Marcia Talley - This Enemy Town

There were only two people on that list: her husband and her son.

Kevin, I knew from Emma, had an ironclad alibi. He’d been doing a Physical Readiness Test at the time of the crime. The PRT was a killer of another kind: sixty-five situps, forty push-ups, run a mile and a half in ten minutes or less, or a midshipman doesn’t graduate. Kevin’s PRT had been monitored by a couple of straight-arrow firsties.

Ted Hart had an ironclad alibi, too. He’d been briefing the Joint Chiefs.

When I asked him to, Murray Simon had confirmed both alibis.

For a change of scenery, I turned over in bed and watched the digital clock cycle from 12:01 to 12:02 to…

Three!

Hannah, you idiot! There were three people on Dorothy’s short list. Her husband, her son, and herself.

I’d always discounted Dorothy as a suspect. She was too frail to overpower a healthy young woman like Jennifer Goodall. Besides, Jennifer’s body had been found in Sweeney Todd’s trunk. There was no way Dorothy, in her weakened condition, could have moved her body from…

I sat up straight in bed. I switched on the bedside lamp. I pounded Paul on the back until he groaned and opened one bleary eye.

“Dorothy did it!” I shouted, slapping him lightly on the thigh to emphasize each syllable. “I’m not sure how, but she did it. She got Jennifer to come to Mahan Hall on some pretext, lured her up to Sweeney’s tonsorial parlor, then clobbered her with the hammer and pushed her into the trunk.”

I folded my arms across my chest and leaned back against the headboard. “I’ve been working on the assumption that Jennifer had been killed elsewhere and her body moved to the trunk because Dorothy told me that’s what happened. But I just this minute realized that I only have Dorothy’s word that it happened that way.”

Next to me, Paul fluffed up his pillow, folded it in half and stuffed it between his back and the headboard. “I thought Dorothy had an alibi. Didn’t you tell me she was getting a manicure?”

“According to Dorothy.” I slapped myself on the forehead. “Damn! Why didn’t I ask Murray to check that one out, too?”

Paul rolled over on his side to face me. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Hannah.” He stroked my arm. “Okay. Let’s assume for a minute that you’re right and that Dorothy is the killer. What’s her motive?”

“Try this. Somehow Dorothy found out that Jennifer Goodall was blackmailing her former boss, Hart, over that contract business. Either Hart himself told Dorothy or Dorothy figured it out. Maybe she ran across her husband’s checkbook or something. So, Dorothy killed Jennifer to shut her up, in order to salvage her husband’s career.”

“Works for me.”

“Or, Dorothy really believed her husband was having an affair with Jennifer Goodall and killed her in a fit of jealous rage.”

“That works for me, too.”

“Or both of the above,” I finished triumphantly.

“What I really don’t understand is what happened to Kevin,” Paul mused. “Here he’s all set to go on for the ailing star, it’s his big break, and he blows it all by taking some sort of tranquilizer. That just doesn’t wash, does it?”

“Okay, let’s think about that.” I gnawed thoughtfully on my thumbnail. “If Kevin didn’t take the tranquilizers on purpose, where did he get them from?”

“It couldn’t have been from the dining hall,” Paul said, gently pulling my hand away from my mouth. “That food comes directly from the kitchen in family-style serving dishes, and gets passed around the table. Everyone at Kevin’s table would have been whoozy.”

“Kevin said he picked up a Dr Pepper when he got to Mahan.”

“Then Kevin’s lying, Hannah. There aren’t any soft drink machines in Mahan.”

“He didn’t have to go to a soft drink machine. The cast and crew have a refrigerator in a little room backstage. We keep a supply of soft drinks in there. You drop a couple of quarters in a coffee can…” My voice trailed off.

I could see myself-was it only three weeks ago?-sitting in the tech room listening to Gadget as he helpfully explained the rules of the fridge. “And I think I know how Kevin ingested the tranquilizer! I just have to prove it! I’ll need to have another look at Mahan Hall.”

“Hannah?”

“Huh?”

“Can’t it wait until morning?”

I burrowed under the covers and wiggled closer to my husband, resting my head in the crook of his arm. “Professor Ives, are you trying to distract me?”

“I certainly am,” he whispered, his breath warm against my hair.

Monday morning, early, I dressed in my recentlyacquired jogging gear, jammed a wool cap over a hopeless hairdo, and jogged stylishly off to the Academy, leaving Paul to finish his coffee and newspaper in peace.

At Gate 3, I fished the chain holding my ID out of my cleavage and showed it to the Marine guard, who studied the ID briefly before waving me through. “Have a good day, Mrs. Ives.”

“Oh, I intend to, Marine.”

Classes were already in session when I let myself in through the door of Sampson Hall and wound my way quickly up the stairs and down the corridor that connects Sampson with Mahan. Once inside Mahan, I made a bee-line for the tech room and opened the refrigerator.

Because the show had ended its run, most of the soft drinks had been consumed, but a handful of Cokes, Diet Cokes, and Gatorades remained, some still with labels: BILL G, KAREN-YOU TOUCH-A, YOU DIE. I found none of Adam Monroe’s favorite Dr Peppers.

I closed the fridge and looked around.

In the corner by a television set and a stack of videotapes sat a black plastic garbage bag. I’m not terribly fastidious, but the thought of rooting through several days of adolescent garbage with my bare hands made me gag. I swallowed hard, undid the plastic ties, spread the bag open, held my breath and peered into its depths.

Starting with the pizza boxes, I removed the contents of the bag one item at a time, gingerly, sorting them into neat piles around me. By the time I got to the bottom of the bag, I had collected five pizza boxes, approximately twenty miscellaneous twelve-ounce soda cans, ten sixteen-ounce plastic soda bottles, exactly seven wine cooler bottles in assorted flavors (a dismissal offense, but I’ll never tell), and a single, plastic Dr Pepper bottle with ADAM MONROE, HIS DRINK scrawled in black magic marker across the label.

I also found a surprise: an empty blister pack that had once contained ten tablets of Zofran, Dorothy’s antinausea medication. I sniffed the empty package. It smelled like strawberries. Adam Monroe would never have detected the medicine in his already spicy, fruity Dr Pepper.

As far as I was concerned, it was an open-and-shut case. Dorothy had set a trap for the midshipman playing the Beadle, not knowing the young man had been stricken with mono and that Kevin had already been tapped to sing in his place. But unfortunately, Kevin had drunk the Dr Pepper intended for Adam, with near tragic consequences.

Holding the Dr Pepper bottle by the mouth with my thumb and forefinger, I set it carefully on a shelf along with the empty blister pack, then started shoving the garbage back into the bag. I was making so much noise that I didn’t hear someone come in behind me.

“What are you doing here, Hannah?”

I tucked the pizza box I was holding into the garbage bag and turned around ten times more calmly than I felt. “Good morning, Dorothy. I was so busy picking up in here that I didn’t hear you come in. How’s Kevin this morning?”

Dressed in jeans and a blue and gold Naval Academy jacket, Dorothy glared at me from the top of the stairs. Under the baseball cap she was wearing, her face grew dangerously red, and I realized, too late, that mentioning her son’s name had been a terrible mistake.