The Good Race

Chapter 21

ETHAN DONAHUE SLAMMED the door of his pickup truck and looked around him at the log home and barns. His brother and sister sure did have a lot of land. Being raised on a farm, his trained eye saw where the fields used to be. One barn was definitely in better shape than the other one that was for sure. Still there was potential here for nice little operation and he wondered what his new brother and sister intended to do with it.

He started around the truck with the limp that always accompanied him now. Having lost the bottom half of his leg in a roadside bomb, he had to learn to get around on the new prosthetic. It was often slow going, but he had adjusted easily enough. He tried to keep a positive attitude about it. Some of his battalion died that day and some were more severely injured than he had been. Losing the part of your leg certainly sucked and there were things he wouldn't be able to do again, like slide into home plate playing baseball back home, but he still wouldn't consider himself disabled.

The injury had ended his run as a working dog handler. You couldn't do that job if you couldn't move fast and agilely. He could have retrained for a different position in the Corps, but he figured after giving six years, he'd take his Honorable Discharge and head home. When he did return home to his family's farm, he discovered things weren't as rosy as his parents had said they were. While he was gone, the bank had foreclosed on the farm. After a few years of a low crop yield, they couldn't hold the mortgage. It frustrated Ethan that they hadn't asked him for help. While a working dog handler didn't yield a high salary, he was getting combat pay and being stationed overseas in a war zone, there wasn't much to do with his money. It was directly deposited into his bank account and there it sat. He'd have gladly turned it over to his parents to help in any way it could have. But they didn't want to bother him and the money wouldn't have been enough anyway.

His father, Jamie Donohue, was a third generation farmer. He and his wife, Linda, couldn't have children and had adopted Ethan only days after he was born. He loved his parents with everything he had and he never felt like he wasn't really theirs. They showered him with love and while they didn't have a lot of money and he couldn't always have the hottest gaming system or trendiest shoes, he had their full attention, which to Ethan, made him richer than a lot of kids he knew.

Less than a week after he'd returned home, when he was busy helping his parents pack up their house to leave the farm, he had a visitor in the form of Eric Davis. Davis was investigating Daisy Dolan, who it turned out was Ethan's birth mother. He'd never heard her name before and neither had his parents. It was a closed adoption, but Eric somehow had a lot information. The most shocking of which was that he had five other siblings; two sisters and three brothers. It seemed Daisy Dolan had a habit of having children and leaving them behind.

Davis had told him all about his brothers and sisters; where they were, what they did. His parents had encouraged him to go meet them. They told him that he was at a crossroads in his life and this may help him find a new direction to go in. They weren't sure they were going to stay in Nebraska at this point. His mother's cousin had been trying to convince them to retire for years and join her down in Florida and they thought they might go check it out. Ethan had been encouraging them to retire for years. It had been his plan to take over the farm when he got out of the military, but as his mother pointed out, he needed a new direction.

One of Ethan's brother's was a surgeon; one was a professional baseball player. He wasn't really sure he would fit into either of those lifestyles. One of his sisters was in witness protection—though supposedly living in this town—so hanging with her was out of the question. Probably. This sister and brother had recently relocated to Grayson Falls, New Hampshire. Jackie was a doctor and Ryan designed stock cars. Again, two careers that didn't really interest him. But what did catch his eye was that they lived in a small, quiet New England town. He noted as he drove through it that people stopped to talk to each other on the street. Nobody exceeded the speed limit. Nobody was in a hurry. That appealed to Ethan. After six years with the military police, he wanted quiet.