Marcia Talley - This Enemy Town

I touched my ears, then pointed at the dresser where my jewelry box sat. “Earrings?”

Amanda Crisp shook her head. “We don’t recommend you wear jewelry.”

I glanced at my engagement ring. The young Paul Ives had slaved all summer to earn the money for that ring, sweating from sunup to sundown in a South County tobacco field. It was only a third of a carat, but more precious to me than the Hope diamond.

Crisp noticed. “And you’d better leave that at home, too, Mrs. Ives. They’re just going to take it away from you.”

“They?” I croaked. “Who’s they?”

“The U.S. Marshals at the Federal Courthouse in Baltimore. That’s where you’ll be arraigned.”

I swayed on my feet, suddenly dizzy. “I need to sit down.”

Crisp held up a hand, palm out. “Just a minute.” While Agent Taylor kept her eagle eyes trained on me, Agent Crisp shook out the bedding and laid it aside. Using both hands, she tipped up the mattress and looked underneath, checking (I supposed) for any handguns I might have hidden in the box springs. Then she peered under the bed. “Okay. You can sit.”

I plopped down on the edge of the mattress, inhaled deeply, and held my breath, as if by not breathing, I could stop time. It didn’t work. I wrapped my right hand around my ring finger and considered what she’d just told me. “No,” I said after a few minutes. “I’m not going to take my ring off. And if anybody tries to take it from me, I’m going to fight them for it!” I waved my hand in the air. “How can I possibly hurt myself with this?”

Crisp shrugged. “Your choice, but I think you’re going to find that the U.S. Marshals are not particularly good ‘people people,’ if you know what I mean. They’ll want to take it from you and put it in an envelope with your personal effects. Trust me. It’ll be much safer with your husband.”

Personal effects . They were talking about me as if I’d died.

Maybe I had, and instead of going to heaven, I’d ended up in hell. Maybe that’s why my bladder was giving me fits all of a sudden. “Can I use the bathroom?” I asked.

Agent Crisp nodded. She gestured to Agent Taylor, who pushed herself away from the door frame and ambled into the bathroom. Taylor opened the medicine cabinet, ran her fingers over the items inside, removing a brown prescription bottle. I had no idea what it contained. She peered into the cabinet under the sink, lifted each towel. She peeked inside the toilet tank, too, checking for weapons there, also, I presumed.

Satisfied, she motioned me inside, then assumed a watchful position near the open bathroom door.

I stood by the toilet, waiting for her to leave, but she didn’t move a single one of her oh-so-solid muscles. I needed to pee, but there was no way I could do it, not while Taylor was watching me. So I brushed my teeth. Made a production of washing and drying my face and my hands, anything to delay the inevitable.

Then I finished dressing and they escorted me downstairs.

“Where’s your coat?” Crisp inquired when we reached the entrance hall.

Coat. I’d forgotten about a coat. It was February. It was cold outside. Why was I so hot?

Without any direction from me, Crisp located the closet, selected a black corduroy car coat with a fake leopard collar that used to belong to my daughter, and held it out. I was too exhausted to correct her.

Crisp patted down the pockets of Emily’s coat before helping me into it. I was allowed to fasten the buttons, then we began what would become a ritual over the next several hours: coat on, handcuffs on, handcuffs off, coat off, handcuffs on. This time, though, the handcuffs went on in front.

While all this was going on, Paul stared at me forlornly from the chair in the entrance hall. “Hannah, Hannah,” he crooned as the cuffs tightened around my wrists.

With a firm hand on my back, Crisp guided me toward the front door.

“Call your lawyer! Call Murray Simon,” I yelled to Paul over my shoulder. “But please, don’t tell Emily!”

Paul shot from the chair. “Don’t worry, Hannah. Murray and I’ll get you out of there. You’ll be home for dinner. I promise.”

“I know you will. And Paul? Don’t you worry. I beat cancer, and I can beat this, too.”

On the narrow one-way street outside our house an unmarked Ford Taurus idled, blocking traffic. Behind it, an irate motorist began backing up. I recognized the driver as one of my neighbors, Ray Flynt. As I watched Ray turn his car around near the William Paca House and drive the wrong way down Prince George Street, I prayed that he didn’t recognize me, that none of my other neighbors were awake and peering out their windows.

Crisp opened the rear door on the passenger side of the Taurus and guided me inside with a gentle hand on my head, just like on TV. After I sat, she leaned inside the car and wove the seat belt through my handcuffs before inserting the buckle in the clip and clicking it shut. Then she slammed the door, walked around the other side of the car and climbed in next to me. With Agent Taylor behind the wheel, we rolled quietly away.

With tears streaming down my cheeks, I twisted in my seat to look over my shoulder. Paul stood framed in our doorway, barefoot, his bathrobe flapping open in the wind. Light snow had started to fall, each flake a sparkling diamond in the light from our porch lamp. Mother would have grabbed my hand, squeezed and said “Look, Hannah, it’s a Winter Wonderland!”

Some Wonderland.

My husband standing half naked in a February snow-storm. And even in the lamplight, I could see he was crying.

“What time is it?” I asked Amanda Crisp asAgent Taylor steered the Taurus through Annapolis’s narrow streets, avoided the ever-present construction on Rowe Boulevard, and eased into the commuter traffic heading west on Route 50.

Agent Crisp stared straight ahead. “Seven.”

Back in my cozy kitchen, the coffeepot would just be kicking into automatic, gurgling cheerfully, in the mistaken assumption that it was going to be just an ordinary day. At that moment I could have killed for a cup of coffee.

Except for the crackle of the police radio, it was quiet inside the car. I wanted to fill the silence with shouting: I’m innocent! You’re making a big mistake! As if the FBI didn’t hear those words twenty times every day.

Instead of heading north on I-97 to Baltimore, Taylor took the Riva Road exit, and I began to panic. “Where are you taking me?”

“The FBI Resident Agency.”

“Oh, right.” I remembered now. That’s where they’d “process” me. Whatever the hell that meant.

“What happens there?” I asked.

“We have an automated booking process,” she explained. “JABS. Saves having to do it up in Baltimore.”

I remembered what Crisp had said earlier about the U.S. Marshals not being “people people” and began to relax.

We turned right on Truman Parkway. Just opposite the Farmers Market, Agent Taylor turned into the underground parking garage of an unremarkable brick office building I’d passed a hundred times before. My brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders, especially without my usual shot of caffeine, but some questions were beginning to float to the surface.

“Why the FBI?” I asked as Crisp unbuckled my seat belt.

“Lieutenant Goodall was murdered on federal property,” she explained. “That’s where we come in.”

“But it’s a naval base,” I said. “I thought the NCIS had jurisdiction.”

Crisp stood outside the open car door, looking in. “They do, but we get involved, too, particularly whenever a civilian enters the equation.”

Civilian. I thought for a moment. That would be me.