My Brother Called From the Ocean Floor, So I Hung Up novel · Chapter 17 of 24
Chapter 17: Eve
The Navy commander met us at eleven that night in a hangar office at the old naval air station on Sand Point.
She had a gray crew cut, a uniform with the jacket off, and a mug of tea she didn't drink.
She looked at the technician first.
"Sit," she said.
He sat.
"Your family. Where?"
"Spokane. My wife's mother's house, on Garland."
The commander picked up a desk phone and dialed four digits.
"Fairchild," she said. "I need two people at a residence on Garland Street in Spokane, in the next hour. A woman and two children. Plain clothes. They're not to leave her side until I say."
She listened.
"No, it isn't official yet. It will be."
She hung up.
The technician put his face in both hands.
"Thank you," he said, through his fingers.
"Don't thank me. Talk."
He talked for forty minutes.
Joan sat beside him, and my mother and Kit sat on a bench by the wall, and I stood by the window with my arms crossed.
I laid everything on the desk, one piece at a time.
The yellow shop copy, with Harlan Rask's signature and the line about burning the lot slip.
The lot slip.
My phone, with Quist's voice on it saying the joint creeps and the Tern was never meant to come back.
The pilot's watch.
She played the watch last, with her eyes closed.
When my father said "Then let him go down," she opened them and looked at Kit.
"You made this?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"At what risk?"
"I don't know. He said I'd be put away."
"Were you?"
"Not yet."
She turned off the watch and set it very gently on the blotter.
"Commander," I said. "This is enough to arrest them."
"It's enough for a very long civil suit," she said. "It's not enough to arrest anyone by Saturday."
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