This Enemy Town

by Marcia Talley

  “Tough break, Kevin,” I said with a smile. I turned to Professor Black. “So who ended up playing the Beadle?”

  “And someone had to sub for Jonas Fogg, too.” Professor Black twiddled with his beard. “Never happened before, to be two actors down. It was a bit of musical chairs,” he said, finally getting around to answering my question, “but we got it covered. One of the grave diggers had played Beadle Bamford in high school, and we sent Dean Kelchner in for Fogg.”

  “Kelchner?” Kevin erupted, groaned, pressed his palm flat against his temple. “Kelchner couldn’t act his way out of a wet paper bag.”

  Professor Black grinned mischievously. “There is that,” he said. “But we wrote his speech down and pinned it to the back of one of the lunatics. Kelchner managed fairly well.”

  “The show must go on,” Dorothy said in a small, sad voice just as the plastic surgeon blew into the room, his lab coat flapping. He shooed everyone out except Kevin and his mother.

  “Just a few stitches,” Kevin told us after the surgeon was done and the nurse allowed us back into the treatment room. A small, neat bandage covered the wound under Kevin’s impressively bruised eye.

  Dorothy hunched in a corner, arms folded across her chest. “You need to see a specialist.”

  “They have fine plastic surgeons at Bethesda, Mother. Some of the best in the country.”

  “They just don’t want to pay for proper specialists, is all. Damn the military.”

  I could understand her point of view. First her husband, now her son, was getting, in her words, royally screwed by the military.

  A few minutes later doctor number one returned and cleared us all out again. I leaned against the wall outside the door to Kevin’s room, engaged in some serious multi-tasking. With my right ear, I listened to Medwin Black tell about the cruise he took to the Greek isles the previous summer. My left ear stayed glued to the door, trying to overhear what the doctor inside the treatment room was saying.

  “What were you taking, young man?”

  There was a pause, during which time Medwin was dancing to the music of bouzoukis on Rhodes late into the summer night; meanwhile, I imagined Kevin’s brows lifting in surprise. “Taking? I wasn’t taking anything! Glucosamine for my knee. That’s all I can think of.”

  “Were you nervous? Stressed out? You exhibit all the symptoms of an overdose of tranquilizers.”

  “Kev?” Dorothy again, playing the mother card. “Did you drink anything before the show?”

  “Jeeze! I ate lunch. Drank milk with that. When I got to Mahan, I had a Dr Pepper. That’s it. Say, Doc, you don’t think I was drinking, do you?”

  Next to me Medwin snorted, and I realized he had finished his travelogue and was listening to the conversation, too. “Hah!” he grunted. “I’ve seen midshipmen go on stage so pickled that even if you shot them, they wouldn’t fall down.”

  “No, no,” the doctor on the other side of the door hastened to add. “There’s absolutely no trace of alcohol in your blood.”

  “Of course there isn’t,” Dorothy chimed in. “He’s an actor. He had a show to do.”

  “Did you find traces of tranquilizers, then?” Kevin asked with a tinge of panic.

  “No, and I wouldn’t expect to. Most tranquilizers are completely metabolized by the body.”

  “I can’t explain it, then,” Kevin said.

  “A mistake,” said his mother.

  Ten minutes later Kevin was released. Over the tearful protestations of his mother, Professor Black drove the midshipman back to the Academy.

  I chauffeured Dorothy to her home in Davidsonville, settled her into a chair in front of the TV, fixed her a cup of tea and a bowl of hot oatmeal with butter and brown sugar, and waited with her until I was sure she would keep it down.

  It was nearly seven before I returned home to Paul. He’d gone ahead and fixed dinner, the sweetheart, although about the only good thing you can say about Paul’s five-alarm chili is that it clears your sinuses.

  I was applying a medicinal glass of red wine directly to the inferno raging in my stomach when Murray Simon called. “Paul, pick up!” I yelled.

  When Paul joined us on the line, Murray said, “Hannah, I have good news and bad news.”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, Murray, get on with it! Please!”

  “The good news is that the FBI is dropping the case against you,” Murray said. “Seems they picked it up under pressure from NCIS, and now that the sting operation is over, they don’t think there’s enough evidence to convict you.”

  “I’m so relieved.” I could actually feel my blood pressure going down.

  “The bad news is that NCIS isn’t similarly inclined. They may be taking the case forward on their own.”

  I was speechless, gasping for air.

  Paul filled in the blank. “If there isn’t enough evidence for the FBI, why is there enough for NCIS?”

  “Well, there is that other matter.”

  “Murray!” I’d found my voice at last. I actually screamed into the phone. “Sometimes you can be the most infuriating man!”

  “What other matter?” Paul was spitting nails.

  “We know who NCIS’s key witness is, the person who saw Hannah leaving Mahan Hall the day Jennifer Goodall was murdered.”

  I gripped the arm of my chair so tightly that I must have left my fingerprints embedded in the varnish. “Who?”

  “Are you sitting down?”

  “I’m sitting down.”

  Murray cleared his throat. “It was Dorothy Hart.”

  CHAPTER 25

  That night I lay in bed, numbly studying the shifting shadows cast on the wall by the light of the full moon shining through the branches of the tree outside my window.

  For a long while Paul lay awake beside me, trying out possible scenarios, but after a particularly lengthy lull in the conversation, followed by regular snuffling sounds, I turned my head to find that he’d drifted off to sleep.

  I’d thought Dorothy was my friend. We’d worked together, laughed together, cried together. How could she betray me with such a monstrous lie?

  I knew I had been nowhere near the back of Nimitz Library on the day Jennifer Goodall died. Dorothy had to know it, too.

  Was she simply mistaken? That hardly seemed likely.

  Was she purposely trying to frame me? As strange as her behavior had been in recent days, I couldn’t believe that either.

  My bet, after staring at the ceiling for quite some time, was that in pointing the finger at me, Dorothy believed she was diverting suspicion from somebody else, somebody far more important to her than I was.

  There were only two people on that list: her husband and her son.

  Kevin, I knew from Emma, had an ironclad alibi. He’d been doing a Physical Readiness Test at the time of the crime. The PRT was a killer of another kind: sixty-five situps, forty push-ups, run a mile and a half in ten minutes or less, or a midshipman doesn’t graduate. Kevin’s PRT had been monitored by a couple of straight-arrow firsties.

  Ted Hart had an ironclad alibi, too. He’d been briefing the Joint Chiefs.

  When I asked him to, Murray Simon had confirmed both alibis.

  For a change of scenery, I turned over in bed and watched the digital clock cycle from 12:01 to 12:02 to …

  Three!

  Hannah, you idiot! There were three people on Dorothy’s short list. Her husband, her son, and herself.

  I’d always discounted Dorothy as a suspect. She was too frail to overpower a healthy young woman like Jennifer Goodall. Besides, Jennifer’s body had been found in Sweeney Todd’s trunk. There was no way Dorothy, in her weakened condition, could have moved her body from …

  I sat up straight in bed. I switched on the bedside lamp. I pounded Paul on the back until he groaned and opened one bleary eye.

  “Dorothy did it!” I shouted, slapping him lightly on the thigh to emphasize each syllable. “I’m not sure how, but she did it. She got Jennifer to come to Mahan
Hall on some pretext, lured her up to Sweeney’s tonsorial parlor, then clobbered her with the hammer and pushed her into the trunk.”

  I folded my arms across my chest and leaned back against the headboard. “I’ve been working on the assumption that Jennifer had been killed elsewhere and her body moved to the trunk because Dorothy told me that’s what happened. But I just this minute realized that I only have Dorothy’s word that it happened that way.”

  Next to me, Paul fluffed up his pillow, folded it in half and stuffed it between his back and the headboard. “I thought Dorothy had an alibi. Didn’t you tell me she was getting a manicure?”

  “According to Dorothy.” I slapped myself on the forehead. “Damn! Why didn’t I ask Murray to check that one out, too?”

  Paul rolled over on his side to face me. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Hannah.” He stroked my arm. “Okay. Let’s assume for a minute that you’re right and that Dorothy is the killer. What’s her motive?”

  “Try this. Somehow Dorothy found out that Jennifer Goodall was blackmailing her former boss, Hart, over that contract business. Either Hart himself told Dorothy or Dorothy figured it out. Maybe she ran across her husband’s checkbook or something. So, Dorothy killed Jennifer to shut her up, in order to salvage her husband’s career.”

  “Works for me.”

  “Or, Dorothy really believed her husband was having an affair with Jennifer Goodall and killed her in a fit of jealous rage.”

  “That works for me, too.”

  “Or both of the above,” I finished triumphantly.

  “What I really don’t understand is what happened to Kevin,” Paul mused. “Here he’s all set to go on for the ailing star, it’s his big break, and he blows it all by taking some sort of tranquilizer. That just doesn’t wash, does it?”

  “Okay, let’s think about that.” I gnawed thoughtfully on my thumbnail. “If Kevin didn’t take the tranquilizers on purpose, where did he get them from?”

  “It couldn’t have been from the dining hall,” Paul said, gently pulling my hand away from my mouth. “That food comes directly from the kitchen in family-style serving dishes, and gets passed around the table. Everyone at Kevin’s table would have been whoozy.”

  “Kevin said he picked up a Dr Pepper when he got to Mahan.”

  “Then Kevin’s lying, Hannah. There aren’t any soft drink machines in Mahan.”

  “He didn’t have to go to a soft drink machine. The cast and crew have a refrigerator in a little room backstage. We keep a supply of soft drinks in there. You drop a couple of quarters in a coffee can….” My voice trailed off.

  I could see myself—was it only three weeks ago?—sitting in the tech room listening to Gadget as he helpfully explained the rules of the fridge. “And I think I know how Kevin ingested the tranquilizer! I just have to prove it! I’ll need to have another look at Mahan Hall.”

  “Hannah?”

  “Huh?”

  “Can’t it wait until morning?”

  I burrowed under the covers and wiggled closer to my husband, resting my head in the crook of his arm. “Professor Ives, are you trying to distract me?”

  “I certainly am,” he whispered, his breath warm against my hair.

  CHAPTER 26

  Monday morning, early, I dressed in my recently acquired jogging gear, jammed a wool cap over a hopeless hairdo, and jogged stylishly off to the Academy, leaving Paul to finish his coffee and newspaper in peace.

  At Gate 3, I fished the chain holding my ID out of my cleavage and showed it to the Marine guard, who studied the ID briefly before waving me through. “Have a good day, Mrs. Ives.”

  “Oh, I intend to, Marine.”

  Classes were already in session when I let myself in through the door of Sampson Hall and wound my way quickly up the stairs and down the corridor that connects Sampson with Mahan. Once inside Mahan, I made a bee-line for the tech room and opened the refrigerator.

  Because the show had ended its run, most of the soft drinks had been consumed, but a handful of Cokes, Diet Cokes, and Gatorades remained, some still with labels: BILL G, KAREN—YOU TOUCH-A, YOU DIE. I found none of Adam Monroe’s favorite Dr Peppers.

  I closed the fridge and looked around.

  In the corner by a television set and a stack of videotapes sat a black plastic garbage bag. I’m not terribly fastidious, but the thought of rooting through several days of adolescent garbage with my bare hands made me gag. I swallowed hard, undid the plastic ties, spread the bag open, held my breath and peered into its depths.

  Starting with the pizza boxes, I removed the contents of the bag one item at a time, gingerly, sorting them into neat piles around me. By the time I got to the bottom of the bag, I had collected five pizza boxes, approximately twenty miscellaneous twelve-ounce soda cans, ten sixteen-ounce plastic soda bottles, exactly seven wine cooler bottles in assorted flavors (a dismissal offense, but I’ll never tell), and a single, plastic Dr Pepper bottle with ADAM MONROE, HIS DRINK scrawled in black magic marker across the label.

  I also found a surprise: an empty blister pack that had once contained ten tablets of Zofran, Dorothy’s antinausea medication. I sniffed the empty package. It smelled like strawberries. Adam Monroe would never have detected the medicine in his already spicy, fruity Dr Pepper.

  As far as I was concerned, it was an open-and-shut case. Dorothy had set a trap for the midshipman playing the Beadle, not knowing the young man had been stricken with mono and that Kevin had already been tapped to sing in his place. But unfortunately, Kevin had drunk the Dr Pepper intended for Adam, with near tragic consequences.

  Holding the Dr Pepper bottle by the mouth with my thumb and forefinger, I set it carefully on a shelf along with the empty blister pack, then started shoving the garbage back into the bag. I was making so much noise that I didn’t hear someone come in behind me.

  “What are you doing here, Hannah?”

  I tucked the pizza box I was holding into the garbage bag and turned around ten times more calmly than I felt. “Good morning, Dorothy. I was so busy picking up in here that I didn’t hear you come in. How’s Kevin this morning?”

  Dressed in jeans and a blue and gold Naval Academy jacket, Dorothy glared at me from the top of the stairs. Under the baseball cap she was wearing, her face grew dangerously red, and I realized, too late, that mentioning her son’s name had been a terrible mistake.

  “He’s at Bethesda,” she snapped. “His eye is infected. But you wouldn’t care about that!”

  “Infected? But I thought the doctor said his eye would be fine.”

  “Hah!” Dorothy snorted. “What do they know? I told you Kevin needed a specialist! This morning the whole side of his face was hot and swollen, and his eye was glued shut. Kevin reported to sick bay, and the duty driver rushed him to Bethesda, and they’ve diagnosed—” Dorothy stopped to catch her breath. “He’s got peri something, peri … peri … periorbital cellulitis! That’s what it is.”

  She took two steps down, then paused on the third. “They did a CT scan and found orbital involvement. Kevin could go blind, Hannah, and it’s all your fault! If you hadn’t insisted on taking me to that goddamn hospital, Kevin would never have been hurt!”

  As irrational as Dorothy seemed, I couldn’t fault her logic on that one. “I guess you’re right about that,” I confessed. “But you were very ill, Dorothy. You wouldn’t be able to stand where you are today, bitching at me like this, if I hadn’t taken you to a doctor for help.”

  “If anybody had bothered to tell me that Kevin was going on for Beadle Bamford,” she continued coolly, “I could have retrieved the soda. Kevin would never have drunk it.”

  “You put your Zofran into the Dr Pepper, didn’t you, Dorothy? That’s why you didn’t take your medicine. You didn’t have any left. You’d put it all into Adam Monroe’s Dr Pepper.”

  Dorothy ignored me. She drifted down the remaining stairs and crossed the room to the wall where members of the cast of Sweeney Todd had painted their names,
joining the names of countless other midshipmen who had, over the years, acted in Academy musical productions. “See that,” she said, pointing to a spot about ten feet up the wall where Kevin had printed KEVIN HART, “JONAS,” 2004 in crimson paint.

  “Kevin was wonderful in the role,” I gushed. “Better than the guy who did it on Broadway, if you ask me.”

  Dorothy turned furious eyes on me. “Don’t you dare patronize me, Hannah Ives.”

  I raised both hands in an attitude of surrender, but in the time it took me to say, “Sorry,” Dorothy’s hand dove into her bag and came out holding an object that flashed silver in the light streaming down from the ceiling fixtures. “You couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you, Hannah? I had everything under control, then you came along to screw things up.”

  I backed away. “What’s that in your hand?” I asked stupidly. It looked like one of Sweeney’s prop straight-edge razors, it was so large and shiny.

  Without warning, Dorothy lunged.

  I staggered back. Something pricked my arm, and when I looked down, I saw that Dorothy had sliced open the sleeve of my brand new jogging outfit. I rubbed my arm where it stung, and when I pulled my hand away, I noticed a dark stain creeping along the edges of the cut.

  Dorothy’s arm swung up again, and as it began to descend, it suddenly registered that the razor was all too real. Dorothy had attacked me with a box cutter.

  I didn’t stay to argue with her. I turned and ran.

  Behind me, I heard Dorothy’s bag hit the floor with a plomp as she lightened her load, preparing to take off after me.

  I raced up and out of the tech room, crossed the stage and stumbled down the stairs on the opposite side, heading for the door that opened into the hallway near the water fountain. I skidded to a halt in the stairwell. Some damn fool had piled the folding chairs used by the orchestra against the door, blocking the exit.

  I turned back to the stage door, but Dorothy was blocking it, box cutter in hand, her face incandescent with rage.