The Second Life of the Malicious Colonel's Daughter novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Word on the Door
Jessamine scrubs SNITCH off her shop door and the military police investigator on her step says her father's case is open again.
The paint on my shop door was still wet when I found it.
Red letters, three feet high, across the glass.
SNITCH.
It was the fourth time since spring.
I set down my coffee on the step and went inside for the solvent.
Depot Street was empty at twenty to seven.
The diner across the road had its lights on, and two men in the front window turned to watch me.
I knew what they thought of me.
They thought I was the Burris girl, the captain who sold out her own father to save her career.
I did not say anything to them.
I wet a rag and started on the first S.
The paint came off in long red streaks and ran down my wrist.
"You want to call the police on that?" Marva Bettis asked.
She had come up behind me with her keys in one hand and her reading glasses pushed up in her hair.
Marva was sixty-two and owned the shop.
She had hired me three years ago when nobody else in Merrow Junction would look at my resume.
"The police know," I said.
"The police are the ones who keep the gas station camera pointed at the pumps."
"Then it won't matter."
"It matters to me."
She stood there and watched me scrub.
Then she went inside and started the coffee, because that is how Marva shows she is angry.
I was on the last letter when a man stopped at the bottom of my step.
He was not tall.
He was about five foot ten and thick through the shoulders, with a copper-brown crew cut and wire glasses.
His tan field jacket had a small brass badge clipped at the belt, and he held it where I could see it.
"Jessamine Burris?" he said.
I knew the way he stood.
Feet apart, weight even, hands where I could watch them.
I had taught soldiers to stand like that when they were nervous in front of an officer.
"We open at eight," I said.
"I'm not here for a key."
"Then we open at eight."
"Ms. Burris, I'm Chief Warrant Officer Isaiah Doran, military police investigator at Fort Merrow."
I turned back to the door and rubbed at the paint.
"Your father's case has been reopened," he said.
My hand stopped.
The rag was cold and wet and the solvent stung the cut on my knuckle.
"Say that again."
"The Army has reopened the Tolliver convoy investigation. I'm the investigator."
I stood up slowly.
I was taller than him by an inch, and I let him see it.
"I testified for two days under oath," I said. "I said everything I know."
"I've read the transcript."
"Then you don't need me."
"I need you to look at some things."
"I looked at enough things for a lifetime."
He did not move off the step.
"Three soldiers died on that grade," he said.
"I know how many."
"Do you know their names?"
That was the wrong question to ask me.
I had said those names out loud every night for five years, in a rented room, to a ceiling.
I stepped back into the shop and put my hand on the door to close it.
His boot was in the gap before I finished.
It was a plain black duty boot, and it stopped the door cold.
I looked down at it.
Then I looked up and caught his wrist where it hung by the frame.
His pulse was fast under my fingers.
He did not pull away.
"Take it out," I said.
"Hear one sentence first."
"You get one."
"I asked for your father's case."
Nobody asks for that case.
Nobody at the Army wants to touch a colonel who put three families in the ground and a daughter on the stand.
I held his wrist a moment longer than I needed to.
Then I let go.
He took his boot out of the door, and I shut it and turned the deadbolt.
Through the glass, the last wet corner of the S ran down between us.
He stood there a while.
Then he knelt, wrote something on the back of a card, and slid it under the door.
I waited until his footsteps went down the street.
The card said ISAIAH DORAN on the front.
On the back, in blocky print, it said, "The brake stamp on your father's forms was cut at the Fort Merrow motor depot."
I read it three times.
Fort Merrow was the base at the end of this street.
I had driven past its gate every morning for three years.
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