There’s no place like home!

By now my regular blog readers are most likely on Bella overload. We’re so glad she’s home and so grateful to everyone who took their e-mail mailing lists in hand and got the word out. A local television news producer received a tweet from one of my fans and sent it out to his 18,000 followers!!! But what won the day? A posting on Craigslist.

You can now color me a Craigslist Believer. And a social media believer as well. There was an army of people out there who sent their love, prayers, and support, and believe me, all of them were appreciated even though in the darkest hours of yesterday, just reading through them made me cry.

So Bella is here. She’s asleep on a cushion on a chair in true princess style, and you will notice she is DEFINITELY wearing her collar and tags!!!

Our week did not turn out the way we had planned. Last night when we were supposed to be at an Outstanding In The Field event and sleeping at the Ritz in Phoenix we were still at home in Tucson and not sleeping at all!! I believe we did have some kind of scrambled egg concoction for dinner, but it wasn’t the gourmet dining experience that we had been anticipating. Even so, I’m not complaining. We skipped the event and got our dog back. For all the dog owners out there, that means we had our priorities straight. We’re also brain-dead and headachy today.

I’m writing this on Thursday afternoon. That means tomorrow, Friday, we’ll be in Scottsdale at the scheduled Friends of the Library event. I’m looking forward to that, but before we go to the library we have an important errand to run in Phoenix.

First a little background. (My husband says that with me there are no short stories, and he’s probably right!)

Second Watch, my most recent Beaumont novel, includes a segment in which Beau meets up with a former schoolmate of mine, Doug Davis, a West Point graduate who died in Vietnam in 1966. Through the magic of fiction Beau and Doug meet and interact in Vietnam. In the book, Beau eventually also meets up with Bonnie Abney, the girl who was engaged to marry Doug at the time of his death.

Last March while on the Deadly Stakes tour, I often mentioned Second Watch under the heading of previews of coming attractions. After an event at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, a fan chased me down and asked if I knew about Michael Reagan. At first I thought she meant the radio commentator, but she explained she was referring to Michael G. Reagan, a Vietnam War vet and a talented artist, who is the driving force behind the Fallen Heroes Project. Michael lives in Edmonds, Washington, and he has made it his life’s work to do pencil portraits of fallen soldiers for Gold Star families. By the way the framed portraits come at NO CHARGE for those families.

Those of you who have read Second Watch already know that the back of the book contains a photo of Doug, that very real fallen hero from Bisbee. That photo, taken in Vietnam two days before Doug’s death, came to light solely as a result of my writing Second Watch. As I was finishing the manuscript, a review copy of some of the material was sent to one of Doug’s fellow West Point classmates. The piece was then forwarded to another classmate who went down into his basement and found the photo, hiding in a box where it had been left forgotten through all the intervening years. It arrived in Bonnie’s life for the first time in an e-mail sent in early January.

After Lake Forest Park, I contacted Michael Reagan and asked him to do a Fallen Hero portrait of Doug based on that photo that we would give to Bonnie. When it was completed, I picked the framed portrait up from the artist’s studio and took it back to our house in Bellevue to wait for Bonnie to come pick it up. As I carried the portrait into the house from the garage, I had this sense that I was bringing Doug Davis home. The portrait stayed with us for a period of time. At one of our family dinners this summer, I explained to the kids and grandkids about Doug Davis, the guy whose picture was sitting in a chair in the living room. Sometime later we gave the portrait to Bonnie during a quiet private afternoon in our garden.

Those of you who attended this fall’s Second Watch events know that Bonnie, the real one, accompanied me on tour and so did Doug. He came along in the form of a copy of that portrait along with several other photos. At one event my grandson, Colt, was in attendance. He wanted to sit next to me, but the portrait, once again sitting on a chair, was in the way. “Grandma,” he said. “Do you mind if I move Doug Davis so I can sit down?” That really struck me. Doug died almost forty years before Colt was born, but that portrait turned Doug into someone Colt recognized on sight.

On tour the portrait and the other photo memorabilia traveled with us in a black art valise that we came to refer to jokingly as Doug Davis. As we were going to or from events all over the country, one of us would say, “Who has Doug Davis?”

In San Antonio, as we were setting up the photo display, a man in the front row looked at the portrait in slack-jawed amazement and said, “Isn’t that Doug Davis?” This was someone else who had been at West Point with Doug. He came to the event with no idea that Doug’s story would be part of Second Watch, but Michael Reagan’s portrait instantly bridged all those intervening decades.

There are almost 60,000 names on that wall in Washington. Bonnie and Doug’s story of loving and losing is only one of them and yet it is emblematic of them all. Along the way we met up with several of those women, ones who had watched as the loves of their lives went off to the Vietnam War and came back home in flag-draped coffins.

Which brings me to what, as you’re reading this, should be today’s errand.

One of those still-grieving women is a Phoenix area resident. Her name is Beverly Barden. Her husband, Captain Paul Barden, went off to war and never came home at all. He is still MIA in Southeast Asia, even after all these years. His remains have been located but the local authorities will not authorize their retrieval and return.

We told Beverly about Michael Reagan. She sent him a photo, and Michael worked his pencil magic. Captain Barden was and is a handsome man, captured in the portrait proudly wearing his country’s uniform. Bill and Bella and I will be delivering that portrait to Beverly.

Because I wrote Second Watch and because that fan put me in touch with Michael Reagan, Beverly will be the sixth person to have a portrait of his or her fallen hero as a result of Second Watch.

Yes, I’ll be talking about that book at the Friends of the Library in Scottsdale. I’ll probably be telling them something to the effect that I consider the book a literary thank you note to all of those who served. But the most important part of the day will happen earlier in the afternoon when I knock on Beverly’s door to bring Captain Barden home.

I know it’s going to be a difficult moment. I can only hope I’m up to the task.