Position of Honor The Honor Series Book Two

Chapter 1

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Chapter 1

The road was icier than she remembered, narrower, quieter. She turned the windshield wipers on to high as the snow fell harder. The radio had gone dead once the storm came in an hour ago. She remembered all too well the long cold nights of sitting around the fireplace, the electricity out, waiting for the storms to past. Coming home is a bitch, she thought as her knuckles whitened on the steering wheel while her eyes stayed focused on the white road ahead of her.

She should have stayed in New Mexico.
It had been twenty years since she left Dahlia. The young innocent and shy girl of eighteen, who walked away from this town and all its gossip, cliques, and small-town ways, was back. She had run away from it all, she could admit to that now. She hated the small town, the talk of her mother, of how the apple never fell far from the tree. As soon as she was out of school, Madison went to the big city of Albuquerque.

Well, not so big she'd get lost, but big enough she wouldn't get noticed, and hid.

Madison was painfully shy back then. She fought for her grades, worked hard, kept her nose in a book most of the time and kept the gossip about herself to a minimum. Her mother was the one who enjoyed stirring up the trouble, not her.

Mostly people said, "Poor child to live with a woman like that" or "her father doesn't even care she exists." Now here she was, Madison Stone, thirty-eight years old and coming home at last. Not for anything good, she reminded herself, but because she was the only living relative left.

Her head pounded as the blood pulsed in her temple. The throb in her eyes made her take a deep breath just to try to sooth the pain. She reached for the cup of coffee in her drink holder. The cold after-taste reminded her it had gone cold hours before and now tasted like bitter sludge.

Madison had been on the road for the last thirty hours. She had been driving home from California when the call came in. Her father was dead and she was needed to identify the body. How was she to identify him when she hadn't seen him in twenty years? The call was impersonal, although the voice on the other end had seemed to know her, or knew of her at the very least.

She could honestly say she never forgot him.

Lieutenant Matthew McKennan of Dahlia County, South Carolina, the voice haunted her even now. He identified himself before he relayed to her what had happened. The Lieutenant was friendly enough for a cop, calm in his description to her of what had happened. Detached, impersonal and professional, she respected that. Madison also remembered how her heart sped up at the sound of his voice. He still affected her and he did even know she existed. She would have to face him and then she would deal with what she knew. Her past had finally come back to find her after all these years.

The incident was still under investigation, but appeared to be a burglary gone badly, Lt. McKennan had said. Her father must have walked in on the crime taking place and was a casualty from it. She was needed to come identify the body. The throb came harder in her left temple. Madison rested her elbow on the window ledge of the door and gently rubbed it.

Identify a man she barely knew, she thought. The last time Madison had seen her father, he ignored her existence. He said she was small town trash and would amount to nothing. Perhaps he knew her better than she thought.
Madison had struggled to make ends meet as a secretary for a law firm, but never made it to be a lawyer. She had only enough student loans, only enough grants to get her so far in school. The bills had taken over. Madison had to settle for what she could get.

It hurt and humiliated her still that her mother was not the woman she needed to guide her growing up and her father hated the sight of her. Her parents weren't what she wanted but they were what she had. Perhaps it was for the best. She had been able to get out and make a life for herself where no one talked about her.