When Emery graduated high school two years later, she’d applied for every scholarship and grant she could find online and had been awarded quite a few of them. After she made it through Boise State University with an elementary education degree, she’d found the job at Virgin Valley Elementary School. She’d thought she was ready for year-round warmth, but had been a little naïve about how miserable the heat could be.
She and Travis had grown apart because of the physical distance between them, but they’d been fiercely loyal to each other as only two orphaned siblings could be. They emailed, texted, called, and got together any chance they had. Until his last deployment.
She loved her brother and said a desperate prayer that he would be welcomed by his Savior on the other side.
“H-how did he die?” she croaked out.