“She should have,” Anne said. “She thought it out and hit me where it hurt.”
“You haven’t told me what you did to scare her so badly.” Holt turned to Anne, with a platter of barbecued chicken and grilled corn.
“I left a picture of her sleeping in her bed that I’d taken the night before,” Anne said. “And a pre-need contract from First Memorial Funeral Home.” Anne smiled, the smile of a shark. “I filled it out with her name, and included her date of death. Which was this coming May on the last day of school.”
Holt shook his head and laughed. “Good call.”
“I figured there was no chance she wouldn’t understand that,” Anne said serenely. “Not even a small one.”
Small Signs
A remark by the producer for the Midnight, Texas television series sparked this story. David Janollari is a big fan of the Anne DeWitt stories, and he told me he really wanted to find out more about David Angola. I was taken aback. After giving Holt’s former boss a cool name, I had completely forgotten about him.
Why would Angola show up in Colleton County? He wouldn’t be there for work-related matters as Holt and Anne are no longer his employees. He’d have to have some time on his hands. Perhaps he was on sabbatical for reasons that would provide the foundation for an intriguing story. And suddenly I saw a way to tie everything together and reveal a new dimension in the relationship between Anne and Holt.
Small Signs
David Angola was leaning against Anne DeWitt’s car in the Travis High School parking lot. The bright early-fall sun shone on his newly shaved dark head. It was four-thirty on a Friday afternoon, and the lot was almost empty.
Anne did not get the surprise David had (perhaps) intended. She always looked out the window of her office after she’d collected her take-home paperwork.
Anne hadn’t stayed alive as long as she had by being careless.
After a few moments of inner debate, she decided to go home as usual. She might as well find out what David wanted. Anne was utterly alert as she walked toward him, her hand on the knife in her jacket pocket. She was very good with sharp instruments.
“I come in peace,” he called, holding out his hands to show they were empty. His white teeth flashed in a broad smile.
The last time Anne had seen David they’d been friends, or at least as close to friends as they could be. But that had been years ago. She stopped ten feet away. “Who’s minding Camp West while you’re gone?” she said.
“Chloe,” he said.
“Don’t remember her.”
“Chloe Montgomery,” he said. “Short blond hair? Six feet tall?”
“The one who went to Japan to study martial arts?”
David nodded.
“I didn’t like her, but you obviously have a different opinion.” Anne was only marking time with the conversation until she got a feel for the situation. She had no idea why David was here. Ignorance did not sit well with her.
“Not up to me,” David said.
Anne absorbed that. “How could she not be your choice? Last I knew, you were still calling the shots.”
For the past eight years, David Angola had been the head of Camp West, a very clandestine California training facility specializing in survival under harsh conditions . . . and harsh interrogation.
Anne had been his opposite number at Camp East, located in the Allegheny Mountains. Since the training was so rigorous, at least every other year a student didn’t survive. This was the cost of doing business. However, a senator’s daughter had died at Camp East. Anne had been fired.
“I was calling the shots until there were some discrepancies in the accounts.” David looked away as he said that.
“You got fired over a decimal point?” Anne could scarcely believe it.
“Let’s call it a leave of absence while the situation’s being investigated,” he said easily. But his whole posture read “tense” to Anne, and that contrasted with his camouflage as an average citizen. David always blended in. Though Anne remembered his taste as leaning toward silk tee shirts and designer jeans, today he wore a golf shirt and khakis under a tan windbreaker. Half the men in North Carolina were wearing some version of the same costume.
Anne considered her next question. “So, you came here to do what?”
“I couldn’t be in town and not lay eyes on you, darlin’. I like the new nose, but the dark hair suited you better.”
Anne shrugged. Her hair was an unremarkable chestnut. Her nose was shorter and thinner. Her eyebrows had been reshaped. She looked attractive enough. The point was that she did not look like Twyla Burnside. “You’ve seen me. Now what?”
“I mainly want to see my man,” David said easily. “I thought it was only good sense to check in with you first.”
Anne was not surprised that David had come to see his former second-in-command, Holt Halsey. David had sent Holt to keep an eye on Anne when she’d gotten some death threats . . . at least, that was the explanation Holt had given Anne. She’d taken it with a pinch of salt.
“So go see him.” Anne glanced down at her watch. “Holt should have locked up the gym by now. He’s probably on his way home. I’m sure you have his address.” Aside from that one quick glance, she’d kept her eyes on David. His hands were empty, but that meant nothing to someone as skilled as he was. They’d both been instructors before they’d gotten promoted.
David straightened up and took a step toward his car, a rental. “I hated to see you get the ax. Cassie’s not a patch on you.”
“Water under the bridge,” Anne said stiffly.
“Holt had a similar issue,” David said casually. Apparently, he was fishing to find out if Anne knew why Holt had left Camp West.
Anne didn’t, and she’d never asked. “What is this really about, David?”
“I’m at loose ends. I haven’t taken a vacation in two years. I’m always at the camp. But until they find out who actually took the money, they don’t want me around. I didn’t have anything to do. So I came to see Greg. Holt.”
That wasn’t totally ridiculous. “I think he’ll be glad to see you,” Anne said. “When will you know the verdict?”
“Soon, I hope. There’s an independent audit going on. It’ll prove I’m innocent. You know me. I always had a lot of trouble with the budgeting part of my job. Holt did most of the work. Makes it more of a joke, that Oversight thinks I’m sophisticated enough to embezzle.”
“That’s Oversight’s job, to be suspicious.” Embezzling. No wonder David had taken a trip across the country. You didn’t want to be in Oversight’s crosshairs if the news was bad.
“Okay, I’m on my way,” he said, slapping the hood of his white Nissan.
“Have a good visit,” Anne said.
“Sure thing.” David straightened and sauntered to his rental car. “Holt’s place is close?”
“About six miles south. It’s a small complex on the left, all townhomes. Crow Creek Village. He’s number eight.”
“Has he taken to North Carolina?”
“You can ask him,” she said, smiling pleasantly. Would this conversation never end?
He nodded. “Good to see you . . . Anne.”
Anne watched until David’s car was out of sight. Then she allowed herself to relax. She pulled her cell phone from her purse and tapped a number on speed dial.
“Anne,” Holt said. “I was ….”
“David Angola is here,” she said. “He was waiting for me when I came out of the school.”
Holt was silent for a moment. “Why?”
“He says they asked him to leave the camp while the books are being audited. Money’s missing. He’s on his way to see you.”
“Okay.” Holt didn’t sound especially alarmed or excited.
They hung up simultaneously.
Anne wondered if Holt was worried about this unexpected visit. Or maybe he was simply happy his former boss was in town.
Maybe he’d even known David was coming, but Anne thought n
ot. I’ve fallen into bad habits. I felt secure. I quit questioning things I should have questioned. Anne was more shaken than she wanted to admit to herself when she entertained the thought Holt might have been playing a long game.
The short drive home was anything but pleasant.
Anne’s home was on an attractive cul-de-sac surrounded by a thin circle of woodland. She’d never had a house before, and she’d looked at many places before she’d picked this two-story red brick with white trim. It was somewhat beyond her salary, but Anne let it be understood that the insurance payout from her husband’s death had formed the down payment.
Anne noted with satisfaction that the yard crew had come in her absence. The flowerbeds had been readied for winter. She’d tried working outside – it seemed so domestic, so in character for her new persona – but it had bored her profoundly.
Sooner or later the surrounding area would all be developed. But for now, the woods baffled the sound from the nearby state road. The little neighborhood was both peaceful and cordial. None of the homeowners were out in their front yards, though at the end of the cul-de-sac, a couple of teenage boys were shooting hoops on their driveway.
The grinding noise of the garage door opening seemed very loud. Anne eased in, parking neatly in half of the space. She’d begun leaving the other side open for Holt’s truck.
There was a movement in the corner of her eye. Anne’s head whipped around. Someone had slipped in with the car and run to the front of the garage, quick as a cat. The intruder was a small, hard woman in her forties with harshly dyed black hair.
Anne thought of pinning the woman to the garage wall. But the intruder was smart enough to stand off to the side, out of the path of the car, and also out of the reach of a flung-open door.
This was Anne’s day for encountering dangerous people.
The woman pantomimed rolling down a window, and Anne pressed the button.
“Hello, Cassie,” Anne said. “What a surprise.”
“Lower the garage door. Turn the engine off. Get out slowly. We’re going inside to talk.”
There was a gun in Anne’s center console: but by the time she’d extracted it, Cassie would have shot her. At least the knife was still in Anne’s pocket.
“Hurry up!” Cassie was impatient.
Anne pressed the button to lower the garage door. Following Cassie’s repeated instructions, Anne put the car in park and turned it off. She could not throw her knife at the best angle to wound Cassie. There was no point delaying; she opened the car door and stood.
“It’s been a long time.” Cassie looked rough. Anne’s former subordinate had never worn makeup, and she certainly hadn’t gotten that dye job in any salon.
“Not long enough,” Cassie said. She pushed her hood completely off her head. Dark hoodie, dark sweatpants. Completely forgettable.
“If you don’t want to talk to me, why are you here? Why the ambush?”
“We need to have a conversation. I figured you’d shoot first and ask questions later,” Cassie said. “All things considered.”
“Considering you threw me under the bus?”
When Senator Miriam Epperson’s daughter had died in the mountain survival test, Cassie had laid the blame directly on Anne’s shoulders. At the time, Anne had thought that strategy was understandable, even reasonable. It didn’t matter that Cassie had been the one who’d kept telling Dorcas Epperson to suck it up when the girl claimed she was ill. Anne clearly understood that the buck would stop with her, because she was in charge of Camp East. There was no need for both of them to go down.
Understanding Cassie’s motivation did not mean Anne had forgotten.
“It was my chance to take charge,” Cassie said. “Let’s go in the house. Get out your keys, then zip your purse.”
“So why aren’t you at the farm on this fine day? Snow training will begin in a few weeks,” Anne said. She unlocked the back door and punched in the alarm code. She walked into the kitchen slowly, her hands held out from her side.
From behind her, Cassie said, “Have you seen David Angola lately?”
Anne had expected that question. She kept walking across the kitchen and into the living room. She bypassed the couch and went to the armchair, her normal seat. She turned to face Cassie. “I’d be more surprised to see David than I am to see you, but I’d be happier. He’s still running Farm West?”
“He was,” Cassie said. She was savagely angry. “We’re both on probation until . . . never mind. I figured he’d head here, since you’re such a favorite of his. I just found out Greg is here too. He was always David’s man, to the bone.”
“Surely that’s a melodramatic way to look at it?” And inaccurate. Holt was his own man. At least Anne had believed so.
Now she was leaving margin for error.
“I don’t know why both of you are living new lives here,” Cassie said. “In the same town. In North Carolina, for God’s sake. No two people have ever been placed together.”
“Most people get dead,” Anne said. “The point of being here is that my location is secret.”
“It took some doing to find out,” Cassie said. “But by the usual means, I discovered it.” She smiled, very unpleasantly.
“Coercion? Torture? Sex?” Anne added the last option deliberately. Cassie didn’t answer, but she smiled in a smug way. Sex it was.
That’s a leak that needs to be plugged, Anne noted. She should have taken care of it the first time someone from her past had shown up in her house and tried to kill her. At the time, Anne had dismissed it as a one-off, a past enemy with super tracking ability and a lot of funds. Now she knew there was someone who was talking. A weak person, but one who had access to records. . . .
“Gary Pomeroy in records,” Anne said, making an informed guess. Cassie’s eyes flickered. Bingo.
“Doesn’t make any difference, does it?” Cassie now stood in front of the couch, still on guard, a careful distance away. She gestured with the gun. “Strip. Throw each garment over to me.”
Anne was angry, though it didn’t show on her face. No one can tell me to strip in my own house, she thought. But what she said was, “What are we going to talk about?” She stepped out of her pumps and unzipped her pants.
“Where Angola hid the money,” Cassie said.
“You’ll have to tell me what you’re talking about,” Anne said. “I’m totally out of the loop.” Anne’s jacket came off (her knife in its pocket), then her blouse. When she was down to her bra and underpants, she turned in a circle to prove there was nothing concealed under them. “So, what money?”
Her eyes fixed on Anne, Cassie ran the fingers of her left hand over every garment, tossing the jacket behind the couch when she felt the knife. “Someone in accounting sent up a flare,” she said. “After that, the accountants settled in. Like flies on a carcass.” Cassie waved her gun toward an easy chair. After Anne sat, Cassie tossed Anne’s pants and blouse back within her reach. While Anne got dressed, keeping her movements slow and steady, Cassie sat on the couch, still too wary and too far away for a successful attack.
“Both camps got audited?” Anne said, buttoning up her blouse.
“Yes, the whole program. Our accounts got frozen. Everyone was buzzing. Bottom line, in the past few years over half a million dollars vanished.”
Anne was surprised at the modesty of the amount. It wasn’t cheap to run clandestine training facilities staffed with expert instructors, much less to keep a fully staffed and equipped infirmary. “The money was missing from the budget? Or from the enemy fund?”
“The fund.” Both farms contributed to a common pool of money confiscated—or stolen outright—from criminals of all sorts, or from people simply deemed enemies. The existence of this fund was known only to the upper managers and to Oversight . . . and, because it couldn’t be helped, a high-clearance branch of the tech team responsible for data handling also had access to the figures.
Cassie continued, “It would have been too obvious
if it had only disappeared from David’s allocation. It came from the undivided fund. Oversight’s pretending they suspect David. I know they really think I did it. I’m suffering for it. Even when I’m cleared, and I will be, and get reinstated . . . they’ve halved the number of trainees for next year because of the deficit. I’ll have to let two instructors go.”
This was not a novel situation. A money crunch had happened at least two times during Anne’s tenure. “Consolidating the camps would save a lot of money,” Anne said, because that had been the rumor every time a pinch had been felt. She’d scored a direct hit, from the way Cassie’s face changed. Cassie was the younger administrator; she’d be the one to go if the camps combined.
“Not going to happen,” Cassie said.
Anne knew denial when she saw it. “What do you think I can do about this?”
“David and I are both on suspension until the money is tracked down. I’m sure David will come to see Greg. They’re thick as thieves. Maybe literally.”
“I’ve been here for four years, Holt for two,” Anne said. “It’s hard to see how either of us could be responsible.” But it’s not impossible, she thought. “What do you plan to do if you find David?”
Cassie didn’t answer that. “I’ll find him. Are you telling me the truth? You haven’t seen him?”
“That’s what I said.” Why would Cassie expect Anne to tell the truth?
“What’s Greg’s new name?”
“Holt Halsey. Baseball coach.” Anne could see no need to keep the secret. She planned to make sure Cassie never told anyone.
“As soon as it’s dark we’re going to pay Coach Halsey a little visit,” Cassie said. She sat back on the couch and fell silent. But she stayed vigilant.
Anne had plenty to think about. She’d grown into her new identity. She’d become proficient in making her school the best it could be . . . though sometimes through very unconventional methods. She found it intolerable to believe she was on the brink of losing it all.
Small Kingdoms and Other Stories Page 9
