The Final Mission

A different world indeed.

From below she could hear the sounds of Dom and the boys at breakfast, and she could even smell some of the aromas that had wafted under her closed door, but not even coffee could make her move.

Emotionally, she felt trampled. Last night she had determined that she would finish up today somehow and leave.

This morning she doubted she would be able to do much of anything. It was as if a load of grief she had been carrying around, carefully compartmentalized for two years, had finally hammered her. Reading through Mary’s letters to her sons had left her feeling positively battered.

Worse, it seemed to have awakened memories of things she had seen over there. Nightmares of war, of mutilated bodies, had plagued her all night. She’d awakened at least three times with the sounds of screams in her ears. But her exposure had been relatively small. Someone like Mary, someone who saw it almost every day, would surely have worse nightmares, worse memories. Worse everything.

I’m lucky, she told herself firmly. Lucky her job had taken her into hell so rarely. Other people had been there for years.

But the thought of opening those doors of memory any wider almost sickened her.

So what was she going to do? Give up her pursuit of justice? Let the desert ghosts lie in their hiding places? Because for her Mary wasn’t the only ghost. So were the women of that village who had never received justice. So was the person who had murdered Mary to protect himself and his buddies. Some of those ghosts she felt unable to leave alone.

Except that today it all seemed like too much. Way too much. Her plan of poring over letters, photos and tapes had been anticipated from a professional angle. It was the kind of thing she did all the time in her job.

But this was no job. This was personal. And it hurt.

Apparently not even two years had buried the anguish completely, and she could only imagine what it was like for Dom, surrounded by all his memories of his wife, taking care of two boys who looked quite a bit like her.

Of course, maybe that had helped him deal faster than her own burying of it had. Maybe he was further down the road than she.

Sighing, she at last rose, tended to her needs and went downstairs. Dom wasn’t there and she imagined he had taken the boys to the bus. Through one of the windows she could see Ted walking out into the pastures. He appeared to be carrying some tack with him.

Breakfast still waited on the table, and the coffee was still hot and fresh. Her place had been set, as if her arrival was anticipated. Somehow that made her feel a little more welcome.

She poured some coffee and then took some pancakes and link sausages from a platter and warmed them in the microwave. Blueberry syrup topped her menu. Not that she felt much like eating. Not after the nightmares, not after that damn email yesterday that was probably as toothless as an old hag, designed to frighten her, but unable to do anything else.

She forced herself to take a bite of pancake. No, that email was meaningless. It had probably arrived simply because she had gone out of reach of oversight. And someone was worried.

Wouldn’t they be horrified to realize that all they had done was confirm her suspicions that something was seriously wrong with the way the investigation had been quashed? For a moment, she almost smiled, and the taste of the pancakes became wonderful.

Yeah. They’d confirmed her suspicions. Now she would get to the bottom of this or die trying.

She tried to imagine Mary sitting at this table. All her memories of Mary involved the base, the hospital and a couple places where it was safe for an American to stop for coffee. Even in a pacified zone that wasn’t always a sure thing.

She ran her fingertips over the aging oilcloth, and figured from the pattern that it must have been Mary’s choice. She had loved cheerful things.

And she probably wouldn’t be very happy to see Courtney sitting here feeling as if lead weighted her down. That just wasn’t Mary. She probably wouldn’t be happy, either, that Courtney had gotten Dom all stirred up again.

Crap! She put her head in her hands as powerful, painful feelings grabbed her. Maybe she should have just let this lie and lived with her sense of outraged justice.

But as soon as she had the thought, she knew she couldn’t rest until she was absolutely certain that she had done everything possible. Everything.

She heard Dom come into the mud room, and didn’t even bother to look up. She didn’t want to know, in a moment of reaction he couldn’t conceal fast enough, how little he wanted her here.

“Are you okay?”

“No,” she admitted frankly. “But it doesn’t matter.” And it didn’t, compared to his problems.

“Of course it matters.”

She listened to him pour coffee for himself, then heard a chair scrape as he sat at the table. “What’s going on?”

She shook her head, still resting in her hands. “It’s hard reading those emails and letters.”

“I know.”

Yeah, she was sure he did. And it seemed petty of her to even mention it. “How are you managing?”

He shrugged a shoulder, seeming to indicate he wasn’t going to talk about it. But then he said, “With time I feel it less often. I still feel it, it still hurts like hell, but it happens less often. I guess you can get used to anything, given time.”

“I guess so.” She gave herself an inward shake and looked up at last, finding his strong face looking calm, even resigned. And then she caught a flicker of something else in his gaze, something hot. It was gone almost instantly, but she knew that look, had seen it often enough to know what it meant: he found her sexually attractive.

But as quickly as the heat showed, it was followed by a flash of puzzlement, as if he didn’t understand what he’d just felt.

Guilt. It was thick on the air, she realized. They both felt guilty, though perhaps for different reasons. She felt it because it was partly her fault Mary had died. He probably felt that an instant of attraction somehow betrayed her. And frankly, Courtney wondered the same thing, because as she had caught that flicker of sexual yearning in his gaze, she had felt herself respond all the way to her center.

Desire, evidently, had its own calendar and its own causes, and simple thoughts of propriety, ugly things like guilt, couldn’t entirely squash it.

Life went on whether you wanted it to or not. That was the hardest part. Just when you felt everything should freeze in time and space, that the whole world should halt because you had lost someone you loved, life intruded, reminding you that you had to go on.

“Have you decided whether you’ll go camping with us tomorrow?” he asked.

“I …” The hesitation, so strong earlier, the decision she thought she had made … all of a sudden they were gone. “Yes. Yes, I will.”

One corner of his mouth lifted. “Good. You’ll enjoy it. There’s a cabin up there, not much, but I’ve kept it up because the boys love to go up there in the summers when we look after the horses. You won’t exactly be roughing it.”

“It would be fun either way. I think—” she hesitated, then blurted it “—I think I need some fun.”

“I think you do, too. I think we all do.” His smile widened slightly. “How devoted are you to spending another day in my office?”

She thought about all those photos she still needed to review, all the tapes and CDs. “There’s a lot I need to look at still.”

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