One Was a Soldier (32 page)

The new cemetery, as it was called, had been new in 1870, when the dead from the Civil War had claimed the last of the original settlers’ burying ground. Clare rolled through the iron-framed gate and crunched along the twisting gravel drive, past Victorian marble obelisks and yellow weeping willows, past Depression-era granite and dark red alders, until she reached a treeless plain of flat stamped-metal markers and high-gloss composite memorial stones. She parked behind a line of cars. She left her coat in the car but took her hat.

She picked her way through the grass, her heels sinking into the ground with every step. A small striped awning had been erected next to a large mound of excavated soil discreetly covered with bright green outdoor carpeting. She hated that carpeting. She always wanted to roll it away at her interments. Show the reality. Earth to earth.

There were more people than she expected; far more than the number of folding chairs set up beneath the awning. Good. She spotted Trip Stillman and Sarah Dowling standing near the back of the crowd, Sarah in Quaker gray and Trip, like Clare, in an immaculate green uniform whose shoulders were blotched with rain. She joined them.

“Do you know the minister?” Sarah asked quietly.

“That’s the funeral director.” Clare spoke in the same undertone. “They’re not having a religious service. Just a few people speaking. Mr. Kilmer will make sure things move along smoothly.”

The first person to the podium was a cousin. Good choice. Close enough to have some warm anecdotes, not so attached to the deceased that she was in danger of losing it. Clare let her mind and her eyes wander. The woman in the front row who looked a thousand years old must be Tally’s mother. With his face varying shades of purple, green, and yellow, Wyler McNabb was very visible a few seats down from her. Russ had told her Tally’s husband had been discharged, been arraigned, and posted bail all on the same day.

Farther back, Clare spotted the kind-hearted Dragojesich, already wiping his eyes with fists the size of softball mitts. She caught a glimpse of army green at the other edge of the crowd and was surprised to see Colonel Seelye, also in her dress uniform. Perhaps not so surprising, though. Russ had told her the MP wanted access to Tally’s house, bank accounts, and records. Maybe she was trying to get in good with the family. Or maybe she was watching to see who showed up. She spotted Clare looking at her and nodded coolly.

Next up was one of Tally’s friends, a young woman with two-toned hair and way too much eye makeup for a funeral. She was only a few sentences into her remembrances of Tally and Wyler in high school when she started to gulp and cry and her mascara began to run black down her cheeks. Clare felt a nudge. Looked at Trip. The doctor nodded toward the line of parked cars. Eric McCrea, spit-and-polished in his own Class A’s, was striding toward them. She was amazed. Given what Russ had told her about Eric’s treatment of Wyler McNabb, she had expected the sergeant to be holed up with his union representative right now. Or with his lawyer.

McCrea fell in between Clare and Sarah, so that the four of them made a wall of hawkish green punctuated by dove gray. Like Trip, he stood at ease, facing the speaker. His eyes cut toward Clare. “The chief isn’t here with you?”

Clare shook her head minutely. “He offered.” She kept her own spine straight, her hands clasped behind her back, her eyes forward. “The husband is here. Is your presence going to be a problem?”

From the corner of her eye, she could see the ribbons on his chest rise and fall. “You know about that?”

This time she looked at him directly.

Eric’s mouth compressed. “No one’s going to notice me. They’ll just see the uniform.” He faced front again. “I had to come. She was one of us.” Sarah leaned forward and glared at them, her finger to her lips. McCrea dropped his voice to a whisper. “She was one of us.”

*   *   *

There was no honor guard. Clare didn’t know if that was because the area commandant was so overwhelmed with requests he couldn’t supply one, or if the army didn’t send a team for soldiers who had died after walking away with a million dollars of army money. There was a group from the local VFW, though, one big-bellied guy, a pair who looked too thin and frail to hold up their rifles, and a bearded man of about forty. Three of them fired the volley while everyone in uniform saluted and the older folks placed their hands over their hearts and the younger ones stared.

Clare and Eric and Trip and Colonel Seelye kept their salutes as the bearded man and the big-bellied guy—
Desert Storm and Vietnam,
Clare thought—folded the casket flag into a sharp-edged triangle and presented it to Tally’s mother. She clutched it, as mothers always did, and for a moment Clare could see in her every woman standing at a graveside, left with nothing but a flag to hold. Those hands, digging into the star-spangled twill, seemed to reach into Clare’s chest and squeeze her heart. She stopped analyzing the ceremony. Stopped comparing and critiquing it against the dozens of funerals she had officiated at. Her eyes filled with tears and the bitter, salt-rimed taste of grief stung the back of her throat.

She turned her face away from the childless mother, struggling to master herself. She stared hard at the trees fringing the older section of the cemetery, their autumn colors burning like banked coals against the heavy gray sky. She paid attention to the details, slick stone and dripping branch, because focusing on the sodden scenery meant she wasn’t falling apart.

That was how she saw Quentan Nichols.

*   *   *

“It was him. I’m sure of it.”

Russ relocated a pile of reports and newsletters from the extra chair to his desk. “Sit down.”

“I don’t want to sit down.” Clare paced from the desk to the filing cabinets to one of the tall windows. It was streaked and spotted, the watery afternoon light held at bay by the bright fluorescents inside the office. “I want you to do something.”

There was a knock on the door. Harlene stuck her head in. “Would you like a cup of coffee, Clare?”

“I’d love one, Harlene. Thank you.”

“Hey!” Russ crossed his arms and leaned against his desk. “What about me?”

“You got two legs, don’t you?” The dispatcher nodded at Clare. “You look a right treat in that uniform.” She shut the door.

“So what do you think?”

“Sorry, Major, the uniform doesn’t do it for me. Too many bad memories of idiot officers.”

“Russ!”

He raised his hands in surrender. “Sorry.” He straightened and went around his desk. He picked up a file. “Here.”

She took the slim folder. Inside was a fax from Fort Leonard Wood acknowledging the MKPD’s request, blah, blah … she found the information halfway down the sheet. Nichols, Quentan L., posted to Fort Gillem, Georgia, September 26. Copies of the travel order and the transportation receipts. She flipped the page. A different fax headlined Office of the Commandant, Fort Gillem, told her Sergeant Nichols had arrived on October 4 and was currently listed as active duty assigned to the military police post.

She looked at Russ. “He’s in Georgia?”

“Since a week before Tally McNabb’s death.” He took the folder from her. “Did you think I wouldn’t take a look at Nichols? Rule him out as a suspect?”

“But I saw him. Today. At the cemetery.”

“Did you go after him?”

“Of course not! I had to stay till the end of the ceremony, and then I had to introduce myself to Tally’s mother and offer my condolences.” She ground the sole of her ugly regulation pump against the floor. “I should be at her house right now.”

“I bet you made a casserole.”

She glared at him.

“Okay. So today you saw a youngish black man of average height, standing maybe a hundred yards away, through the mist and rain.”

The door bumped open and Harlene entered, carrying two mugs and a sugar bowl on a wooden tray that looked as if it had been someone’s shop project in high school. She set it atop the most stable stack of papers on Russ’s desk. “I got one for you, too,” she told Russ. “Don’t get used to it.”

After she closed the door behind her, Russ spooned a generous helping of sugar into one cup and handed it to Clare. The oversized mugs were decorated with fat, parasol-carrying geese. Too cutesy-poo for his wife, he had once told her, so they had donated the set to the department.

Clare took a sip of the sweet and bitter brew from Linda Van Alstyne’s rejected kitchenware. “Yes, okay, I was a long way away and conditions were cloudy—but I have very good eyesight, and it’s not as if Millers Kill is crowded with black men in uniforms.”

“What about the private who’s here with Seelye? Was he with her during the ceremony?”

“No, but—”

“She probably set him at a distance to observe. Maybe follow Wyler McNabb.” He blew on his coffee. “If I were investigating the theft, I’d have him dogged. See if he led me to the money.”

“I know what I saw! It was Quentan Nichols!”

“Clare, it doesn’t matter. Let’s say you did see Nichols. Let’s say he took a leave of absence and drove a thousand miles north to lurk outside his girlfriend’s funeral. He didn’t kill her. Her husband didn’t kill her. She committed suicide. The case is closed.”

“I cannot believe you’d dismiss her death that—that—casually!”

He stepped away from the desk. “I’m not dismissing her death. I’m making a judgment based on physical evidence and solid investigating. You, on the other hand, are pulling crap from thin air because you don’t want to believe the plain facts.”

“The plain facts? You mean, like the fact that she may have a fortune stashed away somewhere? The fact that she must have had accomplices who helped her steal the money? The fact that she was troubled and under investigation—”

“Which led to her suicide!”

Clare stabbed a finger against his khaki-covered chest. “So she knew, one way or the other, that the party was over. Anyone who wanted to keep that money or keep their involvement in the crime a secret had a million reasons to shut her up before she could talk to anyone. I don’t see how you can just blindly ignore that!”

He leaned forward in a way she had seen before, when he was trying to use his size to intimidate people. “The theft of U.S. Army property is outside my jurisdiction.”

“Tally McNabb’s death is in your jurisdiction—and you’re failing her.”

His mouth thinned until it was a hard line. “I’m sorry you can’t accept the death of someone in your therapy group. I’m sorry you didn’t see where she was going ahead of time and stop her. But I’m not going to waste my department’s resources on an imaginary murder because you feel guilty for not helping her.”

His words hit like a sucker punch. When she could find the air, she said, “I see. Clearly, I should keep out of your business. Like Linda did.”

“Goddammit!” He slammed his mug on his desk, sloshing coffee over folders and papers and blotter. “That is
not
what I said.”

“You think I’m overreacting because—what? She was in Iraq, like me? Because she was in therapy, like me? Because she was screwed up, like me?”

He looked at her. “Yes.” His voice was flat.

“I’m out of here.” She grabbed her purse and hat from the top of one of the filing cabinets.

“Clare—”

“And I want you to think, very carefully, about whether you really want to marry someone like me.” She swung open the door and dropped her voice. “Because God knows, I might snap and decide to kill myself for no good reason.”

BUT I HAVE SQUANDERED THE INHERITANCE OF YOUR SAINTS, AND HAVE WANDERED FAR IN A LAND THAT IS WASTE.

—Reconciliation of a Penitent, The Book of Common Prayer

MONDAY, OCTOBER 10

They were sitting around Will Ellis’s hospital bed, all five of them together. At the end of the sad, short ceremony at the graveside, Sarah had said, “It’s Monday. I expect to see you all tonight.” Trip Stillman had pointed out Will hadn’t been discharged yet. “That’s why the group is meeting in his room,” she had told them.

The three soldiers had changed back into civilian clothes, but Sarah could still conjure the way they had looked, pressed and contained and ramrod straight, as if they were double-exposed in photographs. Sarah wondered, not for the first time, which was the original image and which one had been superimposed.

Fergusson told Will about the people who spoke, and Stillman described the rifle salute. Sarah mentioned how beautiful the flowers were. Everyone tried to keep it upbeat, but there wasn’t really any way to put a good face on the violent death of a twenty-five-year-old woman. Will grew pale and paler as they spoke, as if the light inside him were being turned down by degrees and would soon be extinguished. “I can’t believe it,” he finally said. “I can’t believe she really did it.”

It struck Sarah that the only difference between Will and Tally was lack of access to a gun and seven days of stomach purges and antidepressants. Coming close but no closer seemed to have stripped death of its glamour in Will’s eyes.

Fergusson shook her head. “I don’t believe she did.” Sarah was sure she had been drinking. She was in control—no slurring or listing—but her color was high and her expression unguarded.

“Forget it.” McCrea lifted his head and spoke for the first time. Something was clearly bothering him beyond Tally’s suicide. “I thought she was killed, too, but we’re wrong. Her husband turned out to have an airtight alibi before, during, and after the time of death.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. And her boyfriend from Iraq couldn’t have done it because he was on duty at Fort Gillem. I’m not saying she was killed in some sort of lovers’ quarrel. I think she was killed for money. A whole lot of money.”

“Excuse me?” Sarah said.

“You saw the other officer at the funeral?”

“Yes. I thought she was from Tally’s company.”

“She was. Sort of. She’s with CID, assigned to FINCOM. She’s investigating the theft of a million dollars from the army’s coffers.”

Stillman leaned forward. “She thinks Tally was involved?”

“She thinks Tally’s responsible.”

“What?” Will said.

“That’s ridiculous,” Stillman said.