White Space Season 1

laughed at the irony, but held his laugh, and the nasty response he wanted to give, firmly in place.
    “I don’t get daily updates on the Hughes family,” Jon said, “but Cassidy looked good.”
    Jon was pretty sure Warren was about to say something that might get him out of his seat and over to his brother’s side of the table, but before Warren could open his mouth, Melinda set her fork down and opened hers.
    “How long are you going to be in town?” she asked.
    Warren answered for him. “I’m sure Jon has pressing business back home.”
    Jon could feel his blood boil, like it always did within an hour of stepping foot inside Conway Gardens. He caught the glint in Warren’s eyes; interest, anxiety, maybe concern. Whatever it was, the hairs on Jon’s neck didn’t like it a bit.
    Jon lied, “Actually, I’m between projects, reading some scripts. Since I’m back at Hamilton Island, I figured I might as well stay a while, catch up with some old friends.” He swallowed, then added, “I’ll be here at least a week.” Jon turned from Melinda to Warren, then asked, “When’s Dad coming back?”
    “He’ll be back next week,” Melinda said.
    Warren shot her a look.
    Jon smiled ear to ear, his eyes fixed on Warren’s. “Excellent,” he said. “I’ll stay until then, at least.”
    Jon continued to smile as his brother twisted under the thumb of discomfort. The rest of the meal had talk small enough to be mostly invisible. Jon finished his meal, muscled his way through polite goodbyes, then went to the garage where the family kept the classic cars and a motorcycle, and traded his Avalon for his silver Porsche 356, built in 1963, and still looking showroom shiny. He was glad that he’d asked Carl to have someone maintain the car in his absence.
    Jon climbed into the driver’s seat, thrilled to find the keys in the glovebox where he’d left them a year ago. His face suddenly lit with a smile as he fished beneath the seat hoping his treasure was still buried there, too.
    It was.
    Jon pulled the small wooden box from beneath the seat, smiling, then flicked the latch and opened the lid to a vacuum sealed baggie and seven perfectly rolled joints. He wondered how long weed stayed fresh, but figured anything was better than nothing.
    Jon turned the engine, pulled the car from the garage, then left Conway Gardens, waving to a smiling Carl on his way past the gates.
    Jon hit the coast and gunned the engine, speeding toward the island’s north end.
    The entire north side of the island belonged to the Conways, originally as his grandfather’s retreat where he wined and dined politicians and the powerful, and later as home to several Conway Industries laboratories, where they worked on the more sensitive, and Jon suspected, government projects. Jon followed the winding road through acres of unspoiled woodlands which were beautiful during the day, but nothing more than blots of darkness against the night sky as he headed toward Jensen’s Cove, his favorite chill-out spot on the island.
    He needed time to think about Emma, and the possibility that she might be his daughter. If she were, why hadn’t anyone yet told him? Had Sarah kept the secret even from her family?
    As Jon drove through the darkness, he felt more alone than ever, wishing he had a friend he could dig into the deep shit with. Odd, he thought, how the closest people to him these days were people in his employ, his agent, Marty, and his assistant, Felicia. But neither relationship was one which Jon would consider intimate.
    It wasn’t that he didn’t trust them. He did, implicitly. But they weren’t friends with long shared histories. They weren’t the kind of people he talked to about the stuff that kept him up at night. Truth was, he hadn’t had anyone like that since Sarah. Perhaps the closest thing to a friend he had these days was his private detective buddy, Brock Houser. But he wasn’t sure if this was something he’d feel comfortable talking to Brock about.
    A mile from the cove, Jon was surprised to find a gate that wasn’t there before, blocking the narrow road with a large red sign that said “No Trespassing” sitting snug between two others, warning trespassers that they WILL BE PROSECUTED.
    Jon stepped from the 356 to get a closer look at the fence, and to see if he could maybe pick the lock. Houser had showed him how plenty of times before, and the last couple of times it had even started to stick. He was searching the