And the old bastard, who was as much a father to me than he ever was to this girl I looked upon now, had charged me with protecting her, watching over her in his stead.
My eyes traced her face and then landed on that daisy in her hair. Just like I had promised to never look back over the past few years, I made another promise: Rose Davonport would be mine.
Chapter One
September 1973, California
The haunting voice of Karen Carpenter played through the speakers as I drove down the highway, heading west. The sun was setting like an orange flame in the California sky. Being from the northeast and raised in a small town filled with green forests and summer rains that puddled every street, the Sunshine State’s barren landscape was as foreign to me as another planet. The heat, I grew used to. The long days and tan dirt, the sparse sagebrush, and the wide starry sky at night was like a balm to my soul, especially compared to where I’d been the past few years half-way across the world.
It had taken me more time to acclimate to day-to-day living as a post-war American than I’d thought. After a few weeks spent on base, then afterward with all the paperwork and finding a placement outside as a civilian, I had slowly found my groove again.
The first thing I did, once rehabilitated, was hire a private investigator, an old friend from my first military stint, retired Officer George Steele. While I tied up loose ends in North Carolina, he’d send me weekly updates on Rose—her comings and goings, her habits, and later, her graduation. By the end of May, I was ready to take over and move to her in Montana and begin what would be Operation Daisy.
In my mind, I’d no longer called her Rose. She was forever Daisy now.
The first time I saw her in person, the day after my arrival in Montana, I was sitting in a booth in the back of one of her favorite haunts, some hole in the wall diner where all the teenagers hung out on Friday nights. Her group of girlfriends had just walked in, and my eyes practically strained to search that head of golden hair that I’d only glimpsed from the latest photographs George had sent me.
Finally, I spotted her. She was the last to arrive in the line of giggling girls. Tall, graceful, and smiling, she was a stunner. I had paused in my admiration to look around the diner at the many patrons sitting in their booths. Just as I’d suspected, all the males in the long aisle turned and twisted to watch her pass.
My gaze returned to her, and I watched my Rose, my Daisy, swing her hips as she walked down the aisle, her miles-long legs displayed in a pair of pink calf-high boots. She wore a miniskirt of blue and red paisley design. Her pale blue blouse billowy and soft.
A walking dream.
She and her friends had chosen a booth diagonally across from me, next to the windows, giving me a perfect vantage point to watch, and possibly listen, yet far enough away not be noticed in my darkened booth next to the kitchen door.
The topic of conversation that night was like those of all girls her age; boys and fashion, but also idealism. The innocence of youth always granted a brightly painted window of the wide world. I knew in my younger days, growing up in the 50s and 60s, the promise of a better tomorrow always felt a hand’s breadth away, something you could reach out and grab onto if only you could drop the veil of society’s mores.
Nam had changed me more than age did, however. And I think it changed all of America. Music was different. Movies, not that I saw many these days, just weren’t the same. Hollywood’s golden days were at an end, heralding in a grittiness and a certain dusting of taint. As for women, the days of free love had given birth to loose morals and a naïve independence that turned my stomach, for the most part.
Which was why I was so thankful to be able to watch over Daisy. Rose Davonport was a dreamer, and if I read the wind right, a pretty, young dreamer was bound for trouble.
As the weeks went by from that night at the diner, I continued to watch the nineteen-year-old beauty. I had rented a room on the top floor of an old couple’s three-story home downtown. Every morning, I watched from my window to the street below, where Daisy would walk to work at the record store. And in the evenings, I’d sit on the bench on the opposite block, newspaper fanned open, my eyes on her as she left for home. Then, after five minutes would go by, I’d throw out the paper in the bin beside me and, with my hat down, my hands in my pockets, I’d meander up the sidewalk, discreetly following her to the bus stop, where she’d hop on the bus that would arrive just in time while I pretended to be on my way down the block. Instead, I’d jump in my car and park on her street, a few houses down from her own. There, I’d watch and wait till sleep found here before walking behind her house and to her bedroom window for a while, eventually driving back home to repeat it all over again the next day.
She never noticed the man following her every day. It probably wouldn’t even occur to her, being so young, so sheltered, so lost in her own world, one filled with color and daisies and promise. No, in her world, a thirty-five-year-old man, a stranger, stalking
