by Sara Rosett
“The funeral’s tomorrow,” Joe had said. There wasn’t any inflection in his voice. I tucked the phone between my ear and shoulder so I could hold Livvy in one arm and pick up her plastic book from the floor with the other hand. We had been up three times with Livvy during the night. She didn’t seem to know what she wanted.
“I’m going to stay out here for a few more days. The Security Police at Greenly are releasing the van. Could you please pick it up for me?”
I did a quick mental scan of the day’s events. Mitch had training in the flight simulator, or the sim, as the guys called it. I’d planned on going to the Comm, the grocery store on-base called the commissary. “Sure. I’ll have Mitch drop me off on the way to his sim. I’ll drive your van back and leave it in your driveway.”
Hopefully, Livvy would sleep during the drive to the base.
That morning, I’d gone through the whole routine—feeding, burping, diaper changing. I’d hoped a car ride would soothe her. It didn’t. She cried during the twenty-five-minute drive. As I stopped for a light, I reconsidered my grocery shopping plan. I didn’t think I could handle it with Livvy’s fussiness. I drove past the chapel, the gym, and the Comm, each painted pastel yellow with mud brown trim. The government must have gotten a huge discount on that paint. It’s the standard exterior paint at every base I’ve ever seen. The color is probably called Pale Blah.
A military base is almost like a college campus, a self-contained world with everything a person could need: a gas station, credit union, banks, grocery stores, a base exchange, which is similar to a Wal-Mart only smaller, a recycling center, and a movie theater. Theoretically, a person never had to leave. Of course, if a person never left the base, theoretically, that person would go insane.
I rolled to a stop at the next intersection, tapping the steering wheel with my thumb, unsure what to do. I could tough it out and do our grocery shopping, but Livvy’s cries, although not as insistent as they were at the beginning of our drive, were still shrill and loud. Just the thought of navigating the Comm’s aisles with Livvy crying made my head hurt.
I flipped on my blinker and turned right for the car wash. Sometimes loud noises soothed Livvy. She loved the roar of the vacuum cleaner and the gush of water into the tub. The van was dusty on the outside and gum wrappers, dead pine needles, and paper napkins and cups littered the floor mats. I doubted Joe would want to even see the van, much less clean it up, so I could do that for him. Livvy went silent in midcry.
I could feel my eyebrows wrinkle together as I tried to figure out why she stopped crying suddenly. Then she grunted. I knew exactly what that noise meant: urgent diaper change. I sighed and pulled over to the side of the car wash parking lot.
I hated changing diapers in the car, but this was the worst I’d ever seen. Without a second thought, I tossed her overalls and shirt embroidered with a gardening theme of flowers, pails, and shovels in the trash. There was no salvaging that outfit. I fished a worn onesie from the depths of the diaper bag. It fit like a surgical glove. She was growing every day. I put her back in the car seat. As soon as the buckle clicked, she squished her eyes shut and cried.
I found several quarters in the bottom of my brown leather backpack purse and slipped them into the machine. I sat back in the dim light as the water pounded the car. Livvy gave a few more gulping sobs, then a shaky sigh tapered off into silence. Thank goodness. My nerves were stretched to the limit. Mitch could ignore her crying or tell himself that she was fussy and would be all right in a little while, but my natural mother response system couldn’t take much more of Livvy’s unending crying. Shouldn’t she quiet down when I comforted her? Shouldn’t I be able to figure out what was wrong?
I sighed again and glanced around the interior of the van in the dim light. Cass sat in this same seat right before she died. I got that creepy feeling I always get in a car wash, the gloomy half-light and the sense of enclosure. A fine layer of soap bubbles coated the van and intensified my uneasiness as it cut off my view of the cinderblock walls. I flipped the wipers on to open a small clearing. Get a grip. I sat up straighter. Cass didn’t even die inside the van. There was no reason to feel so uncomfortable. I glanced around the interior. Someone had cleaned up the personal items that were scattered over the passenger seat and floorboard the day she died. Probably returned them to Joe.
I opened the glove compartment and shifted the maps, flashlight, tapes, and napkins around. Where was the EpiPen? Joe said he kept one in the van. Had the police returned it to Joe with Cass’s purse? I flipped the compartment door shut and eased the van slowly through the dryer. Then I hit the accelerator hard, knowing that without the loud water noises the motion and tire noise of the van might keep Livvy asleep.
It worked. It was a blissfully quiet drive home. I was even able to think about Livvy’s crying with a little perspective. She had always cried loud and often. Livvy was not one of those babies who slept for twenty hours every day. My books said she fell into the “high maintenance baby” category. But, this was extreme, even for her. Was she getting sick? I dreaded her first cold. I knew she wouldn’t be able to tell me what was wrong, where it hurt. I decided to call a doctor when we got back home or, I amended, find a doctor.
“I’m sorry, but Dr. Henry isn’t taking new patients,” the cool voice said without a hint of regret.
I hung up and looked for Dr. Williams in the phone book. I finally found it under Northwest Family Health in the Yellow Pages. She was taking new patients and could see Livvy in six weeks. “You can try our Urgent Care Department. I’ll transfer you,” the receptionist said. I took their first opening, Friday at 10:30.
I sat on our kitchen steps with the thick phone book splayed open on my lap, hoping our neighbors wouldn’t call Child Protective Services. Faintly, I could hear Livvy crying in her crib. I had done everything I could think of: feeding, burping, diaper changing, playing, cuddling, singing, and rocking. She seemed to want to eat, but after a few moments, she’d jerk her head away and cry.
I felt like crying myself. So I put her down in her crib and shut the door. I was amazed that Livvy, so small and powerless, could almost push me to my limit. When I was pregnant a friend told me, “You have to have a place where you can put your baby down and walk away when you get so frustrated you can hardly stand it.” At the time I thought she was crazy. How could a sweet, helpless baby push someone over the edge? Now I understood.
I rubbed my forehead and tried to think of something to do outside. I looked over at the van still parked in our driveway, where I had left it as I hurried to get inside, feed Livvy, and put her down for her nap before I ran it across the street to Joe’s driveway.
“If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” My dad’s steady voice sounded in my head. It was a hot spring day when he showed me how to wash a car. He unlooped the vacuum cleaner cord and said, “Doing it right includes vacuuming the inside and cleaning the tires, too.”
I found the handheld vacuum and the extension cord. Sliding back the door on the passenger side, I tossed paper cups and a discarded newspaper into the trash, then I vacuumed up pine needles, lint, dried grass, pebbles, and tiny paper scraps. Neatness hadn’t been high on Cass’s priority list. When I turned the handheld vacuum off to close the sliding door and move up to the floor mats in the front, I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t place what it was. I stood still and listened.
Silence. I put the vacuum down and trotted up the steps. It was quiet inside the house, too. An article I had read about SIDS at one of my prenatal appointments leapt into my mind. Could she really be asleep? Of course, she was fine, but I’d just check on her. I tiptoed down the hall and struggled to open Livvy’s door as stealthily as a spy breaking into a foreign embassy. Peeking in the crack in the door, I saw Livvy, her blanket twisted in a knot beside her, her hands loose and relaxed. I watched her little chest rise and fall and let out my breath, silently. And Mitch said I worried too much. Ha!
I went back to the
van and worked my way around to the driver’s seat, throwing away the trash, then vacuuming. I was thinking about what I would have for lunch when I pulled a cup from under the gas pedal. It was wedged, so I gave it a good jerk. I glanced in it as I turned to toss it in the trash can. I dropped it on the ground like it burned me, jerking my hand backward.
After a second, I poked it with my toe. When nothing happened I grabbed one of the sticks that littered our driveway under the pine tree. I gently slid the stick into the squished opening and angled the cup until it stood up. Then I peeked in, still ready to dive for cover. I wasn’t wrong. I’d seen it right in that first glance. Black and yellow smears and a few wings circled the inside. At the bottom of the cup there were a few fairly intact bees or maybe wasps. Stinging things, anyway.
I stood there the hand-vac dangling in my hand, looking from the cup to the van. The cup was a generic, medium-size cup with the red and white Coca-Cola lettering. It didn’t have a lid on it and I didn’t see one inside the van. The cup had been wedged under the gas pedal. How long had it been there? How did it get there in the first place? The back of my neck felt prickly. This had to be a bizarre coincidence. Slowly I put the vac down and rubbed my forehead. Thoughts were skittering through my mind that I didn’t even want to examine. What I was thinking was impossible. I squatted down to look at the cup again.
I felt a presence beside me and turned. A brown and black dog stood beside me, his face only inches from mine. I could see each sharp white tooth in detail as warm doggy breath engulfed me.
“What’s up?”
I jerked around. Mitch, still in his flight suit and carrying his gym bag, stood behind me. I hadn’t even heard him drive up. The dog trotted back to him, paused with his head under Mitch’s hand. I took an uneven breath to calm down.
“Isn’t he great?” Mitch rubbed the dog’s ears. “Sit, Rex.” The dog obeyed. His brown eyes fixed on Mitch adoringly.
“Where …” my voice trailed off. “That’s Joe’s dog.”
“Yeah, Tommy was watching him for Joe, but Tommy had to go TDY, so I volunteered to keep him. I figured he could sleep in the garage. Rex, that is.”
Tommy was gone on a trip, or Temporary Duty, as the Air Force referred to it. I’d never understood why the acronym for Temporary Duty was TDY instead of TD, but there’s a lot of things I don’t understand about the Air Force. What mattered now was Tommy was gone and Mitch had Rex. “Mitch,” I paused, unsure which objection to voice first. “We don’t know what that dog would do around Livvy. It might be dangerous. And does it shed?” I stood up to gain a better bargaining position.
“Oh, he’ll be fine. Joe says he’s great around kids.” Rex’s gaze bounced back and forth between us, like he knew he was being talked about.
“What kids has he been around?”
“Look, it’s just for a few days. I thought he might get lonely, but if it will make you feel better he can stay over at Joe’s house and we can go over and feed him and take him for walks. We’re already going to be over there getting the mail.”
Mitch wanted a dog. I’d held out. We moved so much that we never knew if we’d have a place to put a pet. But beyond that little difficulty, we disagreed on what kind of dog we would get, if we got one. Mitch wanted a big dog; I wanted a cute, little dog. A cuddly dog I could handle. Ever since a German shepherd chased me home from school when I was eight I’d kept my distance from large dogs. Rex eyed me with his solemn brown eyes.
“Okay,” I said reluctantly. “You take care of the dog. I’ll take care of the plants and the mail. Are you done for the day?”
“Yeah. I decided to skip my workout since Livvy was so fussy. How is she?”
I listened for a moment. “Still sleeping.” I pointed to the cup on the driveway beside Mitch’s foot. “I found that in the van. Wedged under the gas pedal. Look inside.” He peered in and then let out a low whistle. “We’d better call the Security Police.”
“Then you think this means …” I didn’t want to say it. If I didn’t say it, it wouldn’t be real.
“Someone wanted Cass to die. And made sure she did.”
Chapter
Six
And you found this in the driver’s seat after you drove the van home?” Nott looked at the cup now encased in a sealed plastic baggie on the desk between us. “After you vacuumed it. After you ran it through the car wash.”
“Well, yes. I didn’t notice it right away.”
“Didn’t notice it.” Nott’s dark eyes bored into mine. So far he had repeated everything back to me. Shouldn’t he be taking notes?
Nott leaned back, studied the ceiling tiles for a moment. Then he stood. “Be back in a moment, ma’am.” He took the baggie with him, casually swinging it back and forth, like it contained a ham sandwich and he was on his way to lunch.
What was I doing? Nott obviously thought I was crazy to bring in a cup of squished insects and claim they were a murder weapon. I rummaged through my bag until I found a Hershey Kiss. I popped it in my mouth. Who would kill someone with bees? You’d have to know how to handle them, that’s for sure. Not something I’d want to mess with. A memory teased at the edge of my thoughts. Something about bees? No. Honey? I crushed the foil wrapper. Abby brought me honey the day Cass died. It was from Jeff’s mom.
Oh, no. I closed my eyes and leaned back. Jeff’s parents had a hobby that, to me, was slightly bizarre. They were beekeepers. Jeff couldn’t be involved in this, could he? He didn’t have a hive, but he knew how to get bees and handle them.
And Cass had threatened him. Then he’d gone outside. What had I done?
I watched Nott return without the baggie. He escorted me out of the large room with scattered desks into a private office with a faux cherry–finished desk and a window overlooking an empty parking lot. Colonel Witson sat behind his desk, turning the plastic bag around in his hands. “Nice of you to bring this in, all bagged up and everything. You must watch a lot of TV.” Witson grinned and tossed the bag on his desk.
I felt my face heating up. I’d been trying to help, but Witson made me feel like I was some kind of bungling police groupie, a big joke.
“I thought you might need it. It might help,” I said tersely.
“Was this”—he looked at a file on his desk—“Cassandra Vincent a friend of yours?”
“Not really. I’d just met her a few days before.” I wished I had changed out of my shorts and T-shirt into something dressier. I felt a distinct disadvantage here.
Witson picked up the baggie. “And now you think someone placed this in her car so she’d be stung and die?” His smile was wide.
“Look, I don’t know. That’s why I brought it to you. It sounds too crazy to be true to me, too. But I thought you would want to know.”
“Yes, we do always appreciate any help we can get. Thank you for coming in, Mrs. Avery. We’ll look into it.” He closed the file and stood up to shake hands with me.
I tossed a load of tiny clothes in the washing machine. How could someone who weighs twelve pounds generate three loads of laundry? Upstairs, I heard the gentle splash of water and the murmurs of Mitch’s onesided conversation with Livvy as he bathed her. I closed the washing machine lid and looked at the cabinets without seeing them. The supper dishes were done and I’d started the laundry more to keep busy than anything else. I couldn’t seem to focus on anything tonight. Despite Colonel Witson’s apparent lack of interest, two Security Police officers arrived at our house shortly after I returned from the base. They left with the van and my hand vacuum, so Witson was more interested than he let on. Although I didn’t like his attitude, he seemed to be following up on what I had found.
I felt a surge of anger and shook my head at myself. My time-delayed anger, which I experienced over and over again, didn’t do me any good. I wished I’d spoken up and defended myself instead of being embarrassed.
I couldn’t do anything about that now, but I could do a little research. I climbed the stairs from our basem
ent garage/laundry room. In our bedroom, I punched on the computer. It was too big for the secretary desk that my dad had made, so the computer was squished into our already crowded bedroom on a tiny pressboard desk. While the computer whirred through its warm-up routine, I plucked a chocolate Kiss out of the dish on the desk. Chocolate helps you think, I’d told Mitch. It was logical to have Hershey Kisses beside the computer. I logged on to the Internet and searched for information on bees.
Even though Witson had the van at the base, there was no guarantee he would do anything. Cass had died an awful, untimely death and whoever planned it was getting away with it.
The confrontation between Cass and Jeff worried me. That scene combined with Jeff’s knowledge of bees really worried me. I chewed the inside of my lip. Did I want to do this? I scooted the chair closer to the computer. The truth had to be better than not knowing.
After pointing and clicking my way around a few sites, I found several color pictures on a university education site and realized I had seen wasps, not bees. Wasps! I felt a little better. But if you know how to handle bees, you’d probably know how to handle wasps, too. I scanned the text. Yellow jackets are fairly aggressive wasps, especially if their nest is disturbed. If the hive is crushed it will provoke a fierce response, with wasps stinging repeatedly, instead of only once, as in the case of bees.
I scrolled down and clicked on the heading “Allergic Reactions.” It described the symptoms of a reaction. If the reaction was severe, death could occur within half an hour, but sometimes within five minutes.
I bookmarked the sight and continued exploring the other hits. The emergency room on-base had closed last year. That info was part of Mitch’s in-processing brief and he’d told me, so I’d know in case I ever had to get Livvy help when we were on the base. The nearest hospital was at least fifteen to twenty minutes away. I shivered, thinking of Cass. Even if she had been stung in the parking lot with people around, she might not have reached a hospital in time to help her. Whoever had placed the wasps in her car must have known it would be difficult for her to get to a hospital or emergency room.
