monotone chatter of news from his big-screen TV. While an auto’s backfire could have him crouching to protect himself from small-arms fire, or the cry of a seagull take him straight to the nights when the monkeys shrieked from the craggy mountains surrounding the base in Afghanistan, thoughts of Erica raised a wall between him and the rest of the world.
“We each had a different sponsoring magazine, both owned by the same publishing company,” he said, moving back so he could lean against the nearby wall. “The newsweekly was paying my way. Erica was the first embedded war journalist on assignment for what’s generally considered a women’s fashion publication.”
Jane glanced at the collection of tear sheets. “Brave lady.”
“Dogged.” He didn’t want to examine too closely right now what, exactly, she’d been so determined to accomplish, so he pushed the question away. “It’s a man’s world out there. Every ten or fourteen days, we rotated to a slightly larger base for a chance at a hot meal and water to wash with, but the rest of the time it was MREs and our own sweat. The guys pissed into PVC pipes stuck in the ground.”
Griffin eyed Jane, trying to picture her among the soldiers in his platoon. Erica had been bold and bawdy, coping with the almost-adolescent sexual bravado of the young men by telling jokes so dirty they could almost make him cringe. Jane, on the other hand… She’d probably faint dead away.
As if reading his mind, the blonde straightened in her chair, her eyebrows drawn together and down. “Don’t stop on my account. Three summers in a row my dad hauled my brothers and me out to the Arizona desert while he conducted fieldwork studying an elusive reptile. One of my first jobs in this business? I assisted a man ghostwriting the autobiography of a notorious metal band’s lead singer. To get ‘color,’ I rode with them on their reunion tour bus for a month. I might look sheltered, but I assure you that’s not the case.”
Her annoyance bemused him. “What elusive reptile was that?”
She didn’t blink. “The Black-and-Green Spotted Hootswaggle.”
“You made that up.”
Her little movement might well have been a flounce. “So? I’ve forgotten its real name. My father always says I have no head for science.”
Yet she’d survived those arid summers and then four weeks with the kind of band infamous for debauchery. “Did you, uh, date any of those band members?”
“Well, I did make sure I had all my shots up to date before the tour—you know, rabies, distemper, smallpox and the like—but no, tempted as I was by scrawny men wearing leather pants and hair extensions.”
She made him smile. Not only was she funny with her dry way of delivery, but for some reason it pleased him to know some ancient lecher with a groupie list a mile long hadn’t touched the baby skin, kissed the tender mouth.
That mouth that was part silent star, part very bad girl.
“But we’ve gotten off the subject,” Jane continued.
Damn it, she made him do that too, Griffin realized. He was supposed to be sending her on her way, not smiling at her.
The governess gestured at the tear sheets again. “We were talking about Erica.”
In his mind’s eye he saw the women who had populated their remote outpost. It wasn’t the single real one he pictured, however. Instead he saw their other female companions—the naked centerfolds taped to the plywood walls, their humongous breasts and big white smiles fly-speckled, their expressions creepily come-hither as their paper selves watched over the boys ever ready to risk their lives. One young man had a morning ritual of kissing the paper nipples for luck.
“Erica…” Jane prompted again.
He ran his hand over the back of his neck. “A patrol was going out to search the valley for weapon hoards and ratlines—foot trails that are enemy supply routes. The night before I’d been on the same kind of mission myself.”
“But this time was different?” Jane asked.
“There’d been radio chatter.” He looked down at his feet, aware of his own blank tone. Glad that he felt just that way inside. “That day, she shouldn’t have gone with them.”
“Did someone try to talk her out of it?”
“Sure.” He’d thought he’d convinced her not to go, too tired to recognize the set expression on her face and the determined light in her eyes. When she’d left, he’d been sleeping, dosed up on the pills they all swallowed down to find a few hours of relief from the high temperatures and the tension. Until he woke up and found her note tucked between his fingers, he hadn’t known what she’d been planning. “She didn’t listen.”
Erica had only heard what she wanted to hear. About the wisdom of going out that day. About what was going on between her and Griffin.
Jane picked up a cookie from the glass plate in front of her, then put it back down. “What happened?”
“Ambush. Particulars are a little sketchy, as everyone was busy trying to stay alive. They took fire and jumped off the trail. But when they realized she wasn’t with them, they headed back, at their own considerable risk. They found her sitting down, holding her arm. She’d been hit in an artery. Bled out in a matter of minutes.”
Jane pushed the platter of cookies farther from the table edge. “Oh.” Her voice was tight, as if there was a hand around her throat. “That’s terrible.”
Griffin gazed off into the distance. “This one kid, Randolph, he put her body over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Her blood stained his vest from his shoulders to his waist. It was the first thing I noticed when he returned. That, and the way tears had turned the dirt on his face to mud.”
Griffin had been sitting against a wall of sandbags, idly watching another guy squeeze cheese onto a granola bar, razzing the man about how the combo made him sick to his stomach. They’d been laughing.
Then Randolph had been standing there. Without a word, Griffin had known. He’d gotten to his feet, then stumbled toward the spot where they’d placed Erica. “I saw her,” he told Jane now. “The dirt in her hair, the stiffening wetness of her sleeve where the blood was already drying, the dusty laces of her boots. One had come undone, and as I stood there, Randolph knelt down and retied it for her.”
His brain had clicked away, cataloging each of those items and more, as if storing them for some later test. The details had seemed to fill a yawning black chasm opening up inside him—leaving no room for anything beyond those cold, bare facts. Leaving no room for any feelings. He’d gone icy inside then, and three days later become completely—perhaps permanently—frozen.
At the time, he’d thanked God.
He was still grateful.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Jane said.
Puzzled, he looked at her. His loss? It was Erica who had lost everything. But he nodded, knowing it was expected of him, knowing a man who hadn’t been rendered entirely numb would be expected to acknowledge Jane’s expression of sympathy.
“That’s the kind of story you signed up for,” he said. The librarian in her would surely back away from it, right?
“No,”
