“Some people truly are impossible, aren’t they?” Amanda said. She glanced at me briefly with a faint smile before turning to stare at a spot a foot above Jessica’s head.
Maybe in high school I’d have been tempted. But even in high school, I don’t think I’d have fallen for their overtures. I ignored them, and stood up.
“Can I still leave?” I asked the detective. “And is it okay for me to clean out my desk right now? I’m resigning, effective immediately, and I’d rather not have to come back to this snake pit.”
“Be my guest,” he said.
Tiffany and Amanda both rose, uttering feeble bleats of protest.
“Ladies,” the detective said. “I have a few more questions for all three of you.”
They sat back down again, looking forlorn. The detective led Jessica back to the office he’d been using as his interview room.
Packing wouldn’t take long. By the time he finished with the mean girls and hauled Jessica down to the station, I’d be long gone. Maybe I’d stop on the way home and buy some champagne to celebrate my freedom.
Better yet, maybe I’d stop at Starbucks and toast my victory with a latte.
Donna Andrews was born in Yorktown, Virginia, and now lives in Reston, Virginia. The Real Macaw, (July 2011, Minotaur), is the latest book in her Agatha- and Anthony-winning Meg Langslow series, and Some Like It Hawk will be released in July 2012. She has also written four books in the Turing Hopper series from Berkley Prime Crime. For more information: http://donnaandrews.com.
WHEN DUTY CALLS, by Art Taylor
Keri is just setting out the silverware when the Colonel calls across from the living room with a new question. He’s watching the Military Channel and finishing up the cocktail she made for him-a thimble of Virginia Gentleman, a generous portion of soda, another light splash of whiskey on top to make it smell like a stronger drink. The Colonel’s house has an open floor plan from the kitchen through the dining room to where he sits, and as she’s finished up dinner, she’s listened to him arguing lightly with the program’s depiction of Heartbreak Ridge, reminiscing about his own stint in Korea, rambling in his own way. “Last rally of the Shermans,” he mused aloud, and something about “optics” and “maneuverability” and then-a different tone than Keri’s heard in the four months she’s known him-“Is the perimeter secure, Sergeant?”
“The perimeter?” Keri asks, cautiously. She’s grown used to these sudden shifts in subject-learned quickly just to roll along with the conversation, even in the first days after she and Pete moved in. But she still stumbles sometimes to catch up and find the right response.
The Colonel turns in his chair-turning on her, Keri thinks, expecting his regular confusion or the occasional rebuke-but he doesn’t look her way. He’s listening, it seems, his jaw fixed, his chin jutting more than usual. The tendons in his frail arms tighten, his tie tugs at the skin around his neck, his whole body perches alert, if unsteadily so. Medals and photos crowd the wall behind him. Round stickers dot many of them and almost everything else in the living room: lamps, books, bookcases, the chair itself. Red, white, and blue.
“Incoming,” he says.
“No one’s out there, Colonel,” she tries to reassure him. Not anymore, at least, since that pair of surveyors out in the woods had packed up their bags a half-hour before, one of them waving at her through the window before cranking up, heading out. They’d stayed late. She was glad to see them go.
“Vibrations,” the Colonel whispers. “A good soldier can sense these things. Life and death.” Just his mind wandering, she knows, just another bout of dementia, but for a moment the seriousness of his tone, the weight of his words, stop her. Despite herself, she looks toward the door. Has he actually heard something? The surveyors had forgotten something, returned unannounced. Or maybe Pete had canceled his Tuesday night classes in town to come home early. But no. There’s no knock at the door, and no sound of a key turning in it. No muddy shoes being brushed against the mat. No sound of tires on the gravel drive. Just the TV program rolling on. Strategies, skirmishes, victories, defeat.
“Did Pete call?” she asks.
“Negative,” the Colonel says casually, just the hint of disdain, and then he relaxes, settles back into his chair. “Radio silence has been maintained.”
There’s something melancholy in his answer, or maybe it’s Keri’s imagination this time. She wonders if he even notices how seldom the phone rings-for either of them. Calls come so rarely that she once raised the receiver to her ear just to make sure there was a dial tone there. More than once, actually.
“Lasagna’s ready,” she tells him, and the Colonel brightens up.
“Officer’s Club,” he says eagerly. Date night, she knows.
Other nights, mealtime is just “chow,” but on Tuesdays Pete always stays on campus late, and the Colonel seems to love those nights best. She’s not sure how she goes from being his staff sergeant to being his…wife? Girlfriend? Daughter? She’s not sure about that either: which role she plays. He doesn’t seem to know who she is at all, has never even spoken her name. But sometimes when Pete is out of the way, the Colonel reaches over and presses his gnarled fingers over her hand, pats, squeezes, breaking Keri’s heart a little each time.
“It’s a good deal,” Pete said after the interview with the Colonel’s daughter, after she’d offered them the job. Do a little housecleaning, make a couple of meals a day for the old man, and in exchange: free rent, a grocery stipend, a monthly bonus. A six-month stint. “The whole semester,” Pete went on. “Not just a good deal, but a great one, especially with teaching assistant stipends these days.” He didn’t need to add that Keri was unemployed herself, had been for a while.
It was that last part that convinced Keri and kept her from pointing out how much of the cooking and housecleaning quickly fell to her. Pete was at least pulling his weight elsewhere, wasn’t he? Teaching a freshman survey course in western drama? Pursuing his own PhD? She could hardly complain about doing the dishes when he had lessons to prep and essays to grade and all that reading to do: Shakespeare, Ibsen, O’Neill, Beckett, Miller. And then fitting in work on his doctoral dissertation around the edges. He was already the golden boy of the doctoral program, destined to be the star of some big English department. She shared those dreams, and she tried not to nag him about her own. That wasn’t the woman she wanted to be-about work or marriage, about children somewhere down the line.
“We’re both in school,” Pete had said more than once when she talked about the future. “Student loans won’t pay themselves.” And that dissertation wouldn’t write itself. And tenure-line jobs didn’t come knocking on your door. School first, life later. She’d grown accustomed to that.
But now, with the semester living at the Colonel’s, with the savings, he’d hinted more about next steps. “With the money we’re saving here, we can set aside a little bit,” he said, “for the future.”
Maybe it was for the best for her to shoulder the work at the house while he focused on his education. And maybe there were other good reasons that Pete’s duties around the house were more limited. After all, the Colonel didn’t seem entirely to approve of him. He didn’t like the meals that Pete tried to make (“too spicy” once, “too bland” another time), he didn’t like all the time he spent reading (“needs to get off his duff”), and he generally peppered Pete with complaints on a regular basis.
“A trip to the barber in your future anytime, son?” the Colonel asked one morning. “That hardly seems regulation length.”