One September Morning

by Rosalind Noonan

  Flint’s gaping mouth curls into a snarl.

  “Hey,” the stranger says, “how’s it going?” He moves off down the hallway toward the bedroom.

  Flint’s heart freezes in his chest. Abby is already seeing someone.

  Doing his laundry. Shacking up. And here he’d been holding back, trying to give her time to heal…

  Abby presses the edited papers to her chest, wincing. “Do you remember Charles Jump? He was in John’s platoon.”

  Flint shakes his head. “Actually, I don’t. Or maybe I just don’t recognize him naked. Christ, Abby. You don’t waste any time.”

  “It’s not how it looks! I know it’s weird, but he was really good friends with John.” She points to a framed photo on the wall. “He gave me this as a Christmas gift, and, well…” She lowers her voice. “I guess I felt a little guilty because I didn’t even realize that Jump and John were friends.”

  In the photo, two men in desert khakis stand side-by-side, a helicopter perched on the sand behind them. John is grinning, his arm slung around the other man’s shoulders, hugging Dr. Charles Jump.

  “Him? That’s the one they called Doc. Mr. Personality.” Flint scowls. Something about the photo is off, artless. “You know, one photo op does not make a friendship.”

  “I know, but Charles went to Rutgers with John,” she says, worrying the corner of the papers. “They played football together for a while.”

  “Not really a sufficient answer for why the man is in your bathroom, Abby. John had a lot of friends. I don’t see you doing their laundry.” Using his keys, he lifts one corner of a pair of black, low-rise briefs on the table.

  Abby slaps his hand away. “The laundry is a favor, just a one-time thing,” she insists. “And he’s showering here because there’s no hot water in the BOQ, the bachelors quarters where he lives.”

  “Ah! The old ‘no hot water’ ruse.” Flint forces himself to grin, as if it doesn’t matter one lick. As if his entire speech about reevaluating his life priorities and wanting Abby to be among them didn’t just go down the drain along with Doc’s shower suds.

  “Anyway…” Abby smooths out the edited papers on the table. “I like the idea of a new opening. Actually, all your changes look good. If I incorporate this stuff, do you think it will be ready?”

  “Yeah, sure.” He digs his hands into the back pockets of his jeans, struggling to shift his focus from the dick in the bathroom to Abby’s editorial. “I’ve already got a green light at my paper, and I’ve gotten a few nibbles from e-mail pitches. With a little polish it should fly.”

  “That’s a relief.” She smooths the papers onto the table and turns to Flint. “You know, Jump has helped me profile the guys in the platoon.”

  “Really? Maybe I should interview him. I have a talent for dragging out the truth. Journalism tricks.”

  “It’s difficult for him to go there,” Abby says. “But he’s managed to sift through his memories to help me understand the dynamic of that platoon.”

  “Really? Let me have it.”

  “Well, in his capacity as a field psychiatrist, Dr. Jump observed that a few men had intense rivalries with John. He observed friction between John and Lieutenant Chenowith—the West Point grad. Chenowith seemed intimidated by John’s fame, and maybe a little jealous.”

  “I get it,” he says, thinking of the way Chenowith ordered him off the forward base. Was it because he didn’t want Flint to sniff around and find incriminating evidence? “No love lost there.”

  “Jump also said that Antoine Hilliard despised John.”

  “Hilliard?” Flint scratches the stubble on his chin, two days’ growth. Flint hates shaving. He liked to think that the stubble made him look intellectual, but at Christmas his mother told him it was “downright seedy.” “I didn’t pick up on any friction there. But you know, Hilliard was killed by a bomb.”

  “Yes, I heard that, so if he had something to do with John’s death, the trail ends there.” Abby rubs her hands together. “Jump also noted that John and Noah had an intense sibling rivalry, something I was aware of but never considered a factor in John’s death. I find it hard to believe that Noah would ever hurt his brother, let alone kill him, but Jump thinks it highly suspect that Noah fled after John died. He believes that Noah ran off to escape prosecution.”

  “Oh, come on.” Flint smacks his forehead. A few weeks out of town and this nincompoop steps in and fills Abby’s head with asinine theories like this. “Noah isn’t the first war resister to go AWOL and flee to Canada. Granted, the guy had a total meltdown after his brother died, but can you blame him? And honestly, if my boss told me I had to go back to Iraq right now, I think I’d run off to Canada, too.”

  “I understand that, Flint.” Abby pulls the sleeves of her sweatshirt over her hands and folds her arms across her chest. “I want to believe in Noah, too, but often, in homicides, the killer is someone you know well.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Anger sluices through his veins, cold and steely. He rubs his cold hands together, not wanting to lash out at Abby, despite the fact that this conversation has gone from bizarre to ridiculous. “I’ve covered crime beats. I’ve quoted statistics.”

  “Then you have to agree, Noah is a loaded suspect.”

  He shakes his head. “Every soldier in goddamned Fallujah at that time is a goddamned suspect. Pardon my French.” He blows on his hands, and his breath forms a puff in the air. “It’s cold in here.”

  “Freezing, again.” Abby rubs her hands over her arms as she marches to the thermostat on the wall in the hallway. “I don’t know what’s wrong with the furnace. Look, it’s set at sixty-eight, but it’s fifty-two degrees in here.”

  “Fifty-two? Sounds like a thermostat problem.” He joins her at the wall, noticing that the thermostat hangs just a few inches from that photograph of John and Dr. Dickhead. “It wasn’t that cold when I came in a minute ago.”

  Abby shakes her head. “This keeps happening when Charles is here. I wonder if he turns it down when I’m not looking.”

  “Part Eskimo, is he?”

  “I was thinking it’s a reaction to being so hot in Iraq. Overcompensating,” she says in a quiet voice so the idiot in the bedroom can’t hear. “You know, those hundred-and-thirty-degree days you have in the desert?”

  “If that isn’t a load of psycho-crap.”

  “Pardon your French.” She jiggles the thermostat and sighs. “I give up! Suz keeps saying that John’s ghost is turning the heat off.”

  “His ghost?” He grins, watching as Abby crosses to the couch and bundles the fleece throw over her shoulders. Somehow the notion of John’s ghost, like Topper, messing with the furnace lightens things up and almost lets him forget about the jerk getting dressed in Abby’s bedroom. Almost. “You gotta love Suz. So is the ghost trying to save you money on heating bills, or just trying to piss you off?”

  “Something tells me you’re not taking this seriously, but it’s odd. I’ve had a furnace specialist out here and he tells me it’s working fine, which it was while he was here.”

  “Wait!” He blows on his hands for warmth. “Didn’t you say the temperature drops only when Jump is here? I’m thinking Suz is right. John’s ghost is trying to freeze the guy out.” He lets out a laugh, though it lacks heart.

  But Abby is not amused. “Okay, that’s it.” She whirled around, blanket trailing her down the hall.

  “Where are you going?” he asks.

  “To confront Jump about changing the thermostat,” she calls over her shoulder.

  He plants one hand on the wall and leans in over the small square box housing the brains of the heating system. Maybe it’s a faulty wire? He is jiggling the switch when something moves in his peripheral vision. A crashing bang follows.

  He turns to see that one of Abby’s framed portraits has fallen off the wall—the picture of John and Jump.

  “What kind of guy gives a girl a photo of himself with her dead husband as a Christmas gift
?” he mutters under his breath as he bends down to pick up the photo. As he reaches for it he sees that it’s cracked, the glass splintered in small shards. Not only that, but the polished pewter frame is cold to the touch, as if it’s been in a freezer.

  Upon holding it closer for examination, Flint sees the glass fog up before his eyes. Ice crystals blossom in separate patches then spread until the entire panel of glass is painted white with…frost?

  And the frame is so cold, he worries that his fingers might adhere to its surface, frozen together. He releases it, letting it drop the last inch or so to the floor as he straightens.

  “What are you doing?” Abby asks, coming up behind him. “Flint! Did you just toss my picture on the floor?”

  “I didn’t break it. It fell off the wall, shattered. I just picked it up and…”

  “I can’t believe you.” She kneels and picks it up. The moment she sees the smashed glass, her face crumples, her lips puckering in a pout that takes a good twenty years away. “You didn’t have to break it.”

  “I didn’t! Abby…”

  “You don’t have to like Jump,” she says in a quavering voice, “but please, have some respect for John’s memory.”

  “Abby…” He gets accused of having no respect, but the guy getting dressed in Abby’s bedroom, wearing the clean clothes she laundered, is a good guy? Frustrated, Flint wheels away from her, not wanting to say anything that will further inflame the situation, knowing that nothing he says or does in this moment will be construed the right way.

  “I gotta go.” He grabs his laptop and strides to the door, expecting Abby to try and stop him. To apologize. To maintain the peace. To beg him to stay.

  But she is conspicuously silent as he pushes out the door into the driving rain.

  My mistake, he thinks. My mistake from the beginning. I was wrong to e-mail her when I learned about John. Wrong to try and help her. Wrong to come here. Wrong to fall for her.

  Opening up to Abby was like sticking a knife in his own gut and twisting it around a few times. I am the king of schmucks.

  Chapter 54

  Outside Fort Lewis

  Emjay

  When you’re on guard duty, every dark doorway might open to an insurgent with a rifle. Every person walking on the street might be your murderer.

  Emjay Brown did not want to venture out alone.

  He would have preferred to stay in the apartment, keeping watch at the window.

  But he needed to ease the pain, dull the fear. He ran out of pills from Doc, burned through the beers and whiskey he bought with his last pay check.

  And the only way he knows to self-medicate in a pinch is whiskey.

  So here he is, creeping along the street in the middle of the night, a moving target as he passes under the yellow gloom of streetlights.

  Not a good hood to be out in at night without a partner, without a second pair of eyes to cover you.

  But he has his rifle.

  “A soldier never goes anywhere without his rifle.”

  “Sir, yes, sir!”

  His trench coat covers the weapon just fine, so people don’t freak out. Of course, he walks with a limp, the rifle swinging against his leg when he moves. That’s okay. Better to be bruised and alive.

  In the distance, two white lights pop out of nowhere, and he breaks into a run.

  The lights are coming at him, closing on him, faster, faster…

  He lunges toward a bus shelter and swings inside for cover just before the lights of a car try to sweep over him. They miss, but too close for comfort.

  His breath is a raspy hiss in the hollow shell of the bus stop.

  Damn, but they shouldn’t send him out here alone. A one-man mission is suicide in the desert.

  The pumping, slamming, jamming in his chest has got to stop. Goddamn, it’s so fast. But it will only slow when he gets a drink.

  And where are the reinforcements?

  His mission objective is two blocks away.

  Two long blocks.

  Heart racing. Erratic. It’s going to pop before he gets there.

  This is the dark stretch of road, no light here by the park.

  Like you need a park here in the middle of nowhere, here where green surrounds you.

  He crouches low as he moves along the park’s perimeters. It’s a relief to be out of the light, but there are too many shrubs and trees in the park where insurgents could hide.

  Stay low.

  Keep away from them.

  Suicide bombers.

  Roadside bombs.

  Rocket-propelled grenades, missiles that will scorch your soul.

  He scurries quickly past a hunk of stone the size of a tractor, then crouches behind a bench. If his heart would stop thudding, clamoring, it would be easier to get there. With his sleeve, he wipes the sweat from his brow and stares into the park, looking for them.

  Fear flares in his chest at the thought of moving on. How will he get there alive with all these obstacles coming at him? Oh, God.

  Another set of white lights floats toward him…and another. And one in the distance. A convoy.

  Our guys? Friendlies? And can they be trusted?

  He squints into the light, hopeful, until it happens.

  The explosion from one of the cars, a shot that cracks the night.

  “Eerrr!” Belly in the dirt, he fires his weapon, bracing his finger on the trigger. But the familiar jolt of rapid-fire rounds never comes. There is only one shot, a single bullet that skitters off harmlessly into the dark abyss.

  What the hell?

  What is this piece of shit in his arms?

  He looks down and sees, not his familiar M-16, but an old hunting rifle.

  What nightmare is this?

  He combat-crawls under the park bench and curls up there, shivering. Something skitters over his head and he scratches his scalp feverishly to scrape off the itch. If he stays here, low and quiet, maybe they won’t come. Maybe the convoy will move past him and the night will become quiet again. Squeezed into the compact space, he thinks himself safe.

  Safe as the hill beyond the chicken coops on a balmy summer night.

  Chapter 55

  Lakeside Hospital

  Madison

  “So…do you think I’m crazy?” Madison asks as she goes through the books on the shelf of the shrink’s office. Mostly dusty, fat textbooks. Snooze.

  “I think crazy means different things to different people,” he answers. “The question is, would you like to have more psychological stability? Would you like to feel more grounded?”

  “Yes…and no.” She takes a deep breath, thinking about it. “I’d like to feel safe, like it’s okay to stand still for a minute. But then, I wouldn’t want to give up the ability to fly.” She turns back to face him, the man in the navy doctor’s coat who now sits straddling his wheely desk chair like a cowboy in a saloon. He’s cute—a buff body lingers under that lab coat—but way too military for her taste. Something about him seems so anal. Probably washes his soap dish. “The thing is,” she goes on, pacing over to the wall where a bunch of degrees are mounted, “if you’re going to keep flying, sometimes you’re going to crash and burn.”

  “And you don’t mind that? The moments when you’re crashing?”

  “Of course I do.” She reads the first diploma from Rutgers. That’s right. She remembers he went to school with John. “Charles D. Jump.” She turns back to him and crosses her arms. “What’s the D. stand for, Chucky?”

  He winces. “I usually don’t tell, but I will if you promise not to call me that again?”

  “Hit a soft spot, did I?” She grins. “So what should I call you?”

  “Doc would be fine.”

  “As in, ‘What’s up, Doc?’” When he doesn’t laugh, she shrugs. “Yeah, I guess you heard that one before.”

  “Only a hundred times.”

  She can feel him watching her as she crosses to the closed door, where two fresh navy lab coats are hanging on a hook.
“What’s with the lab coats?” she asks, pulling one jacket off its hook and slipping it on. The fabric feels crisp under her fingers. “Do you need a degree to wear one of these ugly things?”

  “Yes, you do. That ugly coat actually costs about a hundred thousand dollars in student loans.”

  “Ouch. That’s fickle fashion for you.” The sleeves dangle down to her knees and she’s getting the soft scent of fabric softener. Suddenly, the act of trying on the coat seems sort of sexy, like she was jumping into his bathrobe or something. Quickly, she sheds the jacket, hangs it up and goes to the window.

  She didn’t want to come here. It’s nerves that are making her blabber on like this, nerves and a streak of rebellion that flared when she learned Dr. Charles Jump was going to be her therapist. When she agreed to see someone, she pictured a kind, nonintimidating woman like Abby.

  Not a rangy man with eyes like glue. Not a shrink with a hot bod under his lab coat. Definitely not someone so army.

  Aren’t you supposed to be able to pick your own therapist?

  Madison didn’t like her mother hooking up with a doctor who carved the roast at Christmas Eve dinner. “Geez, Ma, you really beat the bushes to find someone for me,” she had complained to her mother.

  But, hey, it could be worse. What if she complained and they switched her to a warty old lech? Or a brittle birdwoman? Or one of those foreign doctors you can’t understand? Sienna had to see this Asian gynecologist who cracked a joke about burned eggs, and Sienna freaked, thinking that the eggs in her ovaries were scorched. Scary.

  “You know, you’re welcome to have a seat,” he says.

  “Do you want me to lie on the couch?”

  “You can if you want to.”

  “Do other people come in and flake out there?”

  “Many people find it freeing. Relax the body, free the mind.”

  “I think it’s weird.” She goes to the leather couch and perches on its square arm. The leather feels slippery under the seat of her jeans. “Does somebody clean it, like the seats on a commercial jet?”