Muriel Jensen - Father Fever

Bram followed Trevyn with a tauntingly disparaging glance in David’s direction. “He’s going to stand there,” he said. “He thinks that just because he’s letting us live with him for a couple of months that indentures us somehow. Tell us again—” his voice rose as he went into the other room “—how we ended up having to host a party for two hundred people when we know absolutely no one here!”

There was the clatter of metal on metal as they began to open the chairs.

David pocketed his handkerchief and went into the large dining room that accommodated a table that seated twenty. For the purpose of the party, he’d distributed those chairs around the living room and placed the table at the side of the room for buffet service.

He helped place folding chairs. “Because Aunty always hosted the historical society’s masked ball every year and her…passing left them high and dry a mere ten days before the party.”

They exchanged grim glances. Trevyn and Bram had worked with Aunty, also.

Trevyn sighed and looked around the room. “She was so no-nonsense on the job,” he said with a reminiscent smile. “It’s weird to think that she had this beautiful home and willingly left it for…what? We were looking for excitement, but what is a sixty-year-old woman looking for?”

“Some kind of fulfillment, maybe,” Bram guessed. “You could tell by the way she worked she wasn’t the kind of woman who did nothing but golf.”

They were all quiet another moment, then he put a chair in place and asked briskly, “There’s no Elk’s hall or armory or anything in town where they could have had this affair? They had to have it here because that’s the way they’ve always done it?”

David shook his head. “Invitations had already gone out. Many to out-of-town people who are summer residents of Dancer’s Beach. Calling to change locations would have been too complicated. So the mayor stopped by while the two of you were still driving the U-haul in from Chicago and asked me if I’d consider saving their hides. Since all three of us will be doing business in this town in one way or another, it seemed like the sporting thing to do.”

Trevyn unfolded the last chair. “What do you know about these historical society types?”

David stood back to survey their work. “Not much, except that I imagine they’ll be Mrs. Beasley’s vintage—middle sixties—so don’t get your hopes up for a lap full of beautiful young things. But they might prove to be potential clients for your photo studio.”

“Hope so.” Trevyn flattened the seat of a chair in a corner, his expression suddenly serious. “I can’t believe Aunty left you all this—or how lucky we are that you’re still looking out for us even though we’re not in the field anymore.”

David moved a floor lamp aside several inches to make room for the chair. “We’ve been on so many rotten jobs together, it seems like now that we get to live real lives, we ought to at least start out together.”

They’d shared experiences over the past few years that made men closer than brothers. In good times, they’d been an efficient, effective machine that did the government’s dirty work.

In bad times, they’d shared one another’s pain, nursed one another’s wounds, and on a few occasions, saved one another’s lives.

The experiences made transitioning into normal, everyday life difficult. And an exercise best shared with friends. “Well, how come he got the guest house and I got the room above the garage and a daily dose of carbon monoxide?”

Bram was putting him on. He’d done his job fearlessly on their last mission when everything had gone bad on them. He was a couple of years older than Trevyn and David and had seen far more action—too much, maybe—but there wasn’t a selfish bone in his body.

“It keeps you out of the way,” David replied. “You know, like the crazy relative nobody wants to talk about.”

“Would you really rather have the guest house?” Trevyn asked Bram, still serious.

Bram shook his head at Trevyn, then grinned at David. “He’s so easy. No, I don’t want the guest house. I’m very comfortable in my apartment. I don’t need a dark room and space to store all the contraptions you’ve got. I’ve got my office downtown and when I come home, all I need is room for the television, a coffeepot and a bed.”

The three loped out of the house to the truck Bram had used to pick up the chairs from the party supplier. There were another dozen to unload. A pewter sky spit rain and blew a cold wind around them.

“Did I tell you I got a case?” Bram asked as he leaped into the truck to hand chairs down. “It’s just a divorce case surveillance, but detective work has to start somewhere.”

“At least you found an office and got it open in three days.” Trevyn took two chairs in each arm and started backing toward the house. “I’ve found a photography studio, but it’ll be weeks before I get it in good enough shape to open the doors.” He turned and hurried into the house with his burden.

David watched him go, concerned about his carefree attitude, so at odds with the burden he carried inside.

“He’s going to be all right. Stop worrying,” Bram said, handing David down a pair of chairs.

“He won’t talk about the mission,” David disputed. “That isn’t healthy.”

Bram grinned at him. “You’re a writer,” he said. “You have to understand everything. You have to know every little detail and how it relates to every other one. But some of us aren’t like that. We just let it be and go with it. He’s healing. His nightmares have stopped. He no longer gets times and places confused. Stop worrying.”

David walked back to the house with the chairs, thinking Bram was right. The three of them had been living in David’s Chicago apartment since their “retirement” two months ago and he and Bram had been awakened half a dozen times by Trevyn’s nightmares of that last mission.

David and Trevyn had been paired up by the CIA years ago, the natural combination of a writer and a photographer to seek out intelligence and bring back information. They’d held regular jobs between CIA assignments, David writing a column for the Chicago Tribune, and Trevyn working as a photojournalist. The publisher, an old military man, knew about their part-time work for the government.

On their last mission, they’d been sent into Afghanistan to track Raisu, an infamous terrorist thought to be hiding somewhere in the Paghman Mountains north of Kabul.

Bram, a security expert with fifteen years in the military and five with the Company, had been assigned to keep them safe.

They’d hired a young native man as their guide, and his sister as their translator. Bram hadn’t liked their dependence on anyone outside their small unit, but the terrain and the language were difficult and they’d had no choice.

Trevyn had formed a particular attachment to Farah, the translator, and when she’d wanted to go ahead of them to provide a distraction as David and the team approached, Trevyn had refused her. But despite all they’d heard about male dominance in Middle Eastern cultures, it apparently hadn’t applied in her case. She’d gone ahead of them anyway.

The whole thing had gone to hell within a minute of their arrival. She’d been one of the first to die.

Their escape had been a grisly ordeal. When they’d finally reached Pakistan and safety, Trevyn didn’t speak for days afterward.

They’d been debriefed, then all three had resigned.

Bram had no life to go back to, and Trevyn, though now pretending to be his old self, had seemed fragile to the two of them. By mutual consent, the three decided to stay together until they could decide what to do with the rest of their lives.