Garret cursed softly, stretching out his long legs. “She’s about maxed out.”
“I told her to let me help shoulder this load. That it wasn’t hers to carry alone.”
Garret gave him a narrowed look. “Has she said anything to you about her father, Ray? What he did to her?”
Instantly, Reese’s gut clenched. “No,” he growled. “What happened to Shay?”
“I managed to drag it out of her over the past six months,” Garret groused. “Man, she’s tighter than Fort Knox when it comes to giving up personal intel on herself. I pride myself on being black ops, but she puts me to shame. I’d ask her a question and she’d dance around it. I’d time it such that I wasn’t pressuring her, and she began to trust me enough to tell me a few things.”
“Like what?” Reese closed his hand over the ledger, staring at the scowling vet.
Garret lifted his head. “She’s been abused. That much I know. I guess her mother, Wanda, was verbally abused by Ray until she died of breast cancer. When Shay was about eight, her father started picking on her when the mother was too ill to protect her any longer.” He sighed and shook his head. “The bastard.”
“What kind of abuse?” Reese asked in a low tone.
“Shay wasn’t specific. Said Ray was always putting her down. Telling her because she was a girl, she was nothing. He told her he wished she was a boy. He wanted a son, not a daughter.”
Clenching his teeth, Reese stared at Garret.
“I asked her once if he’d ever hit her, and she grew real quiet but wouldn’t say anything. When you looked in her eyes, you could tell. I can’t prove it because she didn’t admit to it,” Garret said. “One time, when she opened up a little to me, she was in a philosophical mood. Shay said she’d left one war zone for another.”
“What did she mean by that?”
Garret shrugged. “That maybe Ray made living under his roof a war zone for her and her mother? And she joined the Marine Corps at eighteen and got sent off to the Middle East, to another war or two.” And then he gave a shake of his head. “My old man’s an alcoholic, too. Not something I’m proud of, but when I told Shay that, she started being even more open,” he muttered. “My old man beat the shit out of me. He’d go after my mother and I’d wave him off, get him to come after me instead.”
Reese heard the pain in Garret’s deep voice, saw the shame in his eyes. “He still alive?”
“Yeah. So’s my mom. You don’t know how many times I begged her to leave him. She wouldn’t. Blows my mind.”
“So when the Army discharged you, did you go home?”
Sneering, Garret said, “Only long enough to hug my mother, pick up my clothes and my gear. My mom is a shadow of herself. There’s nothing I could do. So, I left. It’s a lousy situation. I don’t understand women. I don’t understand my parents’ marriage, if you could call it that.”
Reese gave him a sour grin. “You have a lot of company.”
Grunting, Garret muttered, “Well, Shay, in my opinion, has been abused physically and verbally. That’s my two cents’ worth, based upon my own experience.” He flexed his thick-knuckled hand. “I’d like to punch Ray Crawford out, but he’s sick and he’s not gonna get better. The worst of it is that Shay visits him three times a week. Today was one of those days. You saw how she was when she got back. The old man takes her apart with his mouth and his uncontrollable rages. He blames her for everything that’s happened to him and this broken-down excuse of a ranch.” He sighed heavily and stared across the desk at Reese. “She does so much for us. She gives us the shirt off her back to make ends meet and to give us a safe place to heal up.”
“But she isn’t safe,” Reese said quietly. “If she has to see that father of hers, it’s like someone opening a wound three times a week. Why hasn’t someone gone with her? Protected her?”
“Believe me, the three of us, once we realized what was going on, wanted to. Harper really got into it with Shay. He accused her of enabling her father by letting him continue to verbally abuse her. Told her she should walk away from him and not see him again. Man, she got furious with him. I’ve never seen her so angry.”
“But Harper was right,” Reese said darkly.
“Yeah, damn straight. In my book, Harper was dead-on.” Garret tilted his head. “You got a decent set of folks, Lockhart?”
“Yes, I do.”
“If I coulda been discharged to return to a good home, I’d sure have liked to. As it was, I became a bum walking the railroads, hitching rides on boxcars, living off the land and going deeper and deeper into quicksand by the year.” He looked around the small office. “Until Shay found me down-and-out.”
“Shay picks up us strays,” Reese agreed, his voice low with feeling.
“Why didn’t you stay home, Bro?”
“I tried. But all I did was make it hard on my folks.”