One Was a Soldier

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  “Here,” he said.

  “What?” Nichols trotted down the corridor toward him. “How do you know?”

  Russ pointed at the dangling cord.

  “I’ll be damned,” Nichols whispered.

  “Help me move this stuff.” He and Nichols started removing the plastic five-gallon buckets piled like a wall beneath the marker.

  “Wait. Look.” Nichols leaned against the stack of boxes to the left of the buckets and pushed. The cardboard tower slid away, revealing a dolly, empty except for a blue plastic tarp. Nichols pulled it toward himself. It rolled easily out into the open corridor.

  Peering into the narrow, shadowy space they had revealed, Nichols breathed in. “I think this may be it.”

  “Let me see.” Russ replaced Nichols in the gap. He could see white opaque plastic stretched over a cracked and splintered wooden pallet. The corner closest to the wall had been ripped open and resealed with duct tape. Russ tried to reach it, but he couldn’t fit.

  “Let me try.” Lyle was five inches shorter and a good fifty pounds lighter than Russ. He squeezed into the angular space sideways. Past the rest of the buckets, he was able to turn toward the wall. He got down on one knee. Russ could hear the ripping sound of tape being torn away.

  “Well?” Russ wanted to shove the buckets aside and get in there himself.

  Lyle grunted. Stood up. Shifted to the side and edged back toward them. He had a wad of heavy plastic in his hand.

  “Well?”

  Barbara LeBlanc butted up against Russ. “What is it?”

  Lyle stepped free. “This is one of the empties.” He handed Russ the stiff, crumpled plastic, and then, like a magician producing a rabbit, held up more of the stuff, wrapped crudely around stacks and stacks of cash. Twenties, in bricks of five hundred, enough to fill a small suitcase.

  “Oh. My. God.” Barbara LeBlanc’s voice was faint.

  “Gotcha,” Russ said.

  FEAR THE LORD, YOU THAT ARE HIS SAINTS, FOR THOSE WHO FEAR HIM LACK NOTHING.

  —Psalm 34, The Book of Common Prayer

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 17

  Sarah was looking at the black cats and flying witches pinned to the walls of the community center’s meeting room. Lots of black and purple and green crayon, with one defiantly pink-and-yellow standout, as if Glinda the Good Witch had taken to her broomstick. Some little girl was not lowering her princess standards, even for Halloween.

  “Hey, y’all, look who I brought.”

  Sarah turned at the sound of the Virginia drawl. Clare Fergusson rolled Will Ellis through the doors. He smiled and waved, and if she hadn’t known better, she would never have guessed the boy had narrowly escaped death by his own hand.

  “Welcome back, marine.” Eric McCrea got up from his folding seat and shook Will’s hand. “You’re looking a lot better than you did last week.”

  He was, too. His hair had been shaved away to a sandy brown fuzz, and he had some color in his face. He was still far too thin for such a big kid—after seeing his father and brother in the ICU, Sarah realized Will must have stood over six feet before the amputations—but he had lost that ghastly drawn expression he’d had in the hospital.

  Will ducked his head. “Feeling better.” He paused, taking in the smaller than usual circle of chairs. “Where’s Dr. Stillman?” His voice had an edge of panic.

  “He’s fine.” Sarah took the seat opposite Will. “He was on call this evening and had to go in to the Glens Falls Hospital. He told me he probably wouldn’t make it tonight.”

  Fergusson put the brake on his chair and set off for the coffee table. “How are things now that you’re home?” Sarah asked.

  “Better. More honest.” He rubbed his thighs. “We started family therapy while I was an in-patient, and we’re going to keep it up for a while.” He smiled briefly. “Never saw myself as the kind of guy who’d be seeing two therapists a week.”

  “If you had diabetes and, say, an ulcer, you’d see a specialist for each condition. It’s no different for mental health. Eric? How are you doing? You’re still on suspension?”

  “Yeah.” He bent forward, bracing his elbows on his knees, his face toward the floor. “It’s been … tough. My wife…” He looked up at her. His face changed. “She just doesn’t get that I need a little time! I was gone for a fucking year, and she won’t even give me a few months to readjust to being back.”

  “Have you thought about entering marriage counseling? Or family therapy, like the Ellises?”

  “Oh, Christ, don’t you start, too. That’s what she said.”

  “So?” Fergusson dropped into her seat with her customary cup. “What’s holding you back?”

  “I’m a cop. Do you know what that means? I have the most fundamental job in the world. Because nothing else matters if people and property aren’t safe and if the law isn’t enforced.” He smacked himself on the chest. “We’re the line between civilization and the jungle. The only line. You trust me to do that job, you gotta trust me to have my head on straight.”

  Sarah waited a beat. “So … what does your suspension mean?”

  Eric turned away. “I made a bad call. I’ll take my punishment and that’ll be the end of it.”

  Sarah waited, but he didn’t seem inclined to continue. “Clare? How about you?”

  “I think he ought to accede to his wife’s request. Even if he doesn’t think he needs it, it would strengthen their relationship.”

  Sarah pursed her lips. The caretaker strikes again. “I was asking how you are this week.”

  “Oh.” Fergusson rubbed the end of her nose. “Good. Busy. Stressed.” She paused, and Sarah opened her mouth to ask about drinking, but Fergusson went on. “There’ve been a lot of developments in the police investigation around Tally’s death. They may break open part of the case soon.”

  That snapped McCrea out of his sulk. “What’s going on? I called Lyle MacAuley yesterday, and all he’d tell me is that they were bringing in somebody from the army for a possible arrest on the theft.”

  “There really was money stolen?” Will sounded bemused. “I wasn’t sure if I’d imagined that conversation or not.”

  “The MKPD found it Saturday,” Fergusson said. “Something like six hundred thousand dollars. It was hidden at the Algonquin Waters.” Fergusson was quite effectively derailing any inquiries into her own emotional life. Sarah wasn’t sure if the priest was aware of it or not.

  “So what was MacAuley talking about?” McCrea said. “Why didn’t they just tag it and ship it back to the army? Or hand it over to the Feds?”

  “Russ—the chief—thinks Lieutenant Colonel Seelye may have been after the money for herself when she showed up here asking questions.”

  Sarah didn’t want to get sucked into Fergusson’s self-protective behavior, but she had to ask. “Was that the other officer we saw at Tally’s funeral?”

  “Uh-huh.” Fergusson drank some coffee. “The MKPD and Russ’s JAG contact—the Judge Advocate General’s Corps—are trying to get her to incriminate herself.”

  “How?” Will asked.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen Russ since last Friday. Most of this I got from a phone message he left me.”

  McCrea’s glance sharpened. “Does the chief think this lieutenant colonel had something to do with Tally’s death?”

  Fergusson’s face, which had been rosy and animated during her conversation, fell into disapproving lines. “He still insists she killed herself. He won’t listen to any—” Her mouth worked, as if she were trying to find the right word.

  “Other evidence?” Will offered.

  “Sensible arguments.” Fergusson frowned into her coffee.

  “The ME’s conclusion was pretty well grounded,” McCrea said.

  Fergusson gave him a look. “Don’t you start, too.”

  Time to steer this into a therapeutic mode. Sarah looked around the tiny circle, gathering each of them in. “If Tally McNabb did, in fact, kill herself, we have some hard wo
rk to do. How do we accept an unacceptable death? How do we find meaning in an act that denies meaning?”

  “I got the chance to talk with my other therapist about her while I was in the hospital,” Will said. “It sounds weird, but looking at her situation helped give me a different view of my own stuff.” He glanced at Sarah, as if for permission to continue. She nodded encouragement. “See, I can look at Tally and think, she could have returned the money, she could have gotten a different job, she could have kicked her husband to the curb. Things were hard for her, real hard, but she had options. She could’ve taken them.” He rubbed his thighs. “It kind of made me see that even when I don’t feel like it, I have options, too.”

  Fergusson put her coffee down and leaned toward Will. “Yes, you do. And you have your family and friends and a great cloud of witnesses all around you. Wherever you look, there’s someone who loves you looking back.”

  “Oh, I know that. I knew it when I … when I did it. The problem was, they loved me too much. Too much to stand seeing me hurt and mad all the time. Too much to let me touch bottom.” Will glanced across the room to where the Crayola witches flew between construction-paper cats. “And I had to touch bottom.” He twisted in his chair, as if settling himself into the present. “Anyway, we’re talking about it in family therapy. They’re trying to see me the way I really am now. As much as they can.”

  “See? That’s the hard part,” McCrea said. “Getting the people in your life to admit that you’ve changed. Been changed.”

  Fergusson smiled crookedly. “Some days I fantasize about starting fresh in a new town. Nobody to have to put up a front for.” She looked at Sarah. “Of course, in my business, you always have to put up a front. No one wants to see their priest spit and swear and fall apart.”

  “I dunno,” Will said. “I’m getting kind of used to it.” Fergusson laughed.

  “So even you can find people to accept you as you are,” Sarah said.

  “Yeah,” Will said. “Remember how you said I should get in touch with some of my old friends from school?” He smiled a little. “I did.”

  “Oh.” Fergusson hid her pleased expression behind the rim of her coffee cup. “I don’t suppose any of these friends happen to be girls?”

  “Yeah.” His cheeks pinked up, and the combat veteran disappeared, replaced by a teenaged boy. “I’ve been talking with Olivia Bain.”

  “Is she still here in town?”

  “Naw. She left for SUNY Geneseo this fall. Got a full scholarship.”

  “That’s a tough school to get into.” McCrea nodded. “She must be a smart girl.”

  “A lot brainier than me. I can talk to her about anything, though. She knows what it’s like to have something really bad happen to you. Her mom died in a car crash this summer.”

  “That’s hard,” Sarah said. Still, it made her a good choice for Will’s confidant.

  “This summer?” McCrea said. “Here? In Millers Kill?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Um…” Will frowned in thought. “Eleanor? Ellen? Something like that.”

  “Ellen Bain.” McCrea’s mouth twisted.

  “You know her?” Fergusson asked.

  “I cleaned up after her. She went barreling down the resort road with no seat belt on after taking part in Happy Hour. I didn’t have to follow up with the survivors, thank God. I didn’t know she’d left a kid behind.”

  “Yeah, and it was just Olivia and her mom. Her dad took off when she was little.” Will made a face, clearly unable to imagine a father like that. “Her mom did okay with her bookkeeping job, she said, but she would’ve had a hard time with college if she hadn’t gotten—”

  McCrea cut the boy off. “What did you say she did?”

  “Who?”

  “Ellen Bain. You said she was…?”

  Will looked at him, confused. “A bookkeeper. At the new resort.”

  Fergusson sat up straight.

  McCrea extended his hand and tapped his palm. “Ellen Bain, who died in an auto accident at the end of July, was a bookkeeper at the Algonquin Waters. Tally McNabb, who committed suicide in October, was a bookkeeper at the Algonquin Waters.”

  “Yeah, but…” Will’s forehead crinkled. “It’s got to be a coincidence. Tons of people work for the resort.”

  “Chief Van Alstyne always says he doesn’t believe in coincidence.” Fergusson put her cup down. “Did Tally and Ms. Bain know each other? Did they have the same job responsibilities?”

  Will shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “We’ve got to find out,” Fergusson said.

  “No, we’ve got to tell the chief,” McCrea countered.

  “Eventually.” At his look, she spread her hands. “I’m just saying we should come up with something more solid if we want him to reopen Tally’s case. I’m overdue for a visit with her mother. I can ask her how Tally got her job, and what she might know about Ellen Bain.”

  “Stop.” Avoiding issues in group was one thing. Acting out that avoidance in real life was a whole other ball game. Sarah pointed to Fergusson. “You are not Daphne from Scooby-Doo. We are not going to get into a purple van and ride around town looking for a spooky old house.”

  “All I’m proposing we do is ask a few questions.”

  McCrea studied the priest. “Are you sure you’re not all hopped up on this idea because you’d like to show up the chief?”

  “No!” Fergusson paused. “Well. Maybe a little.”

  “Okay. I’m in.”

  “Me, too,” Will said. “What should I do?”

  Fergusson gave McCrea a go-ahead gesture. “Get back in touch with Olivia,” McCrea said. “Ask her if her mother was behaving oddly at any time before her death. Ask her if she ever mentioned Tally or Wyler McNabb.”

  Will nodded. “I’ll IM her when I get home tonight.”

  “See if she can get us a look at her mom’s bank balances and investment reports.”

  “Investment reports?” Sarah was losing control of the session. Again.

  “It’s clear Tally stole a million dollars, and it’s a pretty sure bet her husband was in on it with her.” McCrea had an expression Sarah had never seen before. It was, she realized, his cop face. “If the money’s been found at the resort”—Fergusson nodded—“it’s a good bet that they had an accomplice to help hide it. Accomplices usually get paid off.”

  “Unless,” Fergusson said, “somebody decided to cut her out of the picture.”

  “Yeah.” His mouth compressed. “I’ll go talk to the HR people at the Algonquin Waters.”

  “But you’re still suspended,” Sarah said. “Isn’t that—I don’t know, illegal?”

  “I’m not going to arrest anybody.” He grinned suddenly. “Like Reverend Clare said, I’m just going to ask some questions.”

  Will looked at her slyly. “What are you going to do, Sarah?”

  She shook her head. “I guess I’m going to put on an orange turtleneck and drive the van.”

  * * *

  It was one of the easiest stings Russ had ever set up, even given the tight time frame. Nichols contacted Seelye on Saturday morning and told her he’d found the money after a search of Tally’s house tipped him off. Lyle had soothed Ms. LeBlanc’s fears and assured her that no one would even know an arrest was occurring in her resort’s basement—they would use the employee exit to get in and out. Even persuading Tony Usher to fly up to Albany and run the operation with him had been a cinch. Bringing down a lieutenant colonel could be tricky, politically, but the prospect of bringing home six hundred grand—they had counted the remaining bricks and scanned their FDIC routing labels before replacing them on the pallet—was enough to paper over his concerns. Within twenty-four hours, Tony had found an ambitious CID investigator to be another witness, and right now, at ten o’clock on Monday evening, the man was hidden behind a screen of empty boxes not five feet from the money. It was his small camera stashed in the piping above, recordin
g everything that happened.

  Russ and Tony were in another blind, this one with a partial view of the employees’ exit. They could see Quentan Nichols shifting from foot to foot in front of the door. He was dressed in a cleaning-service uniform. They had gotten three of them; Kevin, mopping close to the hotel-side employees’ entrance, had one, as did Lyle, who was playacting sleep in the darkened break room. At least Russ hoped he was acting.

  “He’s going to walk a trough in that cement if he doesn’t stop pacing.” Tony kept his voice down. They’d set up a blower farther down Broadway’s corridor to mask any ambient sounds, but no one wanted to take any chances.

  “He’s got a right to be nervous.” Russ shifted on his box. The combination of cold and inactivity was making his hip ache. “He’s betting everything on this.”

  “Nichols isn’t the first soldier to go stupid and start thinking with the wrong head.” Tony sighed. “And Seelye, sad to say, isn’t going to be the first officer to be tempted by all the money they’ve got floating around over there. The stories I could tell you—” He broke off as Nichols grabbed the handle and opened the employees’ entrance.

  Lieutenant Colonel Arlene Seelye stepped in. She was dressed as anonymously as Nichols—dark jeans, dark shirt, dark windbreaker. Nichols said, “Colonel,” but she held up her hand. She glanced around her, then strode past him into the corridor. She walked up toward the hotel-side entrance and back down, past Russ and Tony, past the CID captain, past the loot itself, scanning left and right. She poked her head into the darkened break room but didn’t turn on the lights. Evidently satisfied, she returned to Nichols’s side. “Quentan Nichols.” She looked him up and down. “I’m still not convinced you’re not yanking my chain. What’s really going on here?”

  Nichols took two dancing steps into the corridor, like a nervous junkie about to make a deal. Now they were both under one of the dangling fluorescent lights. In perfect focus for the camera. “I told you. I waited until Tally McNabb’s old man was gone and then I searched that house from basement to attic. I found a reference that made me think it might be here, and it is.”