Donna Andrews - Chesapeake Crimes - This Job Is Murder!

The Colonel always apologizes to one version or another of who he thinks she is. “Aging is an indignity, Sergeant,” he’s said before. And other times: “In all our many years together, my darling, did you ever believe it would come to this?” These seem his only flashes of awareness about time and his place in it, but even those moments are dim with confusion.

“I’ve not been a good husband, dear,” he tells her tonight. “A good father, either, to-” He stops, he catches himself. Some small reality intrudes. “Thank you for looking after me,” he says. He strokes her cheek.

She puts him to bed, she tucks him in, she turns out his light. Nearly always, he’s staring at the ceiling when she leaves him. Tonight, he watches the window.

“The guards,” he says. “The duty roster.”

“Yes, yes,” she tells him, and she closes the door.

Back in her own room, she tries to go to bed, but finds herself restless, irritable, waiting once more for Pete, angry a little at him this time-and even more of each emotion tonight because of whatever’s gotten into the Colonel. She lies in the darkness for a while, staring at the shadows playing outside her own window, at that full moon raging, and then she turns on the light once more to read. She wants to keep up with what Pete’s doing, give them more to talk about, so she’d been following his syllabus. The class has already reached Lear , and she takes down the bulky Riverside Shakespeare from the nightstand, reminds herself again to get a more readable copy, then picks up mid-scene where she’d fallen asleep the night before:

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,-often the surfeit of our own behavior,-we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!

It’s near the end of the monologue that she hears the click of the front door-opening, closing. Pete at last, sooner than she expected. Sometimes he calls, usually she sees the sweep of his headlights against the window. He’s surprising her this time.

She’s left a note for him: “A plate of lasagna in the fridge. Microwave two minutes. XO. Me.” But she hopes he won’t see it, that he’ll just come back to her, ease this troubled evening. She listens for his footsteps coming down the hallway, but instead, she hears him trip over something, and she knows then he’s been drinking after class, too many drinks again, and suddenly it seems like he’ll just complicate the night further instead of improving it.

She starts to go out to him, confront him, but no, she’ll wait. She picks up the book again:

Edgar-

[Enter Edgar.]

and pat! he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy. My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o’ Bedlam. O, these eclipses do portend these divisions! Fa, sol, la, mi.

She’s stopped by the sound of the front door, opening and closing once more.

He’s gone out again? Keri lays the book down, steps to the window to see what he’s doing. But his car’s not out there at all, the yard looks empty. And then the sound of the front door opening again, and soon after, the sound of glass breaking, but muffled as if from a great distance.

Incoming, she thinks, and now her senses tingle, her whole body as alert as the Colonel’s had seemed earlier.

She picks up the bedside phone. She’ll call 911. She’ll call Pete, already hurrying him homeward with her mind. But there’s no dial tone, just a dull ominous emptiness on the receiver.

Radio silence , she thinks, and then she remembers the Colonel’s other words: Life and death .

And then she just thinks about the Colonel himself.

His door is still closed, she sees when she leaves her own room. There’s relief in that, though she recognizes the irony: the old warrior protected by the defenseless woman. But he would only add confusion on top of whatever danger is out there. And the truth is she’s not entirely defenseless. She’s carrying the biggest object in the bedroom-that complete Shakespeare-though she’s unsure whether it might best work as a weapon or as armor. She shudders to think it might come to that.

As she eases down the hallway, she wonders who’s out there. One of the leering surveyors, after all? That’s why they’d stayed so late today. They were casing the house, returning now to rob it. Or one of those college kids who sometimes drove down the wrong road-a prank this time, a dare, a different kind of trouble. She remembers too how Claire called Margaret a thief, remembers Margaret’s own words that you got no token of thanks unless you took it.

The living room is dark, just as she’d left it, with only the moonlight streaming in from various windows, casting shadows around the room.

Then one of the shadows near the dining room table moves, a silhouette stumbling toward the living room. The dim form lifts a pair of pictures from the wall, returns toward the table, lays the pictures flat. Its arm raises high into the air, some object in its grasp, and smashes down sharply. A crunching sound.

Dwight, she realizes, unsure where the knowledge came from. And then she looks again at the empty spaces dotting the wall, the pictures that the intruder is destroying. The Eisenhower is among the missing photos. Dwight would get it, one way or another. There truly was something evil behind that smirk of his, beneath those callous comments.

Suddenly, the book in her hand doesn’t seem protection enough.

The guns on the wall, she thinks. Are any of them loaded? How easily could she break the case? Would she know how to use one? But Dwight would stop her. He stands in the way, still fidgeting with things on the table. He could get to those guns first. In fact, she understands now, he’s already taken one of them from its box, hasn’t he? One of the gun cases stands empty, its glass front shattered. That’s the sound Keri had heard. That’s what Dwight is holding over his head, what he brings down once more against the table.

The knife. The one she left soaking in the lasagna pan. She can get to that. It’s a clear line into the kitchen. It’s not a gun, but it’s better than Shakespeare. At least she won’t be entirely unarmed.

As soon as she’s thought it, she’s done it. A quick sprint, and she’s at the sink. Hand in soapy water, fingers slipping around the handle. But Dwight has come up behind her, grabbed her arm, pushed her against the counter. Keri can’t get a grip on the knife.

Hot breath brushes against her neck, carrying with it the stench of alcohol. “You should’ve stayed in bed,” the voice huffs, a snarl there, an undertone of amusement. But it’s a woman’s voice. Not Dwight, not at all. “It’s just a break-in,” the woman slurs quietly. “Vandalism. You were asleep. You didn’t hear, you didn’t know.” Keri tries to shuffle around, to gain an edge, but the woman holds fast, surprisingly strong. “All those years, year upon year. And they think they have any right here? They never cared about him, not once. They don’t deserve any of this.” She coos, she soothes: “Just let it happen. You know it’s right.” And then a dark whisper: “I’ll compensate you.”

Keri shoves her elbow back into doughy flesh, hears the sharp intake of breath. Freed for a moment, she reaches toward the sink. But there’s not enough time. Before Keri can grab the knife, she feels fingers around her throat. “This isn’t between you and me,” the woman says, a snarl now, and maybe it wasn’t their fight, but it is now. The woman’s grip is relentless, squeezing, pressing. “They can’t know it was me. They can’t ever know.”