Brendan DuBois - Final Winter

How wonderful.

Yet… Mariah’s sister and family. Could there not be a way of warning them?

Henry stood up, thinking. A puzzle, a quandary, that he would have to think and pray over for the rest of the day.

Brian Doyle was now fully awake, the little fog of exhaustion that had clouded his thinking having been dispersed with that one shocking word: anthrax. He recalled the mailings, right after 9/11, and how it had seemed as though a reeling country was coming in for another blow, with newspeople taking Cipro and postal workers wearing rubber gloves and face masks. After a while, the panic had ebbed away — what the hell else could you do? — but now the boogeyman was back.

He said, ‘Anthrax. All right. What else do you have?’

Adrianna said, ‘Observe the screen, please.’

Brian turned, saw the flickering image of the dead Brit fade out, replaced by a burst of static. Then something snapped into focus, and the rest of the group turned as well, looking at the image. It was a moving image, with numbers and letters streaming across the bottom of the screen. An overhead shot, showing a city scene. Narrow streets, a hell of a lot of traffic, carts, vendors and shops. There was a flickering motion as the camera seemed to focus on one particular vehicle: a white four-door, maybe a Toyota, with rust stains along the roof. The vehicle was moving slowly through the crowded street.

Adrianna said, ‘Aerial record, last month, from a Predator III drone.’

The doctor turned to Adrianna. ‘I thought the Predator drones only went up two generations. Not three.’

She smiled thinly. ‘Publicly, you’re right.’

Monty asked, ‘Where are we?’

‘Western part of Damascus, Syria. Keep on watching, please.’

Brian watched the video, unease creeping around in his gut. He wasn’t sure why but he remembered one of the last good times he had had with Marcy, before things had started crumbling between them. They had rented a cottage up in the Adirondacks, at some chilly lake whose name escaped him. Late one night, after a good meal and a bottle of wine, they had gone skinny-dipping in the cool waters of the lake, and in the moonless night they had made frantic love on the sands of their little beach. Marcy at first had been reluctant — ‘Suppose someone sees us?’ — but she had given in to his logical reply: ‘Who the hell’s gonna see us tonight?’.

And the answer now, of course, would be that anybody and everybody with the right gear and the necessary curiosity could see you if they wanted to. And he remembered an event, during his first month, working for the team.

At first Brian had done the usual investigative grunt work, which had been fine, considering what they were paying him and how the burden of worrying about court appearances and getting one’s story straight with whatever youngster assistant DA was assigned to your squad was no longer on his shoulders. The only thing was that he missed the reassurance of having backup. Back on the job, help was just a hurried radio call away: 10-13, officer needs assistance. But on this whacked assignment, he was on his own, which took a bit getting used to. He had flown alone out to Michigan, to interview some woman about her wayward nephew. The woman had emigrated from Yemen nearly twenty years earlier, and she had welcomed him into her living room with the quiet resignation of one who knew that her last name and ethnic background now meant that the giant searchlight of the government was glaring on her every move. Her house was sparsely furnished, with only one couch and two chairs and a tiny television set in the living room. She was worn and old, wearing a black dress and a headscarf. Brian felt like a fool, sitting in her room, asking a series of questions that he was sure had been tossed her way before, over and over again, from people as diverse as the INS and the Michigan State Police.

He went over the woman’s childhood, her coming of age, her marriage to a man who had worked for the American embassy in Aden and who had managed to emigrate to the United States. Her two sons and daughter, all grown, all married and with lots of grandchildren. Her husband’s unfortunate death five years ago. How difficult it was, making do in this community, even with a little money coming in every now and then from family members. How humiliated she had been, the first time she had received food from Meals on Wheels. So forth and so on, and the only time the conversation got heated was when she talked about her nephew — ‘that accursed young man’ — and she had said, with emphasis by pointing a gnarled finger at him, that she had not heard from the boy for years and years.

Then, tears in her eyes, she had lowered her head and apologized for raising her voice. ‘You’re just doing your job. That’s all. I understand.’

And as Brian made to leave, his interview over, she had pointed proudly to a photo of a young man in an Army uniform, posed stiffly in front of an American flag.

‘My son,’ she had said. ‘Halim. Serving as a translator in Iraq. With the Third Infantry Division.’

So Brian had gone out to his car, thinking the trip had been a bust — just low-level practice work for the team, he guessed — and as he was about to start up his rental car and head back to the budget motel that unfortunately was the closest lodging to this neighborhood, he had stopped. Car keys in hand.

Just stopped.

Something wasn’t right.

He paused, listened to his gut tell him something was up. It wasn’t something that was taught in the Academy or even in the few months on the street on the job. It was something you picked up along the way, absorbing it until it became part of who you were. And right now it was telling him that something wasn’t right.

Okay. Take a breath, take in the surroundings. A fairly desolate area outside Detroit, tiny one-family homes, butted up right against each other. Waist-high chain-link fences separated each tiny lot from its neighbor. The poorer homes had no garages of any kind, those doing a little better had open carports, and the real up-and-corners had proper garages.

The woman’s home just had a driveway. No garage.

Brian looked around some more. Most of the lots had the usual residential debris scattered around the small front yards: wagons, tricycles, bicycles, baseball bats and gloves, a skateboard or two, bright plastic toy furniture.

The woman’s lawn was empty. Of course it was empty. She lived alone, it would only be strange, would only be out of the ordinary, if there were toys or kids’ belongings on her front lawn, with the close-cropped grass and—

Grass.

Okay, then.

He checked out the other lawns. Most of them were just packed squares of dirt. Maybe two or three were struggling with crab grass, dandelions and brown grass, trying to make do in solid urban dirt.

But not this woman’s lawn.

Her lawn was lush, green, well groomed and well maintained. There were ornamental plants placed along the foundation line of the small house. Brian recalled how painfully the woman had walked from the kitchen to the living room, limping heavily, saying she needed hip-replacement surgery and if God was kind her children would band together to help pay for it. He couldn’t see her out in the yard, sowing fertilizer and weedkiller, or walking along the edge of the driveway, weed-whacker in her gnarled hands, trimming away.

Little money, he thought. Look at the rest of the house. The shingles curling up along the edge of the roof. The oil-stained and cracked driveway. The broken pane of glass in one of the small basement windows, plugged up with a piece of cardboard.

So how come she had a jewel of a lawn?