Marcia Talley - This Enemy Town

In the meantime I could hear that Agent Crisp’s intrepid colleagues had moved from my kitchen to my dining room, noisily opening and closing drawers and cupboards. Flashbulbs flashed. I heard the distinctive clanking of my mother’s silverware as someone pulled open a drawer. Glassware in the china cabinet tinkled alarmingly.

“Paul,” I bawled. “They’re tearing the house apart. Please, make sure they don’t break anything.”

“Don’t worry, ma’am.” Agent Crisp was reassuring. “We’re trained to be careful. We photograph the rooms both before and after we search. Everything will be left exactly the way we found it.”

My head throbbed. No, you’re wrong! Nothing will ever be the same. You’ve invaded my home. I’ve been violated.

But it was about to get worse.

“Stand up, please, ma’am. I’m going to search you now.”

She was polite, Agent Crisp, and professional. There was a nurse at Anne Arundel Hospital Center like that, I remembered. No matter how terrifying the procedure I was about to undergo, she’d explain it to me carefully, as if I were a moron. “This is a pill. We’re going to give it to you now. It’s a sedative. It’ll make you feel very sleepy.”

I could have used one of those sedatives just then. Maybe a dozen. Maybe someone could wake me when it was all over.

With another officer and Paul observing, Agent Crisp removed my handcuffs just long enough for me to take off my bathrobe and step out of my slippers. Through my nightgown, she felt around my waist, then ran the backs of her hands along both sides of my legs, my upper body and arms. Finally, she checked my head. Some criminals hid weapons in their hairdos, I supposed, but considering my short bob, that additional step seemed rather ridiculous.

“You’ll need to dress,” Agent Crisp said. She tucked a wayward swath of bangs behind her left ear.

Still sobbing, I nodded.

“Where are you taking my wife?” Paul demanded.

“To the FBI Resident Agency here in Annapolis for processing, then up to the courthouse in Baltimore, where she’ll be arraigned.”

“On what charge?”

“The charge is murder, sir.”

“But I didn’t kill anybody!” I choked back fresh tears. “Why isn’t anybody listening to me?”

Agent Crisp reached into her pocket and handed Paul a card that she’d already prepared. “Here’s the name and number of the Assistant U.S. Attorney in charge of the case. Have your lawyer contact him.”

“When can she come home?”

“That’ll be up to the judge.”

And with my hands still cuffed behind me, she marched me upstairs.

How many times had I stood in front of that very closet, trying to decide on an appropriate outfit for a wedding, or a funeral, or to dress the part of a trophy wife in order to trap a crooked insurance broker? What did I own that was suitable for going to jail?

Agent Crisp had planted me in the center of the bedroom, removed my handcuffs, and slid open my closet door. I felt ridiculously embarrassed by the mess inside. The clothes I’d worn the night-no, years!-before were heaped in a corner, and shoes I kicked off in a hurry lay scattered everywhere.

I realized Agent Crisp was waiting for me to say something. “What should I wear?” I asked, feeling helpless.

“Nothing expensive or tight,” she suggested.

From five feet away I stared into the closet.

My jeans? Too tight.

My green wool skirt? Too new.

My black wool slacks from Talbots? Too expensive. They’d be ruined.

“That long skirt,” I decided at last, pointing. “The one with the gored panels.”

Crisp located the skirt and eased it off its hanger. Made by Ahni Salway, an Annapolis designer with a genius for fabric and color, the skirt was one of my favorites. Falling at mid-calf, it was smart but comfortable. Colorful geometric shapes swirled over one panel; Japanese courtesans lounged on another; ripe apples decorated a third. Usually it made me smile, but not that morning. “And a black sweater,” I added. “I don’t care which.”

As Agent Crisp rummaged through my closet looking for a sweater, I tried to gather my wits. They think I murdered Jennifer Goodall. But I hadn’t, of course, so what possible evidence could they have against me? The fight alone wouldn’t have been enough to sustain an arrest warrant.

Maybe I was being framed!

Oh, God. What was going to happen to me? Would they lock me away forever? Send me to the electric chair?

Crisp interrupted my panic attack. “Where’s your underwear?”

I gaped at her. My God, I wasn’t even going to be trusted with a pair of underpants! “Top drawer,” I told her, struggling to maintain control.

Agent Crisp opened the drawer I’d indicated and ran her hand around inside, checking, I supposed, for guns in my drawers. (Ha, ha!)

I asked for my black tights, but that wasn’t allowed. Were they afraid I might hang myself with them? I would have to wear ankle socks instead.

Agent Crisp added the ankle socks to the neat pile she had made on top of my dresser. I knew I was supposed to get dressed, but I wasn’t sure how. All the usual protocols had suddenly, drastically, changed.

I’d dressed in locker rooms before, of course, at summer camp and in college, but that was long before my mastectomy. It had taken me months after the surgery to gain enough confidence to show my body again, even to Paul. And Agent Crisp was a total stranger.

I stood there shivering in my nightgown, arms dangling at my sides, doing nothing.

Crisp seemed to sense my discomfort. She lifted the bra and panties from the top of the pile and held them out. “You can turn around, if you like,” she suggested. “But don’t go near any of the furniture.”

I took the underwear from her outstretched hand, slipped the underpants on under my nightgown and then turned away. I eased my gown over my head and let it fall to the carpet. I fumbled for and dropped the bra. When I bent to retrieve it, I noticed Crisp flinch as she caught sight of my reconstructed breast. It wasn’t bad, as reconstructed breasts go-the plastic surgeon had done a terrific job-but the nipple had migrated a little left of center. Clearly, it wasn’t the breast I was originally issued.

I flushed, picked up the bra and put it on as quickly as I could, my back to her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this must be difficult.”

“I didn’t do it, you know,” I said as I struggled with the hooks. “I won’t pretend that I’m sorry Jennifer Goodall’s dead, but I didn’t have anything to do with her ending up that way.”

Agent Crisp slipped a sweater off its hanger, felt it over carefully, then handed it to me.

“And I can’t be the only person in the world who hated her guts,” I added as my head emerged from the neck of the sweater.

“I couldn’t possibly comment on that, Mrs. Ives.” Was it my imagination, or had Agent Crisp just suppressed a smile?

“My first name’s Hannah,” I told her, as if she didn’t know. “What’s yours?”

“Amanda,” she said. “Amanda Crisp.” She nodded toward her colleague, who at one point or another had joined us in the bedroom and now lounged tall against the door frame. “And that’s Special Agent Elizabeth Taylor.”

Taylor was a solid, sour-faced woman whose muscular arms and broad shoulders seemed custom-designed for blocking any attempt on my part to escape. She wore her dark hair in a ponytail tied low at the nape of her neck and not a speck of jewelry. Somehow I didn’t find the knowledge that she shared a name-and little else-with a famous movie star reassuring. If we got into a Good Cop/Bad Cop situation, I knew which one of them would be the first to aim a five-thousand-watt klieg light in my face.