CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
McLean, Virginia
Dr. Samantha Owens
Sam read and translated as best she could, pausing only to accept dinner and another drink from Susan. The food was simple fare, tomato soup and crusty bread that only partially filled the empty space in her stomach. They sat at the kitchen table in silence, each lost in her own thoughts, spooning the warm soup into their mouths absently. The tension hadn’t dissipated after Sam’s comment about the fountain pen, and she felt bad about it.
The soup was nourishing, but not filling. The scotch, on the other hand, a sixteen-year-old Lagavulin, curled up in the remaining empty holes and lit a merry fire, making Sam cozy from the inside out. It wasn’t a cure, but a damn good intermediary medicinal.
After the first twenty minutes of frustrated page flipping, Sam set the journal on the desk thoughtfully and looked to the bookshelves for a primer she knew Donovan would have close by. It didn’t take long to find. His battered copy of Wheelock’s Latin was on the third shelf, happily nestled between Pliny and Vergil. She took it reverentially and went back to the desk. “Never come between a man and his Wheelock,” Donovan used to crow.
Better equipped, she set back to work.
Sam hadn’t talked to Donovan in years, but the tenor of the entries told her something was definitely wrong. His words were melancholy at best, downright miserable at worst. But it didn’t say why. He wasn’t thrilled with his new job, she did gather that. They had him hopping, and while he enjoyed the work, she got the sense his boss wasn’t his favorite person. There were a number of references she couldn’t decipher; her Latin translation skills were a little rusty.
The first thing Sam had done was flip to the page dated the day before Donovan’s murder. It seemed like the most logical place to start. She’d gotten horribly choked up—he mentioned the day off from work, how he was looking forward to spending some quality time with his family. The girls featured prominently in his missives to himself, he was tickled with them both. Especially Ally, the one he saw himself in so clearly.
Sam understood that.
A child, a creation, something made of love, and desire, and passion, and fear, became the best, and the worst, part of you. To have them stripped away was inhumane punishment. Just as it was for a daughter to lose her father. Sam had been lucky, her parents had lived to see her graduate and become a doctor before they passed. In marrying Simon and having the twins, she’d found a family again. And now even they had been taken from her. Punishment, surely. But for what? Why? She would never understand.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three.
She shook herself slightly, to refocus, and the journal’s pages flipped of their own accord. The book settled open to April 10. Sam glanced at the page, a vivisection of Donovan’s all-day meetings with a representative from NATO, and started to turn the page back to where she was already reading when she felt the slightest bit of resistance.
She flipped the page open and saw April 4.
The journal skipped several days. That was unusual for Donovan, a natural chronicler. He had a fresh entry for each diurnal and, as Susan had said, wrote up the happenings of his day religiously, no matter how short or mundane.
Five days in April, missing.
She looked closer, pulling the binding apart as far as it would stretch. The resistance she’d felt was from tiny slivers of paper, left over from where the pages had been cut out of the journal. It acted almost like a bookmark.
Sam went into the kitchen. After dinner, Susan had respread the financial papers on the kitchen table and had her glasses on as she perused something. She heard Sam come in, looked up and raised her eyebrow.
“Need a refill already?”
“No, thank you. Did you see this, Susan? The pages have been torn out here, or cut out. From April 5 to April 9. What happened those days?”
Alarm colored Susan’s face. “I don’t know …?. Nothing I can think of offhand. Let me go get my calendar.”
“Did Eddie keep his own calendar?”
“Top right drawer. But he carried most of that info on his BlackBerry. His admin at work would probably have a better idea of his work schedule. The calendars we keep here are for family stuff. That’s why he doesn’t have a work laptop at home anymore—he was trying hard to keep work at work, but had his BlackBerry on all the time, for emergencies.”
Sam went back to Donovan’s office, pulled the drawer open and found a cocoa-colored leather day timer. The leather was well broken in, but the pages inside were crisp and white, barely used. She opened to April 5, and saw nothing. All the pages were blank, actually, except for one. The previous Tuesday had a small notation on it. A cross, with the letters BS.
Susan came back into the office with her own day timer, a pink Filofax stuffed full of coupons and receipts and checkbooks. Sam used to have one just like it. When she had a family of her own to manage.
“There’s nothing in here that’s out of the ordinary. We had a babysitter on the night of the sixth. We went to the movies. Date night. Other than that, it’s the usual kid stuff. I didn’t notice anything weird or strange then … I’ve been racking my brain. Maybe the fountain pen exploded and ruined the pages? It’s done that before.”
“When it did, would he just rip the pages out?”
“No. He’d just fold them together and keep going. He hated to waste paper.” Her eyes went wide. “Do you think the person who broke in took the pages? That something on them is why he was killed?”
“I don’t know, Susan. You said he got called into work the day he was killed, even though he’d taken a vacation day?”
“Yes. It doesn’t add up. I know his boss says they didn’t call him in, but Eddie reacted so quickly, and said it was going to take a while. Work is the only thing that would make sense. He always left when Raptor called. What else could it have been?”
The pressure of the day, the enormity of the situation, was suddenly too much for Susan to bear. She broke into tears. “Iwas angry with him, Sam. The last emotion I felt toward my husband before he died was anger. I am a horrible person. I’ll never be able to forgive myself.”
Sam took the woman in her arms, let her cry. When she started to quiet down, Sam stepped back, her hands on Susan’s shoulders.
“Look at me. You can’t do that to yourself. There’s nothing to be gained in the guilt. He knows you were upset because you loved him and wanted to be with him. That’s the right kind of anger.”
“But I should have been better about it. I should have understood—”
“Susan. Trust me. He knew you loved him. It’s kind of hard to miss.”
Susan gulped a choking laugh, the hysteria of loss. She pulled away from Sam.
“Thank you,” she managed. “That helps.”
“Good. Take a look at this for me, would you?” She showed her the page on the calendar with the notation. “Do you know what that means?”
She traced her fingers across the letters as if forging a connection to the dead.
“No. I have no idea. It looks like a doodle more than anything. That’s weird.”
“Yeah, it is. I’m going to look at the journal a little more. I think we need to get the ones from his last deployment, though. Can you manage yourself, or do you need help?”
“I’ll do it. I need … well.”
Sam understood. Susan would have to open a part of her soul that was already cloudy and worn to go through more of Donovan’s things. If she broke down again, she’d rather do it privately.
“I’ll be here,” Sam said, then went back to the desk. She fingered the journal, thinking.