Julia Spencer-Fleming - One Was a Soldier

Farther back, Clare spotted the kind-hearted Dragojesich, already wiping his eyes with fists the size of softball mitts. She caught a glimpse of army green at the other edge of the crowd and was surprised to see Colonel Seelye, also in her dress uniform. Perhaps not so surprising, though. Russ had told her the MP wanted access to Tally’s house, bank accounts, and records. Maybe she was trying to get in good with the family. Or maybe she was watching to see who showed up. She spotted Clare looking at her and nodded coolly.

Next up was one of Tally’s friends, a young woman with two-toned hair and way too much eye makeup for a funeral. She was only a few sentences into her remembrances of Tally and Wyler in high school when she started to gulp and cry and her mascara began to run black down her cheeks. Clare felt a nudge. Looked at Trip. The doctor nodded toward the line of parked cars. Eric McCrea, spit-and-polished in his own Class A’s, was striding toward them. She was amazed. Given what Russ had told her about Eric’s treatment of Wyler McNabb, she had expected the sergeant to be holed up with his union representative right now. Or with his lawyer.

McCrea fell in between Clare and Sarah, so that the four of them made a wall of hawkish green punctuated by dove gray. Like Trip, he stood at ease, facing the speaker. His eyes cut toward Clare. “The chief isn’t here with you?”

Clare shook her head minutely. “He offered.” She kept her own spine straight, her hands clasped behind her back, her eyes forward. “The husband is here. Is your presence going to be a problem?”

From the corner of her eye, she could see the ribbons on his chest rise and fall. “You know about that?”

This time she looked at him directly.

Eric’s mouth compressed. “No one’s going to notice me. They’ll just see the uniform.” He faced front again. “I had to come. She was one of us.” Sarah leaned forward and glared at them, her finger to her lips. McCrea dropped his voice to a whisper. “She was one of us.”

There was no honor guard. Clare didn’t know if that was because the area commandant was so overwhelmed with requests he couldn’t supply one, or if the army didn’t send a team for soldiers who had died after walking away with a million dollars of army money. There was a group from the local VFW, though, one big-bellied guy, a pair who looked too thin and frail to hold up their rifles, and a bearded man of about forty. Three of them fired the volley while everyone in uniform saluted and the older folks placed their hands over their hearts and the younger ones stared.

Clare and Eric and Trip and Colonel Seelye kept their salutes as the bearded man and the big-bellied guy- Desert Storm and Vietnam, Clare thought-folded the casket flag into a sharp-edged triangle and presented it to Tally’s mother. She clutched it, as mothers always did, and for a moment Clare could see in her every woman standing at a graveside, left with nothing but a flag to hold. Those hands, digging into the star-spangled twill, seemed to reach into Clare’s chest and squeeze her heart. She stopped analyzing the ceremony. Stopped comparing and critiquing it against the dozens of funerals she had officiated at. Her eyes filled with tears and the bitter, salt-rimed taste of grief stung the back of her throat.

She turned her face away from the childless mother, struggling to master herself. She stared hard at the trees fringing the older section of the cemetery, their autumn colors burning like banked coals against the heavy gray sky. She paid attention to the details, slick stone and dripping branch, because focusing on the sodden scenery meant she wasn’t falling apart.

That was how she saw Quentan Nichols.

“It was him. I’m sure of it.”

Russ relocated a pile of reports and newsletters from the extra chair to his desk. “Sit down.”

“I don’t want to sit down.” Clare paced from the desk to the filing cabinets to one of the tall windows. It was streaked and spotted, the watery afternoon light held at bay by the bright fluorescents inside the office. “I want you to do something.”

There was a knock on the door. Harlene stuck her head in. “Would you like a cup of coffee, Clare?”

“I’d love one, Harlene. Thank you.”

“Hey!” Russ crossed his arms and leaned against his desk. “What about me?”

“You got two legs, don’t you?” The dispatcher nodded at Clare. “You look a right treat in that uniform.” She shut the door.

“So what do you think?”

“Sorry, Major, the uniform doesn’t do it for me. Too many bad memories of idiot officers.”

“Russ!”

He raised his hands in surrender. “Sorry.” He straightened and went around his desk. He picked up a file. “Here.”

She took the slim folder. Inside was a fax from Fort Leonard Wood acknowledging the MKPD’s request, blah, blah… she found the information halfway down the sheet. Nichols, Quentan L., posted to Fort Gillem, Georgia, September 26. Copies of the travel order and the transportation receipts. She flipped the page. A different fax headlined Office of the Commandant, Fort Gillem, told her Sergeant Nichols had arrived on October 4 and was currently listed as active duty assigned to the military police post.

She looked at Russ. “He’s in Georgia?”

“Since a week before Tally McNabb’s death.” He took the folder from her. “Did you think I wouldn’t take a look at Nichols? Rule him out as a suspect?”

“But I saw him. Today. At the cemetery.”

“Did you go after him?”

“Of course not! I had to stay till the end of the ceremony, and then I had to introduce myself to Tally’s mother and offer my condolences.” She ground the sole of her ugly regulation pump against the floor. “I should be at her house right now.”

“I bet you made a casserole.”

She glared at him.

“Okay. So today you saw a youngish black man of average height, standing maybe a hundred yards away, through the mist and rain.”

The door bumped open and Harlene entered, carrying two mugs and a sugar bowl on a wooden tray that looked as if it had been someone’s shop project in high school. She set it atop the most stable stack of papers on Russ’s desk. “I got one for you, too,” she told Russ. “Don’t get used to it.”

After she closed the door behind her, Russ spooned a generous helping of sugar into one cup and handed it to Clare. The oversized mugs were decorated with fat, parasol-carrying geese. Too cutesy-poo for his wife, he had once told her, so they had donated the set to the department.

Clare took a sip of the sweet and bitter brew from Linda Van Alstyne’s rejected kitchenware. “Yes, okay, I was a long way away and conditions were cloudy-but I have very good eyesight, and it’s not as if Millers Kill is crowded with black men in uniforms.”

“What about the private who’s here with Seelye? Was he with her during the ceremony?”

“No, but-”

“She probably set him at a distance to observe. Maybe follow Wyler McNabb.” He blew on his coffee. “If I were investigating the theft, I’d have him dogged. See if he led me to the money.”

“I know what I saw! It was Quentan Nichols!”

“Clare, it doesn’t matter. Let’s say you did see Nichols. Let’s say he took a leave of absence and drove a thousand miles north to lurk outside his girlfriend’s funeral. He didn’t kill her. Her husband didn’t kill her. She committed suicide. The case is closed.”

“I cannot believe you’d dismiss her death that-that-casually!”

He stepped away from the desk. “I’m not dismissing her death. I’m making a judgment based on physical evidence and solid investigating. You, on the other hand, are pulling crap from thin air because you don’t want to believe the plain facts.”