Chapter 2 - The Distance Between Fort Knox and Indianapolis
The distance between the main gate of Fort Knox and the southern bypass of Indianapolis is one hundred and thirty-eight miles.
If you drive the speed limit—sixty-five through the urban crawl of Louisville, seventy through the rolling corn ground of Clark County, fifty-five through the construction bottlenecks around Columbus where they are widening the bridge over the Flatrock River—it takes two hours and twenty-eight minutes.
Earl did it in one hour and forty-six.
He did not use the siren. He did not have the red-and-blue strobe units engaged behind the radiator grille. He simply drove the Suburban with the cold, rhythmic aggression of a man who had guided eighty-ton Bradley fighting vehicles through five hundred miles of desert track without losing a track pin. He used the center shoulder when the semi-trailers tried to box him in; he used the slipstream of long-distance moving vans to clear the left lane; he did not touch the brake pedal once between the Ohio River bridge and the exit for County Line Road.
I did not speak.
I sat with my back pressed against the leather seat, my service cap in my lap, my thumbs hooked over the gold belt buckle of my dress uniform.
In my head, a clock was running backwards.
Nine years.
Rob had been gone nine years. A non-commissioned officer in the 101st Airborne who had survived three deployments to the Korengal Valley only to have an eighteen-year-old girl texting her boyfriend run a red light on Fort Campbell Boulevard and t-bone his pickup truck forty yards from the PX entrance.
I had been in Qatar when it happened.
It took thirty-two hours to get me from the regional operations center back to Tennessee. By the time I walked into the chapel, the coffin was already closed. Abby had been seventeen years old, standing in the front pew in a black cotton skirt she had outgrown two summers before, her shins bare, her fingers gripping her father’s service cap so hard that the brass badge had cut small, crescent-shaped tears into her palm.
She had looked up at me from that pew.
She hadn't screamed. She hadn't thrown herself onto the wood. She had simply looked at me with Rob’s pale, gray-blue eyes—the eyes that looked like slate after an autumn rain—and said, “You took too long to get home, Mom.”
Those seven words had lived inside my ribcage like an unexploded submunition for three thousand days.
Whenever I chose to take a battalion command instead of a desk job in the Pentagon; whenever I signed the orders that sent me to Poland for nine months while she finished her degree in agricultural economics at Purdue; whenever I sent her a five-hundred-dollar wire transfer for her birthday because I was sitting in a bunker outside Poznan reviewing anti-tank defense diagrams—those seven words were the background hum of my life.
You took too long to get home.
And so, when Travis Keene appeared in her life three years ago, I had stepped back.
He had seemed... safe. That was the word I had used in my journal the night after she brought him to the small, clapboard house I rented off-post outside Radcliff. He was five feet ten inches tall, had soft, pale hands with neatly trimmed cuticles, and worked in an office with gray carpeting where nobody ever checked the serial numbers on small arms or smelled like cordite at five in the morning.
He didn't own a rifle. He didn't have an old field jacket hanging behind his door. He had looked at my service ribbons with a polite, vacant smile that people give to modern art they don't understand, and he had asked if the military provided good dental coverage for dependents.
“He’s gentle, Mom,” Abby had told me on the porch that night, leaning her head against my shoulder while the Kentucky cicadas roared in the maple trees. “He doesn't have secrets. He doesn't go away for six months and come back looking at the tree line like he’s waiting for someone to shoot at him. When he comes home, he just... comes home.”
I had wanted that for her.
God forgive me, I had wanted that so badly that I had turned off every sensory tripwire I had spent thirty years cultivating in the military.
When an intelligence officer brings you a patrol report and three paragraphs are missing from the middle of the third page, you do not sign the document. You throw the captain out of your office and you send an investigative team to the grid coordinates.
When a supply clerk tells you fifteen cases of fifty-caliber link ammunition are “accounted for in the secondary register,” you do not nod. You walk down to the concrete bunker with a crowbar and you open the wooden crates with your own hands.
Yet when my daughter stopped laughing on Sunday mornings, I told myself she was tired.
When her voice became thin and dry as onion skin, I told myself she was adjusting to the marriage.
When Glenda Keene moved into their two-bedroom apartment on the south side of Indianapolis four months ago—bringing with her three boxes of ceramic figurines and forty-two years of experience in small-town Indiana church gossip—I told myself it was good that Abby had a mother figure nearby while her own mother was planning division-level live-fire exercises in the scrub oak of Hardin County.
“She’s so helpful, Mom,” Abby had whispered on the phone back in July. It was the last time she had called me from her own number. “She does the laundry. She tells me what to eat. Travis says we’re saving so much on groceries now that she does the shopping.”
“Helpful,” I said aloud inside the Suburban.
Earl’s eyes cut to the rearview mirror. “Ma’am?”
“Nothing, Earl.”
We hit the southern loop of I-465. The sky above Indianapolis had turned the color of greasy dishwater, a flat, Midwestern gray that pressed down against the commercial strips, the used-car lots, and the two-story apartment complexes built out of beige vinyl siding and hollow-core pine in the late nineties.
The complex was called The Sycamores.
There were no sycamores. There was an asphalt parking lot with six drainage grates clogged with rotting maple leaves, three rows of two-story residential barracks with beige aluminum trim, and a green dumpster near the entrance that was overflowing with cardboard furniture boxes and plastic nursery wraps.
Earl pulled the Suburban into an empty visitor stall forty yards from the breezeway of Building 4. He did not turn off the engine.
He reached down beside his right hip, unbuckled his seatbelt, and pulled his personal sidearm—a black, finish-worn SIG Sauer P226 that he had carried off-duty since his days with the military police at Fort Hood—from the leather holster beneath his civilian windbreaker. He pulled the slide back half an inch, verified the brass casing seated in the chamber with the tip of his index finger, and let the slide snap home with a muffled, metallic chack.
“Wait here,” I said.
Earl looked at me. His gray eyebrows didn't move.
“Ten minutes, ma'am?”
“Ten minutes,” I said. “If you don't get a text from my personal phone by ten minutes past the hour, you don't knock on the door, Earl. You bring the local sheriff, you bring the emergency medical squad, and you bring that sidearm.”
“Understood, Colonel.”
I opened the door.
The cold Indiana wind caught the hem of my dress jacket, pulling it against my thighs. I adjusted my service cap, squared the peak four fingers above the bridge of my nose, reached down to ensure my ribbons were flat against my left breast, and stepped onto the damp asphalt.
I did not hurry.
A colonel in the United States Army does not run across a residential parking lot. You walk with twenty-eight-inch strides, your heels striking the ground first, your arms swinging six inches to the front and three inches to the rear. You let the sound of your arrival announce that the authority of the state has just entered the grid square.
I climbed the exterior wooden stairs of Building 4. The pine risers were rotten in the corners, flexing beneath my shoes with a small, wet groan.
Apartment 204.
A brass knocker shaped like an acorn was screwed to the hollow fiberboard door. Beside it hung a wooden plaque, painted in blue acrylic with small white daisies: The Keenes – Est. 2024.
May you like
I did not use the acorn.
I lifted my right fist, doubled my knuckles, and hammered three times against the center stile of the door. The hollow wood boomed like an empty fuel drum across the second-floor breezeway.
