by Chris Hauty
“How do we know he hasn’t always been playing us, sir?” Her light smile evaporates. “How do I know you won’t have my place ransacked again?”
He had hoped she wouldn’t bring that up. “We had to make sure. About you.”
“And are you? Finally? Are you ‘sure’ about me?”
Wilde cowers just slightly against the onslaught of her intense gaze, hoping to avoid it. He stands. “As much as we hope we can be.”
Hayley also gets to her feet. “When you came here, I was out.”
“Yes.”
“And now?”
Wilde pulls the door open and steps into the hallway. “We’ll be in touch.”
She watches him head down the stairs, his footsteps fading with every floor he descends. Until there is silence. She strains to hear the elevator descending to the ground floor. She listens for a faraway police or fire engine siren. But the sounds simply don’t exist. Not even wind blows on this impossibly still morning. Silence reigns.
There it is, Hayley thinks. This is peace.
* * *
SAM PARKS THE car at the curb. It is Sunday morning, mercifully cool for a summer day in Northern Virginia. Yazat, the French bulldog, sits in the front seat between Sam and Hayley. After Rafi Zamani’s escape and subsequent demise, his pet was destined for the city’s animal care and control services. Hayley adopted the dog, reluctantly. The French bulldog is her first pet since childhood. She hopes, in a conscientious effort of self-improvement, Yazat will be a friendly antagonist. Something to help get her outside of herself. That’s the theory, at least. But, so far, Rafi Zamani’s dog has been mostly a pain in the ass.
It’s been a little over twenty-four hours since Andrew Wilde came to her apartment to drum her out of Publius. She hasn’t heard from him in that time, but she’s confident of her status with the deeper state. Hayley Chill will be assigned a new mission. Much will be at stake. Perhaps the fate of nations will hang in the balance. Great leaders will fall, others will rise, and in her intrepid way, the deeper state operative from Green Shoals, West Virginia, will be a vital instrument of the Constitution’s preservation.
Hayley’s intention until her next operation is to slow down. To see if this “smell the roses” business is all that it’s cracked up to be. The man who sits beside her—this kind and stalwart savior of lives—seems willing to start the long journey of becoming friends. The promise of intimate companionship exists. But friendship first, they have decided. Hayley has told Sam McGovern nothing of her work for Publius, of course. But he knows why she nearly lost her mind with rage that awful day a few weeks earlier. And he understands why they are now parked in front of this modest home on Fifth Street in Arlington, Virginia. The brick, two-bedroom bungalow belongs to Charlie Hicks. The man who killed Hayley’s father lives in this house.
“You sure about this?” Sam asks her after he shuts off the car’s engine.
“If I was going to kill him, do you think I’d let you drive me?”
He takes stock of her calm demeanor and decides the risk of violence is minimal. “I’ll wait for you here.”
Hayley smiles and leans over to give him a light kiss. She seems fine.
The twenty-foot walk to Hicks’s front door is an Odyssean journey, populated with the recollected tragedies and struggles she endured just to get to here. She reflects on the small miracle of finding herself at this strange moment of her stubborn existence, in possession of facts no one wanted her to have. Does anyone but herself really care about the death of one Marine in a war most Americans would rather forget? As much as she hopes for some final resolution, Hayley also fears that inside the house is yet another vortex, an abyss she doesn’t even know exists. She hasn’t decided what she will say to her father’s murderer. Or what she will do to him. At a bare minimum, she has decided, Charlie Hicks must live with the awareness that Tommy Chill’s unaltered memory is alive within her. The truth resides within Hayley.
She knocks on the door and waits. There is no response. Hayley had chosen a Sunday morning to see Hicks. Better to confront the man here at his home than at work. This time she will not be turned away. She is grateful for Sam’s presence out front, the guarantee of a sane process. Some independent, external control on her emotions. But everything depends on Charlie Hicks and his response. He will determine what happens next. Will he confess to his crime? Will he then offer to turn himself in to the authorities? And what about those hidden forces inside the Pentagon who have protected him all these years? Who will stand up against them?
Hayley tries the doorknob and is mildly surprised to find it unlocked. She pushes the door open and puts her head through into the house. “Hello? Mr. Hicks?”
There is still no answer. But the smell is unmistakable. Hayley recognizes the reality of what had happened here even before she called out his name.
But she must see him with her own eyes. It won’t be over until she sees him.
Hayley steps inside the house. The small living room just beyond the door is haphazardly furnished, with castoffs from thrift stores and yard sales. A torn and yellowed window shade pulled down to the sill. Stained rug and faded paint on the walls. Houseflies circle the room with uncertain trajectories. So this is the home of Charlie Hicks. The ambiance couldn’t be sadder. It suggests a man who has lived on a life on the margins, one devoid of human connection.
She is a conflict of emotions. Fear battles pity, but neither trumps rage. Hayley can’t imagine the hell the home’s inhabitant has experienced inside his head to live in this manner. With this much grief. She can’t possibly know what compelled Hicks to commit his despicable act. What can’t be understood, therefore, must be discarded from her decision to act. Perhaps if he hadn’t taken the cowardly way out, then he might have provided her with some explanation. In the seconds she stops there in the sad, cramped living room, Hayley decides the man’s final act is indictment enough of his past motivations. Hicks chose that route because he could not face her. It was murder, plain and simple.
Hayley presses on. To finish it.
Entering the bedroom down the short hallway from the living room, Hayley stops arrested by a sight she could not have expected. Even superheroes stumble.
The body hangs by the neck from the door. He is shirtless, shoeless, and entirely dead. He cannot be Charlie Hicks, however, because the body hanging by the neck from the bedroom door is her father. The dead man is Tommy Chill.
She recognizes his features, of course, as readily as recognizing her face in a mirror. Still, the reality is too outrageous to accept. Her obsessions must be toying with her powers of perceptions. It simply can’t be! Drawing nearer to the body, Hayley forces herself to study the body more closely. Take a good, hard look. It’s him. No avoiding the truth now. If she has any shred of remaining doubt or disbelief that the man hanging from the rope isn’t her father, the crossed arrows tattoo on his right side is a thunderclap of absolute confirmation.
Her mind reels, struggling to process the reality before her. Her father didn’t die in Iraq. He returned home from the war. But how? Under the assumed identity of another man? That can be the only answer, explaining why he avoided meeting her face-to-face at all costs. Whatever the desperate reason, her father chose to separate himself irrevocably from his old life—from his wife and children—to live this alternative life in Arlington. More questions loom. What of the real Charlie Hicks? Did the grieving family bury a stranger’s body parts back home in West Virginia? That sort of deviousness would give the conspiracy a logical symmetry, of course. But there’s something worse. One more twist of the screw. To her horror, Hayley makes the next leap of logic: her father killed Hicks to steal his identity. But what insane circumstances would drive him to do such a thing?
Knees giving out, she must prop herself up with a hand on the hallway wall. The shock of seeing her father is almost too much. Hayley wishes she could claw her eyes out, that they had never seen such a thing. The senselessness of her father’s decis
ion to abandon his family torments her. How can it ever possibly be explained? Who inside the military could have engineered the plot? What was his relationship to that cabal?
Staring at her father’s corpse, Hayley feels the push, not the pull of these relentless questions. Steadying herself, she takes a step backward. And another. Hayley experiences an overwhelming desire to be outside again. Away from this. She craves to be next to Sam, with the bulldog in the front seat between them. Driving to the park. To a Nationals game. The beach. For the man she remembers from her youth—a good father, always wise, loyal, and true—Hayley will leave the scene here untouched. With the others in her family, she needs that memory of him to remain intact. No one else must know the truth she has learned today. More than anything, however, she wants to be out of this house.
* * *
HAYLEY HASN’T SPOKEN a word about what she had found in the brick home on Fifth Street. The sun feels so good on her face, the hot air blowing across her elbow as Sam’s car speeds down the parkway. The Eastern Shore they had decided. Maybe a little fishing. There will be a time when she will need more answers, but it is not today.
Dog to her left, she exhales a long breath. Not a sigh, but release.
“You okay?” Sam asks.
She’s tough. Sucks it up. “I’m fine.”
“Tough week?”
“You don’t know the half of it, believe me.”
He takes her hand in his. “Let’s keep it that way.”
12
TOMMY
Nineteen Years Earlier
Family organized the get-together on account of her father being home briefly from the war in Iraq. What he was doing over in that cartoonish, exotic land, and why he has to go is a mystery to his eldest child. Her dad was forever gone, absences more real than his all-too-rare presence. Tommy Chill’s military deployment isn’t so different from his previous job as a long-haul trucker. Both pursuits are the natural inclinations of a man who can’t sit still for anything longer than a haircut. No one in town is surprised Tommy volunteered for another go at the jihadists. His war buddies are the best friends he’s ever had. By extension, the Marine Corps is a second and more enticing family than the one he leaves behind. With a stoic grin and the rangy looks of a movie cowboy, Tommy is a snapshot taped to the refrigerator that occasionally comes to life. Eight-year-old Hayley didn’t sleep a minute the night before her dad’s homecoming.
Her grandmother has come down from Charleston, provisioned with four grocery bags of her famous fried chicken, vegetable oil soaking through the brown paper. Tommy’s two brothers journeyed from out of state with their families for the gathering. A few of Tommy’s high school buddies stop by, too. Linda Chill, riding her youngest on her hip, is recovering from a mysterious illness that envelops her in impenetrable fatigue. Having rallied somewhat that morning, she generally helps more than she imperils preparations. The picnic site is a clearing next to the Big Ugly Community Center, within earshot of the unlikely rapids in the creek. Torrential downpours in the preceding five days threatened plans to hold the gathering outdoors. But on the morning of the big day, the sun peered through scattered clouds. The organizers decided to go ahead and set up at the center’s ancient picnic tables. With the addition of a few folks from church, Hayley’s four younger siblings, and her best friend, Jessica Cole, just over twenty people come together to welcome Tommy Chill home. Simultaneously, they gather there to see him off again.
Hayley can barely tear herself away from her father’s side for the first two hours of the party. She soaks up his every look and word, storing them away with her prodigious memory. Wearing denim cutoffs, a Shrek T-shirt, and cheap, no-brand sneakers from Walmart, Hayley dresses the part of an unapologetic tomboy. If Tommy needs another beer, Hayley will be at his elbow, offering a cold one with the top already popped. If his jokes seek appreciative laughter, her guffaws will be louder than any other. Wherever the war hero mingled with guests, his adoring daughter is certain to follow. With a lean reserve and quiet competence, Tommy Chill mostly earns this dogged worship. For what he lacks in quantity of time allocated to his young family, he compensates for that deficiency with the mesmerizing quality of his sterling presence.
“Go play with the other kids, girl,” her mother scolds, shooing Hayley away from Tommy like a sovereign’s loyal courtier. “Your friend looks half-sick with boredom.”
Hayley doesn’t glance in Jessica’s direction. “She just wants to smoke cigarettes down by the creek.”
“Don’t make jokes,” Linda Chill says.
With a clear favorite in this unfolding drama, Tommy puts a hand on Hayley’s shoulder. “She isn’t bothering anybody,” he says to his frustrated wife.
Linda takes a rebuking pull off her beer. “She’s bothering me.”
The look Tommy exchanges with his wife carries the weight of countless nights apart, of a marriage joined at too early an age. Travels away from home have given twenty-nine-year-old Tommy Chill a perspective on broader possibilities, one that finds his wife lacking in just about every respect. The feeling is mutual. Linda wants something more—she isn’t quite sure what—from Tommy. Sincere physical affection? Respect? A bigger, newer house? Whichever it might be, the marriage seems destined to crash. Lacking the sophistication and money necessary to redress the grinding failure of their union, the Chills soldier on with the unspoken agreement to let fate intervene. Hayley, of course, has no awareness of her parents’ dysfunction. Their behavior toward one another is no different than most other couples in Lincoln County, West Virginia. Like two wary prizefighters, the Chills mostly dance through these long, middle rounds of the bout. Taking measures of each other. Rarely drawing blood.
“Go on. Git!” Linda says sharply to Hayley. “Go play!”
* * *
HAYLEY AND JESSICA have been walking along the creek’s steep bank for more than twenty minutes when the older girl draws a flattened Marlboro pack from a pocket. A single cigarette is retrieved and lit up. Jessica, ten years old, inhales a modest amount of smoke and immediately exhales it, all without so much as a whisper of a cough.
She smiles, triumphant. “I love smoking.”
“You look dumb.”
They resume their exploration of the swollen and churning waterway. For Hayley, the metamorphosis from a benign creek to raging river is a wonder. Captivated by the apparent power of the bucking waves, she momentarily forgets all about the startling novelty of her father’s return. But Jessica is unimpressed with the creek’s wild abandon. Away from the thrill of social interaction, she feels bored and useless.
“My mom thinks your dad is hot.”
Hayley makes a face in response. “Shuddup, freak!”
Standing on the edge of the creek bank, Jessica shrugs and takes another drag on the cigarette. “My mom would screw the mailman if he stopped walking long enough.”
The older girl is so pleased with her outrageousness that she fails to notice the clay riverbank has started to collapse beneath her feet. She is saved from the roiling, brown water below only by Hayley’s alert intervention. The younger girl hauls her friend backward, away from the shattered precipice.
They tumble atop one another on the grassy embankment. Safe! Their ensuing laughter is spontaneous and a little shrill.
“Holy shit, that was close!” says Jessica.
Hayley remembers her father again, imagining him with one foot up on a bench and one arm akimbo, telling stories that enthralled his rapt audience. God is in that vision, a love too profound for her eight years to comprehend. With every molecule of her being Hayley craves to be at Tommy’s side, no matter how much her mother might carp and carry on.
“Let’s go back.”
Jessica sighs with exasperation. “You used to be fun.”
They stand, brushing the muck from their backsides. Hayley turns to head back up the way they had come. Jessica pauses, her hand repeatedly patting her pants pocket.
“My cigarettes!”
“Jess! Stop!”
The older girl disregards Hayley’s command and traverses the distance to the cigarettes in a few seconds. Retrieving her prize, Jessica holds the Marlboro pack aloft in triumph as the clay ridge under her feet disintegrates. An absurd yelp escapes her mouth as she drops into the roiling, flood-choked Big Ugly Creek.
Hayley springs forward, drawing as near as she dares to the water’s edge. She spies Jessica’s head bobbing in the surging waves as the current carries her friend downstream. Though she is only in the second grade, Hayley already possesses a remarkable ability to formulate decisive action, a trait that will serve her well in future years.
* * *
THE CREEK BANK is relatively free of brush and impeding overgrowth, allowing for Hayley’s pursuit of her friend. “Hold on, Jess! I’ll get you!” she calls out, though it is obvious the older girl could not possibly hear her. In the rare moments Jessica’s face emerges from the undulating torrent—eyes blind with panic and ears oozing watery sediment—it is a mask of terror.
Hayley runs in this manner for nearly two minutes, never failing to keep her friend in sight. But then the topography of the creek transforms. A wall of brush and fallen trees obstruct the way ahead. Without pause, eight-year-old Hayley Chill pivots and leaps with a rescuer swimmer’s urgency, jumping into the maelstrom. Arms churning, she begins to swim. Catching up with Jessica seems impossible. But her friend’s momentary pause in a providential eddy allows Hayley the opportunity she needs. Reunited in the clattering rapids, the two girls throw their arms around one another and embrace like victors of the big game.
Jessica can barely hear Hayley over the water’s roar.
“I got you, Jess. It’s gonna be okay!”
