Whispering Rock by Robyn Carr Read Free Book Online Page A

been reciting a mantra to myself for weeks—it’s been over ten years since an officer of the court was actually hurt by a defendant, and that ADA was not seriously injured. I’m not fixed, but I’m reminded—what happened to me was very unusual. What happened today was more typical.”
    “You deal a lot in percentages, I guess,” he said.
    “Ninety-three point five percent of the time,” she answered with a smile.
     
    Every week, like clockwork, Jack received a letter from Ricky, the boy who’d been his shadow for a few wonderful years until joining the Marines immediately following his high school graduation. The letter was always addressed to Jack, opened with “Dear Jack, Preach, Mike and everyone.” It was the best part of his week.
    When Jack first came to Virgin River, he bought the cabin because of its size and location, right in the middle of town. It had spacious rooms. He slept in one room while he worked on the other, then shifted his pallet. He was building the bar, not quite knowing if it would work in a town of only sixhundred. He added the room upstairs and the apartment behind the kitchen, where he lived until Mel came into his life.
    Ricky was a kid from down the street, a gregarious, freckle-faced youngster with a bright smile and the disposition of a friendly puppy. When Jack found out it was just Rick and his elderly grandma, he pulled him in, acting as something of a surrogate older brother or father. He had the privilege of a few years with the boy, watching him grow into a fine young man—strong, decent, brave. Jack taught him to fly-fish, to shoot and hunt. Together they’d gone through some fun times, some heartbreaking times. The day Rick left for the Marine Corps at the tender age of eighteen had been a day of both admiration and grief for Jack. There was a part of him that swelled in pride that Ricky would take on the Corps, and another part that worried, for no one knew better than Jack how challenging, how dangerous it could be.
    When the letters came, he would share them with Preacher and Mike, then walk down to Lydie’s house—Rick’s grandmother. They would exchange news, for Rick wrote at least two letters a week during basic training—one to the bar where he had worked since he was fourteen, and one to his grandma. Lydie’s news was always censored, Rick keeping the rougher and tougher parts of his experience from her. But Jack read his letter aloud and Lydie laughed and gasped and shuddered, but loved hearing the unabridged version.
    People started showing up at the bar when they heard there’d been a letter. Connie and Ron, the aunt and uncle of Ricky’s teenage girlfriend, always came around, hungry for news. Doc Mullins was as anxious as anyone, as were Mel and Paige. The Carpenters, Bristols, Hope McCrea… Everyone missed Ricky.
    “They run us through the rain and mud with a thirty-poundruck on our backs for miles and miles and miles, screaming and yelling about how we have to pay our dues, get tough—and it makes me want to laugh,” Rick wrote. “I keep thinking, brother, this is nothing. I paid my dues in Virgin River….”
    Ricky and his young girlfriend, Liz, had had a baby together six months ago. A baby who hadn’t lived. They were too young, too fragile to be having a baby in the first place; too young and tender for such a tragedy. Being a father himself, Jack had no trouble imagining how the rigors of the Corps could seem like child’s play by comparison.
    Jack missed the boy. Missed him as a father misses a son.
     
    Mike stepped up his phone calls to Brie to almost every day and it reminded him of how he’d fallen in love when he was a boy. So much phone time. So many hours given to idle conversation about the day, the activities, the family. They’d occasionally drift into tenuous territory—religion and politics. At one point Mike asked her if she was driving yet and she said, a little bit. Over to her sisters’ houses, once in a while to