MIDNIGHT QUEST: A Short 'Men of Midnight' Novel by Lisa Marie Rice
Authors: Lisa Marie Rice
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with him? What the fuck did he care? He was going to sell. What was he going to do with a freaking house in Rancho San Diego?
Feeling uneasy, like he was invading someone’s privacy, Jacko went through Lee’s desk and found that Lee was a man who liked order. Bills were paid promptly, checkbooks balanced, taxes paid. He gave generously to charity and had made loans to friends, which had been paid back. He was a sponsor of the local library and had donated a pediatric dialysis machine to the local hospital.
He’d been a canny businessman, disciplined and organized. Lee owned shares in three quietly prosperous businesses—a feed store, a camping equipment store and a country club. The businesses brought in about three hundred thou a year.
Jesus. He inherited that stuff. Mayer had made it clear that he was sole heir, so Jacko owned shares in those businesses now.
Fuck. Jacko was…yeah. He was a rich man. With his own job, he would have an income of over half a million a year and property worth a million dollars. That was rich by anyone’s count.
But he didn’t come here for the money, he came for intel. He had a sense of Lee and Alice Garrett. And now for the hard part.
It was late afternoon when he found the courage to walk up the oak staircase and into Sara Garrett’s bedroom. His mother’s bedroom.
He was a grown man. He’d been in combat. He was tough as nails. And yet he hesitated on the threshold of the room. He’d put everything to do with his mother behind him, in a locked box. He didn’t want to open that box, ever, but now he had to. Do the hard thing. The Navy SEAL motto.
The Garretts had left their daughter’s room exactly as it had been when she’d disappeared. Jacko could picture Alice dusting and cleaning a teenager’s room, even though Sara would have been a grown woman. It must have been amazingly painful, not knowing whether Sara was alive or dead.
Neither, as it turned out. Sara had been alive in only the biological sense of the word. Any humanity in her had died long before her body.
He did a perimeter walk. It was a spacious bedroom, where a girl could sleep, study, read, listen to music, entertain her friends. The furniture must have been top of the line at the time. Once he’d walked around to get a general feel, it was time to dive into the contents of the room.
He sat down on the pretty, delicate chair of her desk and heard it creak. Sara had been a slender teenager and they wouldn’t have thought to buy a desk chair that could bear the weight of a man as big as he was.
The idea of breaking that chair freaked him, so he hunkered on the floor with her diaries and school notebooks and read about his mother’s life as a child and teenager.
Unlike her parents, Sara had been wayward and rebellious by nature. Jacko could read it in her notebooks. English and math notebooks that should have been full of homework assignments were full of photos cut out from gossip magazines. The Bee Gees and John Travolta and The Eagles. Then the Sex Pistols and Alice Cooper. Sara’s school notes were disjointed, ungrammatical, incomplete. A clear case of undiagnosed ADD, which at that time had probably not been on anyone’s radar. Her grades were just passing. School wasn’t important to her. Boys and clothes and makeup and music were.
Then, when she was seventeen, she met an older guy and it all went to hell. Jackman. What little she wrote was disjointed, handwriting all over the place, words making no sense. She began taking drugs and wrote of her “little friends.” She was mad at her parents all the time. One page was just I HATE THEM written over and over in shaky handwriting.
And then, the notebooks took a turn toward the crazy. Fuck and shit written over and over, underlined until the paper tore. A teacher gave her a failing grade and Sara drew her face with a bullet hole in the forehead. She was sure some girls in her class were stealing from her. One page was a chilling scenario of
Feeling uneasy, like he was invading someone’s privacy, Jacko went through Lee’s desk and found that Lee was a man who liked order. Bills were paid promptly, checkbooks balanced, taxes paid. He gave generously to charity and had made loans to friends, which had been paid back. He was a sponsor of the local library and had donated a pediatric dialysis machine to the local hospital.
He’d been a canny businessman, disciplined and organized. Lee owned shares in three quietly prosperous businesses—a feed store, a camping equipment store and a country club. The businesses brought in about three hundred thou a year.
Jesus. He inherited that stuff. Mayer had made it clear that he was sole heir, so Jacko owned shares in those businesses now.
Fuck. Jacko was…yeah. He was a rich man. With his own job, he would have an income of over half a million a year and property worth a million dollars. That was rich by anyone’s count.
But he didn’t come here for the money, he came for intel. He had a sense of Lee and Alice Garrett. And now for the hard part.
It was late afternoon when he found the courage to walk up the oak staircase and into Sara Garrett’s bedroom. His mother’s bedroom.
He was a grown man. He’d been in combat. He was tough as nails. And yet he hesitated on the threshold of the room. He’d put everything to do with his mother behind him, in a locked box. He didn’t want to open that box, ever, but now he had to. Do the hard thing. The Navy SEAL motto.
The Garretts had left their daughter’s room exactly as it had been when she’d disappeared. Jacko could picture Alice dusting and cleaning a teenager’s room, even though Sara would have been a grown woman. It must have been amazingly painful, not knowing whether Sara was alive or dead.
Neither, as it turned out. Sara had been alive in only the biological sense of the word. Any humanity in her had died long before her body.
He did a perimeter walk. It was a spacious bedroom, where a girl could sleep, study, read, listen to music, entertain her friends. The furniture must have been top of the line at the time. Once he’d walked around to get a general feel, it was time to dive into the contents of the room.
He sat down on the pretty, delicate chair of her desk and heard it creak. Sara had been a slender teenager and they wouldn’t have thought to buy a desk chair that could bear the weight of a man as big as he was.
The idea of breaking that chair freaked him, so he hunkered on the floor with her diaries and school notebooks and read about his mother’s life as a child and teenager.
Unlike her parents, Sara had been wayward and rebellious by nature. Jacko could read it in her notebooks. English and math notebooks that should have been full of homework assignments were full of photos cut out from gossip magazines. The Bee Gees and John Travolta and The Eagles. Then the Sex Pistols and Alice Cooper. Sara’s school notes were disjointed, ungrammatical, incomplete. A clear case of undiagnosed ADD, which at that time had probably not been on anyone’s radar. Her grades were just passing. School wasn’t important to her. Boys and clothes and makeup and music were.
Then, when she was seventeen, she met an older guy and it all went to hell. Jackman. What little she wrote was disjointed, handwriting all over the place, words making no sense. She began taking drugs and wrote of her “little friends.” She was mad at her parents all the time. One page was just I HATE THEM written over and over in shaky handwriting.
And then, the notebooks took a turn toward the crazy. Fuck and shit written over and over, underlined until the paper tore. A teacher gave her a failing grade and Sara drew her face with a bullet hole in the forehead. She was sure some girls in her class were stealing from her. One page was a chilling scenario of
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