“How ’bout when your mother found out you’d enlisted?” Sarah was surprised by the black-clad woman’s accent, a southern Virginia drawl that sounded more out of place up here in the North Country than her own clipped urban consonants.
Willem Ellis laughed at the woman’s remark. “Yeah, I guess that counts as combat. Or at least battle royal.”
“And you are…?”
The woman slouched in her seat. “Clare Fergusson.” There was a pause. Sarah made a go-on gesture. Clare Fergusson sighed. “Major in the Guard, 142nd Aviation Support. Stationed in Ramadi, Tikrit, and Kirkuk.” She took a long drink from her coffee cup. Nothing more seemed forthcoming.
“Aviation support?” Sarah said.
“She flies helicopters,” the brown-haired man said. Before Sarah could ask, he went on, “I’m Eric McCrea. I’m a sergeant. Also in the Guard.”
“Did you serve with Major Fergusson?”
“No.” His gaze slid away from her and came to rest on the doctor. His lip curled up in what might have been a sneer. “I’m an MP.”
“What were you assigned to?” the young woman demanded. “Were you on base patrol? At the Green Zone?”
His lips thinned. “I was on prisoner detail. Camp Bucca.”
Sarah kept herself from reacting, but the rest of the group stared. They had all seen the pictures.
“That figures.” The young woman folded her arms over her generous chest.
“That has nothing to do with it.” Eric McCrea’s cheeks blotched with color. “You think you know what it was like-”
Sarah held up her hands. “Stop right there.” She gave both McCrea and the girl a measured look. “Let’s not go jumping in the deep end before we’ve finished getting our toes wet.” She dropped her hand, opening it to the last person in the circle. “Why don’t you introduce yourself.”
The brunette braced her hands on her thighs. “My name’s Mary McNabb, but everybody calls me Tally.” She looked at Stillman. “Sorta like you, I guess. I was formerly a specialist, formerly in the United States Army.”
“Where did you serve, Tally?”
“Camp Anaconda.”
That got some whistles from the rest. “Mortaritaville,” Fergusson said.
“Yeah, well.” McNabb ran her hands through her short hair.
Stillman snapped his fingers. “Mary McNabb. Fractured left ankle. A car dropped on you?”
McNabb laughed. “I was helping my husband fix it up for resale. I’m impressed you remember.”
Sarah put her hands up again. “Wait.” She looked around the circle. “Do you all know each other?”
They looked at each other. They looked at her. “Yes,” they all said.
“It’s a very small town.” Clare Fergusson’s voice was dry.
Sarah stopped herself before she could ask them to explain. She’d need a clearer picture of their interrelationships eventually, but right now she wanted to focus on opening the first door to whatever issues they might have. “We’ll get into that later,” she said. “I’d like to start by discussing your homecomings.”
MONDAY, JUNE 6
Their dispatcher, Harlene, had managed to get a red, white, and blue WELCOME HOME, ERIC banner printed up and hung from the front of the Millers Kill Police Department. It billowed and snapped in the warm wind gusting up Main Street.
“We gonna have to do the same thing for Kevin, when he gets back?” Deputy Chief Lyle MacAuley squinted in the bright morning sunshine.
The youngest officer on the MKPD had been shipped off for temporary detached duty almost a year ago, first with the Capital Area Drug Enforcement Association in Albany, then with the Special Investigation Division of the Syracuse PD, which saw more major crimes in two weeks than Millers Kill might see in a year.
“Kevin Flynn’s welcome home is going to be a bump up in pay grade, if I can ram it down the aldermen’s throats.” Chief of Police Russ Van Alstyne shook his head. “What we really need is another officer on the force. That way, we wouldn’t be overscheduling everybody. I worry that we’re putting Eric back on the streets too soon. A few days ago he was eating MREs and holding down a guard post in Umm Qasr.”
Lyle raised an eyebrow. “I’m impressed. The only place I could name in Iraq is Baghdad, and don’t ask me to find it on a map.”
“I was in that neck of the woods, remember? First Gulf War.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “God, doesn’t that feel like an age ago.”
“It was. I think Eric was finishing up high school. Kevin was probably still in diapers.”
“Hunh.” And Lieutenant Clare Fergusson had been twenty-three. “They probably already have our beds reserved up at the Infirmary.”
“Speak for yourself. I plan to be shot to death by the enraged father of a pair of twenty-year-old twins.”
Russ laughed. Lyle gave him a sideways look. “You hear from the reverend lately?”
Russ’s laugh died away. “A phone call five days ago. The 142nd is still on target to ship home in three weeks.” He tried to smile. “Of course, they were on target to leave last March, too. Until their tour got extended.”
“She should’a gone into the chaplain’s corps instead of air support. She’d have been home by now.” Lyle hooked his thumbs in his duty belt. “A year and a half’s a long time.”
“Oh, yeah.” The longest damn eighteen months of his life, and that included a tour in Vietnam, going cold turkey on cigarettes, and quitting booze. Sitting home night after night, watching the casualty counts mount on the news-hell, giving up drinking again would have been easier. Drinking and smoking.
“How’s she sounding?”
“Like she always sounds. Chipper. Everything’s fine. She’s fine. The weather’s fine.” Russ glanced up at the banner, the granite, the clear blue sky. “You know what the temperature was in Basra that day? A hundred and five degrees. I saw it on CNN.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I can’t decide if she’s so happy flying helicopters again she’s forgotten there’s a war on, or if she’s babying me so I don’t…” He looked at Lyle. “You know how many helos have crashed or been shot down in Iraq since the beginning of the year? Fifteen. You wanna know how many pilots have been killed?”
“No.” Lyle held up a hand. “Stop it, or you’re going to make yourself crazy. Crazier,” he amended. “Eric’s home safe and sound, and your lady’ll get here, too.”
Russ touched the spot where, beneath his uniform blouse and undershirt, Clare’s silver cross rested against his chest. She had given it to him for safekeeping the day she left, and he hadn’t taken it off yet. He might not believe in a god, but that didn’t seem to stop him from putting his faith in superstition.
“Eric.” Lyle’s tone was deliberately workaday. “When I spoke with him, he was hot to get back into investigation, but if you think he needs more time, I can find some desk work to keep him busy.”
“What, running down addresses for check bouncers and updating the evidence lists? The last thing I want is for him to think we don’t need him anymore and head off for better-paying pastures. He’s our best investigator, after you.”
MacAuley touched one bristly gray eyebrow and smirked.
“Don’t look so smug,” Russ said. “Consider the competition.”
“A diamond in an ashtray is still a diamond,” Lyle said with immense dignity.
Which made Russ think of his recent purchase. He hadn’t told Lyle about that. He hadn’t told anybody, yet. What if she turned him down? A fifty-two-year-old widower with a bum hip wasn’t any great prize. His phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket. “Van Alstyne here.”