He’d reserved the room here for at least a couple of nights, until he had a chance to check out his mother’s house. If it was habitable enough to stay in while he repaired it, he’d stay there. Once it was fixed, it would be up to him to see to the auction and pay outstanding bills.
When he’d received her letter, Hunt had been shocked to find out his mother had named him the executor of her estate. Even though they’d stayed in touch, she never mentioned his brothers and sisters, and with good reason. She knew he wouldn’t care. By the time the letter caught up with him, the postmark was almost two weeks old, and the date on the letter she’d written was a month before that. When she confessed her days were numbered, he panicked and called her, but never got an answer. The thought that she would die without knowing he would do what she’d asked had sent him on a wild sixteen-hour ride from Houston to Blessings. He knew now she’d been waiting for him to come. She’d trusted him enough to wait. Now it was up to him to do the job.
Chapter 2
Hunt went back up to his room after breakfast. He had the lawyer’s number in his mother’s letter. He didn’t think anyone would be at work today, but he sent a text anyway, just in case.
It wasn’t long before he got a response.
I’ll be in the office until noon. You’re welcome to drop in at any time.
Hunt returned the text.
I’ll be there soon. Thank you.
At that point, he put on his jacket, grabbed his helmet, and left the B and B. He knew his brothers and sisters were going to be pissed that she’d given the control of her estate to him, but he didn’t care. They’d betrayed him years ago. He owed them nothing, and certainly not respect.
He felt the curious stares as he rode down Main Street, and couldn’t help but remember the day he left Blessings. Back then, no one even noticed he was leaving, because they would have assumed he would be back. The memory was as vivid now as it was the day it happened.
* * *
It was the day he was supposed to leave for college when all hell broke loose. By the time the fight was over, his world and his future had been destroyed—betrayed by his own family.
His mother didn’t know he was gone or what had happened until she came back from dropping Birdie off at school and found her family in an uproar. She began begging them all to tell the truth about what happened, but Emma, Junior, and Ray clammed up, and his father, Parnell, told his wife the same thing he’d told Hunt.
“What was done was done, so get over it.”
What none of them knew was that Hunt left the house and went straight to Savannah to an army recruitment office and signed up. After testing revealed an aptitude for flying, he went from high school to flight school, and was still in flight school when the United States invaded Iraq.
His first deployment was to Fallujah, flying Apache helicopters, and for the next seven years, he went wherever he was deployed. He was shot at nearly every time he flew out—but somehow always managed to get back. He was fighting a war he didn’t fully understand, running from a betrayal he couldn’t forget.
And then the inevitable happened. After all those years of taking fire and limping back to base, they were shot down.
His gunner died, and the wounds Hunter suffered sent him stateside. It took eight months to fully heal, and then he mustered out.
It took another six months before he found a job doing the only thing he knew how to do—fly choppers. But now, instead of carrying Hellfire missiles, he ferried oil-field workers back and forth to offshore rigs, and had been doing it ever since. It was what he was doing before he got home to find his mother’s letter. And now he was here, carrying out his mother’s last wishes.
He found the lawyer’s office with ease, parked at the curb in front, then dismounted and went inside.
* * *
Betty Purejoy was at her desk when the stranger walked in. When she saw the bike helmet he was carrying, she guessed he must have been the rider on the motorcycle she heard outside.
“Good morning. How can I help you?” Betty asked.
“Morning, ma’am. My name is Hunt Knox. Marjorie Knox was my mother.”
Betty thought she remembered him as a teenager, but he’d certainly changed.
“Mr. Butterman is expecting you, and I’m so sorry about your mother. I’ll let him know you’re here.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you,” Hunt said, and sat down as the secretary picked up the phone.
Within moments, a tall fortysomething man with sandy-brown hair emerged, his hand outstretched.
“Mr. Knox, I’m Peanut Butterman. My sympathies on your loss. Please come into my office.”
“Just call me Hunt,” he said, and took a seat in front of Peanut’s desk.
Peanut waved a hand to his secretary.
“Betty, would you please bring me the file on Marjorie Knox?”
Betty stepped into an adjacent room where hard copies of clients’ files were kept and pulled the one for Marjorie Knox, then laid it on his desk before leaving them alone.
Peanut quickly scanned the paperwork, which included a cover letter and the will he’d written for her a few years back.
“Okay… You do know she named you the executor?” Peanut asked.
Hunt nodded. “I didn’t until I received her letter. It took a few weeks for it to catch up to me,” he said, and took the letter out of his pocket and handed it to Peanut to read.
Peanut read it, then handed it back.
“Of course, I’m not going to pry, but she alludes to hard feelings between you and your siblings. However, the will is straightforward. The property is to be sold and proceeds divided five ways, so that shouldn’t be an issue.”
“I guess you could call it hard feelings,” Hunt said. “One of them, or maybe all three of them—they never would admit any of it—stole money I’d saved to go to college. Over $8,000. It took me over four years of mowing yards, raking leaves, and sacking groceries to save it up. And the morning I’m leaving for school, it was gone. We had one hell of a fight about it. But all of my siblings backed each other, and no one would say who’d done it. My dad told me to forget it and figure something else out. Mom wasn’t there. She’d taken my little sister to school, so she came home to me gone and everyone clammed up as to what had happened. Mom and I stayed in touch, but I never came back. Until today.”
“Good lord,” Peanut said. “That must have been devastating. What did you do?”
“Joined the army. Flew Apache helicopters in Iraq until I was shot down. Now, for the most part, I fly oil-field workers back and forth to offshore drilling rigs.”