Fiancée's Betrayal, Dante's Inferno novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Dad's Boat

Thrown out, Roan sleeps aboard his father's boat, meets Myra, faces down Dixon, and learns his mother filed a complaint with his command.

The deputies didn't cuff me.

They walked me out the side door of the church.

One of them had played football with Dixon.

"Go on home, Roan," he said. "Sleep it off."

"I'm not drunk," I said.

"Nobody ever is."

Behind the door the organ started up again, loud and cheerful.

They were going to finish the wedding.

I stood on the church steps with my duffel bag and my dress blues, and I took a long breath.

Then I started walking.

It's three miles from downtown Beaufort across the swing bridge to Lady's Island.

I had walked farther with sixty pounds on my back.

I did not walk to my mother's house.

I walked to the yard.

Tarrant Boatworks sits at the end of a gravel road on the Beaufort River.

There's a boat shed the size of a hangar, a little marina office, and a long wooden dock.

My father built it from a bait shack.

He left it to Dixon and me, half and half.

He left me one thing more.

At the end of the dock, in slip nine, sat the Marguerite, a thirty-four-foot wooden shrimp boat with a blue stripe.

She was his boat, and then she was mine.

I had the papers in my duffel, and I had never been so glad of anything.

The cabin key was where it always was, under the third bait bucket.

I let myself in, sat down on the bunk, and put my head in my hands.

I didn't cry.

I just sat there, hearing the word "Africa" in my brother's mouth.

It was nearly dark when I heard boots on the dock.

Someone was walking quietly.

I took a wrench off the shelf, stood behind the cabin door, and waited.

The door swung in.

A woman stood on the threshold with a pipe wrench raised over her shoulder.

We looked at each other.

She was about thirty, tall, in oil-stained coveralls with the top half tied around her waist.

Her tank top was gray, and her arms were strong.

She had a long brown braid and freckles, and a front tooth with a little corner missing.

"You're the brother," she said.

"Which one?"

"The one who isn't in a tux."

I lowered the wrench.

She lowered hers.

"I'm Myra," she said. "I run the shop floor. You're sitting in my favorite boat."

"It's my boat."

"I know. I just like it more than you do."

I almost laughed.

It surprised me so much that I sat back down.

She came in and looked me over, the blues, the ribbons, the church-shoe shine on my boots.

"You look like hell, Staff Sergeant."

"I've been told."

"Hungry?"

I hadn't eaten since Savannah.

Ten minutes later she came back from her truck with a paper bag of fried shrimp and two cold beers.

She sat across from me on an overturned bucket and ate.

"Tell me the town's version," I said.

She wiped her fingers on her coveralls.

"The town says you wrote Brynn a letter in April and dumped her. Said you'd met somebody on base."

"I didn't."

"I figured. You've been gone fourteen months. Where would you meet anyone, a camel?"

"There were no camels."

"Then your mother has been lying to the whole county," Myra said, and cracked her beer.

I looked at her.

"You don't think I did it?"

"Your father hired me at nineteen," she said. "I knew what kind of sons he raised."

"One of them cheats, and one of them walks three miles in dress shoes to sleep on a boat."

My throat did something I did not like.

"Thank you," I said.

"Eat your shrimp."

I ate.

For a minute it was just the water slapping the hull and her chewing.

It was the first quiet I'd had in two days.

Then headlights swept across the dock.

A truck door slammed.

Two sets of boots came down the planks, one heavy and one in a deputy's squeaky leather.

My brother's voice floated ahead of him.

"I'm telling you, Deputy, he's trespassing."

Dixon stood in the cabin door with his tie loose, a cheek flushed from champagne.

He looked at Myra, then at me, then at the shrimp.

"You're really going to do this, little brother?"

"I'm sitting on my own boat," I said.

"The yard is Mom's to run."

"The Marguerite is mine. Dad's will says so."

I took the papers out of my duffel and held them up in the light.

The deputy read them with a flashlight.

He read them twice.

He handed them back.

"They're his, Dixon," he said, and he didn't look happy about it. "Boat's titled to him."

Dixon's smile stayed, but his eyes didn't.

"Then you've got till Friday to be out of this county," he said. "Mom's got a lawyer."

"For what?"

"For what you did today."

He leaned in so only I could hear.

"You ruined my wedding. Wait and see what I ruin."

They left.

The truck taillights shrank down the gravel road.

Myra looked at me over the neck of her beer.

"That man owes me eleven hundred dollars in overtime."

"I'll get it for you."

"You'd better."

My phone buzzed against the bunk.

I picked it up, expecting nothing.

It was a message from my command, sent at 8:14 pm on a Saturday.

"Staff Sergeant Tarrant. Report to the First Sergeant at 0700 Monday. A conduct complaint has been filed against you by D. Tarrant."

D. Tarrant.

My mother.

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