An Unlawful Order (The Chase Anderson Series) (25 page)

The band was now playing
The Marine Hymn
. Hickman, Sims, Chase, and every Marine in the hangar were forced to assume positions of attention. Her mind raced with what she might expect from Hickman. Surely Sims had briefed him that both she and Stone had been questioned in his office by a detective from HP.

The music ended and she turned to find that Hickman had already closed the final few yards between them. Before she could utter a greeting, “What sort of trouble are you mixed up in, Anderson?”

Chase’s eyes darted to Sims, who looked away.

“The detective was hoping I had helpful information about a woman who …” here she was stammering … she’d have to confess who the woman was and the connection to Paul Shapiro … “who died in an accident.” Chase had no idea where the last part came from. At the moment, she welcomed it as a gift. Perhaps Melanie’s death had been an accident. Chase didn’t know the extent of the investigation, the results of Melanie’s autopsy. Perhaps Paul’s sister had merely fallen and not been shoved because of her involvement in an alleged cover-up conspiracy as Paul was so determined to believe. She couldn’t wait to tell Paul about O’Donnell and how he’d been chasing after the delusions of a man believed to be suffering mental breakdowns and disorders.

“Who’s the woman?”

Chase resisted the temptation to clear her throat, though that’s what she desperately wanted to do. “Actually, she’s Paul Shapiro’s sister.” She waited for the news to settle across the general’s face before continuing, but Hickman spoke first.

“You knew Shapiro’s sister?” Hickman folded his arms across his chest. He wasn’t much taller than Chase, an inch or so. She felt as uncomfortable with this eye-to-eye position as she did in front of his desk at attention when his eyes scanned her from head to toe.

“No, sir.” she said, realizing she had to quickly repair whatever he was thinking. He’d threatened to ban Paul from the base. Hickman would consider Chase’s knowing this reporter’s sister as a breach of loyalty. “Our paths had only crossed a time or two. I didn’t even know she was Shapiro’s sister until I read about her death in the paper.”

Hickman was about to ask another question when someone stepped to the mic and shouted playfully, “That’s a wrap, folks. See you next week for the final run-through.”

He was clearly agitated with the interruption. “Then why were you questioned?”

Chase recognized that Sims was hunching his body to hear her response. He looked like a goon, turning his head, preferring his right ear.

“The woman was a doctor my husband had been seeing,” she said. “The detective thought I might have had insight to her life that could lead him to a better understanding of how she died.”

Peripherally, she saw they were being approached by another Marine. She glanced over and saw that it was Colonel Figueredo, himself, who looked, from his quick gait, to be in a hurry to reach them. “General,” he shouted, still several yards away. His voice boomed through the near-empty hangar and caused several Marines to stop what they were doing. “May I have a word with you?” To Chase, he said in a cursory tone, “Skipper, will you please excuse us?”

“Certainly, sir,” she said, and using the moment as an escape from the general’s third-degree, she slinked out of the hangar when Colonel Farris joined the group and it was clear to her that the four were engaged in something serious.

She was standing beside her rental car when Figueredo emerged from the hangar. He was wearing sunglasses, and his head was down as if he were plowing through a head wind. She’d spotted his car in the parking lot and had parked hers as close as possible. He was digging into a pocket, and she detected the unlocking click of his electronic locks. She made her move.

“Major O’Donnell called me this afternoon,” she blurted and relished the moment of her ambush. His head had shot up, and though his eyes were hidden behind the dark aviators, she could tell from the sudden rise of his eyebrows above the rims and from the deep lines across his forehead that she’d been successful. His head jerked left and right, as if he were looking for an escape, or, possibly, as if looking to see who else was nearby. Other than a handful of Marines near the open hangar doors, they were alone. Of course, anyone in the upstairs offices could be watching them from any number of the windows that lined the side of the building. She didn’t care. But when he reached an appropriate distance, she saluted out of protocol. She’d have to give him that much.

He returned the salute. “We can’t talk here.”

She held her ground. “Major O’Donnell said to ask you about what’s really going on around here … sir.”

He lowered his sunglasses and, after glancing toward the rows of windows above them, raised them back. “A hundred eyes are on us right now.”

“We’re just two officers who happened to meet in the parking lot, Colonel.”

He gestured toward her car. She was about to refuse, to instead hold this ground beside his car, but she realized he was right. Anyone, even a private, could misread their body language and begin rumors they could never end. So, she complied, and led the way toward her car.

But at the car door, she faced him again. “I’ve been questioned today for murder. I have a right to know what’s going on. Major O’Donnell said—”

“Please lower your voice, Skipper.” He waited for her to unlock her door, and then he opened it for her. “I’ll come to you … tonight.”

“My home?” Her thoughts went to Molly. “My daughter’s—”

He shook his head. “What time do you put her to bed?”

“Twenty-one hundred,” she said, wondering if he detected the plea in her voice. God help her, if she were putting Molly in any sort of danger.

“I’ll be there at 2130. Leave the sliding glass door open. We’ll start rumors if I show up at your front door that late.”

“Oh, like we won’t be starting one when someone sees you sneaking in my back door?”

He forced a smile. “Now I need you to smile and salute me like a good little company-grade officer.”

Her mouth flew open in protest. How dare he treat her with such a condescending tone. He didn’t wait for her salute. Instead, he executed a quick, sloppy one, performed an equally sloppy about-face, and left her standing there beside the car with her mouth still open. Damn him, she thought. She’d get answers tonight, or she’d consider taking everything she knew, however unsubstantiated, to N.I.S. in the morning. Let the chips fall where they will.

After dinner at home that night, which had included a roast she’d left that morning to simmer in the slow cooker, she’d helped Molly with her bath and into bed and read her a short story before turning out the light.

She poured herself a glass of red wine and stepped outside for fresh air. She was wearing a white tank top and her favorite pair of flannel sweat pants, but the chill in the windward breeze caused her to shudder. She retreated back in for a sweatshirt and made a mental note to pull the winter plastic totes from the attic. Molly would certainly need warmer clothing under a hula skirt on Halloween. From inside Paige’s house next door, someone flipped the outside light over their patio on, then off. Chase half expected and dreaded the opening whoosh of their sliding glass door and the interruption of her quiet time should Paige notice she wasn’t alone. Only voices, though nothing distinguishable, emerged from the Abercrombie home. On the other side of Chase, the rattle of pots from Samantha’s kitchen signaled that Sam’s kitchen window was up.

Her sliding glass door probably open as well. Chase could make out faint music, something jazzy floating over with the breeze.

Chase leaned her head against the back of the chair. What a day she’d had. First, there had been the disappointment at not hearing back from Shapiro after his meeting with … O’Donnell … at least she could now name Shapiro’s source. She couldn’t wait to tell Shapiro that one part of this mystery had been solved, anyway. But what about the rest? What did Figueredo know about a helicopter conspiracy? About Melanie Appleton’s murder? About Melanie and White? Maybe even about Melanie and Stone?

Nothing kills a relationship faster than apathy, she remembered her mother saying years ago when Chase had asked how her parents had managed to beat the odds and pain caused by Chase’s father’s alcoholism. Stone had become an alcoholic, at least by the most basic of definitions, she supposed. She’d known then he was self-medicating his way into oblivion to hide from demons. Had he been self-medicating to overcome his lack of love for her? Had he truly loved Melanie, finding in her something Chase hadn’t been able to give?

She looked into the lavender night sky, into the tops of the swaying palm trees as if an answer would materialize there. No answer, but the palm trees reminded her of the short hop she and Stone and Molly had taken to Kauai shortly after they’d arrived in Hawaii. On Kauai, they’d learned that no building was allowed to be erected any higher than the tallest palm tree on the island. Impossible to imagine Honolulu without skyscrapers. She stared at the tops of her palm trees for perspective.

At the rear of the backyard, light from the moon glinted off the gate that opened to the path she’d taken a dozen times or more to the beach on the few times she’d been able to carve out alone time. Right now, the encroaching whine of one of those small civilian helicopters that flew tourists quickly passed overhead and eventually beyond earshot. Chase stared back at the ocean. When a cloud slid across the moon, the ocean vanished into an inky, blank space—a void waiting to be refilled, an empty womb.

Her mind turned to Figueredo’s impending visit and her stomach fluttered with dread over what she might learn. Holding her arm toward the light from the kitchen window, she rotated her watch until she could read the time. It was already close to ten. Perhaps Figueredo wasn’t coming, after all.

Chase leaned back into the chair and closed her eyes. “Stone,” she whispered, “please tell me what’s going on.” The last time she’d said this to him had been months before his last deployment. He’d been acting distant and sexually unresponsive for months, though Chase had attributed all this to the end of their honeymoon period of reconciliation—a period, she would later learn from other wives, that generally lasted three weeks to a month. The reason Chase could remember their honeymoon period so well is because during those few weeks the guilt over the affair with General Armstrong had driven her, almost in a self-punishing way, to physically and emotionally prove she still belonged to Stone, and he to her, if only for Molly’s sake. What had happened over there was, well, over there, right? She could forget it, right? Move on. Resume her role as Stone’s wife and Molly’s mother. Right?

But Chase quickly discovered that forgetting her time in Iraq—and she didn’t mean just the affair with Armstrong—hadn’t been so easy. For several months, she longed to return. She’d only spoken once of this, to North, who had shared that he had been feeling the same way—another secret between them. In the way most secrets have of quietly taking root, her friend, Libby Bergeron, hadn’t been so lucky. Libby’s secret eventually flowered. She was the wife of a Cobra helicopter pilot and the first woman from the Officers’ Wives’ Club to welcome Chase. But Libby had taken the discovery that her husband had requested another combat tour just a month after returning so hard she’d had to seek counseling from Family Services, and someone, probably another officer’s wife, had leaked the news that Libby had been in for several appointments. Libby was one of those admirable wives who divided her time between two off-base charities and her newly elected position as secretary to the wives’ club—all duties performed while her two girls were in school. Had Libby been a Marine, who had spent time in combat, Chase thought, one who had been forced to think of no one or little else other than pure survival, she might have understood how one could become infected by war, could become an unwilling host-turned-carrier of a quiet disease, infected by the sense of belonging to something so much larger than herself—yes, even larger than motherhood, hard as that was to admit. No other moment in Chase’s life, sad as this was also to admit, had matched that heightened sense of being as having been in the middle of a war: not the first time she’d had sex, not the day she’d married Stone, not even the moment she’d given birth to Molly. In fact, if not for Molly, and to some degree Stone, Chase would have requested her own second tour of combat. God help her, but perhaps Stone had even suspected this and volunteered himself in a way of protecting her and Molly, trusting that Chase would not abandon their daughter a second time so soon. Or, perhaps Stone had been fighting his own strange longing to return to war, and this was why he’d begun to drink, and, in fact, was drunk when, on a night similar to this one in temperature and mood, they’d been sitting together outside on the patio when Chase had said to him, almost in a whisper, “We’re not going to make it, are we?”

Stone, into his fourth Scotch, responded by leaning his head against the back of the chair and closing his eyes. “I just don’t know.” Those words had nailed her to the chair, nailed her feet to the terrazzo patio and her wrists to the chair’s metal armrests. Any attempt to slide a foot or lift an arm would have been pointless. If Molly had suddenly screamed out from a nightmare, Chase couldn’t have responded. She’d been able to feel her heart, though: its thump-thump within her chest rapid, reminding her she was awake, not dreaming, hurting, barely breathing. Her breathing had become as shallow as the first time she and Stone had made love in a private cove beside the South China Sea. But now, their love was dead. Even Stone with his eyes closed had appeared dead.

And as the truth slowly settled into her brain, images had developed. She’d seen the two of them in the living room, separating photos from the albums, assigning a new home to each chair, table, and lamp, then of dividing Molly by the seasons of the year—a summer for Stone, a Christmas for Chase. She’d had to will herself
not
to race toward the gate at the far end of their yard, not to fling herself down the treacherous path of knobby roots and sharp vines toward the ocean. If only her brain had allowed it, she thought. She would have tumbled blissfully toward the ocean, rejoicing at vines that would rip at her cheeks and neck and at the rocks that would tear open the delicate skin across her knees. If only her brain would allow her to match the external agony with the internal. An eye-for-an-eye justice. If only her brain would allow her to tumble toward the sea where salt could pour into each wound sizzling, stinging, punishing.