Chương 4
“You have a career.”
“I had one this morning too.”
“You don’t understand what this can do to you.”
“Then explain it.”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
Thomas looked toward Mercer again.
Mara followed his gaze.
This time Mercer did not look away.
A vibration sounded from inside the evidence bag.
Everyone nearest it froze.
The military police sergeant stared down.
The sound came again.
Not from the medal.
From behind the folded paper.
“There’s something electronic in there,” Caleb said.
The sergeant called for the hall to be cleared immediately.
People began moving with renewed confusion as security personnel pushed them toward the far exits.
Shaw ordered everyone back from the chair.
The corpsman took Mara by the arm.
She resisted.
“Mara,” Evelyn said.
Her mother’s voice had broken.
“Please.”
The tiny object vibrated a third time.
Then a thin blue light appeared beneath the taped paper.
Thomas went gray.
“No.”
Mara looked at him.
He was no longer watching the medal.
He was watching the light.
“What is it?”
Thomas backed into a folding chair and caught himself against its metal frame.
Mercer moved toward the evidence bag.
Shaw blocked him with one arm.
“Don’t.”
“I need to see it.”
“You’re not touching anything.”
“Frank.”
“Back up.”
Mercer did not.
For several seconds the two generals faced each other while security personnel shouted evacuation instructions around them.
Then the blue light blinked off.
The vibration stopped.
Nothing exploded.
No alarm sounded.
The anticlimax was almost worse.
A young military police specialist approached with a protective container and carefully enclosed the bag.
Mara watched it disappear inside.
The physical evidence was gone from sight, but its effect remained everywhere.
Her mother was crying silently.
Thomas looked ill.
Mercer had stopped pretending he was merely curious.
Shaw was speaking into a phone, requesting investigators and ordering access logs preserved for the hall.
Caleb stood beside Mara with his hands loose at his sides, studying every face.
The ceremony had become something else, though Mara still could not name what.
The corpsman guided her toward the side exit.
This time she let him.
At the doorway she looked back.
Thomas had followed three steps behind.
Evelyn stood farther away, unable or unwilling to decide whether to follow him.
Mara stopped.
“Dad.”
Thomas lifted his head.
“What did Mom mean when she said you told her it was destroyed?”
He looked at Shaw, then Mercer, then finally at Mara.
The answer seemed to cost him something before he even spoke.
“I told her the truth as I understood it.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“No.”
His voice was barely audible.
“It isn’t.”
“Whose medal is it?”
Thomas’s face tightened.
A security officer approached to separate them, but Shaw raised a hand and stopped him.
Thomas looked at the closed protective container.
Then he looked at the decorations on Mara’s uniform, the career she had built without knowing that some buried piece of his life had apparently found its way onto her chest.
“When I last saw that medal,” he said, “it was on a dead Marine.”
Mara felt the room narrow around his words.
Thomas swallowed.
“And his name was Daniel Velez.”
Evelyn made a small sound behind him.
Mara did not recognize the name.
That was what frightened her most.
Thomas stepped toward her, but she moved back before he could touch her.
“Who was Daniel Velez?”
Thomas looked at his wife.
Evelyn covered her mouth.
Mercer closed his eyes.
Outside the hall, approaching sirens rose across the installation.
Thomas faced Mara again.
“My brother.”
Mara stared at him.
“You told me you were an only child.”
“I know.”
The sirens grew louder.
Thomas looked toward the doors as if he already knew the people arriving would not make anything safer.
Then he said, “And if that medal was put on you today, Mara, whoever did it knows I lied about how Daniel died.”
For a second, Mara heard nothing except the sirens and the blood beating behind her ears.
Then the corpsman said her name, and the ordinary concern in his voice made the impossible sentence feel even more real.
“Captain, we need to move.”
Mara kept her eyes on Thomas.
“How did he die?”
Thomas glanced toward Mercer.
“Not here.”
“You lied to me for my entire life, and your first instinct is still to choose the room?”
“Mara.”
“How did Daniel die?”
A security officer opened the side door, and cold conditioned air from the corridor stirred the edge of Thomas’s jacket.
“He died overseas.”
“Where?”
Thomas hesitated.
Mercer answered for him.
“Jordan.”
Thomas turned on him.
“Shut up.”
The violence in his voice startled Evelyn into lowering her hand from her mouth.
Mercer looked tired rather than offended.
“She’s already involved.”
“You don’t get to decide that.”
“Neither do you anymore.”
Mara looked between them.
“What year?”
Thomas rubbed his mouth.
“Nineteen ninety-eight.”
Mara did the arithmetic automatically.
She had been six.
A memory surfaced without invitation, not of a person but of a summer afternoon in San Diego, her mother pulling curtains closed while the telephone rang in another room.
Mara had been coloring a horse purple because the brown crayon was broken.
She remembered Evelyn sitting on the kitchen floor afterward.
She remembered being told an uncle from her mother’s side had died.
Maybe she had attached the wrong explanation later.
Maybe nobody had given her one.
“Was I alive when you knew him?”
Thomas nodded.
“Did I meet him?”
“No.”
The answer came too quickly.
Mara caught it.
“So that’s another lie.”
Thomas’s shoulders sagged.
“Mari, please go with the corpsman.”
She hated the nickname in his mouth now because it still worked on some primitive part of her.
She turned before he could see that.
May you like
The clinic occupied a low building less than four minutes from the ceremony hall, but security transported Mara rather than allowing her to walk.
Caleb climbed into the vehicle with her until a military police captain told him witnesses were being separated.
