The Right Thing
The Right Thing
by
Donna McDonald
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Copyright 2011 by Donna McDonald
Cover by Dara England
Edited by Toby Minton
License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the author and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is coincidental.
This book contains content that may not be suitable for young readers 17 and under.
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Acknowledgements
I was sitting inside a local cafe one afternoon when I saw an older man ride up on a bicycle and take a package to the shipping store next door. When he came back, I remember admiring how physically fit he seemed, automatically crediting the bicycle which he hopped back on and zoomed away. He never noticed me, but I ended up drafting a three page rough outline of this book before I left. Sometimes stories just come and their birth in my creative mind is still a mystery to me.
The man I saw reminded me of my grandfather who rode a bicycle until he was in his eighties. My grandfather also had a lady friend he used to visit a couple weekends a month until his eyesight failed and he couldn’t pass his driver’s license test. When my grandfather went to see his lady friend, he would put on his best clothes and a cardigan sweater Mr. Rogers and his whole neighborhood would have envied. My grandfather called his visits “courting”.
Looking back on the situation from my advanced age of fifty plus now, I believe “courting” was my grandfather’s euphemism for sex because he came home from those visits smiling and tired. He never remarried after my grandmother died. He never shared his reasons, but looking back I can see that our complicated family structure might not have supported a second marriage for him well. Whatever the nature of his relationship to women in later life, I have a sense that my grandfather did what suited him best. Looking back on it, I hope my grandfather’s “courting” made him as happy as it does my character Gerald which he helped inspire for this novel.
Chapter 1
The last thing fraud investigator Morgan Reed expected to be doing during his recuperation from a gunshot wound was investigating his own father. But he had no choice. A mysterious seven-hundred-dollar cash withdrawal every month for the last nine was not chump change for a seventy-two-year-old man on a fixed income. Retirement and Social Security only went so far, and Morgan well knew Sedona, Arizona, was not a cheap place to live.
He was now in his fourth day of surveillance, which included following his father around to see what kind of life the man he’d lost touch with over the last few years really lived.
Using the small field binoculars he’d purchased at a pawn shop yesterday, Morgan watched his father coast his ten-speed mountain bike to a full stop before hopping off in front of a restaurant. His father seemed impervious to the Sedona heat, despite the fifteen block ride he’d just completed.
Morgan had the air conditioning in his rented SUV cranked down low enough to make icicles, and still felt like he was struggling for every breath. How his father handled the intense heat was a mystery to him.
Wiggling his injured leg to keep it from going to sleep on him as he squirmed uncomfortably in the seat, Morgan watched a woman open and hold the restaurant door for his father.
He lifted his surveillance camera with its telescopic lens and zoomed in for a closer look. He’d originally brought the camera intending to use it for pictures of Sedona’s amazing red rocks. Instead he had been busy collecting pictures of his father and the multiple women he courted.
When Morgan snapped the picture, his father’s hands were gently holding the woman’s face.
So far the women in his father’s life had been his age or somewhere close to it. The restaurant woman definitely looked much younger. In fact, Morgan would have guessed the woman to be closer in age to his own forty-four years. While his father certainly maintained his level of fitness, and looked at least ten years younger than his real age, Gerald Reed was still a good deal older than the woman.
Morgan almost dropped the camera in astonishment as his father kissed her soundly on the mouth while she laughed at his actions. After his father released her, the woman yanked him inside, smacking him lightly on the back of the head as he walked by her.
“Damn, Dad. You big flirt,” Morgan said aloud, his voice barely louder than the roaring fan blowing cool air at his heated face.
He absolutely didn’t want to think about how jealous he was of his father’s easy familiarity with what appeared to be a damn good-looking woman by his own standards. Morgan had no idea what it was like to kiss a woman with the ease his father just did. Truthfully, he hadn’t realized how devoid his life was of real companionship until he’d spent two months alone in Las Vegas recuperating from a gunshot wound.
None of the women he slept with over the last couple of years had even bothered with a phone call to see how he was faring after his release from the hospital. Apparently, his value as a male was nil when gratuitous sex was out of the question. It had taken the shock of that knowledge for Morgan to see that he wasn’t even friends with any of them.
In fact, it was hard not to be jealous of his father in every way.
He had watched the man who raised him move from woman to woman in the last few days as if the entire older female population of Sedona existed only for his enjoyment. It was damned humbling to discover how romantically active the old man was compared to the inactivity of Mason’s own love life.
His father visited one woman in the nursing home, closing the door of her room and hanging a “Do Not Disturb” sign out for an hour. This was the first stop every day. Morgan couldn’t get access to that room without raising suspicions, but it was obvious from what he did see through binoculars and a discreet walk-by, that his father was a regular and well-known visitor.
Another woman he visited was in the hospital. His father had charmed all the nurses as well as her. Dressed as a janitor with a ball cap pulled low over his eyes, Morgan hadn’t drawn too much attention pretending to sweep the hall outside the room as he watched his father holding the woman’s hand.
Then there was the afternoon woman his father had sex with twice in the same week, or at least it had been twice already in the three previous days Morgan had followed him. It was just lunchtime now, but hell, if his father went back to see her for sex again today, Morgan would for sure feel the urge to laugh at his own single life. He was lucky to have a bed partner a couple times a month, and even then it wasn’t for all night.
It had been almost scarring the first time to watch his father practically ravish the woman against her front door when he left. Morgan had ended up having to look away from what they were doing when his father’s hands got too busy exploring. But he hadn’t missed seeing the way the woman watched his father leave with an adoring expression on her face.
Truthfully, Morgan was just guessing they had sex. God only knew what they really did alone together at their age, but Morgan didn’t doubt his father was proficient at it—whatever the hell it was.
And now his father was openly kissing yet another much younger woman that Morgan might even have considered dating himself, if he had been looking for a date in this town. Morgan laughed at irony as he picked up his cell phone, connected the camera to it, and downloaded the pictures onto the memory card.
Damn horny old coot, Morgan thought sourly, even as he smiled in pride. Evidently, his father had trouble keeping it in his pants nowadays, which was quite a change from the man who wouldn’t date at all for years after Morgan’s mother had died in her early sixties.
Part of Morgan was glad that his father was having a final go at being cavalier. He could only hope his own senior years would see that much action, but it wasn’t likely.
His work tended to make serious drinking followed by a quick bedroom tussle for relief more of a priority than any kind of long-term, more friendly relationship. Sadly, Morgan hadn’t even felt the rut of his love life until work hadn’t been a distraction for him anymore. Two months of total bed rest had forced an introspection that had sent him running to Sedona for the remaining four months of his six-month medical leave. There was nothing much for him in Las Vegas other than a job that had might have killed him if the guy’s aim had been better.
Morgan looked at the clock in the dash of the SUV and wondered how long his father would be in the restaurant. While he waited, Morgan decided to run a scan on the business. It didn’t take long to find the chamber of commerce site and the listing. The site listed the restaurant as belonging to Angus Carmichael. He bookmarked the link and saved it too.
Inspired by the phone call for his father about the cash receipt innocently left at the bank, it hadn’t even sunk in that there was a problem, despite the amount. It had never crossed Morgan’s mind to question what his father was doing with the money at the time. Morgan had just created the online login to the bank account, originally intending to teach his father how to check his account balance and pay bills without riding his bike all those blocks to the bank every other day. The last thing Morgan had expected to see in his father’s bank account was the regular withdrawal of a large sum of cash for a period of several months now. It was a serious drain of cash that left his father very close to the end of his income every month.
In his line of work, Morgan had seen people spend money on just about everything imaginable and seen them rationalize lots of unconscionable activities. Not that Morgan had found any signs of high living or expensive hobbies in his father’s life.