S. Tooley - When the dead speak

“Wait.” She looked up at the retreating man. “You’re Lincoln Thomas?”

“Yes.”

Carl swiveled in his seat. “There’s no need to…”

“Sam Casey.” Sam reached for his hand.

“Yes.” Lincoln’s face brightened. “I stopped by to see you the other day.” His eyes dropped down to her necklace. “Where did you get this?”

Suddenly, Hap’s written words popped into Sam’s head, the report her father had written, the account of Mushima valley. All the names, places, events.

She took a step back, assessed his age. Could it be?

“My, god,” she gasped. “You’re Ling Toy!”

Carl leaned back in his chair, his elbow propped up on the arm rest, a fist pressed wearily under his chin. Sam was reading Lincoln’s signed affidavit as she paced the floor.

Carl said, “A copy of everything will be given to the Pentagon, Sam. So, we have just about wrapped up everything here.”

“Wrapped up?” Sam pivoted on her heel. “Did I miss something here? Or did you? What about Hap’s killer? My father’s killer? You can’t just let Preston walk. What are you going to do? File a report that those three men died in Mushima Valley of friendly fire and leave it at that?” She glanced at Lincoln who had remained silent. “Did you threaten Lincoln with deportation if he goes to the press?”

Carl held out his hand to retrieve the affidavit. “No one is threatening anyone here, Sam.” Carl’s phone rang. He walked over to the far end of the table and picked it up.

While he spoke, Sam opened a file folder by his briefcase. Her eyes scanned the handwriting, the paper yellowed with age. It was Hap’s writing. He told of the men in his unit, how he believed they were buried in Mushima Valley.

“Things are getting out of control,” Carl said into the phone. He took four long strides over to where Sam was sitting and pulled the folder out of her hands.

The pages flashed in front of Sam’s eyes like a teleprompter. They had a copy of everything that had been in her father’s safety deposit box.

“You knew! You knew all along.” Sam could tell by the surprised look on Lincoln’s face that he, too, had been kept in the dark.

“She found the report,” Carl said into the phone. “With all due respect, there was a better way to handle the situation.”

Sam lowered herself into the chair. Her father’s papers, Hap’s affidavit. Her father had called the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee who at the time was Jackson Whittier. Whittier knew and did nothing. Sam felt numb. Anger and shock overwhelmed her.

“They knew,” she mumbled, “and they never bothered to look for them, to confirm what Hap had told my father.”

Lincoln blinked rapidly. “All this time? I came here for nothing?”

Carl dropped the phone to his chest then held it out to Sam.

“President Whittier would like to speak with you.”

With a dampened paper towel, Sam slowly erased the writing on the white plexiboard. The names of Hap, Bubba, Shadow, and Booker disappeared one by one. Next was Preston, George Abbott, Leonard Ames, and Parker Smith. Their names reduced to faded images before one last wipe erased all evidence of their existence. It took longer to erase her father’s name. It was like losing him a second time, as if his existing on a plexiboard somehow brought him back to life.

With the board completely cleaned off, she gathered the papers from the study and the dining room table and carried them to the living room. She pressed the igniter and brought the gas fireplace to life.

From the hearth in front of the see-through fireplace, Sam stared wistfully at the window seat in the dining room. She thought back to last night and the way Jake’s arms felt wrapped around her, and the look of longing in his eyes, or maybe she had imagined it. Maybe it had been the longing in her eyes.

She struggled to bring her mind back to her encounter with Carl and her conversation with the President. Whittier admitted he had received her father’s package of information. Carl denied having seen it until just recently. But he also had the pages from her father’s safety deposit box. And there was only one person who could have given them to him.

The writing had been on the wall. She didn’t know how she failed to see it. As she watched the flames flicker, she thought of the night Jake had appeared on her patio. The familiar way his eyes deciphered every movement, registered every detail, his serious demeanor. FBI.

Jake had been nothing more than another watchdog for Carl. His concern had been a lie, the key he finagled out of Abby, his staying here all these nights. She inhaled long and deep, daring those tears to make an appearance. She heard a key in the front door but didn’t look up.

Jake walked down the steps to the dining room. The table was cleared of all the notes, papers. The sandblasted grapevine tree trunk was back in the center of the table with all its greenery, fake cactus, and flowers.

“It isn’t hot enough outside for you?”

Sam tore sheets of paper into halves, then quarters, and slowly fed them to the fire. Out of the corner of her eye she watched him walk over, toss his sportscoat on the couch.

“You’re destroying evidence.”

She looked up at him, gave a resigned sigh and tossed another handful of scraps into the flames, watching the edges curl up and turn to ashes.

“I sold my soul to the devil today,” she started. “I gave President Whittier an offer he couldn’t refuse.”

“President Whittier?” His eyes questioned her as he took a seat on the arm of the couch.

“Yes.” She closed the door to the fireplace and brushed the dirt from her hands. She turned her attention to him, tried to look at him as her nemesis, not the man whose strong arms had protected her in the fall from Preston’s fence. Focus. That had always been her strong point. She just had to force herself to focus.

“In exchange for not revealing that the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee was aware over twenty years ago that the bodies of missing GIs were buried at Mushima Valley, Whittier is going to appoint Abby to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and grant a few other odds and ends.” A tense laugh escaped her throat. “I can almost get used to this deal-making.”

Jake’s face became as stony as Carl’s had been earlier.

“The President, on the other hand,” Sam continued, “will make the murders and Preston’s involvement public. We can finally get the bastard behind bars and reinstate Hap and his unit to their proper, honorable status.”

“He agreed to that?”

He said it cautiously. Sam saw no hint of exposure behind his eyes, those soft brown eyes. Focus. All a lie. Set up. She had to keep saying the words like a mantra. Meanwhile, her chest felt as if a four-hundred-pound sumu wrestler were sitting on it.

“Oh, he blubbered on and on about how he couldn’t give the Black Hills back to the Sioux.” She thought back to the folder Carl had, wondered if Jake might have been behind one of those doors all the time she was there. She felt her face flush, felt tears welling up. Again, she forced them back. “And I agreed to report that my father’s papers were just recently discovered without any hint that the President was ever aware of their existence. He’ll be a hero in the black community. That should be great for votes.”

Sam glared at Jake. “Would you believe, there were two more pages to my father’s report? It mentioned the names of the guys in Hap’s unit and where Hap suspected their bodies had been buried.” She thought she saw a light turn on behind those stolid eyes. She gave him time to digest the information before asking, “How long were you with the Bureau?” She wiped the tears away as soon as they dared to show up.