Hostile Witness: A Kate Ford Mystery

by Leigh Adams

  Frank looked up from where he had just peeled another potato and said, “You ought to get settled in. It’s not going to be long before dinner.”

  Kate looked down at the soft age creases in her father’s hands, and all of a sudden, she couldn’t face telling them both what had happened to her at work today. She turned away and headed for her bedroom.

  ***

  The way things were, she would have to tell them both tonight and then tell Frank again in the morning. Jack was right. Kate spent too much of her time trying to ignore the fact that Alzheimer’s was a disease that progressed over time, and sometimes progressed very fast.

  She shucked off her work clothes and left them on the floor of her bedroom. She put on her most relaxed pair of jeans and a T-shirt that had come from the gift shop at CIA headquarters at Langley. She was very proud of that T-shirt. The CIA gift shop was inside the perimeter where only people with clearance were allowed. You couldn’t just walk in off the street and buy what you wanted. She didn’t think she knew another person who had one of these shirts. Or the CIA teddy bear, either. The teddy bear always sat on her bed.

  When she came out to the kitchen, Frank was still sitting at the table, but Jack was on his feet and . . . cooking.

  “Jack?” she said. “That’s very nice of you, but I really can finish that. And I don’t want you to start doing housework around here like you were—”

  “If you’re going to say the thing about me being a child again, I’m going to say the thing about throwing up again. Sit down. I’ve done this a million times. I just usually do it when you’re not here.”

  “And Grandpa lets you do it?”

  “You bet he does. Especially when he’s showing no symptoms. He’s not crazy. Why don’t you get out the hamburger rolls and the ketchup and the mustard and that kind of thing? This doesn’t take long.”

  “I’ll never understand how you can stand mustard on your hamburgers,” Kate said.

  “There’s mustard on McDonald’s hamburgers,” Jack said. “Why don’t you stop bobbing and weaving and tell me what happened that’s making you look like roadkill?”

  “Oh,” Kate said. “I think roadkill is a little harsh.”

  “I don’t.” Jack flipped three large burgers one after the other and then sat down at the table next to his grandfather. “You came home early today, too.”

  “Well,” Kate said, “I won’t be going in to work tomorrow morning.”

  “You got fired?” Jack looked honestly surprised. “Was it because of an episode?”

  “It wasn’t an episode and I wasn’t fired.”

  “If it wasn’t an episode, then what was it? We’ve talked about this, Mom. I don’t understand how you have a job at all when you get those things, never mind a job that you have to have security clearances for. I wouldn’t give you a security clearance. You could go off sometime and start saying things you didn’t even know you were saying.”

  “I don’t say anything at all when I have an episode,” Kate said. “And last I heard, you didn’t think they were real.”

  “I said I thought they were psychosomatic. That’s not the same thing as not real. That means—”

  “I know what psychosomatic means, Jack. They’re not psychosomatic.”

  Jack got up to flip the burgers again. “Okay,” he said. “Then what was it? And why aren’t you going in to work tomorrow if you haven’t been fired?”

  The hamburgers were done. Jack picked up the spatula and started to transfer them to a plate.

  “I am not going in to work tomorrow,” Kate said, “because I have been suspended. For four weeks. Without pay.”

  Jack said, “Do we have enough to eat for four weeks without pay?”

  “Of course we do.”

  The fries were done, too. Jack turned off the range burner and carefully transferred the deep fryer to an oven pad. Then he lifted up the basket and let the fries drain oil.

  “So why are you suspended?” Jack asked again.

  Kate hesitated only for a moment. Then she spilled the entire story, from the moment she’d first started to wonder about Robotix to her panicked rush to the secure computers.

  “And the next thing I know, my manager comes bursting through the door saying he wants me off the premises and out of Almador for the next month. He went on and on, practically chasing me out the door. The only thing I can think of was that he was furious with me for using the secure computers.”

  “He didn’t say that was it?”

  “No,” Kate said. “He didn’t say anything coherent. But it would make sense. The secure computers are for military work almost exclusively. You know, I told you this. The military has its own version of the Internet, and it’s important to keep it clean from outside influences. And using one for the Robotix thing might have jeopardized our contracts with the military.”

  “You’d think he would have said,” Jack said. He got the ketchup and mustard Kate had forgotten and put them on the table.

  “It’s like I told you, he really wasn’t being coherent. I thought he was going to have a stroke. And we’ll know for sure in a couple of days. Almador will send me a letter with the particulars.”

  “Could you get fired at the end of the suspension?”

  “I could,” Kate admitted. “I’m not expecting to. Unless I did do something that lost us our military contracts. Then they ought to fire me.”

  “Wonderful,” Jack said.

  Kate took the rolls Jack was bringing over and picked up a knife to slit the first one apart.

  “It was just the oddest thing,” Kate said. “It was like a total lock-down of some sort. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was worse than a defense-grade tripwire. And for a company that makes pool vacuums, for God’s sake.”

  Five

  The first thing Kate noticed when she woke up was the noise.

  The noise was coming from right outside her bedroom window, which faced the front of the house and therefore the street. It was tinny and harsh and hard to understand.

  Kate turned over on her back and finally registered the sound as words: Vote for Evans. District Attorney Reggie Evans for governor of the great state of Virginia. Vote for Evans. Vote for—

  There was a lot more of it, but it didn’t make Kate want to vote, and it really didn’t make her want to vote for Evans. She’d met Evans once or twice. She’d heard him speak. She liked what she’d heard him speak about. She even thought he’d made a very good district attorney.

  She had to wonder, though, what kind of an idiot sent campaign vans streaming through neighborhoods at whatever hour this was in the morning.

  She was about to turn over and find out what time it actually was when her bedroom door opened and Frank walked in.

  Frank raised his hands and revealed a bugle. Then he put his lips to the mouthpiece and started playing “Reveille.”

  It was silly and as wonderful as anything could get until Kate remembered the night before and had a horrible thought. Maybe he was here to wake her up because he thought they were all back in her childhood, with her mother down the hall making breakfast and a stack of Kate’s homework on the kitchen table so she would be sure not to forget it.

  “I know you’re not going in to work today,” Frank said, “but you’d better get up anyway. Jack’s got issues.”

  Kate let herself exhale. They were in the here and now. Frank was behaving perfectly normally.

  “I’ve got issues, too,” he said. “I’m supposed to give a talk on code breaking down at the senior center.”

  Frank retreated from the room, closing the door behind him. Kate got up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. It felt very odd to be in no kind of a hurry.

  She got out of bed and headed for her small en suite bathroom. She threw herself in the shower and made the water as hot as it would go. It hit her scalp like needles. Then she got out and found a clean pair of jeans and a T-shirt and put them on. She half-expected that to give her a sense of
purpose for the day, but it didn’t.

  As she entered the kitchen, Frank and Jack were sitting together at the kitchen table, looking through a war-gaming manual.

  “I keep telling Jack here that war-gaming on terrain is a lot more realistic than war-gaming on those video games he likes so much,” Frank said.

  “I keep telling him he ought to learn how to play those video games instead,” Jack said. “He might have fun.”

  Jack and Frank both had scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, and orange juice, and Frank had a cup of coffee. Kate got coffee and orange juice for herself and sat down.

  “That all you’re going to eat?” Frank asked.

  Kate ignored him.

  Jack was fidgeting more than a little. Kate looked at him and cocked an eyebrow.

  “Well?” she said. “Your grandfather told me you had issues.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said.

  “I hate the word issues,” Kate said.

  “Yeah,” Jack said again. He picked up a strip of bacon and examined it as if it were a very important clue in a very important murder mystery. “Here’s the thing,” he started. Then he stopped. Then he stared at the bacon some more.

  “You’re going to have to say something sometime,” Kate said. “I’m not going to be able to figure it out on my own.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said yet again. He heaved a big sigh and rushed into it. “You’re not going in to work today, right? That means you’re not going to have an emergency and have to stay late or anything like that?”

  “Right,” Kate said. “I thought we discussed that last night.”

  “Yeah, we did,” Jack said. “But I didn’t mention it up to now because I thought you’d have to be at work anyway, so it’s not just last minute. I didn’t just wait—”

  “Wait for what?” Kate demanded.

  “To tell you I had a meet this afternoon,” Jack said. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want you to come. It wasn’t anything like that.”

  “Ah.” Here was a subject Kate wanted no part of. She could remember the last time she’d come to one of Jack’s meets, and after that, he hadn’t wanted her to again. “I see. Do you want me to come? I take it you’re competing.”

  “In the relay, the fifty-yard dash and the hundred-yard dash,” Jack said. “And of course I want you to come. I always want you to come. I just don’t want, you know, one of those things.”

  Kate put her coffee cup down very carefully on the table. She rearranged her orange juice glass from the left of the coffee to the right.

  “I really don’t do those things on purpose,” she said. “I don’t plan for them. And I don’t think I can stop them if they start.”

  “But they don’t happen all the time,” Jack said quickly.

  “No, they don’t, Jack. But they also don’t come on a schedule. It’s not like I can say that I’ll only have them on Tuesdays, or if I had one yesterday, I won’t have one today.”

  “But don’t you get any advance warning? And they’re not all as bad as that time at the swim meet. You practically passed out, and you don’t usually do that, so there’s got to be a reason.”

  “I agree there’s got to be a reason,” Kate said. “I just don’t know what it is.”

  “I had to quit swimming because of the last time,” Jack said. “I had to. You just fell over and the meet was cancelled and it was all I heard about for days at school. You wouldn’t believe the things people said.”

  “So maybe you don’t want me to come,” Kate said.

  “I think he definitely does want you to come,” Frank said.

  Jack had eaten his piece of bacon absent-mindedly.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I do want you to come. I’ve been doing really well, but most of the time, you’re at work when we have track meets. So I want you to come. Because even if another of those things happen, there won’t be a million people there. It won’t get as crazy. So I think we should risk it.”

  “Okay,” Kate said. Her chest was tight. If emotional upheaval brought on her episodes, she’d be having one right now. “I think you’re right. I think we should risk it.”

  “So you’ll come?” Jack asked.

  “I’ll come,” Kate said.

  “It’s at four o’clock,” Jack said. “You know where it is, right behind the school. You can just come and sit anywhere.”

  “Okay,” Kate said.

  “I’ve got to go,” Jack said. “I’ll see you there. Grandpa’s coming too.”

  “Of course I am,” Frank said.

  Jack looked from one to the other, as if he were waiting for somebody to say something they hadn’t said. When neither Kate nor Frank said anything, Jack leaped up from his chair and headed for the front door.

  “See you there,” he called back.

  Kate heard the banging and rattling that meant he’d grabbed his backpack off the front hall table and then the sound of a door opening and slamming shut.

  The silence that followed Jack’s departure was so thick that being in it was almost like drowning. Kate stared at her coffee and thought about the kind of life she was giving Jack. His father was gone, and his mother was some kind of medical freak who couldn’t be counted on to stay upright at a junior high track meet. Frank stared at Kate.

  It was Frank who broke the silence. Kate could have sat where she was without a word for an hour.

  “He’s a good kid, Katie,” Frank said. “He’s a very good kid.”

  “I know he is.”

  “He’s just worried about you.”

  “He shouldn’t have to worry about me,” Kate said. “I’m the adult. I should be worried about him.”

  “He’s worried about me, too,” Frank said. “I think we’re all worried about each other.”

  “Jack thinks I can help this,” Katie said. “He thinks I’m doing it on purpose. Not consciously on purpose, but on purpose.”

  “I don’t think he thinks you’re doing it on purpose,” Frank said. “And I don’t think he thinks I’m doing my thing on purpose, either. It’s what I said. I think he’s worried about you.”

  “And what’s your thing supposed to be?”

  Frank got up from the table and brought his dishes to the sink. “If you think I don’t know what’s happening to me, you’re out of your mind.”

  “What’s happening to you?” Kate was feeling very cautious.

  Frank kept his back to her. “I don’t always know when it’s happening. I think maybe I almost never know. But sometimes I do. I knew last night.”

  Kate felt the excitement race through her. “But how is that possible? How do you mean you knew what was happening last night?”

  Frank turned around to look at her. “It was like I was standing outside myself, watching myself. And the part of me that was standing outside knew who you were, and the part of me still in my body didn’t, and I couldn’t make the two parts connect.”

  Kate could barely make herself sit still. “Daddy, listen,” she said eagerly. “That isn’t like any kind of Alzheimer’s I’ve ever heard of. I don’t think that’s Alzheimer’s at all. We should tell the doctor. Maybe he made a mistake. Maybe this is something else and it’s not so bad. Maybe we can do something about it.”

  “I’ve talked to the doctor, Kate. He said Alzheimer’s manifests in many ways.”

  “But that’s just because he doesn’t want to change his diagnosis,” Kate said. “He doesn’t want to be made to look wrong, or incompetent, or—”

  “No, Kate. You have to face reality. I’ve got maybe another year or year and a half when I’ll know what’s really going on most of the time. Before then, we’re going to have to make some decisions. I’m not going to be able to go on looking after Jack, and I’m not going to be able to go on living here.”

  “I don’t understand you anymore,” Kate said. Her voice sounded like a child’s. “You were never like this when I was growing up. You’d never have just sat down and accepted something terrible happening to you.”


  “I’m not just accepting it,” Frank said. “I’m fucking furious, if you’ll pardon my French. I get so angry, I could take off the roof. But it doesn’t matter, Kate, can’t you see that? You play the hand you’re dealt. And this is mine.”

  “You seem to be feeling all right this morning.”

  “I’m feeling fine,” Frank said. He came to the table and picked up Kate’s now-empty coffee cup. “What’s more,” Frank said, “I was able to take in what was going on last night, and I was able to remember it this morning. You’ve been suspended from your job because your manager is some kind of jerk.”

  “I think he might have had a point to some extent,” Kate said. “We aren’t supposed to use the computers we have for our military contracts on anything else.”

  “All right,” Frank admitted. “I know that. But it comes down to the same thing. You’re not working for a month. You’ve got nothing to do but hang around the house brooding.”

  “I don’t brood.”

  “Call it whatever you want. If you don’t find something you can focus on, you’re going to be hell on wheels, and he and I are going to be roadkill. You should try to do something with your time.”

  The kitchen faced the back of the house, so it took a while before Kate and Frank could sort out the noise that began to blare into the room.

  Reggie Evans for governor, it said. Vote for Reggie Evans for governor of the great state of Virginia.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Frank said. “That’s the third time this morning. The first time was at six. Made me fall right out of bed. Reggie Evans, the district attorney, now running for governor. He is also the one trying the Ozgo case, as far as I know.”

  “Of course he’s trying the Ozgo case,” Kate said. “It’s the biggest thing to hit Virginia in a hundred years. It’s national news. Although, there is something interesting. A lot of people think the whole thing is a setup.”

  “You think the Ozgo kid is being railroaded?” Frank asked.

  “It’s Chan Hamilton that was kidnapped—Richard Hamilton’s daughter. And Richard Hamilton is the guy who got Evans to run for governor.”