SORRY CAN'T SAVE YOU: A Mystery Novel

by Willow Rose

  “She was an interpreter, right?” I ask.

  Sammy nods heavily. His shoulders sag. “She studied Arabic and, naturally, that is very useful over there. She really believed she could make a difference, that she could be useful.”

  “So, why didn’t she like it there?” I ask, praying I’m not going too far. But I do feel like they want to tell me this. They want to talk about their daughter. “You said she was disappointed at life at the camp. What was different? How was it different than what she expected it to be?”

  Sammy shakes his head. He looks defeated. It’s no surprise to me that he is a broken man; I can’t imagine losing a daughter, but there’s something else. There is spite in his voice and defiance in his brown eyes that tell me he hasn’t gotten the closure he needs. There’s a wistfulness to his voice that I don’t think he’s aware of. It’s like he’s missing these important pieces, and he’s trying so hard to finish the puzzle without them, but it just won’t fit.

  “She wouldn’t say exactly what it was, but she did tell us on her last call that she had seen stuff in her role as interpreter that she found troublesome.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know much. Methods that were very different from what she was used to from her training.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “Torture?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” he says, “but that’s the only thing that makes any sense.”

  “She did tell me about witnessing prisoners being burned with cigarettes at another time,” Vera says. “Or stripped down and then taunted about their manhood. I got the feeling she only told me a little about what she had seen. She told me she wanted to talk to her supervisor about it because she didn’t want to be a part of it. It was unethical, she said.”

  “Did she ever talk to her superior about it?” I ask.

  Vera shrugs. “We don’t know. There was a notebook that she wrote these things in, but it was never found.”

  “Really?” I ask. “And then she told you that if anything happened to her, she wanted you to investigate?”

  Sammy nods. He doesn’t look at me when he says the next part. He looks down at his fingers. He reminds me of my youngest when he is in trouble.

  “Yes. I think she said it mostly as a joke. She said it with a laugh at the end, you know? Like she didn’t really mean it. That’s what it sounded like to me.”

  The way he talks about it makes it sound like he doesn’t really believe it was a joke. He has only convinced himself to think it was. I wonder why. Is it to make it easier to accept that she committed suicide? Because he doesn’t know what to do about it if it wasn’t? Because the Air Force has told him to think that way? Because his wife wants him to think that way, so he won’t get worked up with his high blood pressure?

  Because it’s easier?

  I lean back in my chair, pensively. It doesn’t sound like a joke to me. Nothing about this seems like a joke. But what do I know, right? I wasn’t there. I didn’t know her very well and didn’t know if she’d joke about something like this. Would anyone joke about something like this?

  “But that’s not the worst part,” Hattie says as she comes back from the kitchen. She has been standing there for a little while like she was deciding whether to come sit with us or go back. She places the cookies on the table in front of us, then sits down, looking at her husband.

  “Tell her, Sammy. There’s no use in keeping it a secret. Tell her what you discovered.”

  Chapter 13

  “We were told it was a suicide,” Sammy says, folding his hands in front of him on the table while he speaks. “And immediately, we both knew it couldn’t be true. We just knew.”

  “Not our daughter,” Hattie says. “Not Clarice. Not my baby. She wouldn’t do that to herself.”

  “None of us would believe it, so I took it upon myself to start digging a little,” Sammy says, grabbing his wife’s hand in his. They exchange a brief look before he returns to his story. “The first thing that rubbed me the wrong way was how she supposedly killed herself. We were told she shot herself in the mouth with a military-issued service weapon. Now, I am a military vet myself, and I knew that Clarice’s service weapon was a forty-inch M-16. My daughter is only five feet tall and weighs maybe ninety pounds. She was a tiny little thing. She would have had great difficulty maneuvering an M-16 into her mouth and firing it. “

  “But that isn’t all,” his wife says.

  “No,” Sammy says. “We were also told that she was upset because a boyfriend had broken up with her via an email. That was their explanation. They said that she received the email, then slung her M-16 over her shoulder and went to the military store to buy a six-pack of soda and a pack of Hershey’s chocolate. They said, at this point, she was with an unnamed male friend and that she returned to her barracks with him, but then she left alone. She then went to a tent belonging to a military contractor, where they say she found a can of aerosol and set the tent on fire, then put the M-16 to her mouth and fired. The Air Force’s investigation showed that she killed herself. The Armed Service Committee in the Senate then signed off on her death, and the case was closed.”

  I stare at the both of them, my pulse quickening. “But…” I say, then look briefly at Vera. “Wasn’t Clarice gay? I thought you told me that once.”

  Vera nods. “Yes, that’s the problem. Only her closest friends knew this about her. She wasn’t exactly open about it to the Air Force, but some of them knew.”

  “So, the boyfriend is made up,” I say. “Someone made up that part?”

  Sammy nods. “Yes. Someone who didn’t know her well enough not to make such a mistake. And that makes one think. How much of the rest is made up as well?”

  “We received her in a casket draped with the American flag, and they refused to let us see her,” Hattie says. Her voice cracks as she talks, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “They said it was for our own good. But my son…”

  “Frank,” I say and think about the chat I had with Vera’s brother just a few days earlier when I called him about Sandra’s autopsy report. He’s a lot younger than Vera and Clarice, like ten years apart from them. I knew him before I met Vera, back when I worked as a journalist before we had Isabella. I used him as an expert for a series of articles I did on forensic work when they found a mass grave in the backyard of an old orphanage in Florida. He helped me get several articles to come to life. Since then, he has been my go-to guy when it came to forensic stuff I needed to have explained.

  “You know how he works at the Medical Examiner’s facility on base,” Sammy says. He is leaning forward now, getting engaged in our conversation. I can tell he’s getting agitated while talking. He’s moving his hands more aggressively, and his nostrils are flaring. He is breathing in small huffs. “So, you also know that he has access that no one else does. We told him to look at her files, and he found out that they had actually performed an autopsy when she died, but it was just not made public. In it, he could see that Clarice had a busted lip, several broken teeth, and she had a lot of scratch marks on her neck. She also had a broken nose. He also noticed that the bullet wound in Clarice’s head was too small to be from an M-16 and that it was on the left side of her face, even though Clarice was right-handed. Frank confronted the investigators about it, and they explained that the bruises and scratches were from before the suicide, days earlier, and she could have gotten them from a fall and that they believed it was definitely an exit wound from an M-16. Frank then went to two ballistic experts, and they said the wound was more consistent with a bullet wound from a nine mm pistol.”

  “Plus,” Hattie said. “There was no trace of residue on her fingers and hands. She would have had that, had she handled the weapon herself. All this evidence was right in front of them, and yet they still concluded it was a suicide.”

  “We have tried to ask them to reopen the case, but they won’t. The official response from them is still that the case is closed. They keep insisting she killed
herself, that she was depressed and had shown signs of depression for a long time before the incident, that they had discussed putting her on suicide watch. But that just wasn’t my sister,” Vera says. “I spoke to her two days before it happened, and she wasn’t depressed. She was looking forward to coming home for Christmas. I’ve started an online petition asking the Air Force to reopen the case. I have written to members of Congress, government and legal officials, and even they are met with the same reply when they try to help. The case is closed. There’s nothing more we can do.”

  “We’re not giving up, though,” Sammy says. His cheeks are blushing, his fists clenched. “We just need to keep pushing until we wear them down.”

  I stay with Vera’s parents way too long. We talk about Clarice, and they tell me so much about her, what she was like as a child, how she always wanted to grow up and join the Air Force, and I can tell they enjoy being able to talk about her. I’m guessing not many people ask about her anymore, out of fear. People get like that when you lose someone, afraid to mention their name or talk about them. It’s like they think you’d rather forget they were ever here, but that’s not how it works. I know this because I lost a brother once, many years ago. He was only three years old when he developed an aggressive type of cancer that killed him within the next six months. It almost killed my mother, and it broke all of us to pieces. And we never talked about him once he was gone, which was the biggest grief for me. My mom would hush me if I mentioned him, or she’d tell me to go to my room. She didn’t want to remember him, and I never understood that. I needed to talk about him and to remember. I was later told by someone that all people grieve differently, but I’m not sure my mother grieved at all. I think she shut it all out and refused to deal with it. In that way, I guess she never did.

  I stay with them for so long that I realize I am late when I finally get up and grab my phone. I only have forty-five minutes until the kids return on the school bus, and the drive back is at least an hour. Luckily, both kids know where to find the spare key and can easily stay at the house alone on base. They’re just not very used to it.

  “It was very nice of you to tell me her story,” I say as I hug them goodbye. Hattie holds me tight for a little longer, then smiles, her eyes turning moist.

  “Thank you for listening. It’s been a while since anyone wanted to.”

  I nod and smile gently, feeling awful for these poor grieving parents. To not only have to deal with burying your daughter but also having the doubt, the lack of closure because you don’t know what really happened. It’s gotta be tough.

  “Thank you,” Sammy says and hugs me with his strong arms. He’s a small man, but still very fit, and it feels like he could easily crush me using his bare hands. He lets go of me but keeps holding my hands between his, then looks me deep in the eyes.

  “You’re a journalist, right?”

  “I used to be once many years ago.”

  “Do with this what you want. You have our permission.”

  I look into his eyes and can tell he’s not just allowing me; he’s begging me. I suddenly get a strong urge to write a piece on this story. I feel like I owe it to them somehow. I also get the feeling that I have put my hand into the hornet’s nest, and I have no idea what I have gotten myself into.

  Chapter 14

  Ryan is home when I get back. He left in the morning to go to physical therapy, he told me. I don’t know if it is true or not. I don’t know if anything he tells me is true anymore. That’s what one lie does to you.

  “Where were you?” he asks, walking into the kitchen where I am taking out the meat for tonight’s dinner. It’s too late, and it probably won’t thaw in time. “Where were you all day?”

  He is smiling while he says it, but I have the sense that he’s not happy. The smile comes off as stiff, and his narrowing eyes tell me he is pretending.

  “I was with Vera,” I say, putting the meat on the counter. I fill a pot of water to put it in, so it’ll thaw faster. “It was her day off.”

  “You’ve been with her a lot lately, haven’t you? Didn’t you just have lunch the other day? What can you two possibly have to talk about so often? I didn’t think she was your type?”

  I pause. “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just that…Vera is the unmarried type, the wild one, the one no man dares even to date because she’s a little…crazy, you know?”

  I shake my head with a small scoff. “No, I don’t know that. Vera is nice, and she makes me laugh.”

  “Her sister was like that too. She was mentally unstable. I think that’s why she killed herself. Not that I know much about it, but that’s what I heard.”

  “How can you say that?” I ask, feeling sick to my stomach after what I heard earlier today.

  He shrugs and grins. “I don’t mean any disrespect or anything, but she wasn’t all there, you know? Something was always off about her, in my opinion. I don’t want you to hang out around her sister. Can’t you find someone else to have lunches with?”

  “You don’t want me to hang out with her?” I ask, puzzled by this. Ryan has never tried to tell me who to hang out with and who not to. Is he trying to control me? “I’m not sure that’s your call to make. I like her.”

  “Yes, you said that. She makes you laugh. I just don’t think she’s good for you. Besides, so do I. I make you laugh,” he says. “Why not spend more time with me instead of Vera? We can go see a comedy show if you want to laugh more.”

  I put the pot down, my back still turned to him. I don’t like that he is trying to restrict who I can see. Why is he suddenly trying to do that now?

  I sense he is moving closer. He kisses my neck, and I shiver lightly. His hands move quickly onto my breasts, and he is moaning softly.

  “I can be way more fun than she’ll ever be,” he says and nibbles my earlobe. “Don’t you think?”

  I chuckle. Not because I find it amusing, but because I don’t know what to say. I don’t push him away. I’m trying to save my marriage here, but that is actually what I feel like doing right now. Yet, I don’t. I chuckle instead—a nervous and awkward chuckle.

  “That wasn’t meant to be funny,” he says and lets his hand slide into my pants. He is touching me, and I let him, closing my eyes. I don’t even hear the small steps behind us until the voice says.

  “What are you guys doing?”

  Ryan pulls away with a gasp. At first, I think he’s laughing, but I realize too late that he isn’t. He is shocked and turns around fast, then lifts his hand in the air, fist clenched, ready to swing it, to hit Damian, when I yell at him.

  “Ryan!”

  Realizing what he is about to do, he pauses with his hand still in mid-air. The boy stares up at him, eyes wide, a gasp caught in his throat.

  Ryan freezes completely. The hand comes down slowly, and now he crumples. He turns away from Damian, and I grab the boy in my arms, then carry him away. Damian is not quite sure what is going on, but he starts to cry.

  I caress his hair gently, then his cheek. “It’s okay, sweetie. You didn’t do anything wrong. You just can’t sneak up on your dad, remember? We talked about this. He scares easily after what he has been through. He can’t forget all those terrible things like bombs and people shooting at him. He’s just afraid.”

  I glance toward Ryan, who is leaning against the counter, catching his breath. I know he’s beating himself up. This isn’t the first time it has happened.

  “I am sorry, Daddy,” Damian cries. “I am so, so sorry.”

  “Shh,” I say and hug him, trying to calm my beating heart, kissing his forehead. “It’s okay. You didn’t mean to. Luckily, nothing happened.”

  I say the words, watching Ryan regain his composure. I can’t help thinking, not this time, at least.

  I make spaghetti and meatballs, and we eat, even though the atmosphere is a little tense around the table. I can’t figure out if Ryan is angry or embarrassed. It might be a bit of both
. Maybe he thinks Damian should know better by now than to sneak up on him; perhaps he doesn’t know how to tell him how sorry he is for almost punching him. Isabella says she isn’t hungry and leaves the table quickly after eating a few bites, claiming she needs to do her homework. I know she’s just using that as an excuse since she told me earlier that she doesn’t have any homework, but I can’t blame her for wanting to leave. She’s very sensitive to tension and has a hard time dealing with it.

  I wish for a second I could just up and leave like that. I’m still angry about Ryan trying to tell me not to talk to Vera anymore. I am not gonna do it, of course, but it still bothers me that he’d say those things—especially what he said about Clarice. I can’t believe he could be so insensitive.

  Ryan stabs his fork into a meatball a little aggressively, then shoves it into his mouth and chews with his mouth half-open. He shakes his head with a scoff.

  “What?” I ask.

  “I was just thinking about something funny,” he says, then drinks his iced tea. He puts the glass down hard on the table, and the silverware clanks. “It’s a military thing. You wouldn’t understand. You should have been there.”

  “But maybe Sandra would have understood?” I say, not quite realizing I have said it out loud until it’s too late. It just bursts right out of me.

  Ryan stops chewing. He stares at me, the fork still in his hand. The silence is long and fills the room. Damian doesn’t notice, at least I don’t think so. He eats without even looking at us.

  “What the heck?” Ryan asks. “Why are you talking about Sandra all of a sudden?”

  I look down at my food, then shrug. “It’s nothing. Just forget it.”

  “It’s not nothing, Laurie. I know you. Why are you talking about Sandra?”

  “It’s just…well, did you have an affair with her?” I blurt it out. I don’t care anymore. I need to know. I deserve to know. If we’re trying to save our marriage, I have to know the truth. Can I trust him?