The Teacher and the Soldier Read Free Page B

sighed. “I’ve been trying to get hold of him for two weeks. Every call goes to voicemail and the reply to the email I sent was short to the point of rude. Asshole.”
    “What is your mom planning to do with the cabins?” Kieran asked this with concern colouring his words. He worked for Daniel’s mom as a carpenter and general handyman. Daniel knew Kieran was worried, as was his mom. To get someone buying up the cabins who wanted nothing more than to change everything was Daniel and his mom’s worst nightmare.
    “God knows. We need to talk to this Luke guy. The estate from Mike passed to him as the only son and he’s screwing with me. I can’t get a straight answer from him or his lawyers. It’s all evasion.” He took another swig of beer to tamp down his anger.
    “You think he will sell?”
    Daniel shrugged then didn’t say anything else. With the death of Luke’s dad, Luke actually owned the other half of the Ellery resort. Daniel’s mom owned the remaining fifty per cent. Mike Fitzgerald, drunk and all round waster, had pretty much left the running of the entire cabin complex to Brenda Skylar.
    He’d been murdered with a gunshot to the face. Then his body had been left on the porch of his cabin which had been burned to the ground. The resultant call out of the volunteer fireman, including Max, had left Finn exposed and vulnerable. It soon had become obvious that that had been the point. The fire had been set deliberately and a man murdered just for a distraction. Jeez. He didn’t even want to think of that night with Neil standing over Finn with a gun, moments away from killing him too.
    “Poor Luke,” Kieran said. “I don’t blame him that he left and never came back.”
    “Until today,” Finn pointed out.
    “What happened? What’s this Luke’s story?” Max asked when the others, Daniel included, went quiet.
    Finn sighed. “He left town to go to college. Never came back. Heard he got his degree and is a teacher in Richmond. No one knows the real reason why he never came back but everyone had their theories. Mike, his dad, was an ex-labourer, inherited half of Ellery Cabins from his own daddy, who, story tells, was as much of a stubborn drunk bastard as Mike was. Kind of a sad story, Mike really lost it when his dad died. His wife walked out on him and Luke, who’d been sixteen at the time. The rest is conjecture and local gossip, but when Luke left, his dad never saw a day without being drunk off his ass.”
    “Broken family,” Max said softly.
    “Everyone knows Mike was abusive and threw his weight around, backed up with his fists where Luke was concerned,” Kieran blurted out.
    Finn frowned at first. Daniel had heard the same stories, but he guessed Finn might actually know more family history than either he or Kieran, being a cop and all. Finally Finn summarised where he stood. “There were a lot of things that happened that we will never know about.”
    Kieran was evidently letting it lie at that. He continued, “I saw Luke once. He was running this basketball training session and you remember how desperate I was to play basketball?” Daniel recalled Kieran being short all through school and at five nine he wasn’t any taller now. He didn’t remember basketball training, but then Kieran and Finn weren’t exactly in his football themed social circle.
    “I remember you wearing the uniform,” Finn said. “When you were what? Twelve or so?”
    “Yeah, he spent some time with me then. Showed me how being in sports wasn’t all about height. I liked him. Then he came out and he did it so effortlessly and not one person thought it was wrong. I kind of looked up to him.”
    Daniel tried to recall Luke in school. He seemed to sum up images of a gentle smile and brown hair but other than that his memory was sketchy. He was too involved in football and being ‘the man’ to see anything outside his limited peripheral vision.
    “Oh God.” Kieran buried his face in his hands and