This Enemy Town (8 page)

I confronted her, my eyes like slits. “Paul doesn't have any tattoos, you lying bitch! I don't know why you're doing this, but I swear to God, I'll get even with you, even if it takes the rest of my life. I'm contacting my lawyer, you're going to retract everything, and if you ever make up baseless lies about my husband again, I'll … I'll …”

“Everything all right, Mrs. Ives?”

I spun around, both flustered and annoyed by the interruption. It was Midshipman Small, sweet, serious Gadget, standing on the stairway behind me.

The silence was heavy with unspoken words.

The auditorium above me was silent, too. No talking, no singing. No happy scrape of bow on string, no friendly trumpet blare. Rehearsal must be over.

“I heard shouting,” Gadget said, moving closer. “Is there anything I can do?”

My hand dug into the handrail as I struggled for control. “No, thank you, Gadget. I was just leaving. Lieutenant Goodall and I were having a friendly disagreement, is all.”

Jennifer stared at me placidly, still wearing that maddening smile.

“You sure?”

“I'm sure. Thanks.”

Midshipman Small made way. I laid a light hand on his arm, then fled up the stairs, past Alice swimming up the wall, past the Dormouse, bursting out onto a stage filled with midshipmen.

Was everybody there? The whole blessed cast? Had everyone heard my argument with Lieutenant Goodall as it drifted upward from the Jabberwocky room?

I didn't give a damn.

Because Paul had been faithful!

I felt light-headed, my feet barely touching the ground as I found my coat where I had dumped it on a chair, waved good-night to the startled cast, and stepped out into the snowy night. I felt like shouting from the cupola on top of the chapel dome, loud enough for everyone in Anne Arundel County to hear. No, to the whole United States of America: Paul had been faithful.

And I ran the last block home, into his surprised but waiting arms.

 

The sun was pushing against the shutters, striping the duvet with light, when I came to the next morning. Paul lay
beside me, already awake, his head propped up on the palm of his hand, smiling at me, his fingers playing idly with my hair.

“You roared,” I said.

“Hmmmm,” he replied, brushing his lips softly against mine.

“That was spectacular,” I whispered, referring to the sex, not the roar.

Paul drew back, touched my cheek. “Only for you, sweetheart.” He kissed my shoulder, my neck, my mouth.

Only later did I think to wonder: Who had Jennifer been waiting for?

Two days before opening night, and panic set in.
The cast had been banished to a rehearsal room in Alumni Hall so that the tech crew—working dangerously close to the deadline as usual—could finally hang the backdrop and wait for a last minute coat of paint to dry.

Opening night, minus one. Dorothy and I scrutinized the set and pronounced it as good as it gets. My fingers itched to touch up the red on the antique barber pole, but it was too late even for that; the cast was already straggling in. A few midshipmen at first, followed by a violinist, two flutes, and a drummer, then the Pair-o-Docs strolling side by side, conferring, shooing everyone along like mother hens.

Not much to do but find a seat and enjoy the show. We'd seen it, of course, but in pieces and bits, fits and starts, but this was dress rehearsal, the first complete run-through. We prayed it would come together—the costumes, the music, the dialogue, the sound effects, and the sets—like a jigsaw puzzle, complete at last.

Act One was a triumph. Sweeney's dark “Epiphany” and Mrs. Lovett's brilliant take on “A Little Priest” would bring the opening night audience to their feet.

Around six everyone broke for dinner, served buffet style on long tables set up in the lobby. Dorothy and I parked ourselves on a marble step, balanced our plates on
our knees and worked our way through a passable beef stew served over egg noodles. Between the noodles and the carrot cake, I brought Dorothy up to date on my daughter and her family, fishing recent photos out of my bag of Chloe, now five, on her first day of kindergarten, and Jake, age two, posing with his stuffed chick, their top-knots standing in identical (and adorable!) spikes.

“I'm crazy about my daughter,” I told my friend as she handed the photos back to me, “but my grandchildren? I'm certifiably nuts over
them.
” I shrugged. “How do you explain that?”

Dorothy thought for a moment. “Maybe because you can play with them for a while, then give them back. Let the parents deal with the dirty diapers, the runny noses, the bad report cards.”

I had to laugh. “I guess it's a grandparent's prerogative to spoil them. It's part of the job description.” Dorothy hadn't told me much about her home life, so I was curious. “Is Kevin your only child?”

She nodded. “I would have liked to have more kids, Hannah, but it wasn't in the cards.”

I tried to draw her out about that, but she squirmed a bit uncomfortably and changed the subject. We ended up in safer territory, chatting about the latest installment of
Harry Potter
until the food went away and Act Two began.

“Fingers crossed,” said Dorothy as we returned to our seats. I knew she was referring to Sweeney's chair. Would it work as we had planned?

The opening number, “God, That's Good,” went off without a hitch, and I began to relax and enjoy the show. Several scenes later, while Mrs. Lovett distracted Tobias with one of her delectable pies, Perelli, upstairs, confronted Sweeney. Perelli swaggered to the washstand and picked up one of Sweeney's razors. “But I remember these … and you, Benjamin Barker,” he sneered, blowing Sweeney's cover. In a carefully rehearsed move, Sweeney knocked the razor from his rival's hand.

“Ooooh, well done,” said Dorothy.

The two men struggled. Advantage to Sweeney as he grabbed Pirelli by the throat and began to squeeze.

Suddenly, Tobias appeared on the stairs. Afraid of discovery, Sweeney dragged Pirelli—foot-dragging, arm-flopping limp—across the shop, tumbled him into the trunk and slammed the lid.

I held my breath. The next bit of shtick was my favorite.

Tobias rushed upstairs, adjusting his wig, looking for his boss. He's supposed to say, “Ow, he ain't here!” and sit down on the trunk with Pirelli's hand still dangling from it, but before Tobias could move, the trunk lid flew open, Perelli crawled out and sprawled on the floor.

I gasped, and looked at Dorothy. “That's not part of the script!”

“Maybe Sweeney got a little carried away with the strangling?”

On stage, the actor playing Perelli rose unsteadily to his feet and backed away from the trunk, wiping the palms of his hands on the trousers of his costume. We watched in silence as the lid of the trunk bounced back against the wall—once, twice—teetered, then slammed shut.

Perelli was wearing a body mike, so everyone heard what he said next. “Oh, Jesus. Jesus. Shit!”

“What's gotten into him?” I wondered aloud.

The music, which had been building steadily from
allegretto
to
poco accelerando
suddenly quit—
fermata
—as Professor Tracey cut the orchestra off with an impatient wave of his hand. He slapped both hands flat on top of the piano; the first violinist started, fumbled, and nearly dropped her bow. “What's going on, folks?” Professor Tracey yelled. “Have we got a train wreck up there?”

Mrs. Lovett, too, was aghast. She stood in her pie shop, hands on hips, gazing up.

Tobias and Sweeney exchanged glances and shrugged.

Medwin Black shot out of his seat, clapping his hands and bellowing, the glasses on his forehead like a second
pair of eyes. “You're half dead, Perelli! You're supposed to
stay
in the trunk, not leap out of it like some demented jack-in-the-box!”

The midshipman playing Perelli didn't appear to be listening. He bowed, resting his hands on his knees, as exhausted as if he had just run a marathon. His panting came to us in ragged gasps, amplified a thousand times by the speakers.

Tobias stood to one side, whipped off his wig. He approached Perelli and laid a hand on his back. “You all right, man?”

Perelli waved at the trunk with a long index finger. “There's something in there! Jesus Christ, there's something already in there!”

Sweeney crossed to the trunk and threw back the lid. He bent, bobbled, then staggered backward. “Tim!” he shouted. “Give me a hand here!”

Tim/Tobias hurried over, his ridiculous wig forgotten. Together they reached into the trunk and pulled something out—it looked like a bundle of laundry—and laid it on the floor.

Medwin Black was already huffing his way up the steps to the stage, followed closely by John Tracey. I started to get up, but Dorothy grabbed my arm. “What is it?” she whispered, her breath hot against my cheek.

I pressed a hand to my chest, as if that would do anything to quiet my racing heart. “I think it's a
who
,” I said, noticing that the bundle wore a blue and gold track suit and white Nikes.

“Cell phone! Who's got a cell phone?” someone yelled, nearly bursting our eardrums as his request blasted out over the speakers.

There wasn't a midshipman at the Academy who didn't own a cell phone—Sprint cut them a sweetheart deal—but after a mid took a call during rehearsal in the middle of “City on Fire,” they'd been summarily banished from the set. The rule didn't apply to me, so I
rushed to the stage, hauling my phone from its holster as I ran.

I held out the phone, then felt like an idiot when Professor Tracey just waved a hand and yelled, “Call 911, for heaven's sake.”

I did as I was told.

While we waited for the paramedics, Tobias and Sweeney began CPR, Tobias doing compressions and Sweeney breathing into the victim's mouth. From the edge of the stage I could see only the victim's head, and it made my stomach churn. Blood covered the forehead and cheeks, and the eyes stared up, unblinking, into the spotlights in the fly gallery.

Sweeney checked for a pulse, shook his head, and the two began again, keeping up the rhythm until the paramedics clattered onto the stage and took over. It took less than five minutes for them to arrive, but I'm sure that to everyone—especially to Sweeney and Tobias—it must have seemed like hours.

It was, as I had suspected, too late. Their body language said it all. While one paramedic packed up their gear, two others lifted the body and laid it gently on the stretcher they'd brought with them. As the paramedics straightened the limbs, a twist of hair separated from the bloody mess that had once been a forehead and hung darkly down over one ear. Blond, I thought. The victim was a blonde. A blanket appeared from somewhere, and in the instant before the blanket covered the face, something clicked in my brain and I knew. The victim wasn't a midshipman at all.

It was Jennifer Goodall.

Nothing—not my husband's embrace, nor a stiff
shot of brandy, nor a half-dozen Paxil left over in the medicine cabinet from 1994—was going to take
this
misery away, not anytime soon.

When the investigators finally let us go, I trudged home alone through the deepening snow with the bitter wind tearing at my scarf, its icy fingers plucking at every seam in the fabric of my coat.

I'm glad she's dead.

There, I'd said it.

Just ahead of me, a man walked his beagle. When he stopped suddenly and turned, I feared I'd spoken out loud, but something in Dawson's Gallery had caught the man's attention. He paused for a moment, admiring, his nose pressed to the window while his dog stretched its leash to the limit and lifted its leg against a trash can. The pair moved on.

I'm glad she's dead.
And if wishes had been arrows, Jennifer Goodall would have been dead years ago, an arrow from
my
bow shot straight through her callous heart.

Someone had solved my problem for me. Jennifer was gone for good.

My boots slithered along the treacherous sidewalk; I spread my arms for balance. I tried to dredge up sympathy for Jennifer's friends, her family, if only to prove that I
wasn't as blackhearted as she. She had a mother somewhere who would grieve, I told myself, a mother who might have nothing now to cherish but a high school photo, a young girl's canopied bed, pencil marks on the kitchen door that marked young Jennifer's growth from child to woman.

It would be hours before the official identification, of course, before the police knocked on that mother's door in Kansas or Iowa or snowbound North Dakota, and the woman's grieving would begin. It would be days more before Jennifer's name hit the news. Paul would hear it first from me.

I turned left onto Prince George Street and slogged the half block to my door. I fumbled with my key and eased it into the lock. The welcoming blast of heat from a furnace working overtime hit my cheeks like a Caribbean breeze.

“Paul! I'm home!” I peeled off my gloves and arranged them to dry on top of the radiator. I kicked my boots underneath.

“Paul!”

Where the heck was he?

I hung my jacket on the hall tree my father had built, left with us when he moved to a smaller place in Snow Hill on Maryland's Eastern Shore, and padded in my stocking feet toward the kitchen. I stuck my head through the basement door. “Paul!”

“I'm in the office,” he called. “Keeping the world safe from the Infidels!”

I should have known. Thursday night. Paul would be playing Civilization III.

I didn't go much for computer games. Emily had given me The Sims for Christmas, and even though it hogged the hard drive on my laptop, I'd installed it just to please her. Together we'd created families modeled on people we knew, and moved them into houses of our own design—a mother-daughter kind of thing. Then the Dennis character I'd named after my brother-in-law self-immolated in a
kitchen fire, turning himself into a tombstone in the back garden, and I threw up my hands.

“Install a smoke detector,” Emily had suggested, hanging over my shoulder, kibbitzing. “And make sure he studies cooking.” Ever helpful, she downloaded a Sean Connery character from the Internet, Mel Gibson, too. I tried to hook Sean up with the freshly widowed Connie, but inexplicably, she refused. Little fool. Then characters started making decisions on their own—Mel wouldn't go to work, and while Mrs. Bromley's plumbing overflowed, a burglar broke in and stole her TV. I decided that real life was complicated enough without taking on a whole fictional community.

Life is real, life is earnest.
I don't remember who said that, but the quote sprang to mind as I lingered at the top of the basement stairs and wondered how I would break the news about Jennifer Goodall to my husband. “Can you come up a minute, sweetheart?” I stammered. “There's something I need to tell you.”

If my voice sounded strange to him, he didn't let on. “I can't leave now,” he yelled back, “the Greeks are massacring the French. Give me a moment. Why don't you put on the kettle for tea.”

Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.
At least I knew who said that: Fielding. The way my life was going lately, just like the British in times of trouble, I was always hauling out the tea.

The kettle was rumbling, nearing a boil by the time Paul finally joined me, sneaking up behind me where I stood at the stove, kissing the back of my neck. “Sorry, sweetie. The Zulus launched a nuclear attack on the Iroquois and I had to wait it out.” He took me gently by the shoulders and turned me around, easing me gently back against the oven door. “Ummmm, you smell like—”

“Careful,” I warned, worrying about the gas burner blazing merrily on high behind me, “or you'll set my butt on fire.”

He kissed the tip of my nose. “You smell like turpentine!”

“Paul,” I began, the teakettle quite forgotten. “Sit.”

“What?” he asked.

“Just sit,” I said.

I thought I'd cry. But standing at the stove studying the puzzled face of the man who had loved me unconditionally for more than twenty-five years, feeling secure in the comfort of my centuries-old kitchen with familiar objects all around me, I was dry-eyed, practically convinced that the whole horrible evening hadn't actually happened.

Paul backed himself into a chair, then patted the seat of the chair next to him. I sat down and with no preamble told my husband that Jennifer Goodall was dead.

Paul blinked once, slowly. A muscle twitched along his jaw. “Jesus,” he said.

I folded my hands to keep them from shaking and rested my forearms on the table in front of me. I gave him the details, watching his face as I rattled on.

I told him how the paramedics gave way to campus security who locked all the doors and hustled everyone—actors, orchestra, directors, and crew—into seats in the auditorium. I described how they secured the scene, awaiting the arrival of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, who took down our names and telephone numbers. Eventually NCIS kicked us out, one by one, and told us to go home. They'd be calling later for our statements.

“How …?” Paul asked.

“A horrible head injury,” I said. “What caused it, I don't know.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. Paul drew a long breath. “This'll be a major headache for the Academy, of course.”

I nodded, hating the press corps that invariably materialized at the merest suspicion of a scandal, fully formed and hungry, out of Annapolis's cobblestones.

“Who …?” Paul was working his way through the five Ws. We'd established the what, where, and when of it; but
only time could answer the questions that were nagging at him now. “Who would do such a thing? And why?”

I shrugged, at a loss for words.

After a few moments he added, “When they know why, I suppose they'll know who.”

“They'll be looking for people with motive,” I said, following that train of thought to its logical conclusion.

Paul had been studying his thumbnail. He gazed up at me with a wistful smile. “Are you asking if I have an alibi, my dear?” The smile, such as it was, vanished. “It's not much of one, I'm afraid,” he continued, not waiting for me to reply. “I've been home all afternoon, alone, playing with myself.”

I smiled at his little joke, stalling for time. I had told Paul about speaking to Jennifer Goodall, of course, but I conveniently forgot to mention my blowup. I was ashamed of it, for one thing, embarrassed that I'd let her get under my skin like that. But my marriage wouldn't be worth a plugged nickel if I waited for the cops to come along and tell him about it first.

“Actually, I was thinking about
my
alibi,” I told him.

Paul's eyebrows came together. “Oh?”

“That conversation Jennifer and I had the other day? The one where she made up that lie about you?”

“Go on.”

“It wasn't exactly a conversation, Paul. It was an old-fashioned, back-stabbing, mud-slinging, your-mother-swims-after-troop-ships kind of shouting match.” I flopped back in my chair, rested my head against the rungs. “Oh God, Paul, after what she said to me, I could have cheerfully drawn and quartered the witch.”

“I've shouted at a lot of people, Hannah,” Paul said, dismissing my confession, “but I've never killed any of them.”

“Yes, but Jennifer's and my little tête-à-tête was overheard by Midshipman Small and practically everybody in the cast.”

“I see.” Paul squinted at the wall clock. “I suppose a lot will depend on exactly when she died.”

I looked at the clock, too. Eleven forty-five? Nearly midnight. It felt like three in the morning. “She must have died shortly before her body was found. Tim told me her body was still warm.” I shivered, remembering the young man's valiant but failed attempt at CPR.

A new thought occurred to me. “Jennifer could have been alive when the killer threw her into the trunk, Paul! She might have been lying in there unconscious, all through the first act. It might have taken hours for her to bleed to death.” I remembered the blood covering her face, a dark glistening red.

I buried my face in my palms. “God, Paul, anyone could have done it.”

The teakettle began to scream. Paul rose from his chair to shut it off. “But wait a minute, Hannah,” he said gently. “I'm confused. I thought you told me that the set's been off-limits to anyone but the tech crew since last night's rehearsal.”

I followed my husband to the stove, reached into a cupboard and selected two mugs. After I'd dropped the tea bags in, Paul filled the mugs with boiling water.

“That's true,” I said, plunging my tea bag up and down. “But there's no security at all, really. The doors were not locked. Aside from the tech crew, anybody could have wandered into the auditorium, even a lost tourist.”

I ran down a mental list of the tech crew. With the exception of me, I couldn't think of anybody who had a beef with Lieutenant Goodall. They probably didn't even know her.

As for the cast, the only midshipmen I'd seen talking to Jennifer Goodall had been Kevin and Emma. Had Kevin killed Jennifer to keep her from reporting him for harassing Emma? On the other had, if Emma had confided in Jennifer about her sexual orientation, and Jennifer had
threatened to out her, that could have driven Emma to murder her, too.

“What happens now?” Paul wondered, taking his seat.

“We'll be interviewed, of course. NCIS told us to expect that.”

“When?”

I shrugged. “I don't have the vaguest idea.”

We finished our tea in silence, while variations on the theme of Kevin and Emma played themselves out in my head.

Paul finally coaxed me to bed, but I couldn't sleep. As he snored gently beside me, I lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling. The numbers on the digital clock clicked from three to four to five before I mumbled, “This is ridiculous,” crawled out of bed and headed for the bathroom. I filled the tub with hot water, dumped in a quarter cup of lavender bath salts, added another tablespoon for good measure, and settled in for a good long soak.

I was standing at the sink, my head wrapped in a towel, brushing my teeth, when the telephone rang. It was 6:00
A.M
.: way too early for someone to be calling. It had to be bad news.

I dove for the telephone, trying to silence it before it could ring a second time. “Hello?” I croaked, and braced myself for the worst.

It was Dorothy, her voice surprisingly bright. “Hannah, I'm sorry to be calling you so early, but I just had to let you know right away!”

“Let me know what?” I whispered, turning my back to my sleeping husband and sitting down carefully on the edge of the mattress.

Incredibly, the Academy had reached a decision about the show. “That woman had nothing to do with the musical,” Dorothy reported. “They think it may be just a coincidence that her body was left there.”

“And, so?”

“We're still on! They're finished collecting evidence,” she continued. “We'll have to get a new trunk for Sweeney, of course, since they've taken ours away. Wasn't there one at Echos and Accents, that place off Chincoteague?”

Quite frankly, I couldn't remember.

“I'm sure that's the place!” Dorothy chugged on. “Could you pick it up for me, Hannah? You live so much closer than me.”

Like a good little Do-Bee, I agreed even though I knew that the only way I'd fit that trunk in my LeBaron was on end, and I'd have to put the convertible top down. That would be an adventure in February.

“See you tonight,” she chirped, and hung up without saying good-bye.

I stared at the receiver, too dumbfounded to speak. It was six in the ever-lovin' morning. How could she possibly know …? Maybe it would make some sense after I'd had some coffee.

I rinsed out my toothbrush and had just hung it up to dry when Paul stumbled into the bathroom, bleary-eyed, his cheeks and chin dark with stubble. “To whom do I owe that wake-up call?”

“Dorothy Hart.” I wrapped my arms around him and squeezed. “Sorry.”

Paul rested his chin on the top of my head and hugged me back. “What did
she
want at this ungodly hour?”

“It was good news,” I said, feeling a bit light-headed from the combination of heat, steam, and lack of sleep. “The Academy's decided.” I took a step backward and waved my hand with a flourish. “In the best of theater traditions, sir, the show must go on.”