An Unlawful Order (The Chase Anderson Series) (31 page)

Chase smartly reported at the position of attention before the general’s desk. Hickman motioned her toward the sitting area. Her stomach was fluttering and she settled on the edge of a chair. Hickman, she thought, looked tired, as if he, too, had spent a sleepless night. He joined her at the sitting area but remained standing behind one of his wingback chairs with his arms folded across his chest.

“Captain Anderson,” he finally said, “I’ve decided to fire you as my base public affairs officer.”

For a moment, it seemed as if all the oxygen had been sucked from the room. Fired. Fired. The word seared through her brain. He added, “You’re one of those people who just won’t play by the rules.” His silver eyebrows had knitted into one long, crooked line. His face was red and swollen, the way her father’s had been during those drinking years.

She rose to her feet on shaky legs. “What reason will you offer headquarters?” Her tone had a purposeful patronizing quality, and when she saw the flash of anger in his eyes, she found herself wishing for the return of Hickman’s aide.

“For one, I’ve never tolerated disloyalty among my staff….”

He’d paused for an obvious reaction, so she gave him one. “Of course, you realize I’ll use the chain of command to explain my side of these events, when word gets out.”

The wingback chair and the seven feet between them disappeared when Hickman rushed her with a pointed finger so close to her face she flinched and recoiled against the back of the sofa. “You’re nothing but a cunt!” he shouted. “Women like you are all the same!”

“Am I dismissed, General, or should I call on your aide to witness the rest of this conversation?”

He leaned in closer. He smelled of booze, sour. “Get the fuck out of here!” he whispered.

She slid across the cushion of the sofa, and once on her feet again, plowed through the thick carpet in her high heels, making it halfway to the door before he grabbed her arm. He yanked her to his chest. “I hear you have a thing for stars,” he said. She tried to pull away from him. “Don’t bother contacting Armstrong, Chase.” At the sound of Armstrong’s name that seemed to reverberate throughout Hickman’s office, she stopped struggling. So Hickman knew too. Which meant Hickman probably knew about the secret investigation, as well, unless Figueredo had also been swayed by a promise from Hickman.

Hickman had pinned both arms behind her back. “One star just not enough for you, Anderson?” His mouth was on her neck.

“Stop it,” she shouted, hoping the aide had returned to the outer office. She managed to free herself and pushed Hickman across the room.

She was scrambling for the door when he shouted, “Who do you think recommended me to National AeroStar? I doubt I could have nailed it without Armstrong’s endorsement!” At the door she turned to see him smiling. His red cheeks were bloated.

“Chase, Chase …” He was now settling into the leather chair behind his desk. “I always knew you’d strike out. Women like you always do in the end.”

Rage coursed through her. “Women like me?
Women like me?
Is this what they teach at the Naval Academy, sir? I’m just asking since both you
and
Armstrong went to Annapolis.”

Hickman gripped both armrests. “Get out of here.”

“Call this one a strikeout, General, but the game’s hardly over. There’s more fight left in a player who has nothing to lose.” She was staring him down and he looked pathetic in his fancy office chair. She’d never seen him in anything but a uniform, and suddenly she was imagining him stripped of those stars on his collar. How ordinary he would be without them.

She turned for the door and heard him say, “Don’t take it too hard, Chase, about Armstrong not coming to your rescue. No woman can compete with a third star. You know, he could go all the—” She closed the door on the rest of it.

As if Marines had been warned this was not the evening to linger around headquarters after work for chatter or to even catch up on work, the building appeared to have been abandoned. There was no trace of Hickman’s aide, no ringing phones, no tapping of keyboards, only the clicking of Chase’s high heels down the long, lonely corridor.

Halfway, she removed her shoes and ran.

CHAPTER 18

S
he’d stopped by the office just long enough to retrieve the Halloween candy and to report to North what had happened, but everyone had closed up shop for an evening of trick-or-treating, and she remembered that North was most likely still at 464 for the Marine Corps Ball practice. She was still trying to determine what it meant exactly to be fired by Hickman, a man who was himself about to be fired. That is, as soon as she contacted N.I.S. She maneuvered the rental car past the soccer fields and up the hill past the Officers’ Club toward base housing, passing home after home that was Halloween decorated with skeletons dangling from the monkey pod trees, fake spider webs over fat hibiscus bushes, pumpkins with carved out spooky faces on the porches, and paper lanterns already glowing with candles along the walkways. She’d never gotten around to buying, much less carving, a pumpkin. With her home sandwiched between the all-out efforts of Paige and the thrown-together attempt of Samantha’s, Chase’s total lack of effort seemed to send a rebellious signal against the whole notion of Halloween. She wondered if Molly noticed such things, and Chase vowed she’d do better at Christmas. “I am the one you can count on, Molly,” she whispered aloud.

Samantha had picked up all three girls from the aftercare, and Molly, barefoot and wearing the raffia hula skirt and a bright pink bathing suit top, burst from Samantha’s house as soon as Chase pulled into the driveway. “It’s almost time,” she chimed, and twirled in the front yard for Chase’s inspection.

“You look just like a hula doll,” Chase said. “But you have to wear shoes.”

“That’s what Miss Samantha said, too.” Each word had been uttered through a giggle.

“I’m thinking your pink sandals.”

“Okay,” Molly shouted, and ran from the yard. Chase could hear the footsteps thudding down the hallway, heard the slide of the closet door and the bang against the door jamb.

In the kitchen, Chase was preparing her daughter a sandwich, though she doubted in Molly’s current state of excitement, she’d get her to eat more than a few bites.

Molly had run back into the kitchen, this time in sandals.

“Where’s your lei?” Chase asked, and the child dramatically threw up her hands, and raced back toward her bedroom. “And stop running before you fall and hurt yourself.”

Chase was rinsing mayonnaise from the knife when she glanced out the window above the sink. “Molly,” she shouted. “How did the back gate get open?” But if Molly heard, she never responded, and before Chase could ask again, her cell phone rang. It was Sergeant Cruise. “Ma’am, I’ve got duty tonight and just arrived. Thought you might want to know that another 81 went down today, in Afghanistan. I’m thinking I might get a call or two from the media since our crash is so recent. Have we got a statement on this?”

“Survivors?” she asked, drying her hands with the dishcloth.

“No, ma’am. They’re already blaming it on the conditions—sand and dust.” Molly, like a bag of cherry bombs, exploded into the kitchen. “Don’t forget to put a flower in my hair.” She was holding up a hairpin and an orange hibiscus bloom that Chase recognized from the tree outside their front door. “Behind my
right
ear.”

Chase draped her daughter’s hair behind an ear, tucked the stem of the flower out of sight, and pinned. She stepped back to examine; forced a smile. “Go look,” she urged, and when Molly was down the hall, said to Cruise, “If you get any calls, just confirm the crash and be prepared to read whatever release headquarters has extended. Don’t let yourself get dragged into any sort of speculation.”

“Aye-aye, ma’am.”

“Did North make it back to the office?” she asked.

“No, ma’am. Probably went on home after the ceremony practice. They were still at it when I left to grab chow a few minutes ago.”

“Call him and tell him about this latest crash, and tell him I’m home from my meeting with Hickman….” She could hear Molly returning up the hallway. “Ask North to call me about 1900. That’ll give me time to settle Molly down after taking her trick-or-treating.”

“Will do, ma’am.”

Molly burst into the room.
My God,
thought Chase,
she is the very image of her father.
The shape of her tiny mouth. How could someone so tiny and feminine be modeled after someone who had been, at least by appearances, so masculine?

Chase reached to open the refrigerator door for a bottle of water and willed herself to avoid the snapshots of Stone. Of course, she’d have to decide soon what to do about them. Would she have the stomach to leave them up for Molly’s sake? How would Chase explain taking them down? “Is it time to go?” she asked in a shaky voice that surely sounded ridiculously chipper, even to Molly. Thankfully, the doorbell rang.

“Can you get the door while I get the candy?” Molly ran for the door, and Chase ripped open the candy bags she’d been safeguarding all day and dumped them into a large ceramic bowl that she carried into the living room. Sara, Paige’s daughter, was dressed as a princess, or so Chase was guessing by the look of the frothy pink dress and glittery crown; Erin was a gypsy in her floor-length peasant skirt and wild red hair like her mother’s, like Chase imagined Samantha to have looked as a little girl. Molly was spinning about in her grass skirt, while Erin demonstrated how finger tambourines worked
and
sounded. Sara’s face turned somber, as if she were suddenly disappointed in her princess costume, and Chase wondered if dressing as a princess had been the little girl’s idea or Paige’s.

“Let me change clothes,” Chase told the girls, and headed for her bedroom. She stood in the middle of a walk-in closet among the orderly rows of khaki Capri’s, pressed white shirts, the stacks of folded jeans, and the row of uniforms and found it impossible to choose. This was depression, she thought. A never-ending sense of the present. If Hickman had his way, she was out of a job already. Her marriage had been a sham, and her husband had played a vital role in a cover-up conspiracy that may have cost so much loss of life. Her infidelity with General Armstrong had been exposed, which could mean a possible court-martial for both of them on grounds of conduct unbecoming an officer. She’d put her entire career at risk by delivering what she knew to a reporter rather than trusting the military chain of command—

Her impatient daughter called from the living room. “I’m coming,” Chase shouted from the walk-in closet. She hurriedly pulled on a pair of Khakis and slid a white, long-sleeved t-shirt over her head. She eased into the comfort of Nikes and gazed longingly at her bed, at the temporary escape of sleep it promised. Then she slipped her wedding band from her hand and tossed it on the bed.

Back in the living room, Molly was doling candy to several trick-or-treaters. Chase stuffed her cell phone in a pocket, set the bowl of candy on the porch, flipped on the porch light, and ushered all three girls out the door.

Paige and Samantha had been waiting on the sidewalk in front of Chase’s house. “Love your costume, Molly,” Samantha said. “Can you hula?” Molly set her candy bucket on the grass, provided the shortest version of the hula most likely ever performed, then raced to join Sara and Erin who were already at the house two doors down. Samantha chuckled. “She’s adorable.”

“They’re growing up so fast,” Paige said.

Their daughters shouted
Mahalo
(thank you) at the first house and were already racing for the second. “Right now,” Paige added, “they can’t imagine not knowing each other, not spending time together every day.” Paige seemed in an uncharacteristically reflective mood this evening.

Samantha gently pulled Chase aside onto the grass to avoid the group of children now racing from Paige’s house, where Lt. Col. Abercrombie was sitting on the front porch with a bowl of candy in his lap.

“Were we ever that young?” Samantha laughed.

There was the chorus of “trick-or-treat,” then
Mahalos.
Samantha leaned in. “Everything okay, Chase? You look so pale.”

Chase shrugged. “Sure,” she said, and pointed down the street toward their girls who were heading toward their third house. “We need to catch up,” she urged.

It was a breezy October night with a damp chill in the air. Lining the sidewalks were flickering candles in white paper bags. Several bags had already been blown to their sides, or perhaps they’d been knocked over by exuberant children. She shivered as she walked down the sidewalk between Samantha and Paige. Over her arm was Molly’s light blue windbreaker that she’d grabbed from the closet by the front door. Now she was wishing she’d grabbed a windbreaker for herself. Samantha appeared comfortable in her long denim skirt and heavy sweater jacket, and Paige had used the burst of October coolness as an excuse to pull on a pair of tan corduroy pants. Over this, she wore a long T-shirt and a fitted denim jacket, reminding Chase of a walking advertisement for J. Crew.

The sidewalks were filling with children and clusters of parents who were hanging back to provide that heady sense of freedom they had relished as children on Halloween nights. Chase, Paige, and Samantha strolled their neighborhood, greeting the clusters of parents who would often pause midsentence to compliment another child’s costume or shout at one of their own to slow down, and then conclude the sentence in that skillful way parents develop over time. Chase smiled and answered questions about Molly’s well-being. She floated through the motions of being neighbor and mother.

The three girls were by now at the Sims’ house. The major’s wife, Charlotte Sims, whom Chase had met the first time at the Ball nearly a year ago and had only run across a handful of time since while shopping at the PX and commissary, tossed candy at the girls. The girls shouted
Mahalo
and were off to the next house. Paige called out to Charlotte who waved and shouted, “Have you seen the boys? All
three
of them.” The reference to her husband, the tall and lanky Major Sims as one of the boys, caused all three women to erupt in laughter.