Tagged for Death

by Sherry Harris

  CJ shook off the guy holding his right arm. “Okay, Sarah. I’ll come alone.”

  A murmur of disapproval rippled from the crowd. I lowered the window, letting out a long whoosh of air. Footsteps pounded up the stairs. A few seconds later, there was a brisk rap on the door.

  “I’m here. Just me,” CJ said.

  I hesitated. Once upon a time, I would have believed anything he said. This time I’d have to trust him again. I opened the door, yanked him in, and slammed the door shut. I hugged him, breathing in his fresh, soapy smell until I thought about Tiffany.

  I stepped back. “Why didn’t you call me?” I asked.

  “I was in Portsmouth. For a funeral. The state trooper who was killed last week. What’s going on?” CJ looked worn-out. Thinner than the last time I’d seen him a month ago. His already-high cheekbones were more pronounced. He looked warily at the slanted ceiling as he moved into the room. His six-two build kept him in the center of the space this time.

  “Is your mike and cell turned off? No one can hear this?” I asked.

  “No one.” He crossed his heart, gave me a half smile.

  I kneeled down, moving the panel that gave me access to the eaves behind the low wall. I’d hidden the bloody shirts when I realized CJ might not be alone. I held them up for CJ to see. He paled.

  He made a call on his cell phone. “It’s okay. Everyone can leave. Just a misunderstanding about my whereabouts. You know women. You show up ten minutes late and they panic.” He mouthed “sorry” as he listened. For once, I didn’t care what he said. I wanted everyone to clear out so CJ could explain what was going on.

  He closed his phone. I walked over to the window. The police shooed away the people gathered on the common. The firemen headed back up the street while the squad cars left. I hoped all the folks had enjoyed their Sunday-afternoon show.

  CJ came up behind me. “What the hell did you do, Sarah?”

  CHAPTER 4

  I whipped around and shoved him hard in the chest. He stumbled back a couple of steps. I wanted to do it again, but someone might be out in the hall “just in case,” not to mention he was armed and I still didn’t even have a bra on.

  “Me? This is about you and Tiffany.”

  I walked over to my couch. I would have stomped if Stella hadn’t lived below. I plopped down. He sat on the wooden trunk that served as my coffee table and extra storage. Our knees almost touched. His pale blue eyes were serious. The words tumbled out of me: the sales, the bags, finding, realizing. I trembled.

  “How did this happen, Chuck?”

  Our knees were almost touching. He leaned forward, cupping my face in his hand for a moment. He brushed his thumb across my cheek. Had he ever done that to me before? Was it a gesture he used on Tiffany? I jerked back.

  He dropped his hand. “You’ve never called me Chuck. Not once. You hate Chuck.”

  I let that lie there between us. How had we gotten to this point? Oh yeah, I remembered. Not. My. Damn. Fault.

  “Let’s focus on the bloody shirts,” I said. “Maybe I should have just tossed them in the Dumpster.”

  “No, I’ll take them. I’ll call Tiffany. See what she has to say.”

  “When is the last time you talked to her?” I tried to ask this with a steady voice, but I failed miserably. Part of me wanted to know, but part of me hoped he’d say it was none of my business.

  “Last week. She called me about a doctor’s appointment.”

  “You answer her calls.” I hated the whiny voice that came out of me. I stood up. “Sorry.”

  “Yeah, me too. For a lot of things.”

  “How did the clothes end up this way?”

  CJ shook his head. “No idea.”

  “I almost cut the cuffs off the shirt.”

  CJ attempted a grin. It turned out nothing like the boyish grin I’d fallen in love with when I was eighteen. “Do you have the original bag the shirts were in? I’ll take it all, until I figure out what’s going on.”

  “You’ll call me when you know, right?”

  “I promise,” CJ said. There it was again—the chasm between us—the broken promises.

  A few minutes later, I walked back to the window. I watched CJ stuff the bag of clothes in the small space that served as the trunk for his hatchback Sonic. Maybe I should have confronted Tiffany. Letting CJ handle it was easier than facing her myself.

  I looked across the town common at DiNapoli’s Roast Beef and Pizza and realized I was starving. It was two doors down from Carol’s store. After a quick shower, I threw on clean jeans and V-necked shirt. I finished my look with a quick swipe of mascara on my long lashes. I walked to DiNapoli’s, a place I discovered soon after moving to Fitch two years ago. Roast Beef and Pizza places were a New England thing. I’d never heard of them at any of our other assignments. Some places added clams: Roast Beef, Pizza, and Clams. Part of New England’s quirky charm.

  Rosalie DiNapoli rushed out from behind the long counter, where I normally placed my order. She pulled me to a seat at an old wooden table in the long, narrow space to the right, which provided seating. She went back to the open kitchen. Open, due to necessity. It allowed for multitasking. Any employee could ring up customers, wrap orders, answer the phone, or pitch in to chop vegetables—whatever task needed handling in the moment. The cook, Rosalie’s husband, Angelo, could deliver food to tables and keep an eye on things. It was my belief knowing what was going on was more important to Angelo than the multitasking aspect of having an open kitchen.

  The kitchen had been like this for years and wasn’t, as Angelo would tell anyone who’d listen, a desire to imitate high-end restaurants with their showy kitchens and star chefs. (Angelo, however, had a deep-seated belief that he was a star chef, and all who came after were imitators and frauds.)

  Rosalie brought me a large basket of fresh, toasted garlic bread topped with gooey fresh mozzarella, which dripped off the sides. She pointed to the bread. “On the house.” She looked over at her husband, Angelo; her normally warm eyes were fierce. “It’s on the house, Angelo. Sarah’s had a bad day.”

  He raised his arms in surrender. Angelo’s name meant “messenger of God” in Italian. He took his role seriously. I’d seen him chase speeders down the road. Rumor had it he’d threatened the town manager more than once. I’d also heard he lectured his priest on a weekly basis. To him, the town codes were guidelines.

  “Are you okay?” Rosalie asked, with brown eyes round in her lovely, lined face. Rosalie was a class act. A lady. I’d asked her once if she was from here. To her, “here” meant Ellington; to me, the Boston metropolitan area. “Oh no. Angelo and I grew up in Cambridge. Our parents were very upset when we moved all the way out here.” (“Out here” was sixteen miles, a distance any military family would consider living next door to their families.)

  “We needed a little space,” Rosalie had said. That I understood completely.

  “What happened?” she asked, this time pulling out a chair to sit across from me.

  I took a big bite of the cheese bread. I could say it was a police exercise, but this was a small town. The dispatcher probably lived next door to someone, who knew someone, who would lunch here tomorrow.

  “It was a huge misunderstanding. I was trying to find CJ. I’m so embarrassed.”

  Rosalie patted my hand. “You want the minestrone? It is better than usual today. I don’t know what Angelo did.” She dropped her voice. “He doesn’t know, either.”

  Angelo set the soup down in front of me. “This will help.” He sat down across from me.

  I could tell he had something on his mind. I slurped in a big spoonful. “This is delicious. What did you put in it?” I thought I’d tease him a little.

  Angelo glanced over at Rosalie. “She thinks I don’t know what I did, but I do.”

  I laughed.

  “I know you think you got it bad right now. Let me tell you a story. When I was growing up, we were so poor we had to eat lobster every Saturday night.�
��

  I stopped eating. “Poor” and “lobster” didn’t go together in my world.

  “Every Saturday, the trains brought the lobsters down from Maine. I had to ride my bike from Cambridge to Boston. After they unloaded, I’d pick up what they’d dropped and take it home for Mama to fix for dinner.”

  I waited for the punch line. This had to be one of Angelo’s jokes. Before he got to it, a group of people came in, calling him over.

  When I finished my soup, Rosalie brought me a cannoli. “If Lou told you he knows what he put in the minestrone, he’s lying.”

  “What about the lobster story?” I asked.

  “That’s true.”

  At nine o’clock, someone knocked on my door. For the first time in months, I hoped it was CJ with news. It was Stella. She held a bottle of red wine. She lifted it. “I have scotch downstairs, if you’d prefer that.”

  I guessed she was coming in, whether I wanted her to or not. “The wine is fine,” I said, stepping back to let her in.

  Stella looked over the place with a critical eye. “You aren’t a hoarder, are you?”

  I looked at the black bags. “No. They’re going to the base thrift shop. I needed to sort them.”

  “If they weren’t here, I’d say the place looked better than it has in ages.” She picked her way through them and settled on the couch.

  I grabbed a corkscrew and two glasses. I wondered what she wanted, if she was going to ask me to leave. This day had been a fiasco. I sat on the opposite end of the couch. “Is this your way of kicking me out?”

  Stella looked surprised. “Of course not. Who hasn’t had trouble with the police?”

  I couldn’t think of anyone I knew who had trouble with the police.

  “I wouldn’t mind an explanation, though.” Stella took a drink, watching me over her glass.

  “It was a police exercise.”

  Stella shook her head.

  “A misunderstanding.”

  This time she raised an eyebrow. “That was one hell of a misunderstanding. I thought, mistakenly perhaps, that you and I were going to be friends.” She waited me out.

  Good Lord, I’d be terrible in an interrogation. “I just can’t tell you. Or anyone.”

  Stella sipped her wine.

  “CJ, Chief Hooker, is my ex-husband.”

  “The whole town knows that by now. I knew because my aunt is the town manager. She said you’d be trouble.”

  “I guess I proved her right.”

  Stella smiled and lifted her glass. “Here’s to trouble. I never liked my aunt that well, anyway.”

  After an hour of chatting, I had a pleasant buzz. “What do you do?”

  “I teach voice at Berklee College of Music in Boston. I also give private lessons here. I hope they won’t bother you.”

  “Not at all. I wondered about all the music coming from your place.” We hit an awkward pause in our conversation. I didn’t know Stella well enough to sit in silence. “Do you know the DiNapolis?”

  “Angelo regularly threatens my aunt, the town manager. He loves my other one. He harasses the selectmen. He thinks his priest should go to him for confession.”

  She left a few minutes later, singing as she went down the steps. I still didn’t know anything about her trouble with the police.

  I slept until nine on Monday morning. A lot of the night had involved tossing and turning. I’d even gotten up for a couple of bouts of pacing. My body had been ready for sleep. My mind screamed, No! CJ finally called me at ten.

  “Sarah, when was the last time you saw the French-cuffed shirt?” He kept his voice low. Voices rumbled in the distance. A couple of car doors slammed. It sounded like he was outside.

  “Yesterday, when I gave it to you. Did someone take it out of your car?”

  “No. Before then. Did you move it with you to the apartment?”

  In the haste of our move—his from being escorted off base because of his “misconduct” and mine to get away from Tiffany—the packers had mixed up a lot of our clothes. I had his favorite sweater. He had my cocktail dresses. We’d long since traded our clothes back, even though we still both had unopened boxes tucked away. Mine were under the eaves, and his were . . . who knows where?

  “I gave you everything I had of yours.”

  “You didn’t keep the shirt as a token remembrance? Like when you took my rugby shirt when we were dating?”

  I’d loved his rugby shirt. It had dropped to midthigh, was soft, and smelled like CJ. I’d slept in it most nights. It drove my mother crazy. “Trust me. A remembrance was not on my mind four months ago. Burning it maybe, sleeping in something of yours? No way. It had to be at your house. Unless Tiffany took it.”

  “When did you last see Tiffany?”

  “I don’t know. Probably the day I moved off base. She sat in the patrol car a few houses down from ours. It kind of creeped me out.”

  “Have you talked to her since then?”

  “No. Why would I?”

  “No phone calls?”

  “No phone calls.” I hoped he didn’t pick up on the hesitation in my voice.

  “No contact since you left base?”

  “A Facebook message . . . one night after a few glasses of wine.... It was stupid. Why are you asking me all this?” I heard a dog bark through the phone.

  “What did you say in the message?”

  “I told her to call off her buddies. They were leaving all kinds of nasty messages on my Facebook page. I told her she was welcome to you, that I was done.”

  CJ paused before he spoke again. “Could it have been perceived as a threat?”

  “Of course not. If anything, Tiffany and her friends were threatening me. What’s this have to do with what I found yesterday?” I didn’t want to mention bloody shirts if he was out with other people. “Where are you?”

  “At Fitch. Outside the enlisted troops’ dormitory. Blood’s smeared on the floor of her dorm room. Tiffany’s missing.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Late afternoon our kids started to show up. In a crisis, if Dad was busy, Mom wasn’t so bad. They were upset about the blood in Tiffany’s room and in an uproar that she was missing. The first group included Tiffany’s best friend, Jessica, who’d been particularly hateful to me; James, not Jim; and a couple of other guys. Jessica fell into my arms, her blue eyes overflowing with tears. She apologized.

  “I shouldn’t have said those things. It was stupid.”

  I patted her back. “It’s okay,” I said. “You’re forgiven.” I brushed a piece of long blond hair out of her face. James, who always introduced himself as “James, not Jim”—naturally, everyone called him “Not Jim”—pulled me in for a hug. James is a great hugger. I always called him James, which he appreciated. He was older than the rest, more mature. He was the one who showed up to mow my lawn or shovel snow when CJ was deployed. He lingered after parties to help me clean up. It was never anything more. No misconduct.

  I wanted to send them all home, to be by myself. But if Tiffany didn’t show up soon, CJ was going to be in a mess way worse than the misconduct charge. Four months ago, I’d wished all sorts of trouble on CJ: body parts falling off, pox, hair loss, but nothing of this magnitude. I decided to keep the kids here, listen to their chatter. Maybe I could find out something helpful.

  “Wow, this place is a dump. Your home on base was a lot bigger.” Jessica clapped her hands over her mouth. “Sorry.”

  The living room was still filled with the trash bags full of stuff set to go to the thrift shop tomorrow. I laughed. “You’re right. This is all headed to the thrift shop. I need to stick it back in the Suburban.”

  Everyone grabbed a couple of bags and loaded them into the car. I did a quick count of how many bags were in the back of the Burb. In the morning, I’d recount them. No one else was going to sneak a bag into this old girl again.

  “This looks much better,” Jessica said when we returned to my apartment. “Where’s all of your stuff? That collection of
glass hearts, that bronze statue, all your paintings. I loved your painting of the ocean. Why didn’t you hang it up?”

  “I don’t have room for everything. Some of it’s at CJ’s house. Some of it’s in boxes under the eaves.” I pointed toward the slanted wall.

  “Well, it’s cute . . . cozy,” Jessica said.

  It was cozy. A worn Oriental rug, purchased at a flea market in Ohio, covered the painted-white wooden floors. My grandmother’s rocker sat next to the window looking over the common. An indestructible plant I’d inherited when a friend PCSed—had a permanent change of station—which to civilians was simply a move. The couch, with down cushions, I’d bought at a garage sale in Monterey. My mom had made off-white slipcovers for it. Assorted paintings covered the walls—one from the Fitch Thrift Shop, another a steal at a Concord antique store. There was a noticeable lack of photographs. I’d sent most of them with the stuff to CJ’s house.

  I gave a couple of the guys some money to buy snacks for all of us at Stop & Shop.

  “How could she do this to us?” Jessica wailed. “I’m scared. What if some mad ax murderer’s running around on base?”

  “This isn’t about you. It’s about Tiffany,” James said in a patient tone. “There’s no ax murderer. Besides, you know how to use a gun.”

  “I only get to carry it on duty. What will happen after work?” Jessica asked.

  “Stay with other people and you’ll be fine,” I said. I almost added “the dorms are safe,” but maybe not—given the blood in Tiffany’s room.

  “Tiffany could just be AWOL for some reason,” I said. Absent without leave was a serious charge. “She’ll turn back up. When’s the last time any of you talked to her?”

  “The day before she took leave,” Jessica said. “She didn’t say anything about going on a trip.”

  “When was that?”

  “Last Wednesday. She had a shift Monday morning. They checked her room when she didn’t show up.”