Marcia Talley - This Enemy Town

Almost reluctantly, I fingered the jacket’s signature J zipper pull, slid it quietly down, then twisted it off the bottom of the zipper, thinking, There goes $88 plus tax. First a gash in the sleeve, now a ruined zipper. Some people were never meant to own designer clothing.

With a flick of my wrist, I tossed the zipper pull across the room, where it pinged anemically on the plywood floor.

Thankfully, Dorothy heard it and set off in that direction. “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” she singsonged.

Cautiously, I unfolded from my cramped position. Keeping the duct work between me and Dorothy, I crept toward the door, sprinting the last three yards. I tugged on the knob, but once again the door was jammed.

Dorothy spun around and came after me, moving slowly but confidently.

I backed away, easing my way warily along a rough brick wall. A few feet to my right, a short flight of stairs disappeared into an opening in the brickwork. I had no idea where they led, but at least it was out, so I scrambled up the steps, banging my head painfully on the jamb as I charged through the low opening.

I emerged into a passageway that appeared to run between the roof of Mahan and the base of the clock tower. Built crudely of firebrick, the rough mortar tore at what was left of my clothing as I careened down the short corridor and pushed through another door. I closed it behind me, noticed that it had a latch of sorts, and with fumbling fingers dropped the hook into the eye. The primitive latch might keep Dorothy at bay for the time it took me to figure out what to do next.

To my utter amazement, I found myself in the clock tower, surrounded on four sides by giant clock faces, their hands all pointing to IIX and IX. Was it 1:05 already? Then it dawned on my frazzled brain that I was seeing the faces from behind. It was only 11:55.

Directly before me was a room within a room, constructed of white clapboard, like a summer cabin, and decorated with the usual midshipmen graffiti: KATHY AND BEN,’02 and the perennial GO NAVY, BEAT ARMY. From the clicking and whirring emanating from inside the structure, I suspected it housed the clock mechanism.

It took only seconds to explore the room. There was no way out, except for the way I had come and whatever lay at the top of a spiral wrought-iron staircase. Another staircase. I groaned. How many staircases had I climbed that day? I’d run out of staircases soon, and then what would I do? Fly?

Dorothy began cursing and kicking at the door, so I had no choice. I scampered up the spiral staircase, round and round, until my head popped out in the bell tower itself. A single bell, larger than a washing machine but smaller than a Volkswagen, hung from a pyramid of stout wooden beams. I touched the bell, ran my hand over the cold metal.

Floor-to-ceiling windows were set into each wall, covered with chicken wire to keep the pigeons out. A door had been cut into one, presumably to provide access to the balcony. I opened the makeshift door and stepped through.

I was standing outside, on a balcony barely four feet wide that encircled the tower, approximately 120 feet above sea level.

Under ordinary circumstances, a person might have paused to enjoy the view-a spectacular panorama of Annapolis all the way from the Bay Bridge to the Maryland State House dome. But these were not ordinary circumstances. And I wasn’t crazy about heights.

On legs of rubber, I grasped the railing and looked down. Patchworks of grass, brick sidewalks, the copper roofs of nearby buildings swam into view. All I could think about was how badly I’d splat should I fall.

In the chamber below, the clock hummed and clanked. I circumnavigated the balcony, searching for a ladder or fire escape, but the only way out was the spiral staircase.

And Dorothy was now standing at the chicken wire door, smack dab in the way.

I reversed direction and ran around the balcony, my feet slipping on patches of ice. While turning a corner, I stumbled on a protruding drain and nearly fell. I managed to recover, but Dorothy gained a few feet on me.

“Hannah, I just want to talk,” she yelled.

“I don’t believe you,” I yelled back, but the wind ripped my words away.

Around and around we ran, slipping, stumbling, staggering as cold and exhaustion took their toll in a senseless chase that could only end badly. There was nothing I could do but confront her.

I whirled around, raised both arms and shouted, “Stop!”

Startled, Dorothy did as she was told. Hundreds of feet below, the winter wind whistled across the Severn River and climbed the sides of the clock tower, lifting the brim of her cap-my cap, I realized with a pang, one of the half dozen or so I had given her. Dorothy’s eyes narrowed and she tilted her head, as if wondering who the heck I was. The arm holding the box cutter hung limply at her side.

“Please, drop the knife, Dorothy.”

Her eyelids fluttered. She raised her hand. Puzzlement turned to surprise, as if she were noticing the weapon for the first time.

But my move backfired. Seeing the box cutter only seemed to remind her of exactly who I was and what she intended to do. “Kevin can’t be a pilot now,” she snarled. With the box cutter held high, she advanced.

“We don’t know that, Dorothy,” I soothed. “Kevin’s in the best of hands. The doctors at Bethesda really know their stuff.”

She shook her head. “No. No. It’s too late.”

The clock beneath our feet whirred and clanked. I realized it was about to strike noon: eight bells. I’d read Dorothy L. Sayers’s novel, The Nine Tailors, and as I steeled myself for the first deafening bong , I prayed she’d made up the part about the bells turning your eardrums to mush.

“Too late for what?” I pressed.

“Ted says you were hanging around the Pentagon. Is that true?”

“Oh, did Ted see me there?” I asked in what I prayed was a conversational tone, although my voice was quaking as violently as my knees. “Why didn’t he say hello?”

“We think you went there to stir up trouble,” she said, narrowing her eyes.

“I can’t imagine why you think that, Dorothy. I was there to visit the memorial chapel,” I told her, shading the truth just a tad. “It’s profoundly moving.”

Below us the clock shifted gears.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Paul and I had friends who perished in the attack.” I’d played the sympathy card, but it was wasted on Dorothy, whose tortured brain knew no pain but her own.

“Ted’s going to jail!” she wailed. “Now I have nobody! Nobody!” The wind, as bitter as her words, swept across the balcony and tore the hat from her head, sending it spinning into the trees. She didn’t seem to notice.

Her sudden baldness, her vulnerability, tore at my heart. In that instant I saw the true source of her pain. Ted might go to jail. In a year’s time, Kevin would graduate, and who knew where the Navy would send him? Dorothy had no other children and, other than me, no friends. She would be utterly alone.

Dorothy closed her eyes for a moment, then joggled her head as if trying to clear it. “I thought you were my friend, Hannah, but now you’ve turned on me, too, just like all the others.”

Others? What the heck was Dorothy talking about? The vague hints of paranoia I’d detected earlier seemed to have grown to epidemic proportions.

“Everyone ends up betraying me.” She swayed, reaching out with her free hand to steady herself on the stone balustrade. “Even you. It really, really hurt when you turned against me.”

Coming from a woman who had lied to the police about seeing me at the scene of a crime, I found the statement extraordinary, to say the least. What the hell was going on? Had the chemo made her crazy? But Dorothy was the one holding the box cutter, not me, so I decided it would be unwise to contradict her. She seemed to be crying out for love and support, so I decided to give it to her.