Magnolia Gods (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 2) by Thomas Hollyday Page B

break, a good discovery, you don’t know which way to turn.”
    “Jeremy will be pissed,” said Mike. “He gets really involved in these projects. After all, without his perseverance we probably would have given up on the P47 several times.”
    “Yeah, but he’s worried about his friend, Jenni. He might be relieved if we quit,” she said, as she tuned the radio through several rock stations.
    Mike drove on, thinking of his father, how the old man would handle this situation if he was still alive and here beside Mike right now. The museum world was tougher than in his father’s day. Today, decisions had to be made for practical cash reasons. Staff had to be paid. He smiled, thinking of how his father would always ask whether the results were worth the trouble. He remembered one of his father’s favorite stories about when he was a navigator in a torpedo bomber. His dad would sit at the company lunch table at break time, his hair cut to a precise military length, still ruddy brown, his strong hands motioning accents to the storytelling. Around him would be the aircraft mechanics and some of the old fliers who hung around the Museum, each sipping on a bottle of Coke or a cup of coffee. Mike, only fourteen years old then, would listen, sitting there on the edge of a folding chair, usually with a wrench or other tool almost as big as he was still held in his hand from his apprentice job out in the workshop.
    “We’d be coming at this Jap destroyer and the skipper would call back, ‘Good attack this time, Buddy.’ The rounds would start zipping by our plane. Once in a while the hot anti-aircraft fragments ripped away some of the wing fabric, the tears of metal flapping in the screaming wind, and I would yell forward over the noise,
    “ ‘Skipper, worth the trouble?’
    “The answer would come back in the static, ‘This run’s worth the trouble.’
    Then his dad would pantomime dramatically that the torpedo was launched and the plane shuddered with loss of the heavy weight from underneath.
    “We’d try to gain altitude, pushing the aircraft for all she had, straining the engine to get away, like a kid who hits the bully and then runs like hell.
    “You could see them, Mike,” he’d say, talking like Mike was as important as the older men in the room, “shooting at us from down below. I remember one time we flew over a ship and I could see some Jap sailor had his rifle pointed right at my face. I could have reached out and touched him. Just before he pulled off his round, the ship exploded, a ball of flame came up around him and sucked him away. We got away from that too, and then it was over until the next time. Me and the skipper chattered on the intercom. He’d say pretty soon that the run was successful, that our attack was worth the trouble.”
    Mike could not imagine his father ever having been afraid. Yet, his father had seen his son afraid, so afraid he could not move. This event had caused the gap of trust between father and son, and this had caused Mike to doubt himself. Since that event, Mike had the constant worry that the fear would come back. He had steeled himself with courage. In everything he tried, he felt fearless. Yet, he was not secure in one faculty, one strength that he had before the cowardice. Mike could not or would not trust himself to fly again.
    If he kept investigating, he knew he’d meet Bullard again and he had no fear of the man. The play at Aviatrice had been only verbal, but the man had tried to push, to cower him, and Mike had pushed back successfully. Bullard was the kind who would stoop to breaking a man’s legs, to humiliating an opponent. Mike, on the other hand, was satisfied with winning, not maiming. Bullard, Mike knew, had to be watched even when he was down, even when he was beaten because Bullard would never stop. Bullard was driven only by hate. Mike knew that was the man’s weakness but also his strength. He wouldn’t forget that he hadn’t been able to scare