“This is still an open investigation,” the detective went on. “And I will probably have more questions for all of you.”
But it looked as if he was letting us go for now. Good. I wished he’d hurry. As the detective handed out his cards and asked us to stay in the area, I found myself eyeing the two muffins still sitting on a small china plate at what would have been Dr. Grace’s place at the table. Part of the usual weekly tribute. The muffins were low-fat, sugar-free bran muffins—I’d once tasted a leftover one and found it about as appetizing as sawdust. But as hungry as I was, even the muffins were starting to look good.
Wait a minute. The muffins were there as usual. Beside them, also as usual, was the vase of fresh flowers that would grace the table during their meeting and Dr. Grace’s desk for the rest of the day. But something was missing.
“Where’s the latte?” I said aloud.
Everyone turned to look at me.
“What’s that?” the detective asked.
“Where’s Dr. Grace’s latte?” I asked. “Every morning Tiffany brings her a bran muffin from the organic bakery down the street. Amanda brings her fresh flowers from the stand by the Metro stop. Sometimes candy, if she can get to the Godiva store, but usually flowers. And Jessica always stops at Starbucks to bring her a low-fat, sugar-free latte with skim milk. Where’s the latte?”
Jessica’s face was fun to watch as it changed from annoyance to surprise to utter horror as she thought through what I’d just said. And like the rest of us, she was staring at the tall brown Starbucks paper cup in front of her own place at the table.
“Dr. Grace didn’t…I mean, knew she probably wouldn’t…”
Then she shut up. She didn’t actually say “I want my attorney,” but I had the feeling those words were in her future.
She looked at Tiffany and Amanda, as if pleading for support.
They both hitched their chairs away from her. Tiffany hitched hers so far she was sitting next to me.
“We knew Dr. Grace was thinking of letting someone go,” Tiffany told the detective. “But we thought it was—I mean, I suppose we should have realized it would have to be Jessica.”
“Some people truly are impossible, aren’t they?” Amanda said. She glanced at me briefly with a faint smile before turning to stare at a spot a foot above Jessica’s head.
Maybe in high school I’d have been tempted. But even in high school, I don’t think I’d have fallen for their overtures. I ignored them, and stood up.
“Can I still leave?” I asked the detective. “And is it okay for me to clean out my desk right now? I’m resigning, effective immediately, and I’d rather not have to come back to this snake pit.”
“Be my guest,” he said.
Tiffany and Amanda both rose, uttering feeble bleats of protest.
“Ladies,” the detective said. “I have a few more questions for all three of you.”
They sat back down again, looking forlorn. The detective led Jessica back to the office he’d been using as his interview room.
Packing wouldn’t take long. By the time he finished with the mean girls and hauled Jessica down to the station, I’d be long gone. Maybe I’d stop on the way home and buy some champagne to celebrate my freedom.
Better yet, maybe I’d stop at Starbucks and toast my victory with a latte.
Donna Andrews was born in Yorktown, Virginia, and now lives in Reston, Virginia. The Real Macaw, (July 2011, Minotaur), is the latest book in her Agatha- and Anthony-winning Meg Langslow series, and Some Like It Hawk will be released in July 2012. She has also written four books in the Turing Hopper series from Berkley Prime Crime. For more information: http://donnaandrews.com.
WHEN DUTY CALLS, by Art Taylor
Keri is just setting out the silverware when the Colonel calls across from the living room with a new question. He’s watching the Military Channel and finishing up the cocktail she made for him—a thimble of Virginia Gentleman, a generous portion of soda, another light splash of whiskey on top to make it smell like a stronger drink. The Colonel’s house has an open floor plan from the kitchen through the dining room to where he sits, and as she’s finished up dinner, she’s listened to him arguing lightly with the program’s depiction of Heartbreak Ridge, reminiscing about his own stint in Korea, rambling in his own way. “Last rally of the Shermans,” he mused aloud, and something about “optics” and “maneuverability” and then—a different tone than Keri’s heard in the four months she’s known him—“Is the perimeter secure, Sergeant?”
“The perimeter?” Keri asks, cautiously. She’s grown used to these sudden shifts in subject—learned quickly just to roll along with the conversation, even in the first days after she and Pete moved in. But she still stumbles sometimes to catch up and find the right response.
The Colonel turns in his chair—turning on her, Keri thinks, expecting his regular confusion or the occasional rebuke—but he doesn’t look her way. He’s listening, it seems, his jaw fixed, his chin jutting more than usual. The tendons in his frail arms tighten, his tie tugs at the skin around his neck, his whole body perches alert, if unsteadily so. Medals and photos crowd the wall behind him. Round stickers dot many of them and almost everything else in the living room: lamps, books, bookcases, the chair itself. Red, white, and blue.
“Incoming,” he says.
“No one’s out there, Colonel,” she tries to reassure him. Not anymore, at least, since that pair of surveyors out in the woods had packed up their bags a half-hour before, one of them waving at her through the window before cranking up, heading out. They’d stayed late. She was glad to see them go.
“Vibrations,” the Colonel whispers. “A good soldier can sense these things. Life and death.” Just his mind wandering, she knows, just another bout of dementia, but for a moment the seriousness of his tone, the weight of his words, stop her. Despite herself, she looks toward the door. Has he actually heard something? The surveyors had forgotten something, returned unannounced. Or maybe Pete had canceled his Tuesday night classes in town to come home early. But no. There’s no knock at the door, and no sound of a key turning in it. No muddy shoes being brushed against the mat. No sound of tires on the gravel drive. Just the TV program rolling on. Strategies, skirmishes, victories, defeat.
“Did Pete call?” she asks.
“Negative,” the Colonel says casually, just the hint of disdain, and then he relaxes, settles back into his chair. “Radio silence has been maintained.”
There’s something melancholy in his answer, or maybe it’s Keri’s imagination this time. She wonders if he even notices how seldom the phone rings—for either of them. Calls come so rarely that she once raised the receiver to her ear just to make sure there was a dial tone there. More than once, actually.
“Lasagna’s ready,” she tells him, and the Colonel brightens up.
“Officer’s Club,” he says eagerly. Date night, she knows.
Other nights, mealtime is just “chow,” but on Tuesdays Pete always stays on campus late, and the Colonel seems to love those nights best. She’s not sure how she goes from being his staff sergeant to being his…wife? Girlfriend? Daughter? She’s not sure about that either: which role she plays. He doesn’t seem to know who she is at all, has never even spoken her name. But sometimes when Pete is out of the way, the Colonel reaches over and presses his gnarled fingers over her hand, pats, squeezes, breaking Keri’s heart a little each time.
* * * *
“It’s a good deal,” Pete said after the interview with the Colonel’s daughter, after she’d offered them the job. Do a little housecleaning, make a couple of meals a day for the old man, and in exchange: free rent, a grocery stipend, a monthly bonus. A six-month stint. “The whole semester,” Pete went on. “Not just a good deal, but a great one, especially with teaching assistant stipends these days.” He didn’t need to add that Keri was unemployed herself, had been for a while.
It was that last part that convinced Keri and kept her from pointing out how m
uch of the cooking and housecleaning quickly fell to her. Pete was at least pulling his weight elsewhere, wasn’t he? Teaching a freshman survey course in western drama? Pursuing his own PhD? She could hardly complain about doing the dishes when he had lessons to prep and essays to grade and all that reading to do: Shakespeare, Ibsen, O’Neill, Beckett, Miller. And then fitting in work on his doctoral dissertation around the edges. He was already the golden boy of the doctoral program, destined to be the star of some big English department. She shared those dreams, and she tried not to nag him about her own. That wasn’t the woman she wanted to be—about work or marriage, about children somewhere down the line.
“We’re both in school,” Pete had said more than once when she talked about the future. “Student loans won’t pay themselves.” And that dissertation wouldn’t write itself. And tenure-line jobs didn’t come knocking on your door. School first, life later. She’d grown accustomed to that.
But now, with the semester living at the Colonel’s, with the savings, he’d hinted more about next steps. “With the money we’re saving here, we can set aside a little bit,” he said, “for the future.”
Maybe it was for the best for her to shoulder the work at the house while he focused on his education. And maybe there were other good reasons that Pete’s duties around the house were more limited. After all, the Colonel didn’t seem entirely to approve of him. He didn’t like the meals that Pete tried to make (“too spicy” once, “too bland” another time), he didn’t like all the time he spent reading (“needs to get off his duff”), and he generally peppered Pete with complaints on a regular basis.
“A trip to the barber in your future anytime, son?” the Colonel asked one morning. “That hardly seems regulation length.”
Other mornings—more than once: “Those shoes need a good buffing, soldier.”
And on the nights when Pete did join them for dinner: “Where’s your tie, boy?”
The Colonel wears a tie each night for dinner, tied in an elaborate knot. “A Full Windsor,” he told Keri when she asked. “Most men employ the Half-Windsor or the Four-in-Hand, but that’s too casual for me.”
“A little old school, don’t you think?” Pete said, when Keri asked him to try it one evening, just a single meal, just to humor the old man. “And that wasn’t part of the deal, now, was it?”
“Recruits these days,” the Colonel sometimes says, just under his breath. “A sorry lot, all of them.”
* * * *
When Keri stands up to clear the table, the Colonel stands quickly as well to help. Even when she dismisses him—“No worries, I can do it” (he’s dropped plates before)—he hesitates before heading back toward the TV. He’s waiting for her, she knows.
“Just let me get this cleaned up,” she says, “and I’ll be right in, okay?”
“Roger that,” he says. “Rendezvous…” He glances at his watch. “Twenty hundred hours?”
“Roger,” Keri salutes, mock-serious. These days, she doesn’t have to count out the real time anymore. “I’ll meet you in the den.”
She stores the lasagna away in squares—leftovers for the week ahead—and sets aside a large slice for Pete, though she knows he’ll already have eaten dinner and probably gone out for drinks after class. Winding-down time after the intensity of the three-hour seminars, he’s explained.
The window above the kitchen sink has a wide view of the yard. The gravel driveway stretches off to the right between the trees, a hundred yards to the main road, a lonely stretch leading “off base.” Shadows play in the woods directly ahead, thick with oak and pine and beech, many of them now tied with red ribbons, marked for timber. Moonlight glistens on the lake off to the left, just barely in sight from this vantage, a rough shoreline that Keri and the Colonel have walked on more than one afternoon, counting Canada geese. A full moon tonight, Keri notes, as if that might explain the tension in the air.
Throughout dinner, the Colonel seemed restless, attentive. Now, as Keri scrubs at the casserole pan, she finds herself watchful, too. Is there “incoming”? She thinks about the people that she’s seen in and around the property sometimes. Fishermen bring small skiffs close to shore or actually trudge down the driveway in their waders, tossing a small wave toward the house as they pass. Hunters often wander through the woods, unsure whose property they’ve crossed into at any point. More than once, teenagers have pulled a car up the drive—couples, groups, looking for a place to hook up, get high, get into trouble. Then, beginning last week, came the onslaught of real estate agents and surveyors, the men from the tree service, the crew taking soil samples, the beginning of the end. Today’s surveyors had lingered until almost dusk, and she’d had the feeling of being trapped somehow, or watched at least, like she and the Colonel were on display, sad curiosities. A couple of times, she caught the men just standing there, smoking cigarettes, staring toward the house. Leering, she thought, no better than construction workers, ogling passersby.
She doesn’t know which is worse—the isolation she’d been feeling out here or these sudden intrusions, and the knowledge of what it means. Stuck somewhere between the two and spurred on by the Colonel’s own brewing vigilance tonight, her imagination leaps ahead again, playing tricks on her. Is that the red tip of a cigarette butt? No, just one of the ribbons flapping in the moonlight. Did that shadow move? No, just a branch swaying in the breeze.
“Full moon,” she says aloud, and then remembers her horoscope from earlier that day: Surprises abound. Follow where the evening takes you. All will become clear. Pete still makes fun of her for reading them each morning.
Behind her, the Colonel turns up the TV—hinting for her to join him. The announcer is talking about the Trojan War, the horse that made history, the importance of surprise. Keri shivers a little.
“Coming,” she calls to him.
The pan still isn’t clean. And she hasn’t even started on the knife, crusted with cheese. She leaves both to soak until later—even till tomorrow perhaps.
* * * *
“He’s dotty,” Margaret, the former caretaker, had said, the second time they’d met—the passing on of the keys. She was an older woman: fifties, stout, frizzy-haired. “You’ll find out soon enough. And you’ve got your work cut out for you with him. With all of them.”
The first time they’d met was when Keri and Pete had been interviewed for the job. Margaret had brooded along the edges of the conversation as Claire, the youngest of the Colonel’s children, put a different spin on the situation: “The world has passed my father by,” she said. “We’ve striven to preserve his old glories, revere his achievements.” She swept an arm about the room. Medals and honors dominated one wall. Photographs with politicians and military leaders lined another, many of them long dead, Keri had since learned. Several framed boxes held guns, relics of a recent past, like museum pieces but brimming with menace. “Unfortunately, everything that my father trained for, everything that he lived for—none of it has much purpose here.”
Claire explained that it was just short-term. Margaret had been called to help her own father; plans were already afoot to sell the property, but might take some time; and they were finally looking into “more professional care” for the Colonel—a step they’d dreaded and delayed for too long. Claire herself had tended to him for several years after her mother died. “But I couldn’t manage any longer,” she explained. “Physically, yes, but emotionally… Well, watching someone you love so dearly deteriorate, become a shadow, sometimes you just feel yourself breaking down as well.” Keri and Pete were a stopgap. She was sure they understood.
The Colonel was napping while they talked. Margaret had shot a couple of looks at Keri throughout the conversation: envy, disbelief, warning glares? Keri hadn’t been sure. (Margaret told her later, on the sly, that Claire was a drinker. Claire, in turn, confided that Margaret was a thief—little things, but hardly negligible.)
It was after the Colonel went down for his nap another afternoon, only a week ago no
w, that Claire and her siblings—Beatrice and Dwight—had made their inventory. This was the first time that Keri had met the other two, since both lived just out of state, and Margaret’s comment about having her work cut out for her with “all of them” echoed throughout the day.
With Pete on campus again—early office hours, eternal office hours—Keri had played host alone. Claire asked her to make a salad for lunch, “something simple, no trouble,” and Keri had, laying it out on the table, not planning to join them until the Colonel insisted, asking his son to move down a seat, make room for the ladies.
Dwight had smirked at that. “Aye aye, sir,” he said, taking his salad with him as he slid down.
The Colonel had seemed to recognize them only dimly, but he nodded politely when Beatrice spoke about her children’s latest report cards and Dwight talked about the business finally turning a profit again last quarter—“despite what the president’s doing,” he insisted, which prompted Beatrice to complain bitterly about the state of political discourse in the country today. More smirks from Dwight at that, and cold looks from Claire.
The Colonel had watched all of them with interest but no reaction. Claire tried at each turn of the conversation to nudge her father to recall Beatrice’s children or the nature of Dwight’s business or just the name of that current president, but she had finally given up, simply watching the Colonel with a mixture of curiosity and distress. Keri had watched each of them and didn’t know exactly how she felt.
After lunch was done and the Colonel had retired to his room for some light R&R, the three of them began to divvy up the belongings, prepping to make an easy sweep of it between the day they moved the old man out and the scheduled demolition of the house, quick work for the condo development ahead. Claire had brought small circular stickers to help with the division. Each of them would simply mark the items they wanted to take. “Pop will appreciate the patriotic touch,” Dwight said, holding up a package of red stickers and leaving blue and white for his sisters. Unmarked items would be slated for donation to the Salvation Army. “And a military nod again,” Dwight said, already beginning to stake down his claims.
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