Chapter 3 - The Cold Soup
The lock did not slide immediately.
There was a five-second interval—an eternity in tactical time—where the only sound behind the fiberboard was the muffled, frantic scrape of socks over synthetic carpet, followed by the low, sharp hiss of a woman’s whisper that was cut off mid-syllable by the slide of a brass chain bolt.
The door swung back three inches.
Travis stood in the gap. He was wearing gray sweatpants with the drawstring hanging loose, an unironed polo shirt that had a greasy smudge of bacon fat across the left collar tab, and no shoes. His hair was ruffled at the crown, but his eyes were not the eyes of a man who had just been disturbed from an afternoon nap.
They were wide, moist, darting from the silver eagles on my shoulders down to the leather shine of my shoes, then past my hip toward the empty parking lot stairs.
“Colonel?”
The word came out on a sharp intake of air, like a diver breaking the surface after their lungs had begun to fill.
“Travis,” I said.
I did not wait for an invitation. I placed the palm of my right hand flat against the wood of the door, four inches above the brass lock, and exerted twenty pounds of lateral pressure.
The door swung back into the entryway. Travis had to take two quick, stumbling steps backward into the linoleum foyer to keep from being struck by the handle.
“You... you should have called,” he stammered, his right hand fluttering toward his neck, trying to smooth down his polo collar with fingers that were visibly twitching at the tips. “We were... Glenda was just finishing up some laundry. We didn't know you had leave.”
I stepped over the aluminum threshold. I did not take off my service cap.
The air inside the apartment hit my face like a wet blanket that had been stored in a cellar.
It was hot—at least seventy-six degrees—and smelled of three things that did not belong in the same room: the heavy, floral stench of cheap lavender air freshener, the sour, curdled grease of bacon grease that had been reheated in an iron pan, and an underlying trace of something metallic and stale, like copper pennies that had been soaked in vinegary water.
Glenda came out of the kitchen corridor.
She was sixty-one, five feet two inches tall, with short, permed gray hair that sat on her skull like a tight wire basket. She wore a purple velour tracksuit with rhinestones pinned around the zippered neck, and she was holding a damp dish towel with both hands, twisting the terrycloth into a tight, gray spiral between her palms.
Her smile appeared on her face with the speed of an automated slide projector clicking into place: bright, wet, completely stationary.
“Why, Colonel Quinn!” she chirped. The voice was high, flute-like, pitched to carry across a church fellowship hall during an argument over altar cloths. “Look at you in all your brass! If we’d known you were coming all the way up from Kentucky, I would have put a ham in the oven. Travis, take your mother-in-law’s coat.”
“Keep your hands off the uniform, Travis,” I said.
My voice was not loud, but it had the specific, gravel-lined bottom that causes three hundred soldiers to stop talking in a mess hall without an order being given.
Glenda’s smile didn't vanish; it simply froze, like grease cooling on a zinc plate.
“Well,” she said, her fingers continuing their rhythmic, obsessive wringing of the dish towel. “Abby is resting, Colonel. The poor thing had a very difficult morning with her digestion. The doctor said no visitors, no excitement. You know how these modern girls are. They don't have the stamina we had. One little kick from the baby and they think the sky is falling.”
I looked past her shoulder.
The apartment was terrifyingly, unnaturally clean.
There were no magazines on the coffee table. There were no shoes kicked off by the sofa. There was none of the healthy, sprawling clutter of a twenty-six-year-old girl who had spent her life collecting half-finished sketchbooks, running shoes, and coffee mugs with chips on the rim.
On the dining table sat a single white stoneware bowl.
Inside it was three inches of pale yellow chicken broth. The surface had cooled so long ago that a thick, translucent skin had formed across the top, wrinkled like old parchment where the draft from the hallway had chilled the grease. A single saltine cracker lay beside the spoon, completely soft, sagging under the humidity of the room.
“Whose soup is that?” I asked.
“That’s Abby’s lunch,” Glenda said instantly. She took half a step to her left, positioning her velour hip between me and the hallway door. “She just didn't have much of an appetite today. I told Travis to leave it out in case she woke up peckish.”
“A pregnant woman doesn't eat cold grease with a skin on it, Glenda,” I said.
“Now, Colonel,” Travis said, stepping up on my right, his shoulder brushing against the wool of my sleeve. “Let’s not get into an attitude here. My mother has raised four children. She knows what Abby needs better than someone who... well, you haven't exactly been around for domestic things, have you?”
I turned my head four inches.
I looked at Travis Keene. I looked at the small, pink shaving nick on his jawline. I looked at the soft curve of his cheek, the absence of any bone structure that had ever resisted an impact, and the small, cowardly moisture gathering at the inner corners of his eyelids.
“Travis,” I said.
“Ma'am?”
“If you touch my uniform again, I will break your collarbone.”
He stepped back two full feet. His heels hit the baseboard with a hollow thump.
“Colonel!” Glenda gasped, her hands flying to the rhinestones at her throat. “You are in our home! You cannot speak to my son that way!”
“Where is my daughter?”
“She is asleep!” Glenda hissed, her flute-like voice finally dropping into that dry, yellow gravel that had been lurking beneath the sweet tea for two months. “And she does not want to see you! She told us that specifically! She said, ‘Don't let my mother come up here with her rules and her uniforms, making me feel like an idiot because I can't keep my house clean!’”
I did not answer her.
I walked down the hallway.
The carpet was thin, gray industrial nylon that smelled of carpet powder and damp concrete underneath. There were two doors on the left: a bathroom, its door standing open to reveal four different bottles of prescription antacids and a plastic bucket of bleach sitting beside the tub; and a spare bedroom filled with Glenda’s cardboard boxes and an ironing board.
At the end of the hall was the master bedroom.
The door was closed.
May you like
Not latched. It was pulled to, but there was a strip of blue masking tape stuck across the brass strike plate on the jamb—the kind people use when they want to keep a door from clicking shut, or when they want to be able to push it open without making a sound that can be heard from the living room.
I reached out my gloved hand. I pushed the wood.
