Every third Friday at six a.m., Linda Libiziewsky parked her oxide green skater, named Kermit the Magnificent, at the far end of the leased housing block and began a systematic trek from stairwell to stairwell, toting a touchscreen, cross-checking and verifying repair reports, fire extinguisher inspection tags, work orders, grounds maintenance, and anything else that caught her meticulous eye.
Her powers were broad. Nominally, she was the post housing coordinator, responsible for ensuring that each and every soldier, civilian employee, school teacher, and attached family member obtained and moved into safe, approved, adequate quarters, preferably within seven days of arrival in the TCM security zone.
But that mandate gave her secondary, sweeping authority to inspect housing conditions in general, in order to assess availability and adequacy. She chose to interpret “conditions” fairly liberally, and was on the lookout constantly and especially for signs of strain; stress; community breakdown. By the time soldiers earn several stripes and several children, their habits are well-entrenched. They come to prefer ordered lives. Too many shaggy lawns; too many toys and appliances left rusting alongside walkways; too many stairwells littered with unclaimed junk; too many bloody noses and black eyes were signs, not so much of bad upbringing, but of families stretched by grueling duty hours; short tempers; fatigue. Absent these factors, the few bad apples were quickly polished by the orchard police.
This morning, as she wound her way down the inevitable Brigham Young Way intersection with John Smith Lane, Linda stopped to ponder the inordinate number of cracked window panes, missing insect screens, unsealed fire extinguishers, and untrimmed hedges. Dirt, leaves, and graffiti marked an imperceptible but inexorable transition into Moorstown. Where once had stood a demarcation line, like foursquare farmland abutting a wilderness, was now more like the brackish pooling of an anastomosing river into a saline estuary—impossible to tell, through mangrove roots or cypress knees, where river left off and sea began. If anything, although drearier, simple lack of possessions made for neater exteriors outside the Moorstown buildings.
Linda’s teeth set. This change was not the result of some long decline. She could date it, and document it. It was very recent indeed. In another era, she would have been housekeeper to a great estate on New Washington or Sparta, aware at any moment of the location and condition of each and every piece of crockery. This state of affairs offended her sense of order.
It had taken about an hour-and-a-half to complete her peregrination, and she set out briskly to reach her office, a temporary partition in a temporary building erected in haste forty years before, by eight o’clock sharp. She could, of course, have simply gone back to retrieve Kermit the Magnificent, but a brisk constitutional along the banks of the river was part of her routine, for she made several more checks and paperwork stops at the various warehouses that intervened.
As she turned toward the meadows, she could barely make out several figures at the forest’s edge. Clearly, something was amiss. At this point, she should be hearing the Doppler mumble of Jodie calls carrying over the bright morning air, and preparing to dodge a couple of hundred running feet bearing down in banana-yellow glory. She squinted, and as she drew close enough to make out faces she broke into a run.
“Marul! Jeri! Sheila! What’s wrong!”
Legrange stood abruptly; frantically waved her back; alternately stabbing toward the ground with one finger, then pointing up into the tree. “Lindy, stay back!”
But with Legrange’s attention occupied, Marul, too, jumped to her feet, and in one motion bolted into Linda’s arms, as Linda’s touch screen bounced across the path into the grass. Linda’s feet froze in place as the girl’s arms enveloped her; gripped her, and her own body shook with the force of Marul’s sobs.
“He kill me! He kill me! He say it is stain on his honor! Lindy!, Lindy! You have to help! Please, you have to help! Please, help me get to Uncle Ollie!”
“Jeri?”
Legrange hesitated only a fraction. Two hundred troops had already seen what happened. “The run came down through here, and plowed into this poor kid just as she slipped and fell in the—” she looked down at Marul, “in his—” and looked again, “as she slipped and fell. There.” Legrange pointed to the skid marks in Hugo’s blood. “She says his name is Hugo? I got the call, and came around. The XO had already released the troops.”
Linda nodded. “Can I—can we—it’s hard shouting like this.”
Legrange nodded and pointed to a safe path around, through the trampled mess made by the troops, where any clue was well-buried now. Linda gently peeled Marul’s arms apart and tried to take her hand, but the girl clung to her side like a toddler as they made their way to Legrange.
“So she was alone here, with about a million soldiers. Male soldiers?”
“Well, yes. I mean, not all male. You know, it’s about sixty-forty on a Brigade run.”
“And the front rank was?”
“Command staff, of course.”
“Then why weren’t you—”
“DO. I was duty officer. So Sergeant….” She trailed off, as Linda groaned.
“Did anyone touch her?”
Legrange turned. “Sergeant Thompson?”
Sheila was staring at the ground. “Yes Ma’am. Me.” But she did not look up.
“Anyone else?”
“Not really.”
“What do you mean, not really? Did they, or didn’t they?”
“Ma’am. It happened pretty fast. I mean, the guys just wanted to help, you know? They didn’t do nuthin.’ Just put their jackets on her, helped her sit down.”
But Linda was already shaking her head. “Oh, Sheila.”
“I know ma’am. I know. I’m so sorry. It happened so fast. I was at the back and it took me a minute to get up there. And we was kind of—well, even me. You know.”
Linda followed her eyes up into the tree, nodded, sighed.
“She’s right. He’ll kill her.”
“Who?”
“Her father.”
“Oh, surely that’s ridiculous.”
Gently, Linda cupped Marul’s chin and turned her face toward Legrange. The sun was higher now, reaching beneath the bonnet’s cowl. One eye was black; the cheek below mottled purple and green. “He did this to her because she waved when they ran past. She wasn’t even on the path. She wasn’t within thirty paces of them. Imagine what he’ll do if he finds out that she was manhandled by a bunch of unrelated, healthy, young men, without a chaperone.”
“But it’s ridiculous! I mean, it’s utterly irrational. Nothing happened. Nothing could have happened. There’s a hundred witnesses.”
Linda sighed. “Jeri, you are missing the point. This isn’t rational. It’s not about whether or not ‘anything’ happened. In his twisted view, something did happen. An honor violation, plain and simple. So somebody has to pay. And since he’s an MP TCM fundy himself, it’ll be the girl who pays, not his troopy buddies.”
“But how does it ‘defend his honor’ to kill his own child?”
“If it makes you feel any better, he’ll probably cry when he does it. But he’ll do it. They talk a lot about defending church and family, but in the end, it’s really all about themselves.”
“But that’s—illegal. He’ll get himself court-martialed.”
“Nevertheless.” She smiled thinly. “And maybe he won’t do it himself. Or maybe he’ll do it, but somebody who owes his family a favor will confess to it and serve the time. In any case, it’ll get done.”
The police sirens, wailing in the distance, suddenly lurched closer. The morning traffic was breaking up.
“So what do we do? We need to do it fast. The civvies will be here any minute.”
“I’ll take her to her Uncle.”
“Her Uncle? But won’t he just hand her over to her father?”
Linda was already shaking her head, but Legrange suddenly blanched and interrupted whatever she might have said. “Oh God. The MPs. I brought two with me.”