Darkside

by P. T. Deutermann

  But I’m not just any mid, am I? Not by a damned sight. I came from nothing much, but everywhere they sent me, I learned all about working the system. There’s always a system. Now we wait to see what the security wienies do next. So little time, so many opportunities for fun down below. Eventually, they’ll figure out they’re playing on my ground. And if they bring a crowd, well, hell, I’ll go have a beer in the Goth lair. Or maybe in my own lair. I do have one, you know.

  Did you know that black cop who met up with the vampire Dyle the other night was NCIS? Just like the redhead who got a steam bath last night. I’d better be careful, right? ’Cause NCIS is also investigating the Dell incident. They get lucky, it might be them getting the twofer… You, too, need to pay attention now. This Dell thing’s like an oil spill in water. It can spread out and get all over you.

  Ev went into his office at nine o’clock that Sunday morning. He had twenty-three senior term papers left to grade, and nothing in particular holding him at home on a Sunday morning. In fact, Sunday mornings were not a good time for him to be at home. Too many memories, and that intrusive silence in the house.

  An hour into the exercise, the words began to run together. Yet another dissertation on the World War I naval battle of Jutland by yet another midshipman who obviously had missed the entire strategic point of the battle. Suddenly tired of things academic, he stepped outside into the sunlight, thought briefly about finding a cigarette, then walked up Stribling Walk toward Bancroft and found a park bench halfway up. Chapel services were in full swing and he could hear the enormous Moeller organ rumbling away in the Academy’s cathedral-sized, 2,500-seat “chapel.” There were some early-bird tourists walking around the grounds, but, compared to the hustle and bustle of a Saturday morning, the Yard was empty. The few people strolling around the brick walks, passing among the aging bronze cannons and marble monuments, actually looked more like townies than real tourists. Except for the couple coming down the double walk from the chapel precincts. An older-looking man was pushing a woman in a wheelchair. The man was overweight, with a reddish face, steel-colored gray hair cut short, and a weary expression on his face, as if he’d been pushing that wheelchair for a long, long time. The woman in the chair was wrapped up in a voluminous blanket. She was also round, but she had an unhealthy pallor, lank gray hair tied back in a bun, and an oxygen line clipped to her nostrils. The chair had an IV stand attached, on which hung the green oxygen bottle. Ev watched them pull abreast of his bench and then look around at the beautiful vistas of the Yard. The Severn River shone like a big blue mirror between the white academic buildings down the walk. The couple was close enough to Ev’s bench that he felt obliged to say good morning.

  “Your first visit to the Academy?” he asked.

  They both looked at him, but it was the man who answered. “Nope. Been here once before. August. Hotter’n hell. This is much better.”

  “August?” Ev said. “Parents’ weekend?”

  “Yup,” the man said, turning the wheelchair so that the woman didn’t have to crane her neck. “Much good that it did us.”

  Ev didn’t understand that comment, but he let it pass. It must have been a real effort to bring this woman into the crowds of parents’ weekend. That was when parents got to see their sons and daughters looking like midshipmen for the first time. The transformations were always something of a small but proud shock. The woman was having trouble breathing, and Ev suddenly realized that she was weeping.

  “Is there something wrong?” he asked, leaning forward on the bench. “Can I help you?”

  The man wiped a tear out of his eyes. “Don’t think you can,” he said, patting the woman’s shoulder. “See, our boy’s dead. Our Brian. That’s why we’re here. There’s gonna be a memorial service. Up there, in that big church. This afternoon. We got here too early.”

  Ev felt a chill settle over his shoulders. These were Midshipman Dell’s parents. He tried to think of something comforting to say, but his voice was stuck in his throat.

  “You work here, sir?” the man asked.

  “Yes, I do. I’m a professor in the Social Sciences Division. I teach naval history.”

  “You know our boy, maybe? Brian Dell?”

  “No, Mr. Dell. I didn’t. I teach mostly first classmen. Seniors. Your son was a plebe. I-I heard about what happened, of course. I’m very sorry for your loss. We all are.”

  “Doubt that,” the woman wheezed, speaking for the first time. “Sumbitch who killed him isn’t sorry.”

  “Killed him?” Ev said, and then felt stupid. Of course they would have learned of the rumors. “I thought he, um, fell.”

  “He fell all right,” Dell’s father said. “But there’re some folks think he had him some help. That some bastard pushed him, maybe.”

  “I really can’t imagine that,” Ev said. He thought he should stand up, but then he’d be towering over both of them.

  Dell’s mother grunted, and then concentrated on her breathing for a long moment. “Brian was small,” she said, exhaling. Her voice was raspy and wet at the same time. “Kids picked on him in school. He shouldn’t oughta come here. Everyone’s too big. Like you.”

  “Well, not everyone,” Ev said, thinking of the women midshipmen. Then he thought of Julie, who was hardly petite. “And everyone gets picked on for the first year. Even big guys like me. It’s part of the program.”

  “You say so,” the woman said, and then began to cough. Her husband did something with the oxygen bottle’s valve, and the coughing subsided. She closed her eyes and concentrated on her breathing again.

  “You go through here?” Mr. Dell asked.

  “I did. Almost thirty years ago. And I have a daughter who’s about to graduate.”

  “How come you’re a professor, then? How come you’re not in the Navy?”

  “I was in the Navy for thirteen years. Flew carrier jets. Got tired of it, being away all the time. Having a wife and daughter I rarely saw.”

  The man nodded. “I was a lifer,” he said. “Twenty-two years. Signalman chief. Brian was my son, by my first wife. Lost her to the cancer.” He had tears in his eyes again. He wiped them away with his sleeve.

  “I lost my wife to a drunk driver,” Ev blurted out without thinking.

  Mr. Dell’s eyebrows rose, and then he nodded. “Then you know,” he said. “You know.”

  Ev wasn’t entirely sure what it was he knew, but he understood the sympathy. A foursome of young civilians came down the walk, passing the Dells on either side, trying not to stare at Mrs. Dell.

  “Didn’t send him here to die, goddamnit,” Mrs. Dell said, loudly enough that one of the girls looked back over her shoulder in surprise. “They took him because he could do that math. And he was a diver. A really good one. Supposed to throw his hat in the air one day. Be a Navy officer. Now he’s in a drawer in some morgue somewhere. Goddamn people won’t even let us see him.”

  “Uh, that’s probably a good thing, Mrs. Dell,” Ev said. “They’re doing that for your protection. For what it’s worth, they never even found my wife. So I know something of what you’re feeling, although losing a child is really tough. But they’re not bastards.”

  She turned her face away from him and stared angrily down the walk. From her tone of voice, he had the feeling that she would have spit on the ground if she could have.

  “She’s real upset,” Mr. Dell said. “We both are. They’re being as polite as they can, but nobody can say for sure what happened. We’re beginning to wonder.”

  Ev couldn’t bring himself to tell them about his relationship to the incident, or that he knew anything about the investigation. “Well, they’re not hiding anything, Chief, if that’s what you’re worried about. There’s an official investigation going on. NCIS. Those things take time. You probably remember-they never say anything while the investigation’s still going on.”

  “We met with the superintendent, that Admiral McDonald. In his office. This morning. We showed up early, so they h
ad to go get him. He said he was very sorry that it happened. I believe he meant it.”

  “I can assure you he meant it,” Ev said. “He feels responsible for every midshipman here. We all do. Faculty and staff.” Even as he said it, he could hear the official line creeping into his words. Mrs. Dell, who still wouldn’t look at him, was clearly not buying it, although the chief seemed mollified.

  “We’re gonna walk around some,” he said. “It’s been nice talking to you, Professor…?”

  “Markham. Ev Markham,” Ev responded, standing up and offering his hand to the chief. “And I meant it when I said I was sorry for what happened to Midshipman Dell. We all are. Truly, we are.”

  “Well, we thank you for that,” Chief Dell said, and then pushed the chair down toward the Mexican monument. As Ev sat back down on the bench, Mrs. Dell turned around in her chair. “Didn’t send Brian here to die,” she said in a surprisingly clear voice. “There’s something wrong with this place. Bad wrong.”

  When Ev got to his office, he found Julie waiting for him. She was standing by the windows behind his desk. She was dressed in service dress blues, probably for chapel, he figured. When he had gone through, attendance at chapel on Sundays had been mandatory. Now it was optional. She didn’t turn around when he entered the office. He stopped in the doorway.

  “Going to church services?” he asked, and then realized that services were already in progress. He kept his tone cool. If she was here to apologize for that crack about Liz, he wasn’t going to make it easy.

  “I was,” she said. “Then I changed my mind.”

  “What’s happened now?”

  She turned around and he saw the worry in her eyes. “There was a company-wide room inspection yesterday. The OOD hit four plebe, four youngster, two second class, and two firstie rooms. One of them was ours.”

  Ev frowned. Saturday room inspections were not unheard of, but it was a bit unusual for the officer of the day to hit first class rooms on a weekend.

  “Who was the OOD?” he asked.

  “Commander Talbot,” she said. “First Batt officer. Hard-ass.”

  “I guess if I had the OOD duty on Saturday, I’d be a hard-ass, too. So?”

  She went over to one of the chairs in his office and sat down. “So, when I got back in last night, I found a form two-a report chit. I was ICOR-in change of room. Talbot fried me for having nonreg gear-namely, men’s uniform items-in my locker. An Academy T-shirt, athletic shorts, and a Speedo swimsuit. In my closet. Up on the shelf.”

  Ev didn’t understand-what was the big deal? A boyfriend’s clothes in her room-okay-a ten-demerit pap. It wasn’t as if the OOD had burst in on them making out in her bed. Except Julie looked like that was exactly what had happened.

  “And?”

  “And the report chit specified the owner of the clothes.” She looked up at him. “Dad, the clothes belonged to Dell.”

  He walked over to his desk and sat down behind it. “Dell? What were they doing in your room? I would think they’d have picked up all of his personal effects by now?”

  “I don’t have any idea. I know this: They weren’t there when I went out Saturday morning. Dad, I think someone’s trying to frame me for what happened to Brian.”

  Ev frowned and tried to think it through. First Julie’s underwear on Dell’s body. Now some of Dell’s clothes appearing in Julie’s locker. “Laundry marks again?”

  “I guess. The report chit said the clothes were ‘hidden’ behind a stack of towels.”

  “Didn’t those NCIS people look through your room right after the incident? If these things had been there, they would have found them.”

  “ If they had been there then, sure. But they weren’t. I put clean towels in that locker day before yesterday. We get laundry back on Fridays. This stuff was not there, and I sure as hell didn’t put it there.”

  “Okay, if that’s true, then somebody else put it there.”

  “What do you mean, ‘if that’s true’?”

  “I was stating a logical case, Julie. If you didn’t hide Dell’s stuff in your locker, then obviously someone else did. Now, who, and why?”

  “Someone’s trying to implicate me in what happened to Dell,” she said again.

  “I say again, who, and why?”

  She got up and started pacing around the office. “I have no goddamned idea!”

  “You have real enemies?” he asked. Then he remembered what both the swim coach and Julie had said about her ex-boyfriend, Tommy Hays. “You said you broke up with Tommy. Could he be doing this?”

  She shook her head vehemently. “Tommy’s not like that, not at all. Besides, I think he’s still…still-”

  “You think he still cares for you?”

  “Yes. He’s angry, but I think he’s more hurt than angry. I mean, it’s not like I dropped him for another guy. I’m just facing reality. He isn’t.”

  “Any other lovelorn corpses bobbing in your wake?” he asked.

  She gave him an exasperated look. It reminded him of looks he used to get when she was a teenager. And sometimes from Joanne. “No-o,” she groaned.

  The chapel bell began to toll. “Okay then, let’s play this out,” he said. “There are rumors circulating that Dell’s fall was a homicide, not an accident or suicide. Say it’s true, that it was a homicide. There’s a fair chance that whoever’s planting this stuff is probably the guy who did it. It would just about have to be another midshipman to have this kind of access to your rooms. That or one of the company officers.”

  Julie sat down again. After a moment, she nodded. “Yes, it would. Anybody else messing around in rooms, someone would notice. Even if it was one of the Executive Department officers.”

  “Where was your roommate yesterday?”

  “She’s on an authorized weekend. So the room was empty for most of the day.”

  “You weren’t there?”

  “I was…away.”

  Away, he thought. As in, That’s my business. “All right,” he said. “So let’s hit this from another angle: Who might want Dell dead?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. I mean, the whole notion of a midshipman wanting to kill another mid-it’s outrageous! We don’t have people like that at the Naval Academy!”

  “Well, there’s a notion that might now be in doubt. I mean, there was that case a few years back, where those two cadets killed another kid. As I remember, one of them was Air Force Academy, the other was Naval Academy?”

  “But that was different. That was some warped boyfriend-girlfriend thing.”

  “Like that never happens here? Two guys getting into it over the same girl? All of them midshipmen?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose, but not to the extent where they go get guns or anything.”

  “If Dell was killed, and of course we still don’t know that, it wasn’t with a gun, Julie. But he was wearing your underwear when he hit the pavement. So there was something pretty weird going on there that didn’t come out of the Academy reg book. Now look: Dell was on the swim team. You were on the swim team. Was there someone on the swim team who might have hated you both?”

  Julie sat there, shaking her head from side to side. “I don’t know about Dell,” she said slowly. “I mean, he was just a manager. But no, I can’t think of anyone. We’re a team first, individual winners second. No superstars, no goats. That’s the whole point.”

  But there was something in her voice that got his attention. Not evasion exactly, but just a whiff of artful casualness. If he’d been talking to just another midshipman, he would not have detected it. But this was his daughter, Julie, who used to tell some barefaced whoppers in precisely that offhand tone of voice when she was a kid. Back then, he would have braced her up about it. But now, with graduation, commissioning, adulthood visible on the horizon, he just couldn’t do it. This was Julie, but she was also Midshipman Markham, almost Ensign Markham, USNR. She was already mad at him for seeing Liz. He realized what he was really afraid of: saying som
ething that would pull down a real iron curtain between them.

  “Well, think about it, Julie,” he said. “When that report chit gets into the system, those NCIS people are going to be all over it. They’re going to sound like a broken record: Why was Dell wearing your underwear? Why does a room inspection come up with some of Dell’s clothes in your room? What connects you to Dell? And if not you, who’s doing this shit? And why?”

  Julie nodded but didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she said, “You’re mad at me, aren’t you?”

  He hesitated, terribly aware of all the possible permutations. But then he thought, Hell with it: She wants to be a grown-up. “Yeah, but you started it,” he replied.

  “What I said about Liz DeWinter?”

  “Yes. As if I’m somehow being unfaithful to your mother. Your mother is dead, Julie. Living alone in that house is beginning to wear me down. All of my friends, the close ones anyway, are forever telling me to get back into the world. The first time I do, my own daughter goes off on me?”

  She opened her mouth to reply but then shut it. He thought about softening what he’d just said, then decided to hold fast. Finally, she nodded, got up, said, “Okay, Dad,” and walked out of his office, closing the door gently behind her.

  He threw a pen across the room. Well done, Professor, he thought. Now who’s she going to talk to? Then he had an idea. Turn this to advantage. He’d call Liz, tell her what had happened, get Liz to call Julie. He had a feeling that Julie might need Liz more rather than less come Monday, when that report chit lighted some fuses. He put in a call to Liz’s office, then remembered it was Sunday. He called her home number, and she picked up.

  “Good morning, Professor,” she said brightly.