THUNDERHEADS ROLLED IN low over the Chesapeake. Thomas Gray watched them come across the silvery water and stack over Smith Point Light. He loved the Northern Neck, a long peninsula on the Virginia side of the bay. It was rural, and people kept to themselves, nothing like the scene of retired Washingtonians over in Maryland around St. Michaels. He liked the emptiness, the woods, the old churches. Being out here in nature was the only way he’d found to take his mind off all the ugliness he had seen.
Small waves hushed against the rocks, and he heard something behind him. He pivoted around, steeled himself. It was an osprey.
It was hard to lose the old habits.
He walked toward the house. Children and grandchildren, husbands and wives, college friends. He could see them through the window sitting around the big farm table.
So many names and faces. Gray couldn’t remember them all. He would stare blankly at a woman while she smiled over sadness. His son would whisper that she was his daughter-in-law. For a moment he had forgotten who she was. It was a common smile these days, patronizing but well-meaning, torture for the man, not old really, just sixty-two, who prided himself on his brain. It was his weapon.
He opened the double doors that led from the garden to his library. A hi-fi from the 1970s sat on the cabinets. He had bought it in Japan when he was stationed there. He tilted a record sleeve, placed the vinyl on the turntable, then walked over to the pool table and put out a rack for nine-ball.
A fanfare, then a soaring contralto. Mahler, a song about being forgotten by the world.
Gray shook his head and smiled.
It’s why he liked country music too. Listening to something so irredeemably sad, he always found it harder to feel sorry for himself.
“Do you still listen to him, Claire?”
He didn’t look back as he spoke. He tapped the edge of his glasses. “It’s darker in front of me than it is behind,” he said. “I caught your reflection.” In the corner of his glasses, he could see a mirrored image of his former student, the suppressed pistol at her side. He held his arms out and turned slowly.
“The things I remember, and the things I forget. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“There,” Claire said, and she pointed to a low-backed chair.
He sat while Claire circled around to the desk, rummaged through the drawers, and came out with an M1911 pistol, a gun that GIs had carried since the First World War and that was still favored by many for its stopping power. She slipped it into her waistband.
“I’m glad they sent someone I know. Do me a favor, don’t let my kids find the body. The water is right there.”
“That’s not what I’m here for, Gray.”
He pointed to the gun. “Is that a housewarming present, then?”
“I need to know what happened to my husband. It wasn’t an accident. Someone tried to kill me this morning. I don’t know who to go to, who to trust.”
“They came for you?” He turned his head to the side and examined the cuts on her neck.
“Did you kill my husband, Gray?”
He kneaded his temple, as if trying to recall. “Claire, Claire, Claire,” he muttered, then he lifted his head up straight as if he had just remembered something.
“Didn’t you?” he asked.
He watched her knuckles turn white as her fist closed on the grip of the gun. She was broken; that’s why they had picked her, for that rage that had no bottom.
During her training, another Cold Harvest candidate, an Army Ranger, had tried to haze her. She was a natural target, the only remaining woman. It was near the end of the diving phase, and sometimes the trainees would lock a newcomer in a storage trunk with an air tank and a regulator but no mask and then drop the trunk into the deep end of the pool for fifteen minutes.
Gray talked to the man afterward, in the hospital. As the Ranger had come for her, she kept saying, “Please, don’t. Please,” with her fists balled at her sides. He’d thought she was begging for her own sake, but it was for his.
She broke his nose and left him with both eyes swollen shut; she might have killed him if two others hadn’t pulled her off. She was like an animal, they said.
Gray stared at her now, her jaw set, her eyes narrowed. As he watched the gun rise and the barrel aim square at his face, he thought maybe Hayes had been right. He’d always said it was too risky, trying to tame anger like that. Gray looked at her over the iron sights of the pistol and wondered, Did you ever find peace, Claire? Did you ever get control?