He shook his head. “What time do you put her to bed?”
“Twenty-one hundred,” she said, wondering if he detected the plea in her voice. God help her, if she were putting Molly in any sort of danger.
“I’ll be there at 2130. Leave the sliding glass door open. We’ll start rumors if I show up at your front door that late.”
“Oh, like we won’t be starting one when someone sees you sneaking in my back door?”
He forced a smile. “Now I need you to smile and salute me like a good little company-grade officer.”
Her mouth flew open in protest. How dare he treat her with such a condescending tone. He didn’t wait for her salute. Instead, he executed a quick, sloppy one, performed an equally sloppy about-face, and left her standing there beside the car with her mouth still open. Damn him, she thought. She’d get answers tonight, or she’d consider taking everything she knew, however unsubstantiated, to N.I.S. in the morning. Let the chips fall where they will.
After dinner at home that night, which had included a roast she’d left that morning to simmer in the slow cooker, she’d helped Molly with her bath and into bed and read her a short story before turning out the light.
She poured herself a glass of red wine and stepped outside for fresh air. She was wearing a white tank top and her favorite pair of flannel sweat pants, but the chill in the windward breeze caused her to shudder. She retreated back in for a sweatshirt and made a mental note to pull the winter plastic totes from the attic. Molly would certainly need warmer clothing under a hula skirt on Halloween. From inside Paige’s house next door, someone flipped the outside light over their patio on, then off. Chase half expected and dreaded the opening whoosh of their sliding glass door and the interruption of her quiet time should Paige notice she wasn’t alone. Only voices, though nothing distinguishable, emerged from the Abercrombie home. On the other side of Chase, the rattle of pots from Samantha’s kitchen signaled that Sam’s kitchen window was up.
Her sliding glass door probably open as well. Chase could make out faint music, something jazzy floating over with the breeze.
Chase leaned her head against the back of the chair. What a day she’d had. First, there had been the disappointment at not hearing back from Shapiro after his meeting with … O’Donnell … at least she could now name Shapiro’s source. She couldn’t wait to tell Shapiro that one part of this mystery had been solved, anyway. But what about the rest? What did Figueredo know about a helicopter conspiracy? About Melanie Appleton’s murder? About Melanie and White? Maybe even about Melanie and Stone?
Nothing kills a relationship faster than apathy, she remembered her mother saying years ago when Chase had asked how her parents had managed to beat the odds and pain caused by Chase’s father’s alcoholism. Stone had become an alcoholic, at least by the most basic of definitions, she supposed. She’d known then he was self-medicating his way into oblivion to hide from demons. Had he been self-medicating to overcome his lack of love for her? Had he truly loved Melanie, finding in her something Chase hadn’t been able to give?
She looked into the lavender night sky, into the tops of the swaying palm trees as if an answer would materialize there. No answer, but the palm trees reminded her of the short hop she and Stone and Molly had taken to Kauai shortly after they’d arrived in Hawaii. On Kauai, they’d learned that no building was allowed to be erected any higher than the tallest palm tree on the island. Impossible to imagine Honolulu without skyscrapers. She stared at the tops of her palm trees for perspective.
At the rear of the backyard, light from the moon glinted off the gate that opened to the path she’d taken a dozen times or more to the beach on the few times she’d been able to carve out alone time. Right now, the encroaching whine of one of those small civilian helicopters that flew tourists quickly passed overhead and eventually beyond earshot. Chase stared back at the ocean. When a cloud slid across the moon, the ocean vanished into an inky, blank space—a void waiting to be refilled, an empty womb.
Her mind turned to Figueredo’s impending visit and her stomach fluttered with dread over what she might learn. Holding her arm toward the light from the kitchen window, she rotated her watch until she could read the time. It was already close to ten. Perhaps Figueredo wasn’t coming, after all.
Chase leaned back into the chair and closed her eyes. “Stone,” she whispered, “please tell me what’s going on.” The last time she’d said this to him had been months before his last deployment. He’d been acting distant and sexually unresponsive for months, though Chase had attributed all this to the end of their honeymoon period of reconciliation—a period, she would later learn from other wives, that generally lasted three weeks to a month. The reason Chase could remember their honeymoon period so well is because during those few weeks the guilt over the affair with General Armstrong had driven her, almost in a self-punishing way, to physically and emotionally prove she still belonged to Stone, and he to her, if only for Molly’s sake. What had happened over there was, well, over there, right? She could forget it, right? Move on. Resume her role as Stone’s wife and Molly’s mother. Right?
But Chase quickly discovered that forgetting her time in Iraq—and she didn’t mean just the affair with Armstrong—hadn’t been so easy. For several months, she longed to return. She’d only spoken once of this, to North, who had shared that he had been feeling the same way—another secret between them. In the way most secrets have of quietly taking root, her friend, Libby Bergeron, hadn’t been so lucky. Libby’s secret eventually flowered. She was the wife of a Cobra helicopter pilot and the first woman from the Officers’ Wives’ Club to welcome Chase. But Libby had taken the discovery that her husband had requested another combat tour just a month after returning so hard she’d had to seek counseling from Family Services, and someone, probably another officer’s wife, had leaked the news that Libby had been in for several appointments. Libby was one of those admirable wives who divided her time between two off-base charities and her newly elected position as secretary to the wives’ club—all duties performed while her two girls were in school. Had Libby been a Marine, who had spent time in combat, Chase thought, one who had been forced to think of no one or little else other than pure survival, she might have understood how one could become infected by war, could become an unwilling host-turned-carrier of a quiet disease, infected by the sense of belonging to something so much larger than herself—yes, even larger than motherhood, hard as that was to admit. No other moment in Chase’s life, sad as this was also to admit, had matched that heightened sense of being as having been in the middle of a war: not the first time she’d had sex, not the day she’d married Stone, not even the moment she’d given birth to Molly. In fact, if not for Molly, and to some degree Stone, Chase would have requested her own second tour of combat. God help her, but perhaps Stone had even suspected this and volunteered himself in a way of protecting her and Molly, trusting that Chase would not abandon their daughter a second time so soon. Or, perhaps Stone had been fighting his own strange longing to return to war, and this was why he’d begun to drink, and, in fact, was drunk when, on a night similar to this one in temperature and mood, they’d been sitting together outside on the patio when Chase had said to him, almost in a whisper, “We’re not going to make it, are we?”
Stone, into his fourth Scotch, responded by leaning his head against the back of the chair and closing his eyes. “I just don’t know.” Those words had nailed her to the chair, nailed her feet to the terrazzo patio and her wrists to the chair’s metal armrests. Any attempt to slide a foot or lift an arm would have been pointless. If Molly had suddenly screamed out from a nightmare, Chase couldn’t have responded. She’d been able to feel her heart, though: its thump-thump within her chest rapid, reminding her she was awake, not dreaming, hurting, barely breathing. Her breathing had become as shallow as the first time she and Stone had made love in a private cove beside the South China Sea. But now, their love was dead. Even Stone with his eyes closed had appea
red dead.
And as the truth slowly settled into her brain, images had developed. She’d seen the two of them in the living room, separating photos from the albums, assigning a new home to each chair, table, and lamp, then of dividing Molly by the seasons of the year—a summer for Stone, a Christmas for Chase. She’d had to will herself not to race toward the gate at the far end of their yard, not to fling herself down the treacherous path of knobby roots and sharp vines toward the ocean. If only her brain had allowed it, she thought. She would have tumbled blissfully toward the ocean, rejoicing at vines that would rip at her cheeks and neck and at the rocks that would tear open the delicate skin across her knees. If only her brain would allow her to match the external agony with the internal. An eye-for-an-eye justice. If only her brain would allow her to tumble toward the sea where salt could pour into each wound sizzling, stinging, punishing.
But the most Chase’s brain had eventually allowed was the slipping off of her wedding ring and the soft placement of it on the table between her and Stone. He had never stirred—but don’t let him be dead, she’d thought—as she rose from the chair and went inside to bed.
That night, which had been on the heels of her media flight with Major White, she’d dreamed of Stone and Major White flying her over Sacred Falls. When the helicopter began to spin out of control, she’d crawled to the cockpit and found White slumped over the stick and Stone missing. The bird was going into a nosedive so that the pool beneath the Falls looked as if it were rising toward them. A demon-like creature had emerged above the surface and was grabbing for the helicopter, narrowly missing it. She heard the metal ripping of blades against the rocky cliff, saw the blades fall one by one into the pool ahead. Where, dear God, was Stone? She’d pushed White’s body away from the stick, but it was too late. They were going down. The demon of Sacred Falls would have his sacrifice, and as she fell faster and faster toward the demon in the pool, her thoughts had turned to Stone and Molly, and she’d apparently begun to cry … until she’d heard, “How can you sleep in this heat?” and was jolted awake. The bedroom had been dark. She could make out Stone’s features from the light shining through the bedroom window.
He’d gone to the window and opened it. The drapes had come to life, ballooning into the room. “Why is it so hot in here?” she’d asked, rolling over to watch him by the window.
“Electricity went out.”
“I didn’t hear any thunder.”
Stone had unbuttoned his shirt and was sliding it down his arms. Next to his hands, she loved his shoulders the most. Capable, was how she would have described his entire upper body.
“Molly must be burning up,” she’d said, and slid her legs from the bed, her feet into slippers.
“She’s fine. She’d kicked the covers to the floor.”
“But if the power comes back on … she’ll be freezing from the ceiling fan and won’t be able to find her blanket.” She reached for her robe from the back of a chair and then decided she couldn’t stand the thought of another layer of clothing on her damp skin.
Stone had been standing in front of her, naked. He brushed her hair to the side. “I put the blanket back on the bed where she can reach it.” He’d leaned down and kissed her forehead. “Remember Okinawa? The night the power went out during the typhoon?”
How could she forget? It had been their first typhoon, and the day before it was due to hit the island, Marines had been ordered to stock up on food and water and to take shelter. Chase and Stone had made a run to the commissary, loading a shopping cart with wine, crackers, an assortment of cheeses, and then, in a last minute thought of practicality, Stone had grabbed a dozen cans of beans and franks, a jar of peanut butter, and a loaf of bread. They’d locked themselves in his room at the bachelor officers quarters where he had a steady supply of movies they had planned to watch until the power went out. And they had. That is, until the power went out and the typhoon hit the island. The windows, though reinforced with steel according to island building codes, had rattled so hard they’d dragged the mattress to the floor behind the sofa in case the windows shattered. Then, hot and sweaty and a little drunk, they’d fallen to the mattress. Stone had unbuttoned her shirt and reached into a cooler for an ice cube and slowly, teasingly, traced the roundness of her breasts, circling upward to each nipple. By the time he slid the ice down her body, she’d been quivering with anticipation.
Now in their bedroom, Stone’s kisses had moved from her forehead to her mouth. His lips had been hot. The Scotch on his breath, faint, a reminder of the moment on the patio and of what she’d been about to lose with Stone forever. The image of her wedding ring abandoned on the patio table had flashed through her as thunder rumbled and a streak of lightning caused her to shiver. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing Stone forever, and this fear of loss stirred her to press her body into his, if only for one last time.
With his mouth firmly pressed against hers, he’d reached behind her. She’d heard the tinkle of ice cubes and jumped when the cold stung the hollow of her neck. Droplets trickled over her collar bone and down a breast.
Her fingers had traced up his biceps and over his shoulders until she was lifting to her toes and slipping her arms around his neck. That’s when she noticed the glint of gold on her ring finger. He’d put it there while she was sleeping. Stone was back. At least for now. Maybe forever.
She’d molded her hips into his. He moaned, and she felt him rising against her thigh. Her left leg slid upward, against his. She’d wanted nothing more than to open herself to him, and so she’d lifted her leg higher, and higher. Encouraging him. Finally, when she thought she could no longer stand it, his hands lifted her short gown, exposing her to the cool breeze, exposing her.
Afterward, they lay across the bed, fingers entwined, wishing for the return of the breeze. The bedroom had been dark and quiet, except for the ticking of the battery-operated alarm clock on Chase’s nightstand.
When rain began to drop like change against the roof, Chase slid from the bed to check the windowsill. “It’s not blowing in,” she said, slipping her T-shirt nightgown back over her body in case Molly were to run in. Back in bed, she’d found Stone’s hand and slid her fingers between his. He squeezed. She heard him take a deep breath.
“I’ve gotten myself into something, Chase,” he’d whispered. She’d rolled onto her side, raised up on an elbow. He was staring up at the motionless ceiling fan. She was almost afraid to speak, afraid of what she was about to learn. She kissed his shoulder.
“I think it’s over.”
“The flying?”
“All of it.” He turned to look at her. Even in the darkness she could see that his eyes were moist. She waited for him to continue. On her left side, she could feel her heart thumping against the bed. “Go on …” she’d whispered and placed a hand on his shoulder.
But Stone hadn’t. Instead, he’d climbed out of bed and crossed the room to the window. The rain was still falling, and the breeze had shifted so that now the drapes were again blowing into the room. “Carpet’s damp.” He’d lowered the window and disappeared into their bathroom, reappearing with a towel he used to wipe down the windowsill. He’d tossed the wet towel back into the bathroom on the tile floor. “I’m going to check on Molly,” he said, sliding on his boxers. So whatever he’d been about to tell her that night, he hadn’t. Two weeks later, he’d received orders back to the Middle East and deployed thirty days after that.
But Chase had followed Stone into Molly’s room that night, and they’d found their daughter lying curled like a question mark in her bed, oblivious to the thunder and lightning, the power outage. Amazing what the child could sleep through. Chase pressed the back of her hand against her daughter’s forehead. It was clammy.
She glanced over at Stone who had been standing before one of Molly’s windows, drapes pulled aside, staring down at the street.
“What is it?” she’d asked. The ignition of a car turned over, and she’d seen a flash of headligh
t just before Stone released the drape.
“Nothing,” he’d murmured. “Everything’s dark. Must be a transformer.”
When she opened her eyes, Colonel Figueredo was there, looking down at her. With his arms folded across his chest and his weight shifted mostly to one hip, she realized he’d been studying her for a while. “I didn’t hear you walk up,” she said, straightening herself in the chair.
His leather jacket was open, revealing a white shirt that was tucked into jeans. His belt and black slip-ons had a European sleekness about them. Colonel Joseph Figueredo was a man who looked as if he would be comfortable on any continent.
He pulled one of the patio chairs from the table and set it so close to hers that she had to quickly remove her forearm to avoid being pinched. “You must have dozed off,” he said as he was settling into the chair.
Was he kidding? Sleep was the last thing she expected to enjoy for a while, not until she had some answers. She corrected him. “You’re kidding, right? After being questioned for murder and after O’Donnell’s call….”
“Are you going to offer me a glass of wine?”
She drained her glass and set it so hard on the terrazzo she thought she might have cracked the empty glass. “No …” she said, and added, “sir.” She was breaking all protocol. Moreover, she didn’t care. Damn the regulations at this point. Besides, this was her home, her home field advantage.
If he was offended, Figueredo was good at hiding it. “What exactly did O’Donnell tell you?” His tone was somewhere between a statement and a question.
“That you need my help with the media and that I was to make you tell me everything.”
At this, Figueredo actually grinned. “I need your help?” He looked away, and she followed his gaze out toward the inky space that was ocean.
She was about to speak, but he’d gestured in a way that encouraged her to keep a low voice. She leaned forward. Her knee was touching his. She whispered, “So, Shapiro’s right, after all, about a base conspiracy to hide defects in the 81.”
An Unlawful Order (The Chase Anderson Series) Page 20
