This Enemy Town

by Marcia Talley

  Someone had solved my problem for me. Jennifer was gone for good.

  My boots slithered along the treacherous sidewalk; I spread my arms for balance. I tried to dredge up sympathy for Jennifer’s friends, her family, if only to prove that I wasn’t as blackhearted as she. She had a mother somewhere who would grieve, I told myself, a mother who might have nothing now to cherish but a high school photo, a young girl’s canopied bed, pencil marks on the kitchen door that marked young Jennifer’s growth from child to woman.

  It would be hours before the official identification, of course, before the police knocked on that mother’s door in Kansas or Iowa or snowbound North Dakota, and the woman’s grieving would begin. It would be days more before Jennifer’s name hit the news. Paul would hear it first from me.

  I turned left onto Prince George Street and slogged the half block to my door. I fumbled with my key and eased it into the lock. The welcoming blast of heat from a furnace working overtime hit my cheeks like a Caribbean breeze.

  “Paul! I’m home!” I peeled off my gloves and arranged them to dry on top of the radiator. I kicked my boots underneath.

  “Paul!”

  Where the heck was he?

  I hung my jacket on the hall tree my father had built, left with us when he moved to a smaller place in Snow Hill on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and padded in my stocking feet toward the kitchen. I stuck my head through the basement door. “Paul!”

  “I’m in the office,” he called. “Keeping the world safe from the Infidels!”

  I should have known. Thursday night. Paul would be playing Civilization III.

  I didn’t go much for computer games. Emily had given me The Sims for Christmas, and even though it hogged the hard drive on my laptop, I’d installed it just to please her. Together we’d created families modeled on people we knew, and moved them into houses of our own design—a mother-daughter kind of thing. Then the Dennis character I’d named after my brother-in-law self-immolated in a kitchen fire, turning himself into a tombstone in the back garden, and I threw up my hands.

  “Install a smoke detector,” Emily had suggested, hanging over my shoulder, kibbitzing. “And make sure he studies cooking.” Ever helpful, she downloaded a Sean Connery character from the Internet, Mel Gibson, too. I tried to hook Sean up with the freshly widowed Connie, but inexplicably, she refused. Little fool. Then characters started making decisions on their own—Mel wouldn’t go to work, and while Mrs. Bromley’s plumbing overflowed, a burglar broke in and stole her TV. I decided that real life was complicated enough without taking on a whole fictional community.

  Life is real, life is earnest. I don’t remember who said that, but the quote sprang to mind as I lingered at the top of the basement stairs and wondered how I would break the news about Jennifer Goodall to my husband. “Can you come up a minute, sweetheart?” I stammered. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  If my voice sounded strange to him, he didn’t let on. “I can’t leave now,” he yelled back, “the Greeks are massacring the French. Give me a moment. Why don’t you put on the kettle for tea.”

  Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea. At least I knew who said that: Fielding. The way my life was going lately, just like the British in times of trouble, I was always hauling out the tea.

  The kettle was rumbling, nearing a boil by the time Paul finally joined me, sneaking up behind me where I stood at the stove, kissing the back of my neck. “Sorry, sweetie. The Zulus launched a nuclear attack on the Iroquois and I had to wait it out.” He took me gently by the shoulders and turned me around, easing me gently back against the oven door. “Ummmm, you smell like—”

  “Careful,” I warned, worrying about the gas burner blazing merrily on high behind me, “or you’ll set my butt on fire.”

  He kissed the tip of my nose. “You smell like turpentine!”

  “Paul,” I began, the teakettle quite forgotten. “Sit.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Just sit,” I said.

  I thought I’d cry. But standing at the stove studying the puzzled face of the man who had loved me unconditionally for more than twenty-five years, feeling secure in the comfort of my centuries-old kitchen with familiar objects all around me, I was dry-eyed, practically convinced that the whole horrible evening hadn’t actually happened.

  Paul backed himself into a chair, then patted the seat of the chair next to him. I sat down and with no preamble told my husband that Jennifer Goodall was dead.

  Paul blinked once, slowly. A muscle twitched along his jaw. “Jesus,” he said.

  I folded my hands to keep them from shaking and rested my forearms on the table in front of me. I gave him the details, watching his face as I rattled on.

  I told him how the paramedics gave way to campus security who locked all the doors and hustled everyone—actors, orchestra, directors, and crew—into seats in the auditorium. I described how they secured the scene, awaiting the arrival of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, who took down our names and telephone numbers. Eventually NCIS kicked us out, one by one, and told us to go home. They’d be calling later for our statements.

  “How …?” Paul asked.

  “A horrible head injury,” I said. “What caused it, I don’t know.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. Paul drew a long breath. “This’ll be a major headache for the Academy, of course.”

  I nodded, hating the press corps that invariably materialized at the merest suspicion of a scandal, fully formed and hungry, out of Annapolis’s cobblestones.

  “Who …?” Paul was working his way through the five Ws. We’d established the what, where, and when of it; but only time could answer the questions that were nagging at him now. “Who would do such a thing? And why?”

  I shrugged, at a loss for words.

  After a few moments he added, “When they know why, I suppose they’ll know who.”

  “They’ll be looking for people with motive,” I said, following that train of thought to its logical conclusion.

  Paul had been studying his thumbnail. He gazed up at me with a wistful smile. “Are you asking if I have an alibi, my dear?” The smile, such as it was, vanished. “It’s not much of one, I’m afraid,” he continued, not waiting for me to reply. “I’ve been home all afternoon, alone, playing with myself.”

  I smiled at his little joke, stalling for time. I had told Paul about speaking to Jennifer Goodall, of course, but I conveniently forgot to mention my blowup. I was ashamed of it, for one thing, embarrassed that I’d let her get under my skin like that. But my marriage wouldn’t be worth a plugged nickel if I waited for the cops to come along and tell him about it first.

  “Actually, I was thinking about my alibi,” I told him.

  Paul’s eyebrows came together. “Oh?”

  “That conversation Jennifer and I had the other day? The one where she made up that lie about you?”

  “Go on.”

  “It wasn’t exactly a conversation, Paul. It was an old-fashioned, back-stabbing, mud-slinging, your-mother-swims-after-troop-ships kind of shouting match.” I flopped back in my chair, rested my head against the rungs. “Oh God, Paul, after what she said to me, I could have cheerfully drawn and quartered the witch.”

  “I’ve shouted at a lot of people, Hannah,” Paul said, dismissing my confession, “but I’ve never killed any of them.”

  “Yes, but Jennifer’s and my little tête-à-tête was overheard by Midshipman Small and practically everybody in the cast.”

  “I see.” Paul squinted at the wall clock. “I suppose a lot will depend on exactly when she died.”

  I looked at the clock, too. Eleven forty-five? Nearly midnight. It felt like three in the morning. “She must have died shortly before her body was found. Tim told me her body was still warm.” I shivered, remembering the young man’s valiant but failed attempt at CPR.

  A new thought occurred to me. “Jennifer could have been alive when the killer threw her into the trunk
, Paul! She might have been lying in there unconscious, all through the first act. It might have taken hours for her to bleed to death.” I remembered the blood covering her face, a dark glistening red.

  I buried my face in my palms. “God, Paul, anyone could have done it.”

  The teakettle began to scream. Paul rose from his chair to shut it off. “But wait a minute, Hannah,” he said gently. “I’m confused. I thought you told me that the set’s been off-limits to anyone but the tech crew since last night’s rehearsal.”

  I followed my husband to the stove, reached into a cupboard and selected two mugs. After I’d dropped the tea bags in, Paul filled the mugs with boiling water.

  “That’s true,” I said, plunging my tea bag up and down. “But there’s no security at all, really. The doors were not locked. Aside from the tech crew, anybody could have wandered into the auditorium, even a lost tourist.”

  I ran down a mental list of the tech crew. With the exception of me, I couldn’t think of anybody who had a beef with Lieutenant Goodall. They probably didn’t even know her.

  As for the cast, the only midshipmen I’d seen talking to Jennifer Goodall had been Kevin and Emma. Had Kevin killed Jennifer to keep her from reporting him for harassing Emma? On the other had, if Emma had confided in Jennifer about her sexual orientation, and Jennifer had threatened to out her, that could have driven Emma to murder her, too.

  “What happens now?” Paul wondered, taking his seat.

  “We’ll be interviewed, of course. NCIS told us to expect that.”

  “When?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t have the vaguest idea.”

  We finished our tea in silence, while variations on the theme of Kevin and Emma played themselves out in my head.

  Paul finally coaxed me to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. As he snored gently beside me, I lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling. The numbers on the digital clock clicked from three to four to five before I mumbled, “This is ridiculous,” crawled out of bed and headed for the bathroom. I filled the tub with hot water, dumped in a quarter cup of lavender bath salts, added another tablespoon for good measure, and settled in for a good long soak.

  I was standing at the sink, my head wrapped in a towel, brushing my teeth, when the telephone rang. It was 6:00 A.M.: way too early for someone to be calling. It had to be bad news.

  I dove for the telephone, trying to silence it before it could ring a second time. “Hello?” I croaked, and braced myself for the worst.

  It was Dorothy, her voice surprisingly bright. “Hannah, I’m sorry to be calling you so early, but I just had to let you know right away!”

  “Let me know what?” I whispered, turning my back to my sleeping husband and sitting down carefully on the edge of the mattress.

  Incredibly, the Academy had reached a decision about the show. “That woman had nothing to do with the musical,” Dorothy reported. “They think it may be just a coincidence that her body was left there.”

  “And, so?”

  “We’re still on! They’re finished collecting evidence,” she continued. “We’ll have to get a new trunk for Sweeney, of course, since they’ve taken ours away. Wasn’t there one at Echos and Accents, that place off Chincoteague?”

  Quite frankly, I couldn’t remember.

  “I’m sure that’s the place!” Dorothy chugged on. “Could you pick it up for me, Hannah? You live so much closer than me.”

  Like a good little Do-Bee, I agreed even though I knew that the only way I’d fit that trunk in my LeBaron was on end, and I’d have to put the convertible top down. That would be an adventure in February.

  “See you tonight,” she chirped, and hung up without saying good-bye.

  I stared at the receiver, too dumbfounded to speak. It was six in the ever-lovin’ morning. How could she possibly know …? Maybe it would make some sense after I’d had some coffee.

  I rinsed out my toothbrush and had just hung it up to dry when Paul stumbled into the bathroom, bleary-eyed, his cheeks and chin dark with stubble. “To whom do I owe that wake-up call?”

  “Dorothy Hart.” I wrapped my arms around him and squeezed. “Sorry.”

  Paul rested his chin on the top of my head and hugged me back. “What did she want at this ungodly hour?”

  “It was good news,” I said, feeling a bit light-headed from the combination of heat, steam, and lack of sleep. “The Academy’s decided.” I took a step backward and waved my hand with a flourish. “In the best of theater traditions, sir, the show must go on.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Sweeney Todd was a smash, selling out from its first night on. Standing room only, too. Morbid curiosity might have driven ticket sales into the stratosphere, of course, but each night after the curtain went down, no one could argue that the show wasn’t worth the price of admission. The collective intake of breath, the seconds of stunned silence, followed by a standing ovation of bravos and ooh-rah-ooh-rahs that seemed to go on forever were proof enough of that.

  The Naval Criminal Investigative Service had been busy, as well. Even before the post opening night congratulatory beers we’d downed at Ramshead Tavern on West Street had worked their way out of our systems, two NCIS agents had gathered up their notebooks, tape recorders, and video cameras, and moved from their permanent second floor offices in Halligan Hall to a small conference room in the Academy’s Administration Building. There, in the shadow of the Naval Academy Chapel dome, they could conduct their interviews in neutral (and far more central) territory.

  It was late in the second week of the show before Dorothy and I met to compare notes at Drydock, the snack bar in Dahlgren Hall. By then it seemed that everyone we knew had run the NCIS gauntlet.

  “How’d they conduct the interviews?” I wondered aloud as we merged into the end of the sandwich line. “A to Z? By rank?”

  Dorothy shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’m an H and they didn’t get to me until today. Kevin says they talked to him on Monday, so I think midshipmen were the first priority.”

  I grabbed a plastic tray and a packet of potato chips and inched forward. “Makes sense, Goodall being the SAVI officer and all, although I hate to think of a midshipman being responsible. It was so …” I paused, involuntarily shivered. There were no words to describe the horror of what had been done to that poor woman’s head. “There was so much rage in it.”

  Dorothy set her tray down on the tray track. Using both hands, she yanked open her packet of chips and offered me one. “I worried about you,” she said just as I stuffed a chip into my mouth.

  I chewed and swallowed quickly before answering, not wanting to deliver a shower of crumbs along with my reply. “Because of the argument, you mean?”

  Dorothy nodded.

  “I told NCIS about the fight right up front,” I confessed, “so the interview wasn’t too bad. They called my husband in at the same time, so I had Paul along for moral support. At least as far as the door,” I added. “NCIS kept him cooling his heels in the hall while they interviewed me and vice versa.”

  “Next!” One of the servers behind the sandwich counter was looking up at me expectantly.

  “Seafood salad sub,” I said. “For here. Lettuce and tomato.”

  I watched quietly, remembering, while the server used an ice cream scoop to dip salad out of a huge plastic tub and heap it on a submarine roll. With gloved fingers she added a pale pink slice of tomato and a single frill of lettuce, before smashing the top down with the flat of her hand and skewering the whole thing together with a fringed toothpick.

  That’s how I’d felt, I thought, after I finally got out of that conference room—squashed and skewered. I’d dreaded the interview, of course, not least because of my very public argument with Lieutenant Goodall. But I’d been as forthcoming as I could, even going so far as to admit that I loathed the woman, figuring that NCIS would be up to speed on my checkered history with Jennifer Goodall anyway.

  Describe what you did that afternoon.

  I h
onestly couldn’t remember. After lunch—had it been a cheese and garlic potato at Potato Valley, or had I skipped lunch that day?—I’d gone downtown shopping, but for what, I couldn’t say. A greeting card, perhaps? Or a funky pair of socks at Goodies?

  Around two I’d stopped in at Mother Earth, I knew that for sure, to check out the new feng shui paraphernalia my sister Ruth had for sale: five element aroma candles—water, earth, wood, metal, and fire!—and the glass and light “fogger” fountains that Ruth claimed would not only add beneficial moisture to the dry winter air in my home, but freshen, purify, and energize it by neutralizing free-roaming negative ions or some such nonsense. The agents’ eyes had glazed over by that point, but I soldiered on, confessing that I found the fountains beautiful, though, like Chihuly glass bowls on tripods, wafting clouds of super-fine mist into the air, a far cry from the turquoise plastic humidifier I stored under the bathroom sink, I can tell you, and $200 more expensive, too. Frankly, I think they were glad to see me go.

  I picked up my sandwich and set it on my tray. A tent card propped up on the counter advertised a COACH DENNIS JACKSON—a steak and cheese sub—and I watched as the server began assembling one for Dorothy.

  “I wracked my brain trying to remember what I was doing that day,” I commented to Dorothy as we pushed our trays farther on down the line.

  “Me, too,” Dorothy said. “In all the confusion, I nearly forgot that I was getting my nails done. And thank God for that,” she added, reaching for her sandwich. “At least the manicurist can vouch for me.” She curled her fingers loosely around her thumb and stared at her fingertips. “Damn. Look at that. I need to go back.” Then she held her fingers out for my inspection. “Big Apple Red. Do you like it?”

  I stared in silence at the spot where the glossy crimson enamel had chipped off her pinky. Somebody’s dead and she’s worrying about her fingernails? I was glad I kept mine short.

  “I wonder what time they think Jennifer was attacked?” I said, trying to turn the conversation away from beauty tips and get it back on track.