Darkside

4

As of Wednesday morning, Ev still hadn’t heard back from Julie. All through his eight o’clock class, he’d been anxious to call Liz DeWinter to see if she’d heard anything. At the break, he tried her office, but she was already in court. Frustrated, he went down to talk to the HSS division director, Captain Donovan. Ev technically worked for Professor Welles, the chairman of his department, but Captain Donovan was the senior military officer. Growing increasingly anxious, Ev had felt he needed a military opinion, not a civilian one. But the captain had not been helpful. He’d heard about the incident, of course, and also about Julie’s involvement. He’d been polite but firm: Let the Academy do its investigation. That way, we get the facts. Then we focus on any required actions. Ev expressed his concerns about the administration possibly using Julie as a scapegoat, but the captain had dismissed that notion. Let them do their investigation. It was the Navy way.

He’d gone back to his office to get ready for the next class, more uneasy than ever, and really wishing Julie would call. He was sitting at his desk, correcting some papers and chewing absently on some folded-up mystery meat, when Liz called.

“Talked to Julie,” she said. “Kind of anticlimactic. Her big meeting with the company officer turned out to be a nonevent. He just wanted her to know that the visit from NCIS was a room inspection, quote, unquote.”

“Sounds to me like your presence has been a shot across their bows, then.”

“That was the point, Ev.”

“I talked to my boss this morning,” he said. “Checking to see what was filtering through the military network.”

“And?”

“And he said he’d heard there was an investigation, that Julie was involved, and that she had a lawyer.”

Liz thought about that for a moment. “That was quick. So, he’s in a neutral corner?”

“He’s a division director,” Ev said. “That makes him part of the Academy administration.”

“As opposed to being an ally of yours.”

“Well, he was friendly, and sympathetic. I think.”

“Okay. That brings me to something I need to say to you, and it goes along with what I told Julie last night when I dropped her off. You need to stop talking to people about this. I know I can’t order you to do this, of course, but as Julie’s attorney, I should be the primary interface with anyone in the Academy administration from here on out.”

He thought about it and then sighed. “Yeah, you’re right. So anything I hear or find out about should come to you, then?”

“Yes. And don’t go playing detective. The next step is up to them.”

“But she hasn’t done anything!”

She ignored his protest. “We wait until they want to see her again.”

“I just hate not knowing,” Ev said. “Since Joanne died, Julie’s well…well, more important.”

Then she surprised him. “Would you like to have dinner with me?” she asked.

“What? Why, sure. Uh, do you have a favorite place?”

“How about Maria’s? Tonight. Say seven? Subject, of course, to any breaking developments over in the Yard.”

“Roger that. Seven it is. If you have to cancel, call my home number. In the meantime, I’ll keep away from Bancroft so they won’t catch me looking in the windows of the interrogation cell.”

She laughed. “See you at seven, Ev.”

He checked his schedule. He had two more classes that afternoon, a fuller day than usual, which was probably for the best, considering his state of mind. He was surprised when Liz called him again just after three o’clock.

“Hey, counselor,” he said. “Change your mind about dinner already?”

“No. But have you heard anything more from Julie?”

“No,” he said, sitting up as he sensed the urgency in her voice. “Has something happened?”

She hesitated. “I need her to call me as soon as possible, Ev. I’ve left her a message to that effect, but she may contact you first.”

“What’s going on, Liz?”

“There’s a rumor circulating through law-enforcement circles that the midshipman suicide case isn’t as clear-cut as everyone wants us to believe.”

He didn’t understand. “What’s that got to do with Julie?”

“Hopefully, nothing. And I’ve got to tell you, cops are the worst rumor mongers there are. Let’s make a deal: no Dell case this evening, okay? I’ll see you later.”

After dinner, they walked up the hill from the Colonial seaport area toward State Circle. Liz’s eighteenth-century house was framed inside an iron-fenced compound just off State Circle. They entered a tree-lined, cobblestoned drive through two leaning stone columns that were engraved with the name Weems. Her house was three stories of ivy-covered Flemish lock brickwork outside, with glowing, if somewhat uneven, heart pine floors, plaster and lathe walls, leaded windows, ornate crown moldings and wainscoting, and sixteen-foot ceilings inside.

Liz left Ev in a living room furnished with what looked like period reproduction furniture and went out to the kitchen to get the makings for the Rusty Nails they had talked about over coffee. He first sat down in a lovely Sheraton-period wing chair, which was downright uncomfortable, then moved over to the sofa. He felt apprehensive about being here, in this woman’s house. They had enjoyed themselves once he’d overcome his own awkwardness. This was the first time he’d been out with anyone since Joanne had died, and he hadn’t been sure what to think of it. Liz had put him at his ease with a steady flow of bright conversation, quick-witted jokes, and stories about clients. Once he’d relaxed a bit, he joined in with equally funny stories about midshipmen and their antics. He’d ended up talking about his own life toward the end of dinner-growing up in Annapolis, the pervasive influence of the Academy on life in the state capital, and the satisfaction of finally returning home after his time in the Navy.

He’d done twelve years in naval aviation before getting out, and then he’d gone to grad school out on the West Coast to get a Ph. D. A week after he’d successfully defended his dissertation, and while he was still shopping around for a faculty appointment, his father had had a heart attack and died. He and Joanne had come back to the East Coast with their eleven-year-old daughter to stay with his mother for a while, and then the appointment in the Academy’s Political Science Department had opened up and they’d never left. Once he’d taken the Academy position, his mother, to his surprise, went into what seemed like a deliberate decline, becoming a semi-invalid. One night five years later, she turned her face to the wall and died.

He had explained to Liz that leaving the Navy after almost thirteen years had been Joanne’s idea, although he knew the truth to be somewhat more complex. His father had been a strong and domineering man, and Ev’s passage into the academy and naval service had been something of a foreordained matter, not really open for discussion. Not that Ev had objected, at least not until he had become a plebe and had all those romantic notions about midshipman life yelled out of him in the first twenty-four hours of plebe summer. He’d met and married Joanne, a Merrill Lynch stockbroker, while doing an instructor tour in Pensacola, and then watched with chagrin as she underwent a similar experience once he had to return to the real Navy world of sea duty, with a lot of the romance being flattened by the stark fact that naval aviators mostly flew in the away direction. The truth was, he’d been as lonely as she had been when he was cooped up in the hot, crowded, constantly noisy steel catacombs underneath the flight deck. Life as a carrier aviator alternated between two extremes. There was the huge adrenaline rush of being flung off the end of the flight deck while strapped inside a cramped Plexiglas cocoon mounted over a pair of unruly rockets built by the lowest bidder. And then there was the seemingly endless, six-month blear of briefs, debriefs, alerts, training sessions, transits, crowded port visits, duty days, safety stand-downs, no-fly Sundays, punctuated occasionally by the jolt of seeing a squadron mate misjudge a landing and go over the angle in a rending screech of flaming metal into the always-waiting sea. Doing this while missing his new wife, their daughter’s early years, and the luxury of life in America made it hard to ignore the fact that the next promotion would mean more deployments and more separation. Even when he had been on shore duty, he had detected a gradual hollowing out of their marriage, as each next deployment loomed ever closer and Joanne began to erect those walls that would support her once he left. Give her credit: She’d never issued any ultimatums, but he had been able to see the choice he would ultimately have to make.

It hadn’t hurt that Joanne had some money. She’d stayed with Merrill Lynch during his active-duty career, and her money had paid off his parents’ remaining mortgage when his father died and they’d moved into the house. They’d had eight years of a wonderfully normal life in Annapolis as he moved from probationary to tenured status on the faculty. Eight years of coming home every night, waking up in the same place every morning without the crash and bang of jets landing on the roof, or the rattling, scraping sounds of the arresting wires reeling into their greasy lairs to await the next trap, sharing the travails of bringing up just one teenager, actual family vacations over on the Atlantic beaches, the short, sharp spats they both recognized as episodes of cabin fever, the sad subsidence of his mother as she pined away for his father, the care of a home and yard and gardens, secure in the knowledge that he’d probably be around to see the results of his labors. In short, normal American life. He explained to Liz that if he’d never been in the Navy, he would never have appreciated the relative tranquility and productive purpose of his civilian existence.

On the other hand, he’d done nothing to stop his daughter, Julie, from falling under the same romantic delusions about the Academy. Absent his father’s political connections, Julie had made it through the grueling admissions process pretty much on her own merits, although it didn’t hurt her admissions package that Ev was an alumnus and faculty member. He remembered vividly her comment during parents’ weekend, four years ago now, when she had described the downer from the huge victory of getting an appointment to spending the entire first night in Bancroft Hall learning how to stencil her plebe summer whites. He had experienced the very same feelings, and could still smell the stencil ink and hear the upperclassman screaming at him to wash his ink-stained hands, something he’d been trying to do for an hour.

And then Joanne died, he thought, pressing a hand on the smooth fabric of the sofa. Just like that, he realized, his eyes blinking. His whole life here, his normal, post-Navy, happy, real life, had begun with his father’s sudden death. And then his mother’s. And then Joanne’s. Viewed one way, his ultimate homecoming to Annapolis had been a veritable chronology of death. This thought had been at the back of his mind during their entire dinner, and at times, Liz’s bright conversation and upbeat attitude had cast a surreal haze around his own thoughts. Liz had skillfully urged him to open up, he realized now, offering small tidbits about her own past, her two ex-husbands, and the challenges of being single at her age. He could not help but notice how other men in the crowded restaurant watched her smile and play with her hair and envied him sitting there, getting her full attention. Despite his emotional fragility, Liz had grown on him, filling his senses and attention. Even so, he’d felt like he was walking through a waking dream, not knowing quite what was coming next but increasingly willing to go forward and see.

Liz came back into the living room. She’d brought a tray with scotch, Drambuie, two snifters, a small sharp knife, a heavy spoon, an ice bucket, and a lemon. She put the tray on the coffee table, tapped a remote to ignite the gas fire in the fireplace, turned on one more table lamp, and sat down at the other end of the sofa. She was wearing a silk pantsuit, and she’d done something to her hair while out in the kitchen. Adjectives tumbled through his thoughts: lovely, warm, smart, sexy, sweet. He felt his cheeks warming just a little when he realized he was staring.

“We’re in luck,” she announced, arranging the things on the tray. “I even had the lemon.”

He smiled but didn’t say anything, suddenly not willing to trust his voice. A familiar feeling was gathering in his chest.

“So, a Rusty Nail,” she said. “One half scotch, one half Drambuie, which I think is scotch-based, and a twist of lemon peel, all over cracked ice. That how you remember it?”

“Yes,” he mumbled. “It’s been awhile, though.” For everything, he thought. And then: I shouldn’t have come here.

“I’ve found a lot of bartenders don’t even know how to make one of these,” she said, cracking ice cubes against her palm with the back of the heavy spoon. “But they’re supposed to be a lot more hangover-proof than most after-dinner drinks.” She cracked ice into each snifter, then sliced off a scrape of lemon peel and squeezed the rind side over the ice, filling the air with the pungent smell of citron. Then she poured equal measures of the liquors and passed one snifter over to him. “Here you go,” she said. “Long life.”

He tipped snifters with her and then they both sat there, holding their drinks, facing each other on the sofa, with the fireplace flickering nearby. He sampled the drink and pronounced it perfect.

“Thank you,” she said. “It’s been a lovely evening. Thanks for dinner, even though it was supposed to be my treat.”

“Your company was treat enough, and it has been very nice,” he said. He tried to ignore the tightness in his chest, then found himself nodding absently as if to confirm what he’d just said. He looked into the fire.

Hey, look at her, he thought, not at the damned fire. He caught a glimpse of her out of the corner of his eye as she crossed her legs slowly, letting the expensive silk rustle suggestively. He felt the skin on his face tighten just as his chest had, and he knew, just knew, he was going to lose it. It made him so damned mad, but he couldn’t help it. He shouldn’t have come back to her house; it was too soon, much too soon. And then the tears came, and he felt like a perfect goddamned fool as he put the drink down on the table, trying not to drop it or spill it, and lowered his chin while tears streamed down his face. In a moment, she was there, her perfume filling the air around his face. Her arm was around him and she was saying in her soft voice, “It’s all right, all right, let it come. Don’t be afraid, just let it come.” And then he folded into her and cried his heart out.

After awhile, he took a deep breath, sat up, and muttered an apology. He was afraid even to look at her. He wanted to wipe the tears off his face, and his hands fumbled, looking for a Kleenex.

“For what, Ev?” she said, handing him some cocktail napkins. “For feeling awkward about being here? Unfaithful to her memory? For getting ambushed by memories?”

“For spoiling the evening,” he said. “And for watering down this great Rusty Nail.”

She laughed quietly and handed him some more napkins. He wiped his face and blew his nose, then tried to figure out what to do with the napkins. Finally, he stuffed them in his pants pocket. He looked over at her. She was sitting back now, both hands wrapped around her snifter. Her eyes were enormous.

“I can’t get it right,” he said, “this getting-over-it business. It’s been almost two years, and you’re the first woman I’ve spent any time with since…since-”

“Since she died,” Liz prompted.

“Yes. Since she died. I can’t even say it unless someone else says it first. Kind of pathetic, isn’t it? And you are so very attractive. You’re smart, fun, beautiful, and yet I kept asking myself all evening, what are you doing here? I mean me, not you. What am I doing here with someone like you? I should be home in my hole, feeling sorry for myself.”

“Instead of out here in the world, feeling like an interloper?”

“Yeah, exactly. I think Julie would be really upset if she knew I was here, for instance.”

“Why? Does she think life is off-limits for you now that your wife is gone?”

“Something like that. She wouldn’t say it, but she’d let me know it.”

“You know, I doubt that. She seems more mature than that. Besides, life alone is a dreary proposition.”

“So I’ve discovered. And it’s not like-well, I mean, it wasn’t as if marriage to Joanne had been heaven on earth all the time, either. We had a good, solid marriage. With all that entails in real life.”

“You apparently did better than I did. And I got two shots at it.”

He sipped some of the drink, resisting the impulse to gulp it down. “We used to keep score on that,” he said. “Joanne and I. Like we were somehow superior to people who got divorced. Joanne would tell me some couple was splitting up, and we’d shake our heads. Like it was such a pity that other people couldn’t manage what we’d managed. And then that little devil voice would say, What would it be like, I wonder, to split up, to start over with someone new?”

“Ever say that out loud?”

“Oh, hell no.”

“I did, you see. Worked like a charm, actually.”

He smiled. “Julie changed after it happened. Grew up a little. Seemed more like an adult young woman than a college kid. And I saw less of her. She’d go out of town on weekends instead of coming home. After the first six months, I felt sort of cut out of her life. I’m guessing she got close to a guy and preferred to lean on him rather than on me.”

“You probably reminded her of what she’d lost,” Liz said.

“Probably,” he said. “And I wasn’t the best of company, as I just demonstrated. And now she’s about to graduate and leave. I think that’s what’s been getting me spooked these past few weeks. And poor Julie, trying so hard not to show how much she’s ready to go, as if that’s somehow disloyal to me.”

“I haven’t met all that many midshipmen,” she said. “But the seniors, the firsties? They all seem to have this look of desperation about making it all the way through and getting out of there. Is it that unpleasant?”

“It’s not so much unpleasant as it is long,” he said. “As we used to say, it’s a four-hundred-thousand-dollar education, shoved up your ass a penny at a time.”

She raised her eyebrows at that. “They all compete so hard to get in, I’m surprised they’d think that way.”

“It’s hard on purpose, and it gets harder throughout the four years. I’d say half the guys would be willing to drop it and go somewhere else, except that it becomes such a point of honor to beat the system and make it through. They make it a four-year challenge and they never let up. You end up feeling superior to your civilian college brethren, because you have the rigors of the academic program as well as all the military stuff.”

“That explains Julie’s attitude about this Dell case,” she said. “She’s angry more than anything else.”

“Exactly. Some plebe’s mistake might screw up her chances to finish, graduate, and get her commission.”

“A plebe who’s dead,” she reminded him.

“And she’s sorry about that, but it had nothing to do with her, and that’s why she wants to march into the front office and have it out with anyone who thinks it did.”

Liz was silent, and he wondered if he’d said something wrong. They’d agreed, after all, not to talk about the Dell case, and this was why. The good news was that he was over his waterworks. He sensed that it was time for him to leave.

“Thanks for inviting me out,” he said. “I needed it, even if I didn’t know it. You’ve been very patient.”

She gave him an amused look. “Nobody’s ever called me patient before,” she said. “But I’ll happily accept all those other nice things you said. On one condition.”

“Name it,” he said, hoping suddenly that he knew what she was going to say.

“That we do it again. Go out. Do something together. Soon.”

“Yes, please,” he said, suddenly happy that he’d anticipated her. They got up and walked to the front door.

“I meant that,” she said. “I like you. I like the fact that your wife’s memory can still unhinge you. It shows you’re human. I spend most of my time with lawyers. The occasional human is refreshing.” She stepped in close, stood up on tiptoes, and kissed him gently on the cheek. He didn’t know what to do, so he was grateful when she opened the door and said good night.

He walked back under the streetlights along College Avenue, past the Naval Academy’s Alumni House, and then turned left onto King George Street to get home. The blocky brick buildings of St. John’s College, almost as old as the town, were on his left. Across the street were the high brick walls of the Academy, and the backs of the captains’ and commanders’ quarters, which lined the Worden Field parade ground. He kept his mind in neutral, not wanting to dwell on his evening with Liz or the prospects of seeing her again. But he knew he would. He’d embarrassed himself tonight, but in a good way, he supposed, if that were possible. He recognized that tonight had been something of a turning point, because it was becoming perfectly clear that his breaking down like that was not about Joanne, but, just as the chaplain had suggested, all about him. And if this lovely woman wanted to help him climb out of the valley of self-pity, he’d be a fool to turn her down.