An Unlawful Order (The Chase Anderson Series) (17 page)

“Sure, work’s fine. Something different every day. You remember.”

“I know, but if you ever need to talk, about anything—”

If only it were that easy,
Chase thought. How wonderful it would be to unload the head noise that was rattling around in her brain—White’s crash for one, but much deeper than even that was the depression she was determined to ignore over Stone, the even deeper depression regarding the guilt she felt over having an affair in Iraq—something she’d never tell anyone. Only Sergeant North knew the ugliness about her that she struggled to hide every day.

“By the way,” Samantha was saying, “Joe Figueredo called this afternoon to ask about you.”

Why did hearing his name, or seeing him for that matter, make Chase so jumpy? Samantha, perhaps misreading Chase’s reaction, reached into the car and squeezed Chase’s shoulder. “Whenever you want to talk—I know you’re trying to get to a movie.”

“You’re a sweetheart, Sam. Thanks.” But could she really trust Samantha? Could she really trust anyone?

On the way down the hill, Chase passed the houses of other field grade officers. At Major Sims’ home, his two young sons—both close in age to Molly and her friends, but having inherited their father’s height appeared destined for basketball greatness, or so their dad had often joked—were taking shots at a basketball goal Sims had erected near the edge of their driveway. The ball rolled into the street, and Chase hit the brake as one of the boys dashed in front of her car, followed by their dog, a yellow Lab. She took a deep breath and gave thanks for her fast reflexes. She waited until the boy retrieved the ball, turned, and saw her car. She heard his brother on the other side of the street shout something, and when she waved, the boy with the ball led the Sims’ dog back across the street. As she passed, the older brother held up a hand to wave thanks.

Minutes later, she was back in downtown Kaneohe making a right into the theater parking lot. She parked to ensure a little privacy and stretched across the passenger seat for her purse that had rolled onto the floor when she’d slammed the bake to avoid hitting the Sims boy. She retrieved her cell phone.

Paul Shapiro answered on the first ring. “This is Captain Anderson,” she said. “Are you alone?”

“Yes, I am. Has something happened on the base?”

“No, nothing like that, Paul. I need to talk—” And here it was, one of those defining moments in her life. If Paul Shapiro were to turn on her and quote anything she said her military career would be over. “Can we meet someplace private? I can’t afford to be seen talking to you off base, Paul.” Just then, a driver was backing from the row of cars in front of her, unaware he was about to collide with another car heading up the lane. The driver with the right away gave a long, warning horn blast.

“Are you okay?” Shapiro asked. “Where are you?”

“I’m at the mall.”

“I’m glad you called, Captain Anderson. I’ve been debating whether I should have called you today about something I learned after going through Melanie’s things last night. I hate doing this, but there’s something you really need to know. It involves Melanie and … your husband.”

“Stone?” She shifted the car in reverse and backed out of the parking space. At the Cineplex, a large group of teenagers and a few parents with small children were already standing in line for tickets.

“Your husband,” he was saying, “is the connection between Melanie and … I really don’t want to talk about this over the telephone, especially over your cell phone.”

Twenty minutes later, Chase was pulling in the parking lot of a secluded bar on the arid, leeward side of the island in a town called Nanakuli, the largest city on that coastal side of Oahu, but she doubted she’d run into anyone she knew. Everyone she knew either lived on base or in privatized housing in Kaneohe.

Shapiro had said he drove a black Camry and would park on the west side of the restaurant. She was to drive past the restaurant if she didn’t see his car, because this meant that he was being followed or had been recognized or something ridiculously sinister like that.

She had only been on this side of Oahu once, with Stone during their first summer of reconciliation after their year’s separation in the war. Though now it was quickly nearing sunset, she could still make out that the mountains, short and brown, and a sharp contrast to the jagged, emerald-fluted Koolau Mountains on the windward side of the island, appeared even drier than they’d appeared the first time she’d seen them. Everything on this side of the island seemed in decay: businesses, homes, the land, itself.

She missed the bar on the first pass. She swerved in a driveway marked private and backed up. Shapiro had been right. Only the locals would know there was a bar tucked in this grove of jungle vines. She slowed to look for his Camry. There it was, parked on the west side just as he said it would be. She whipped in the lot and parked.

Shapiro, in a loose fitting, untucked floral shirt and khaki Bermudas, was sitting at the bar with a beer, chewing it up with the bartender as if he hadn’t a care in the world. The bartender nodded at Chase when she walked in, and Shapiro swirled to face her. He raised a beer and smiled, but she saw the force behind it. The smile, the raised beer were forced gestures to throw off the bartender.

“Here she is,” he said. “She’ll have the same. Make it a cold one.”

The bartender’s arm dived deep in a cooler. He fished out a beer— the bottle dripping with melted ice—and twisted the top. “Glass?” He was reaching for one when Chase shook her head. He shrugged and set the beer onto the counter.

Shapiro slid a five across the wooden bar. “Keep it.”

“Thanks, Paulie.”

Shapiro nodded toward a table.

“And Paulie—” the bartender said. Chase was surprised at the familiarity, even more so that Paul, so concerned about secrecy, would have chosen to meet where he would be identified.

“Yeah?”

“You know, we’re all real sorry about Melanie.”

Shapiro leaned across the bar with a fist he pressed against the bartender’s. “Thanks, man.”

As he led her to a small table by a window, Chase asked, “So, you know him?”

He nodded. “Told you, nobody but locals knows this place is even here. He’s used to seeing me here with different women.”

Chase grimaced as she pulled a chair from the table. She didn’t appreciate being thought of as one of Shapiro’s women. For a moment, she considered walking out, climbing back in her little rental car, and heading home. “When is your sister’s funeral?”

He took a long drink. “Not having one,” he said. “Besides, I insisted on an autopsy, although the Honolulu police have closed the case. They’re so sure it was a suicide leap, given it was Diamond Head and all. No telling when the coroner will release her body, and she wanted to be cremated anyway.”

“This must be terrible for your parents.”

“Our mother died awhile back, from cancer. Dad’s remarried, but he lives in St. Louis and refuses to fly. Had a real scare a few years ago on his flight back to the States after a visit with Mel and me. The plane hit turbulence and the oxygen masks fell … he said everyone was screaming, flight attendants scrambling to calm everybody. Nope, he won’t ever fly again.”

“Why don’t you take Melanie to St. Louis?”

He shook his head. “Wouldn’t be fair. I’ve never seen anybody take to a place like Mel did to Hawaii.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Dad was Navy. Hawaii was his last duty station. Mel and I had just turned fourteen when Dad got stationed here. I was pissed, too. Having to move again … just as I was about to start high school. But Mel loved this place from the moment she stepped off the plane. All it took was a cheesy lei around her neck at the airport and she thought she belonged here. But she was that kind of person. She would have belonged anywhere.” His voice faltered. Chase looked away to give him time to compose himself. She picked at the paper label on her beer bottle and thought back to the first time she had seen Melanie Appleton in a photograph in Major White’s cockpit. The second time … she thought back to a week ago, to last Saturday, the day of the crash, and she could almost feel Melanie’s fingers on her wrist. And the third time, the last time, at Major White’s memorial service when she’d spotted Melanie with her brother under the banyan tree. So much had changed since then. Tony White and Melanie both gone.

Shapiro took a drink, cleared his throat, and continued. “When Dad had his scare and called us from St. Louis to say we’d have to come see
him
from now on, Mel sat me down and said that if anything ever happened to her … well, that I was to scatter her ashes somewhere over this island. She didn’t care where as long as she could be a part of it forever.” He leaned forward and glanced out the window. His eyes were growing moist. She would give him a moment before leading him back to the reason he’d insisted on their meeting. She would not, however, leave without solving the mystery he’d hinted at that involved Stone and Melanie. She felt her pulse quicken. Her stomach was growing queasy, and she remembered that other than a scrambled egg and one of Molly’s pancakes for brunch at The Seahorse Café, she hadn’t eaten. The beer and her anticipation over what she was about to learn were a combination for nausea.

“Paul,” she nearly whispered, and when he turned back to face her, said gently. “What is it you want to tell me about Stone and Melanie?”

He leaned back in his chair. “I went to her condo to go through her things, trying to find anything that would help convince HP to investigate her death as a homicide. When I found her appointment book, I figured I should also contact her patients to tell them. Your husband was one of them.”

Chase’s face must have given her away.

“So you really didn’t know?”

Her mind was reeling from the confusion. For nearly a year since their arrival to Hawaii and before Stone’s second deployment, she’d urged him to see a therapist, someone who could help him recover from, or move through, the survivor’s guilt, someone who would help, not hurt, their marriage. And now Paul Shapiro was telling her that Stone had been seeing a doctor all along? She couldn’t decide if she was happy to learn Stone had been reaching out for help, after all, or if she was furious with him for having kept it a secret. What else had her husband been hiding from her before his death?

“No,” she finally said. “I didn’t know.” She felt the embarrassment settle into her cheeks, and she hoped Shapiro wasn’t noticing. After all, what did it say about her marriage, about
her,
that Stone had kept such a secret? “But I’d been asking him to see someone since his return from Afghanistan. He’d crashed an 81 over there and lost both his copilot and crew chief.”

“Your husband crashed an 81 the first time he was over there?”

She nodded. “Wasn’t so lucky the second time.” They sat quietly for a few moments. And then she added, “You know, I’m so glad to hear he was seeing your sister for help.” What she wanted to say was that she hadn’t noticed any difference in her husband, so whatever help he’d been getting from Melanie hadn’t been enough to ease his pain the way drinking could.

“Major White was a patient as well,” he said.

Chase felt her mouth drop open. “What?”

“I know you thought White and Melanie were lovers, but they weren’t.” He leaned forward. “There’s more, Chase. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I think there was more going on between Melanie and your husband.”

She had been about to lift her bottle. Instead, she cradled the beer bottle to her stomach and leaned back, as if preparing for his next blow. She took a drink. The beer was getting warm; in fact, everything suddenly felt warm, too warm, her face, her breath, her body. She recognized the warming sensation as a prelude to an anxiety attack that could trigger another migraine. She whispered, “I need some water.”

Shapiro jumped to his feet. “Hey, Marcus,” he called out, “a couple of ice waters?”

“Sure thing, Paulie.”

She had never been so relieved to hear the chunking of ice into glasses, nor so relieved by the footsteps of one who was bringing relief. Shapiro stopped him before he reached the table, and she was grateful. She did not want anyone to see her as she must look. Her neck was beginning to itch, her stomach, too, and she realized that her anxiety was bringing on hives.

He set both glasses before her. Ice pressed against her lips and the cool water burned her tonsils as it slid down her throat. She drained half the glass before setting it onto the table, and looking back at Paul. “Go ahead,” she said.

“Are you going to be okay?”

“Probably not—”

He glanced out the window. She thought he looked like a man who was having second thoughts, as if he wished he were anywhere but here with her in Nanakuli. This poor man who had already lost his sister and who was now trapped into telling this woman across the table from him the news no wife wanted to hear.

Shapiro cleared his throat and Chase slid the second glass of ice water toward him, but he shook his head. “I went through several years of appointment books. Last year’s, the book that includes appointments with your husband, their appointments are pretty regular at first … they were meeting once a week, during lunch. She marks each with a note that says
Consult with Major Anderson
. But a few months later, or rather a few months into their appointments, she’s marking them
Lunch with Stone
. And then they’re meeting more than once a week. In fact, several times a week. And these she’s marking
Stone
.”

He had stopped as if to give her a moment to let it all settle. Chase wrapped both hands around the cold glass for a moment and then pressed her cold hands, wet with the condensation, against her hot cheeks. It all made sense. Stone’s drinking, the pulling away from her to the point of rarely sleeping with her most nights. She stared at Shapiro’s wounded face. “And to think I accused your sister of having an affair with Major White.” Yet soon as she said it something about the statement still didn’t ring true. Was she in denial? Maybe; maybe not. She thought back to the day of the crash. Melanie’s face, full of grief, as she wedged Major White’s dog tags into Chase hand. “Then what was your sister doing with Major White’s dog tags?”