Frank jumped up, startling the orderly and causing several people in the waiting area to wince.
“Dr. Walcott! A moment!”
Baxter Walcott paused in recording and eyed Frank with discomfort. He stepped back towards the patient rooms in preparation to bolt.
“Please, wait! I just need a moment,” Frank said, stopping himself so as not to startle the doctor further.
Walcott quietly spoke something to the secretary, who shrugged in feigned ignorance and suddenly busied herself with her computer.
“I’m sorry, but unless you’re suffering acutely, you’ll have to book an appointment,” Walcott said, tucking a fresh pen into a sagging pocket and turning to leave.
“Wait! No! It’s about Bill Beauchamp!”
Baxter Walcott froze.
“Yes! Yes, it’s about Bill!” Frank fumbled a few steps closer.
“What about Bill?” Walcott asked, his voice deadly quiet.
“We insured Bill Beauchamp. I’m investigating his claim,” Frank said, sensing the need to be both brief and to the point.
Walcott peered at Frank.
“It shouldn’t be an inconvenience, really, I just need to clear up a few things. A brief statement should do it.”
“Who are you with?”
“Barringer Insurance.”
“You mean you’re not... with them...” Walcott began, before tapering off and glancing about. His eyes alighted for half of a moment upon one of the many cameras screening the waiting room of the ward.
Frank blinked. “Like I said, I’m with Barringer Insurance.”
Baxter Walcott stared at Frank and looked to be thinking very hard.
“Dr. Walcott? Maybe I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
Dr. Walcott suddenly said: “Take a walk with me.”
He grabbed Frank at the shoulder and ushered him around the desk and the secretary, all but pulling him behind as he walked from the waiting room into the depths of the ward. They passed room after room, some open and some closed.
“Where are we going?” Frank clopped along behind Dr. Walcott.
“Sh.”
“Maybe you misunderstood me, Doctor. I just need this basic statement signed—”
Walcott crowded him inside a darkened exam room and closed the door. He then rushed to the back of the room and began fishing around in a drawer near a gleaming piece of expensive looking machinery. Frank itched his arm and looked warily about.
“I think I caught you at a bad time.”
“You wanna know what killed Bill Beauchamp?” Walcott asked, his voice a harsh whisper over the rattling of the drawer’s contents.
“Not particularly, but it’s my job to know if he’s defrauding Barringer.”
Walcott let out a derisive snort in the darkness.
“Money, money, money! That’s the least of their worries. They throw money around like autumn leaves. This is much bigger than money.”
“You were on his research team. Are you insured for the same amount as Bill Beauchamp? That’s all I want to know, then I’ll be gone. Totally gone.”
“Of course I was. I still am. None of that matters.”
Frank exhaled. Just like that, another potential criminal was proven harmless. No fraud here after all. Despite his exhaustion, Frank felt a bit disappointed. Again. He fished in his thin jacket for the statement he’d drawn up and notarized himself in the car on the drive over.
“If you could just sign this then—”
“No.”
Frank paused and closed his eyes. He nodded to himself. It somehow seemed fitting that he would finally get to the bottom of it all and falter at the very last step.
“With all due respect to your friend, how he died doesn’t really concern me right now,” Frank said, his voice hollow in the darkened exam room.
“Bill didn’t die,” Walcott said, grabbing something from the drawer and spinning back around to face Frank. “He was murdered.”
Frank stepped back. He couldn’t see what was in Dr. Walcott’s hands, but he didn’t like it, whatever it was. He fished around behind him for the doorknob with one hand while warding Walcott away with the other.
“Whoa, whoa. Don’t tell me that. Do not tell me that! My work is done here! I’m kind of out of my depth!”
Frank managed to pop the door open just as Walcott reached him with what he held. A white sliver of light from the hallway fell upon the doctor’s open hand. In it rested a strange bullet: dull ceramic in color with a tiny red capping.
“Bill was trying to solve the glass and water issues...” Walcott said, staring at the diode as if seeing it for the first time.
“The what issues? What the hell is that thing?”
“The diode has a minor charge to it that zaps the solution inside of it when it hits its target, but it’s always reacted poorly on contact with glass and water. I’m not sure of the mechanics of it. That was Bill’s job. He was the engineer. He thought he had it fixed... but he didn’t.”
“And what am I supposed to do with it?” Frank asked, shying away from the doctor’s open palm as if it held some poisonous insect.
Walcott snatched Frank’s wrist before he could react and pressed the diode into his hand. Frank squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for impact.
“Don’t be an idiot. It’s not going to blow up on you. It needs to be shot out of a gun. And even then it won’t work. Not on you anyway. Although it’ll hurt like hell.” Abruptly, Walcott started like a spooked rabbit. “They’ll have noticed my absence already. I’ve been gone far too long.”
He sidestepped around Frank and out to the hall, pressing Frank further into the room.
“Wait here,” he whispered. “Leave in another five or so minutes.”
“I still don’t know what you expect me—”
“Tell everyone. I wish I could be of more help, but I’ve said too much already and I can’t afford a reassignment like Sarah got. She was our third team member. Now she’s God knows where.”
“This is not my area. I’m an insurance agent!”
“That doesn’t matter anymore,” Walcott hissed. “You’re the best shot those kids have got. Get the word out, Frank, or Bill’s death will just be the first in a long, long line.”
With that Baxter Walcott swept out of view and back down the hallway, leaving Frank alone with the diode in the antiseptic silence and the dark.
Chapter Eight
MAX HAULDEN WALKED ALONE under the September tinged leaves of the chestnut trees of Annapolis, Maryland. Their canopies spread above him like yellow sheets of linen and even the sunlight that filtered through them felt weighty with age. Annapolis was an old, solemn town, beautifully quiet in the fall.
Max could see the copper dome of the Naval Academy chapel, oxidized to a sharp turquoise, from the front porch of his parent’s house. Every time it tolled the hour with its muted ringing he caught a faint whiff of his childhood, and he frowned. The Naval Academy was the reason he was no longer welcome in the house of his father. Every time he returned to this place he saw his father, and his grandfather before him, everywhere he looked—whether he wanted to or not.
All that physically remained of his grandfather were his pictures, his medals, and his house. Such was not the case with his father: his father could still sting him, or at least try to, although his son’s employ with the Tournament had sapped Frederick Haulden of any real ability to hurt Max. But whatever problems the Tournament took away it also replaced. Max had long since learned that problems never go away: they just change faces.
Max was eighteen and still a student at NAPS, the Naval Academy Preparatory School, when he and his father parted ways. Max’s classmates had finally accepted him for what he was after two years of trying to befriend him to no avail, and then another two years of trying to bully him–again, to no avail. He was a cold and distant boy, and they eventually gave up bothering with him. Still, his demeanor fascinated them. Whereas other unpopular students were acti
vely rejected from social circles, Max Haulden’s seclusion was self-inflicted. Moreover, he didn’t bother trying to move beyond it. His nonchalance confused his peers. Nonchalance was the hallmark of popular people, not loners.
The girls also liked his hair. It was light-brown and a bit longer than most. Tired of it falling in his face while he read, Max pushed it all back with cheap gel, for functionality only. This, combined with his slightly pinked cheeks, gave the impression that he was romantically windblown most of the time, and even rather attractive. No girl would ever admit it, though. They knew where he stood in the pecking order. Max knew nothing about any of this, and if he did he would have thought it ridiculous.
All Max ever seemed to want to do was read and observe, but he was a senior, so he was also entangled in the long, involved process of applying to the Naval Academy—or rather, Fredrick Haulden was entangled in the long, involved process of applying for his son. Frederick took it upon himself to ensure that Max was to become the third generation of Hauldens to grace the halls of “The Academy.”
Fredrick was an imposing figure. He was taller than his son even at fifty-five, but frumpier, and with the barely perceptible beginnings of a stoop. He was still fairly muscular, but what was once bulk was beginning to settle downward. He had the distinct look of an aging military man, like a wet camping tent, where the basic outlines remain true to form, but the filler is a bit saggy. He still had a commanding voice, however, the voice of a captain. That had never left him. Frederick was frequently away while Max grew up, so when Max thought of his father, his mind brought forth the voice first and foremost.
His mother, however, he could describe without error, down to the gold and pearl broach she always wore on the lapel of her jacket, and the jade-butterfly clip that kept her peppered hair pulled tightly back from her forehead. Nancy Haulden was a predictable woman. She had known his father since childhood, almost twenty-five years before Max was born. She and his father grew up next to each other, not half of a mile from where their house now sat just southwest of Church Circle. It was the house that his grandfather had given them as a marriage present.
Max knew his father’s father, the only grandfather anyone in his family ever talked about, through pictures and stories only, but he figured he had about enough of them to write a tome. They shared the same nickname although his grandfather’s full name was Maximilian, whereas his was Maxwell. His mother often said that this was because he was “so like his grandfather, and yet his own man.” How they had known this at the time of his birth, Max had no idea.
Max did look remarkably like the young cadet he saw in framed, black and white photos on high shelves and coffee tables about his father’s house. They had similarly thin, small noses, and the same light complexion. Mostly, though, it was the expressions that the two wore that likened one to the other: it was a worried look, almost sad, in which their eyebrows sloped gently down and away from a softly ridged forehead, their eyes always a shade shy of fully open.
Perhaps it was partly because of this resemblance that his father took it so hard when, upon receiving his inevitable acceptance, Max told him he would not be attending the Naval Academy.
“Excuse me?” Fredrick said.
“I said I’m not going.”
“Of course you are, son. The commendation is in, the acceptance is back. It is what is happening.”
“Georgetown also accepted me.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes.”
“Then get out of my house,” he said in his captain’s voice: not a yell, not a statement. A command.
So Max left. He left his father’s house and moved into his grandfather’s, where his mother had often stayed when Fredrick was away during his tours of duty back before he had retired. It was still family property, but nowadays his mother mostly used it to entertain guests. She felt it had a friendlier atmosphere than her and Fredrick’s own.
His mother came to see him that first night. She found him in his grandfather’s old study reading in his old desk-chair, and for a moment she silently stood and watched. Absorbed as he was in his book, he seemed not to notice her. He looked so much like Maximilian that it seemed to her that the house had been transported back in time sixty years. Despite the blowout earlier, Max looked calm, if a little sad. Or perhaps it was just the same look he always wore made more profound by the day’s events.
“I’m not going to that school, mom,” he said softly without looking up from his book.
“You broke your father’s heart.”
“It was handed to him, just like it was handed to me. The only man that earned a spot there was granddad.”
Nancy approached and embraced him and pulled him in close to her, and Max knew then that she would support him regardless.
Twice a week throughout the summer following Max’s graduation from NAPS, Nancy would visit him at her late father-in-law’s house where he took up residence, always on the pretense of bringing food, but in reality just to talk to him. He never saw his father, and if the two of them ever spoke about Fredrick it was always within the context of Maximilian. When Nancy would visit she would often find her son reading in the study. “You know, your grandfather loved that book,” she would say, or “In high school I would often come up to this study just to talk with your grandfather. He used to keep a jar of caramels right there.” Back at his own home he had found these stories repetitive, even a bit burdensome, as if he was in constant comparison, but in his grandfather’s house he found them empowering. It was only when he was surrounded by the ghost of his grandfather that he began to understand the man he was.
The longer Max lived in that house, the more he came to realize that Maximilian would have supported his choice to abandon the Naval Academy. His grandfather’s spirit wasn’t a military one; it was entrepreneurial. He came from a family of doctors, but struck out on a different path and succeeded in the military. Max would do the same, even if it meant leaving his father behind.
Max went away to Georgetown that fall, as good as his word, but he always returned to his grandfather’s house during the summers. His mother would find him in the study or on the back porch. More often than not he was reading, but sometimes he would be writing or just watching the movement around him. He made several friends at Georgetown, and was even dating a girl for a few months during his sophomore year, but he put everything on hiatus during the summers when he came back to Maryland. He was transient, unable to commit fully to either residence as home.
One day during the summer of his junior year, as he sat reading in the study, he thought he heard his mother come in the house and start up the stairs. He quickly finished the paragraph he was on and marked his space as the door to the study opened.
“Mom, I was thinking that we could fix up the—” he began, but then he looked up and saw that the person standing in the door frame wasn’t his mother at all: it was a tall black man wearing a cream-colored suit, his head shaved to a gleam. Max froze. Only his bobbing Adam’s apple betrayed the alarm coursing through his body.
The man moved to a leather seat in front of the desk and sat down in it. He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and steepled his fingers. He looked directly into Max’s eyes.
“Can you take an order, Max?”
Max quietly closed his book and set it on the desk in front of him, but kept his hand upon it.
“Who are you? Did my father send you?” he asked, his voice level.
“Your father? No. My name is Greer Nichols. We’ll get to me and what I do in time. What I need to know right now is if you can take an order. From someone other than your mother.”
“My father did send you. Get out of this house.”
Max looked at his grandfather’s old rotary phone, sitting on its own stand just to the right of the desk. It looked to weigh at least twenty pounds. Perhaps he could throw it...
“I wouldn’t do that Max, not yet. At least not until you’ve heard me out.”
&n
bsp; Something in the tone of the man’s voice made Max stop. Despite its low rumbling, it contained no threat. The man ran a well-manicured hand over his head and sat back in his seat. The leather creaked.
“Who are you?” Max repeated, again, more worried this time. The man’s lack of hostility bothered him, and the calm way that he sat in his chair was unsettling, like this was his own study, like nothing at all was out of the ordinary.
“Can you take an order? We’ve been watching you, and are divided on this.”
“Who’s we?”
“Just answer the question. Please.”
The man was looking around the office as he spoke and seemed to be paying only peripheral attention to the conversation. Suddenly Max had the feeling that somehow the man in front of him, a man he had never seen before, knew precisely how Max would answer the question even before he asked it. He felt like he was already caught in something—that he’d been caught as soon as this man walked in the room. Max looked at Greer for a moment, waiting until his focus fell back upon him before answering.
“If it’s from the right person, yes,” Max said.
Greer nodded immediately: obviously this was in line with whatever he was thinking himself. Max was faintly annoyed as well as alarmed. Perhaps he should have lied.
The man then took a dark blue folder with a metallic sheen from the left breast of his jacket and set it on the desk before Max.
“Take a look at this. If you like what you see, call the number written inside and we’ll take you to meet the rest of your team. If you don’t like what you see, or you think this is some sort of joke, do us all a favor and throw it away and never speak of our conversation again. The choice, as always, is entirely up to you”
Greer got up, flattened his lapels, and moved towards the door. Max noticed that Greer removed another folder, identical to the one in front of him, from beneath the right breast of his jacket.
“Whose is that?” Max blurted out. Greer paused.
“Not yours,” he said simply, before nodding a brief farewell and stepping out.
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