When She Came Home Read Free Page B

from Arcadia School.
    “We’re done here.” He waved his hand toward the office door. “Do what you have to do.”
    Thirty minutes later she was hurrying across the parking lot to her Nissan.
    “Captain Tennyson, please, wait up. Please.”
    At the car she turned to see a young man in chinos and a blue blazer hurrying toward her.
    “I’m glad I caught you,” he said, panting a little. He handed her a card.
    “You work for Senator Belasco?”
    “I’ve been trying to reach you for the last three days.”He added in the tone of a parent to a willful child, “You haven’t returned my calls.”
    “If I wanted to talk to you, I would have called back.”
    “Then you did get my messages.”
    “I’m in a hurry, Mr. Westcott.” She unlocked the Nissan and threw her tote across to the passenger seat. “I don’t have time for you or your boss.”
    “There are things you don’t know, Captain.”
    “I’m late for a meeting at my daughter’s school.”
    “Have you been following the hearings, Captain?”
    Senator Susan Belasco’s investigation into allegations of criminal wrongdoing by the private contracting firm Global Sword and Saber Security Services, G4S, had been front-page news for the last several weeks.
    “I have nothing to say to the committee.”
    “A boy was killed at Three Fountain Square. He was ten years old.”
    “Don’t call me again.” She slammed the car door and revved the engine as she shifted into reverse, muttering as she backed up. “Move your toes, you son of a bitch.”
    Taking the back road out of Mission Valley, she used her cell phone to call her therapist, Alice White. As expected, she got her voice mail. Frankie’s situation could not honestly be called an emergency so she hung up without leaving a message. What good was a therapist if she never picked up her phone?
    The Arcadia School secretary had sounded vaguelyaccusatory, or maybe Frankie had imagined that. Lately she felt like everyone was trying to pick a fight or poke a finger at her. Dr. White said stress made it hard to read people and situations correctly.
    Walking fast across the asphalt parking lot to the school entrance, her breath fluttered at the base of her throat and she wished she were wearing her service uniform, not the utility camouflage that was blousy and comfortable as pajamas. More officially dressed, she would not feel so much like a schoolgirl about to be called on the carpet for kicking a soccer ball through a school window.
    Arcadia School had grown within her experience from a small private primary school to a complex of buildings and grounds spread over two blocks of prime San Diego real estate. She had a cloudy recollection of walking this hall for the first time when she was younger than Glory, excited and scared and proudly self-conscious in her new school uniform. The waxed floors still rippled with reflected light from fluorescent bars in the ceiling and the mural in the foyer next to the office depicting generations of Arcadia schoolgirls tossing up handfuls of posies with Native Americans, Father Serra, and Cabrillo’s ship in the background was as hokey as it had been that first day. She had gone on to be one of the stars in Arcadia’s constellation. Class valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar, president of the senior choir. She had played serious basketball and captained Arcadia’s soccer team at two national championships.
    At the office door she inhaled, wiped her palms on the thighs of her pants, set her hand against the doorplate, and pushed.
    The office was exactly as she remembered it: a long, crowded, and disorderly room. Across from where she stood, a wall of windows was covered by slatted blinds drawn up to irregular heights. She had to look away to keep from ordering someone to even them up.
    Below the level of the counter, she pressed two fingers against her wrist. Her pulse hammered. What was she afraid of? This was a school and she had spent ten months in Iraq, for