The Second Life of the Malicious Colonel's Daughter novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: One Question a Day

She lets him in on one rule, finds out he works for the base she just rekeyed, and the base colonel greets her by her old rank.

I carried that card in my vest pocket all morning.

It rubbed against my pick set every time I bent over a lock.

I rekeyed a bakery door and opened a minivan for a woman crying over her infant seat.

Then I cut three spares for a landlord who argued about the price.

None of it took my mind off the back of that card.

At two o'clock Marva looked at the clock and then at me.

"You have the housing office at three," she said.

"I know."

"It's on the base."

"I know where it is."

"You could send me."

"You hate the housing office."

"I hate it less than watching you check that pocket."

I took my tool bag and went.

The gate guard checked my contractor pass and waved me through without looking at my face.

I had driven through that gate two hundred times and nobody had ever looked at my face.

I was always grateful for that.

The housing office was a low brick building beside the commissary lot.

A clerk handed me a list of twelve units that needed new cylinders before the next families moved in.

I took the list and walked out to my truck.

Isaiah Doran was leaning on the fender.

He had his hands in his jacket pockets and his glasses pushed up on his forehead.

He looked like a man who had been waiting a while and did not mind.

"You followed me," I said.

"I'm stationed here. You drove onto my base."

"Your base?"

"My post. I don't own it."

I put my bag in the truck bed.

"Why did you leave that card?"

"You wouldn't take it from my hand."

"I wouldn't take anything from your hand."

"I noticed."

He said it dry, and I almost smiled, and that annoyed me.

"Here's how this goes," I said.

"All right."

"I've been questioned by three investigators and a prosecutor who wanted me to say my father was a good man."

"I read that part."

"I'm not doing it again."

"I'm not asking for a statement."

"Then you ask for one thing a day."

He waited.

"One question a day," I said. "You answer it honestly. If you lie once, I stop answering the door."

"My questions or yours?"

"Mine."

He blinked.

"You want to question the investigator?"

"I want to know who I'm talking to before I say another word to anyone from the Army."

He thought about it.

I watched him think.

He didn't hurry and he didn't look at the building, and I liked that more than I wanted to.

"One question a day," he said. "I'll answer it straight."

"Good. Question one."

I took the card out of my pocket and held it up between two fingers.

"Who's your commander?"

His face changed.

It was a small change, a tightening at the jaw, but I saw it because I was looking for it.

"Colonel Mace Redfern," he said. "Garrison commander of Fort Merrow."

The name went through me like cold water.

I had not heard it in four years.

"Colonel Redfern sat behind my father at the court-martial," I said. "Every day, in the second row."

"I know."

"He brought my father a thermos of coffee."

"I've read the file."

"You didn't say that this morning."

"You told me to say one sentence."

"You talk too much for a man with one sentence."

He actually laughed, a short surprised breath, and the sound went somewhere low in my chest that I did not want to look at.

Then a voice behind us said, "Captain Burris."

I did not turn around.

I knew the voice.

It was warm, a little rough, the voice of a man who has never once had to raise it.

Isaiah's eyes went over my shoulder, and he straightened.

"Sir," he said.

I turned.

Colonel Mace Redfern stood on the walk with two men in uniform behind him.

He was silver at the temples and broad through the chest, with pale blue eyes and a wide, open smile.

He held out his hand.

"It's been a long time," he said. "I'd have known you anywhere."

I looked at his hand.

I looked at the two stripes of ribbons on his chest.

"Colonel," I said.

"You've been in our town all this while, and nobody told me."

"Three years."

"Three years," he said, and smiled again. "My, my."

His eyes slid to Isaiah, and then back to me, and rested there.

Something in that look was not a question.

It was a man counting.

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