Donna Andrews: Chesapeake Crimes: This Job Is Murder!

It was that last part that convinced Keri and kept her from pointing out how much of the cooking and housecleaning quickly fell to her. Pete was at least pulling his weight elsewhere, wasn’t he? Teaching a freshman survey course in western drama? Pursuing his own PhD? She could hardly complain about doing the dishes when he had lessons to prep and essays to grade and all that reading to do: Shakespeare, Ibsen, O’Neill, Beckett, Miller. And then fitting in work on his doctoral dissertation around the edges. He was already the golden boy of the doctoral program, destined to be the star of some big English department. She shared those dreams, and she tried not to nag him about her own. That wasn’t the woman she wanted to be-about work or marriage, about children somewhere down the line.

“We’re both in school,” Pete had said more than once when she talked about the future. “Student loans won’t pay themselves.” And that dissertation wouldn’t write itself. And tenure-line jobs didn’t come knocking on your door. School first, life later. She’d grown accustomed to that.

But now, with the semester living at the Colonel’s, with the savings, he’d hinted more about next steps. “With the money we’re saving here, we can set aside a little bit,” he said, “for the future.”

Maybe it was for the best for her to shoulder the work at the house while he focused on his education. And maybe there were other good reasons that Pete’s duties around the house were more limited. After all, the Colonel didn’t seem entirely to approve of him. He didn’t like the meals that Pete tried to make (“too spicy” once, “too bland” another time), he didn’t like all the time he spent reading (“needs to get off his duff”), and he generally peppered Pete with complaints on a regular basis.

“A trip to the barber in your future anytime, son?” the Colonel asked one morning. “That hardly seems regulation length.”

Other mornings-more than once: “Those shoes need a good buffing, soldier.”

And on the nights when Pete did join them for dinner: “Where’s your tie, boy?”

The Colonel wears a tie each night for dinner, tied in an elaborate knot. “A Full Windsor,” he told Keri when she asked. “Most men employ the Half-Windsor or the Four-in-Hand, but that’s too casual for me.”

“A little old school, don’t you think?” Pete said, when Keri asked him to try it one evening, just a single meal, just to humor the old man. “And that wasn’t part of the deal, now, was it?”

“Recruits these days,” the Colonel sometimes says, just under his breath. “A sorry lot, all of them.”

When Keri stands up to clear the table, the Colonel stands quickly as well to help. Even when she dismisses him-“No worries, I can do it” (he’s dropped plates before)-he hesitates before heading back toward the TV. He’s waiting for her, she knows.

“Just let me get this cleaned up,” she says, “and I’ll be right in, okay?”

“Roger that,” he says. “Rendezvous…” He glances at his watch. “Twenty hundred hours?”

“Roger,” Keri salutes, mock-serious. These days, she doesn’t have to count out the real time anymore. “I’ll meet you in the den.”

She stores the lasagna away in squares-leftovers for the week ahead-and sets aside a large slice for Pete, though she knows he’ll already have eaten dinner and probably gone out for drinks after class. Winding-down time after the intensity of the three-hour seminars, he’s explained.

The window above the kitchen sink has a wide view of the yard. The gravel driveway stretches off to the right between the trees, a hundred yards to the main road, a lonely stretch leading “off base.” Shadows play in the woods directly ahead, thick with oak and pine and beech, many of them now tied with red ribbons, marked for timber. Moonlight glistens on the lake off to the left, just barely in sight from this vantage, a rough shoreline that Keri and the Colonel have walked on more than one afternoon, counting Canada geese. A full moon tonight, Keri notes, as if that might explain the tension in the air.

Throughout dinner, the Colonel seemed restless, attentive. Now, as Keri scrubs at the casserole pan, she finds herself watchful, too. Is there “incoming”? She thinks about the people that she’s seen in and around the property sometimes. Fishermen bring small skiffs close to shore or actually trudge down the driveway in their waders, tossing a small wave toward the house as they pass. Hunters often wander through the woods, unsure whose property they’ve crossed into at any point. More than once, teenagers have pulled a car up the drive-couples, groups, looking for a place to hook up, get high, get into trouble. Then, beginning last week, came the onslaught of real estate agents and surveyors, the men from the tree service, the crew taking soil samples, the beginning of the end. Today’s surveyors had lingered until almost dusk, and she’d had the feeling of being trapped somehow, or watched at least, like she and the Colonel were on display, sad curiosities. A couple of times, she caught the men just standing there, smoking cigarettes, staring toward the house. Leering, she thought, no better than construction workers, ogling passersby.

She doesn’t know which is worse-the isolation she’d been feeling out here or these sudden intrusions, and the knowledge of what it means. Stuck somewhere between the two and spurred on by the Colonel’s own brewing vigilance tonight, her imagination leaps ahead again, playing tricks on her. Is that the red tip of a cigarette butt? No, just one of the ribbons flapping in the moonlight. Did that shadow move? No, just a branch swaying in the breeze.

“Full moon,” she says aloud, and then remembers her horoscope from earlier that day: Surprises abound. Follow where the evening takes you.All will become clear. Pete still makes fun of her for reading them each morning.

Behind her, the Colonel turns up the TV-hinting for her to join him. The announcer is talking about the Trojan War, the horse that made history, the importance of surprise. Keri shivers a little.

“Coming,” she calls to him.

The pan still isn’t clean. And she hasn’t even started on the knife, crusted with cheese. She leaves both to soak until later-even till tomorrow perhaps.

“He’s dotty,” Margaret, the former caretaker, had said, the second time they’d met-the passing on of the keys. She was an older woman: fifties, stout, frizzy-haired. “You’ll find out soon enough. And you’ve got your work cut out for you with him. With all of them.”

The first time they’d met was when Keri and Pete had been interviewed for the job. Margaret had brooded along the edges of the conversation as Claire, the youngest of the Colonel’s children, put a different spin on the situation: “The world has passed my father by,” she said. “We’ve striven to preserve his old glories, revere his achievements.” She swept an arm about the room. Medals and honors dominated one wall. Photographs with politicians and military leaders lined another, many of them long dead, Keri had since learned. Several framed boxes held guns, relics of a recent past, like museum pieces but brimming with menace. “Unfortunately, everything that my father trained for, everything that he lived for-none of it has much purpose here.”

Claire explained that it was just short-term. Margaret had been called to help her own father; plans were already afoot to sell the property, but might take some time; and they were finally looking into “more professional care” for the Colonel-a step they’d dreaded and delayed for too long. Claire herself had tended to him for several years after her mother died. “But I couldn’t manage any longer,” she explained. “Physically, yes, but emotionally… Well, watching someone you love so dearly deteriorate, become a shadow, sometimes you just feel yourself breaking down as well.” Keri and Pete were a stopgap. She was sure they understood.