by Sara Rosett
“It’s me, Mrs. Avery,” Waraday said as he reached passed me to check the door, then stepped back to allow me to precede him down to the sidewalk where Montigue stood impatiently at the curb beside a base security police car.
“Would you like a ride to your friend’s house?” Montigue asked.
“No, thanks, it’s just over th—”
A loud noise, like a clap of thunder, resounded through the air. Montigue looked around, frowning, but I recognized the noise.
“That was a dry ice bomb,” Waraday and I said at the same time. Another explosion rocked through the air and almost simultaneously a high-pitched scream cut through the neighborhood.
Chapter Eighteen
The scream continued, a thin wail. “It’s coming from around the corner,” Waraday said. We were all ducking down, low to the ground beside the car.
Montigue scuttled around to the back and opened the trunk. She placed the evidence bags inside, then made a radio call. I couldn’t understand the abbreviations or the garbled voices, but I assumed she was calling for backup.
“Let’s go,” she nodded to Waraday as she closed the trunk and drew her gun. Waraday already had his out.
“You stay here, Mrs. Avery,” Montigue said. “Stay low.”
They didn’t have to tell me. I was practically one with the pavement.
They took off, crouching low and moving carefully down the street. Porch lights began to flicker on and curtains twitched.
The wail tapered off, then the sound shifted. I thought the cry was coming from a person, but the horrible keening sound was so distorted I couldn’t make out any words.
A few front doors opened and people stepped outside. Montigue and Waraday continued their careful progress down the street. The sound grew louder. A woman came around the corner at a run, one arm extended stiffly in front of her. There was something dark on her hand. Her cries echoed down the street. She saw Montigue and Waraday and headed for them full speed, her cries shifting to sobs. I made out the words “help me.”
As she ran under a streetlight, I realized it was Carrie and her hand and arm were covered in blood. Montigue put away her gun and moved to Carrie. She gripped Carrie’s shoulders and spoke in a low, soothing tone as she helped her sit down on the curb. Waraday still had his gun drawn as he scanned the street.
I glanced around at the neighbors who’d emerged from the houses. Bonnie was standing on her porch and Colonel Barnes was leaning out the front door. A few people had walked down to the sidewalk. I recognized the young woman who’d been with Carrie and Joyce at the cemetery. Her straight hair was caught back in a ponytail and flicked back and forth and she looked up and down the street, searching for someone, anyone. I moved closer to her and said, “Do you know what’s going on?”
“She did it again. I can’t believe she did it again.” She wasn’t really speaking to me, just talking aloud.
“What did she do? Do you know what happened? I saw you at the cemetery earlier, didn’t I?”
She focused on me and said, “She did it again,” then put both hands over her face and shook her head back and forth for a second. She shifted her hands to the sides of her face and said, “I knew something like this would happen. I didn’t understand at first, but when I saw those explosions, I knew I couldn’t do it anymore.”
“Are you okay? Do you want to sit down?” I asked, genuinely concerned. Even in the dim light, I could see her freckles standing out against her pale face.
“Yeah, good idea,” she said and plopped down on the grass.
I squatted down beside her and said, “Should I get someone for you? Your husband? Is this your house?” I asked, half-standing, but she gripped my arm and pulled me back down.
“No. I’ll be fine. If Tim sees me like this…no. I’ll be fine. It’s just the shock of seeing the blood. I’ve never done well with blood.”
I sat down beside her in the grass. She looked toward Carrie, but a huddle of people blocked her from view. A siren sounded in the distance. “I knew someone was going to get hurt. I didn’t think those little bottles could be dangerous—that’s what Carrie said—no big deal, just a little pop to get attention. But when I saw them go off myself, I knew someone was going to get hurt eventually.”
“It was Carrie who placed the dry ice bombs at the cemetery?” I asked, thinking that if it was true, my theory about Colonel Barnes being involved was wrong.
“I didn’t do anything. It was Carrie and Joyce. They’d done it before, but I didn’t want to touch the bottles and when I saw the explosions,” she shuddered, “I knew I wasn’t going to have anything else to do with Carrie.”
The grass pricked my bare legs. People continued to move around us, but no one noticed us. “How did she get the dry ice there?” Maybe Colonel Barnes was involved in some indirect way?
“Oh, she didn’t bring it. She had a girlfriend keep it in an ice chest in her car. Her friend met us at the cemetery and they grabbed the bottles out of her car and placed them real quick. Her friend left and we stayed with the signs, to raise awareness, you know. But they exploded so fast. There was supposed to be time to get farther away, but they went off a couple of seconds after we got back to the car.”
“So it was just you, Carrie, Joyce, and the person who drove the other car? No one else from Peace Now is involved?” I asked, to be clear. I was also reluctant to let go of my favorite suspect, Colonel Barnes.
“No. Stephanie is adamant about that. No violence. Nothing that could turn people off and now I see why. Carrie convinced me that they needed more people to make a bigger impact. She’d set off some dry ice bombs on her own, but then Joyce found out and Joyce loved the idea. They convinced me to join them and I knew I shouldn’t do it. Deep down, I had a feeling it was going to go bad—” she broke off and focused on me. “Hey, who are you? Why are you asking so many questions?”
I think up to that point she’d been talking and hadn’t cared who was listening, but suddenly she was on guard.
“I’m Ellie Avery. I’m curious because one exploded in my husband’s car earlier this week.”
“Oh, God. Was he hurt?”
“No, he wasn’t in the car, but it could have gone off when he was driving home and if it had…”
She shook her head as she watched a fire truck arrive. “He could have been hurt or even lost control of his car and hurt someone else. Oh, this is too horrible. How did I get myself involved in this?”
“How did you?” I asked as I waved away a tiny bug buzzing near my face.
“I wanted to make a difference,” she said miserably. “I don’t like the violence and dying I see on the news. I want it to stop and this seemed like a concrete way to get my voice heard. They’d have to listen to us. Carrie said if we set off some of the explosions in random places, they wouldn’t be able to catch us and they’d be forced to listen to us or else we’d keep setting them off. It was just supposed to be property damage. No one was supposed to get hurt.”
“So the first set of explosions? Carrie set those?”
“Yes. Your husband was one of the unlucky ones, I guess,” she said and I noticed she’d been plucking blades of grass and had created a neat pile of them by her knee. “Carrie said she walked through the squadron parking lot and found a couple of unlocked cars and put in the bottles. Then she had some dry ice left, so she made a few more bottles and put them in the shopping cart return at Wal-Mart. She put another one in some business office lobby.”
The front door to the house we were in front of opened and a man stepped onto the porch. “What’s going on, Faye? You okay?”
Faye scrambled to her feet, then reached down and pulled me up, too. She gripped my hand hard and said quietly. “Please don’t tell anyone I was involved with Carrie.”
“But the investigators already have your name from today at the cemetery.”
Her grip tightened. “Please,” she said before turning and running lightly up the steps.
I studied t
he scene around the fire truck for a moment. Carrie was being loaded into an ambulance that had arrived. She wasn’t sobbing, but her face was tear streaked and she looked terrified. Waraday and Montigue were talking with more security police who’d arrived. I walked in their direction. I wasn’t going to rat out Faye. Waraday already knew she was at the cemetery and had her contact information. I bet he’d be in touch with Faye again soon, but I felt I should pass along the information about the car to him. If the cemetery had any sort of video surveillance at its gates, then it shouldn’t be too hard to get the license number for it.
The ambulance pulled away. I walked to the edge of the group of people gathered at the sidewalk. As the ambulance left the neighborhood, the situation seemed to wind down and neighbors moved back toward their houses.
I spoke to an officer stationed at the edge of the sidewalk. I told him I had information for the detectives, which didn’t impress him at all, but when I mentioned specific last names and told him I’d been questioned earlier, he reconsidered. A few minutes later, Waraday strode over and said shortly, “Yes, ma’am?”
“Just wanted you to know that I heard—in the crowd—that Carrie had someone in a car drop off the dry ice bombs at the cemetery.”
His impatience disappeared as he flipped back through his notes, then he said, “You mentioned you saw a black car pass you on the road shortly before the explosions.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Okay. Thank you, Mrs. Avery. Who in the crowd mentioned it?”
The sirens were off, but the pulsating emergency lights continued to flash, giving Waraday’s face a red cast. “Umm…just someone talking,” I said hurriedly. “I don’t think I could point them out or anything, but I thought you’d want to know.”
He gazed at me for a long moment, then said, “Yes, we’ll check it out. So how does this,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder to the fire truck that was parked in the street and the milling crowd, “impact your theory about Colonel Barnes?”
I sighed. “It blows it out of the water.” I could admit I was wrong and, clearly, I’d been on the wrong path.
“Afraid so. Look, Mrs. Avery, I know you’re ‘trying to help,’ and you’ve got an inside track with some of the people involved, but this is a murder investigation and you’d be smart to not involve yourself in it.”
Anger fired through me. “Not involve myself?” I sputtered, trying to grasp my surging thoughts. “How can I not be involved? There was an explosion in my husband’s car! I—my family—we’re all involved whether or not we want to be!”
At my outburst, Waraday’s chiding expression didn’t shift and his voice grew sterner. “All the more reason to stay out of it. There’s dangerous stuff going on…people who wouldn’t think twice about hurting you or your family if you get in their way.”
I stared at him in amazement, surprised that even though he looked like he wasn’t old enough to order a beer without getting carded, he could sound like my dad. “I know there’s a murderer out there, you don’t have to remind me of that. Believe me, I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Waraday said under his breath.
I spun on my heel and pushed through the crowd, doing some muttering of my own. I couldn’t turn my back on a friend. And you’d think he’d be happy that I’d passed along information that might be helpful. I gritted my teeth, thinking I should have pointed those things out to him. I’d never been a good debater—or arguer—I came up with my best points only after the whole thing was over. In the heat of the moment, my thoughts tended to be a jumbled mess and it was only when I was away from the situation that I thought of zinging comebacks. And there still was no explanation for why Colonel Barnes had been in Denise’s house.
“Ellie,” a familiar voice called. “What are you mumbling about? Everything okay?”
I turned to find Abby standing beside me with a concerned frown on her face. I was in the mix of people in Bonnie and Colonel Barnes’ front yard. “Oh, I’m just trying to work things out and nothing is making much sense at the moment.”
“Well, good to see you’re operating as normal. You wouldn’t be you if you weren’t trying to sort things out into a logical and orderly arrangement,” Abby said. “Where’s Mitch and the kids?”
“He took them home to get them to bed early. Can you or Jeff give me a ride home? I stayed here to check on Denise. She was wandering around her yard.” I summarized the situation with Denise and asked Abby if she’d check on her in the morning.
“Poor thing. Of course, I’ll look in on her. And, what’s all the commotion down the street?” Abby asked and I realized she was guiding me like I’d guided Denise earlier.
“It looks like Carrie is the mysterious dry ice bomber,” I said as we stopped beside her car.
“Really? Carrie?” Abby asked, her voice rising in surprise.
“Yep. Apparently, one went off in her hand. They’re unpredictable.”
Abby was nodding her head. “You know, I can see her doing it…she had to channel all that anger into something. What a shame it was blowing things up. She’s lucky that the only person she hurt was herself.”
Tips for Busy, Budget-Minded Moms
Getting a Handle on the Paperwork
Despite trying to be a paperless society, we seem to have more paper than ever. Here’s a few ideas on how to establish some routines for the paper chase in your life.
Don’t let mail pile up. Open and sort it as it arrives, trashing junk mail and shredding anything with your personal information that you’re not going to keep. Create a folder or in-box for bills to be paid.
Request electronic billing to reduce the amount of paper you receive. Paying bills with electronic bank transfers cuts down paper and eliminates mailing costs.
Create a system to deal with the paper your kids bring home from school. A notebook with pocket dividers labeled with each child’s name is an easy way to store field trip permission slips, receipts for fund-raiser purchases, and school picture order forms.
You can add more pocket dividers to the notebook for take-out menus and coupons.
Label plastic storage crates for each child’s graded homework papers. Go through kids’ backpacks at the end of each week and help them clean out papers they don’t need. Save graded papers and tests until the end of the quarter, semester, or school year, in case a grade wasn’t recorded or they need old tests to review. At the end of the year, you can throw everything away or go through the crate with your child and pick out several examples of their work to store in a memory box.
Chapter Nineteen
“I know it’s short notice, but if you could make time for me, I’d appreciate it,” Bonnie said.
I pressed the phone into the crook of my shoulder as I shoved a juice box into Livvy’s lunch box.
“Mom, I can only find one shoe,” Livvy called, her voice near panic level. Rex circled the island with his tennis ball in his mouth and managed to nudge my calves with his head as he passed me.
I glanced at the clock, wishing I’d had the sense to let the answering machine pick up the call. Seven forty-five. We could still make it to school if I got off the phone, but with Bonnie that was no small feat. If only it had been my cell phone. Calls get disconnected on cell phones. Too bad I was on my landline. I covered the mouthpiece and called, “Check under your bed.”
Bonnie rattled on as I shoved the lunch box into Livvy’s backpack, reached to pick up Nathan, and grabbed the tennis ball from Rex’s mouth as he trotted past me again. I flicked the ball across the living room and he lunged after it, his paws skidding and slipping on the kitchen floor. I stood, boosting Nathan onto my hip. He needed a diaper change before we left to take Livvy to school.
Bonnie said, “Since my meeting’s cancelled, this morning would be the perfect time. You have no idea how ready I am to get this project moving. Simplify. Streamline. I’m ready to get the clutter out of my life, to go green, to work ou
t more. Things are changing for Rich and me. We have to be ready to go with this new phase…”
Livvy’s impatient and increasingly frantic wail overpowered Bonnie. “Mooomm, it’s not there.”
Our late night last night had thrown us off schedule this morning. I made a mental promise to myself to always pack lunches and lay out clothes the night before. Livvy had already checked the other usual places where her misplaced shoes usually turned up. Rex sat waiting expectantly at the door to Nathan’s room with the tennis ball clamped in his mouth.
“So you can see why it’s so important to get started on organizing now. I want to eliminate distractions and have a more peaceful—”
“Bonnie,” I said, interrupting and probably disturbing the Zen vibration she had going, but I couldn’t stay on the phone any longer. “I’m in the middle of something right now.” I taped on a new diaper. “Let me see what I can do. Will both you and Colonel Barnes be there?”
“Oh, no. He left for the squadron today at five this morning. He’s so dedicated, you know. He’s the one who’s holding everything together since Colonel Pershall…anyway, I was just saying the other day how crucial, how integral, he is to the squadron—”
Bonnie was making her pitch to the wrong audience. Since I had no input or control over who became the next squadron commander, I had no idea why she was talking him up to me. Habit, maybe? I cut in again. “I’ll call you back within the hour and let you know if I can make it.”
I weighed my options. I didn’t want to turn down a potential client, but I had no idea if Colonel Barnes was involved in Colonel Pershall’s death. I thought back to Waraday’s lukewarm response to my information about Colonel Barnes being in Denise’s house. He’d said it would be followed up, but he certainly hadn’t seemed excited or even very interested in it.
Perhaps a little time alone poking around their house would be productive, if I actually got in. Bonnie’s past wishy-washy actions had left me in the lurch. She’d set up appointments and cancelled moments before, so I wasn’t going to drop everything to run over to her house right this minute. Of course, she could be serious about getting organized. She certainly sounded like she’d had some sort of epiphany.
