Marcia Talley - This Enemy Town

“He missed the ninety-degree turn at the end of McNair and drove head-on into the seawall,” Professor Black explained. “He was driving slowly, thank goodness, but the air bag deployed, hitting him square in the face.”

“Oh, his face, his poor face,” Dorothy crooned. “It’ll be all right, Kev. Of course it will be all right. Don’t you worry about a thing.”

To my way of thinking, Kevin had plenty to worry about. The results of his blood test, for one thing, if, as I suspected, he’d been driving under the influence. The penalties for that are severe, especially on a federal reservation.

His eye, for another. I cringed at the sight of the bruise that was blossoming around his eye socket. Hopefully it was simple, just a humdinger of a shiner. If Kevin’s vision were impaired, that would shelve any plans he had of becoming a pilot.

He turned his head, and winced in pain. “I tried to call you, Mom. I didn’t want you to miss me.”

“Miss you? What do you mean?”

Medwin Black smiled. “Adam Monroe, our Beadle, was just diagnosed with infectious mononucleosis. The doctors grew concerned about his liver, so Kevin was slated to go on.” Professor Black turned to his student. “But you’ll get your chance next year, Kevin. I’m sure of it.”

“Tough break, Kevin,” I said with a smile. I turned to Professor Black. “So who ended up playing the Beadle?”

“And someone had to sub for Jonas Fogg, too.” Professor Black twiddled with his beard. “Never happened before, to be two actors down. It was a bit of musical chairs,” he said, finally getting around to answering my question, “but we got it covered. One of the grave diggers had played Beadle Bamford in high school, and we sent Dean Kelchner in for Fogg.”

“Kelchner?” Kevin erupted, groaned, pressed his palm flat against his temple. “Kelchner couldn’t act his way out of a wet paper bag.”

Professor Black grinned mischievously. “There is that,” he said. “But we wrote his speech down and pinned it to the back of one of the lunatics. Kelchner managed fairly well.”

“The show must go on,” Dorothy said in a small, sad voice just as the plastic surgeon blew into the room, his lab coat flapping. He shooed everyone out except Kevin and his mother.

“Just a few stitches,” Kevin told us after the surgeon was done and the nurse allowed us back into the treatment room. A small, neat bandage covered the wound under Kevin’s impressively bruised eye.

Dorothy hunched in a corner, arms folded across her chest. “You need to see a specialist.”

“They have fine plastic surgeons at Bethesda, Mother. Some of the best in the country.”

“They just don’t want to pay for proper specialists, is all. Damn the military.”

I could understand her point of view. First her husband, now her son, was getting, in her words, royally screwed by the military.

A few minutes later doctor number one returned and cleared us all out again. I leaned against the wall outside the door to Kevin’s room, engaged in some serious multi-tasking. With my right ear, I listened to Medwin Black tell about the cruise he took to the Greek isles the previous summer. My left ear stayed glued to the door, trying to overhear what the doctor inside the treatment room was saying.

“What were you taking, young man?”

There was a pause, during which time Medwin was dancing to the music of bouzoukis on Rhodes late into the summer night; meanwhile, I imagined Kevin’s brows lifting in surprise. “Taking? I wasn’t taking anything! Glucosamine for my knee. That’s all I can think of.”

“Were you nervous? Stressed out? You exhibit all the symptoms of an overdose of tranquilizers.”

“Kev?” Dorothy again, playing the mother card. “Did you drink anything before the show?”

“Jeeze! I ate lunch. Drank milk with that. When I got to Mahan, I had a Dr Pepper. That’s it. Say, Doc, you don’t think I was drinking, do you?”

Next to me Medwin snorted, and I realized he had finished his travelogue and was listening to the conversation, too. “Hah!” he grunted. “I’ve seen midshipmen go on stage so pickled that even if you shot them, they wouldn’t fall down.”

“No, no,” the doctor on the other side of the door hastened to add. “There’s absolutely no trace of alcohol in your blood.”

“Of course there isn’t,” Dorothy chimed in. “He’s an actor. He had a show to do.”

“Did you find traces of tranquilizers, then?” Kevin asked with a tinge of panic.

“No, and I wouldn’t expect to. Most tranquilizers are completely metabolized by the body.”

“I can’t explain it, then,” Kevin said.

“A mistake,” said his mother.

Ten minutes later Kevin was released. Over the tearful protestations of his mother, Professor Black drove the midshipman back to the Academy.

I chauffeured Dorothy to her home in Davidsonville, settled her into a chair in front of the TV, fixed her a cup of tea and a bowl of hot oatmeal with butter and brown sugar, and waited with her until I was sure she would keep it down.

It was nearly seven before I returned home to Paul. He’d gone ahead and fixed dinner, the sweetheart, although about the only good thing you can say about Paul’s five-alarm chili is that it clears your sinuses.

I was applying a medicinal glass of red wine directly to the inferno raging in my stomach when Murray Simon called. “Paul, pick up!” I yelled.

When Paul joined us on the line, Murray said, “Hannah, I have good news and bad news.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake, Murray, get on with it! Please!”

“The good news is that the FBI is dropping the case against you,” Murray said. “Seems they picked it up under pressure from NCIS, and now that the sting operation is over, they don’t think there’s enough evidence to convict you.”

“I’m so relieved.” I could actually feel my blood pressure going down.

“The bad news is that NCIS isn’t similarly inclined. They may be taking the case forward on their own.”

I was speechless, gasping for air.

Paul filled in the blank. “If there isn’t enough evidence for the FBI, why is there enough for NCIS?”

“Well, there is that other matter.”

“Murray!” I’d found my voice at last. I actually screamed into the phone. “Sometimes you can be the most infuriating man!”

“What other matter?” Paul was spitting nails.

“We know who NCIS’s key witness is, the person who saw Hannah leaving Mahan Hall the day Jennifer Goodall was murdered.”

I gripped the arm of my chair so tightly that I must have left my fingerprints embedded in the varnish. “Who?”

“Are you sitting down?”

“I’m sitting down.”

Murray cleared his throat. “It was Dorothy Hart.”

That night I lay in bed, numbly studying theshifting shadows cast on the wall by the light of the full moon shining through the branches of the tree outside my window.

For a long while Paul lay awake beside me, trying out possible scenarios, but after a particularly lengthy lull in the conversation, followed by regular snuffling sounds, I turned my head to find that he’d drifted off to sleep.

I’d thought Dorothy was my friend. We’d worked together, laughed together, cried together. How could she betray me with such a monstrous lie?

I knew I had been nowhere near the back of Nimitz Library on the day Jennifer Goodall died. Dorothy had to know it, too.

Was she simply mistaken? That hardly seemed likely.

Was she purposely trying to frame me? As strange as her behavior had been in recent days, I couldn’t believe that either.

My bet, after staring at the ceiling for quite some time, was that in pointing the finger at me, Dorothy believed she was diverting suspicion from somebody else, somebody far more important to her than I was.